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Whenever it comes to gaming I just assume anyone saying they've been banned unfairly deserved it. League, Dota, FPSs, and discord too apparently all have this w

Whenever it comes to gaming I just assume anyone saying they've been banned unfairly deserved it. League, Dota, FPSs, and discord too apparently all have this weird group of people who get banned for doing shady shit then go on forums and complain. People being banned from services unfairly (and without explanation) is a real problem, that doesn't mean that everytime someone complains they deserve the benefit of the doubt.

judge2020 6y ago
While we won't get to know the full story and the entire history of this person's Discord account (to side with him one way or the other), this piece still serves to show the downsides of a centralized service which has to do its own abuse management - and at discord's scale[0], there's bound to be a lot of mistakes. On a side-note, running a modded client (like Better Discord) at any time is a risk to your account. Some people have reported getting banned for year-old messages that used a plugin which allowed creating embeds inside the discord client (you otherwise can't create custom embeds on a non-bot account)[1]. 0: https://discord.com/company#app-mount:~:text=Our%20metrics https://discord.com/company#app-mount:~:text=Our%20metrics 1: https://github.com/Fraserbc/BetterDiscord-Embeds#user-content-disclaimer:~:text=It%20is%20possible%20that%20Discord%20will%20ban%20and%20delete%20your%20account%20for%20using%20this%20plugin https://github.com/Fraserbc/BetterDiscord-Embeds#user-conten...
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
  > show the downsides of a centralized service which has to do its own abuse management And platforms that have no censorship also have downsides. There’s no perfect solution.
  - threatofrain 6y ago
    And when others shame, criticize, or shun you for your speech, people also consider that within the framing of censorship. The only speech which is safe from blowback is to yourself.
paxys 6y ago
This generally applies to anyone complaining on the internet about anything. It's convenient when those judging can only ever hear one side of the story.
AHTERIX5000 6y ago
Yeah. I got banned in PUBG due to their broken anticheat and it tagged my Steam account with all the games as having bans on record. Fortunately I wasn't the only one and they fixed their software and reversed accidental bans. I wonder what I could realistically do if something like that happens again and the developer doesn't notice?
- dylan604 6y ago
  Depends on how many Twitter followers you have
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
Unfortunately, this same cynicism can creep into the mindsets of the moderation and support teams. I had to deal with abusive users at a past job. Some of them simply disappeared after we locked their accounts (temporarily, with explanations), but many of them would launch aggressive harassment campaigns at the company. They'd start with support, then attempt to escalate support tickets, then move on to trying to contact management via LinkedIn or guessing e-mail addresses. A surprising number of people would find creative ways to contact our CEO with carefully honed stories claiming innocence. We started removing employee's last names from customer communications after someone started doxxing support employees and arguing with their family members on Facebook. Those who had social media clout were virtually guaranteed to use it against us. The stories they published were always distortions of the truth with convenient omissions. The worst part was that after watching this play out 50 times, everyone starts to grow unsympathetic to any complaints. It's a challenge to maintain some empathy and perform diligence on complaints, otherwise you get legitimate errors slipping through the cracks.
godelski 6y ago
I got banned from Pokemon Go because my phone was rooted, never did geo hacking or anything. Just woke up one day and said I couldn't get in. It didn't really give me any information and it took some searching online to see that they just blanket banned rooted devices. I was upset, but whatever. A year later I got a new phone so I decided to try it again. I tried my login and it said the account didn't exist. So I tried to make a new account with my username and said the username existed. So I tried to make a brand new account and it said my email was in use and I couldn't use it. So I tried the forgot password/recovery thing. Said account didn't exist. So I gave up. Sometimes companies just do weird stuff that is hostile to users. Edit: I want to add that as a big linux user I've found that I can't get into many games because of blanket anti-cheat bans. I know my cases are niche, but there are weird blanket bans.

judge2020 6y ago

While we won't get to know the full story and the entire history of this person's Discord account (to side with him one way or the other), this piece still serves to show the downsides of a centralized service which has to do its own abuse management - and at discord's scale[0], there's bound to be a lot of mistakes. On a side-note, running a modded client (like Better Discord) at any time is a risk to your account. Some people have reported getting banned for year-old messages that used a plugin which allowed creating embeds inside the discord client (you otherwise can't create custom embeds on a non-bot account)[1]. 0: https://discord.com/company#app-mount:~:text=Our%20metrics https://discord.com/company#app-mount:~:text=Our%20metrics 1: https://github.com/Fraserbc/BetterDiscord-Embeds#user-content-disclaimer:~:text=It%20is%20possible%20that%20Discord%20will%20ban%20and%20delete%20your%20account%20for%20using%20this%20plugin https://github.com/Fraserbc/BetterDiscord-Embeds#user-conten...

TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
> show the downsides of a centralized service which has to do its own abuse management And platforms that have no censorship also have downsides. There’s no perfect solution.
- threatofrain 6y ago
  And when others shame, criticize, or shun you for your speech, people also consider that within the framing of censorship. The only speech which is safe from blowback is to yourself.

paxys 6y ago

This generally applies to anyone complaining on the internet about anything. It's convenient when those judging can only ever hear one side of the story.

AHTERIX5000 6y ago

Yeah. I got banned in PUBG due to their broken anticheat and it tagged my Steam account with all the games as having bans on record. Fortunately I wasn't the only one and they fixed their software and reversed accidental bans. I wonder what I could realistically do if something like that happens again and the developer doesn't notice?

dylan604 6y ago
Depends on how many Twitter followers you have

PragmaticPulp 6y ago

Unfortunately, this same cynicism can creep into the mindsets of the moderation and support teams. I had to deal with abusive users at a past job. Some of them simply disappeared after we locked their accounts (temporarily, with explanations), but many of them would launch aggressive harassment campaigns at the company. They'd start with support, then attempt to escalate support tickets, then move on to trying to contact management via LinkedIn or guessing e-mail addresses. A surprising number of people would find creative ways to contact our CEO with carefully honed stories claiming innocence. We started removing employee's last names from customer communications after someone started doxxing support employees and arguing with their family members on Facebook. Those who had social media clout were virtually guaranteed to use it against us. The stories they published were always distortions of the truth with convenient omissions. The worst part was that after watching this play out 50 times, everyone starts to grow unsympathetic to any complaints. It's a challenge to maintain some empathy and perform diligence on complaints, otherwise you get legitimate errors slipping through the cracks.

godelski 6y ago

I got banned from Pokemon Go because my phone was rooted, never did geo hacking or anything. Just woke up one day and said I couldn't get in. It didn't really give me any information and it took some searching online to see that they just blanket banned rooted devices. I was upset, but whatever. A year later I got a new phone so I decided to try it again. I tried my login and it said the account didn't exist. So I tried to make a new account with my username and said the username existed. So I tried to make a brand new account and it said my email was in use and I couldn't use it. So I tried the forgot password/recovery thing. Said account didn't exist. So I gave up. Sometimes companies just do weird stuff that is hostile to users. Edit: I want to add that as a big linux user I've found that I can't get into many games because of blanket anti-cheat bans. I know my cases are niche, but there are weird blanket bans.