Is it acceptable for zenimax to scour through your messages and take account actions at random?

n333rs

karthrag_inak

Yes

Their system. Their responsibility. Their privilege.

Vulkunne

Yes

Absolutely. They are probably just as responsible for any data on their system as much as the person entering it.

Warhawke_80

Yes

It's their Sandbox...we just get to use it.....

Syldras

I don't find it useful, and in case there are really many false positives something has to be reviewed, but in the end it's in the terms of service that everyone here has accepted to be able to join the game. The only thing I'm wondering about is the privacy laws that differ worldwide, but a lawyer would have to check that, which I am not.

twev

n333rs wrote: »

It's not clear:

Are you talking about specifically in ESO and the forums, or are you including other msg forums and apps that any given player may use?

n333rs

No

I'm talking about in game messages to friends. I've had multiple friends get their accounts suspended for interacting with each other, including myself. Simply calling someone "regarded" or saying "come" (both written in different forms) should not be grounds for account suspension.

Syldras

n333rs wrote: »

I'm talking about in game messages to friends. I've had multiple friends get their accounts suspended for interacting with each other, including myself. Simply calling someone "regarded" or saying "come" (both written in different forms) should not be grounds for account suspension.

Next time just call him an idiot instead and you'll be fine.

Desiato

No

There's absolutely no reason for ZOS to intervene in a private conversation unless one party reports it or they're discussing something illegal.

Keyword reports should be limited to illegal activities, not mere insults. There needs to be a VERY good reason for a ZOS employee to read a private conversation.

I can't understand why ZOS is doing this. There is NO upside for them to ban one friend for joking with another. It costs them server resources to monitor chats, it costs them money to pay the CS staff who investigates, and they will certainly lose customers over this. And for what benefit?!

SuspensionDispersingAutomaton

No

n333rs wrote: »

I'm talking about in game messages to friends. I've had multiple friends get their accounts suspended for interacting with each other, including myself. Simply calling someone "regarded" or saying "come" (both written in different forms) should not be grounds for account suspension.

When did that happen to you and your friends, by the way?
Asking on behalf of friends who still refuse to continue playing under this new draconian enforcement of rules. Myself, I already quit.

I was suspended for 72 hours about 3 weeks ago for consensually insulting my friend in a private party with the automatic filter detecting my r-word and banning me. Support kept the ban, telling me that no chats are private and that we must obey this in order to continue playing. To this day, it was not reversed nor compensated, despite Kevin saying he would talk to the support for evaluation.

Desiato

No

twev wrote: »

n333rs wrote: »

It's not clear:

Are you talking about specifically in ESO and the forums, or are you including other msg forums and apps that any given player may use?

ZOS_Kevin wrote:

We want to follow up on this thread regarding moderation tools and how this intersects with the role-play community. First, thank you for your feedback and raising your concerns about some recent actions we took due to identified chat-based Terms of Service violations. Since you all raised these concerns, we wanted to provide a bit more insight and context to the tools and process.

As with any online game, our goal is to make sure you all can have fun while making sure bad actors do not have the ability to cause harm. To achieve this, our customer service team uses tools to check for potentially harmful terms and phrases. No action is taken at that point. A human then evaluates the full context of the terms or phrases to ensure nothing harmful or illegal is occurring. A human is always in control of the final call of an action and not an AI system.

That being said, we have been iterating on some processes recently and are still learning and training on the best way to use these tools, so there will be some occasional hiccups. But we want to stress a few core points.

We are by no means trying to disrupt or limit your role-play experiences or general discourse with friends and guildmates. You should have confidence that your private role-play experiences and conversations are yours and we are not looking to action anyone engaging in consensual conversations with fellow players.
The tools used are intended to be preventative, and alert us to serious crimes, hate speech, and extreme cases of harm.
To reiterate, no system is auto-banning players. If an action does occur, it’s because one of our CS agents identified something concerning enough to action on. That can always be appealed through our support ticketing system. And in an instance where you challenge the appeal process, please feel free to flag here on the forum and we can work with you to get to the bottom of the situation.
As a company we also abide by the Digital Service Act law and all similar laws.


To wrap this up, for those who were actioned, we have reversed most of the small number of temporary suspensions and bans. If you believe you were impacted and the action was not reversed, please issue an appeal and share your ticket number. We will pass it along to our customer service to investigate.

We hope this helps to alleviate any concern around our in-game chat moderation and your role-play experiences. We understand the importance of having safe spaces for a variety of role-play communities and want to continue to foster that in ESO.

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/8190298/#Comment_8190298

tl;dr: ZOS has a system to automatically monitor chats in ESO for TOS violations including basic insults that friends commonly use to joke around with each other. The system reports violations to customer service who review what was said in the private conversation and determine whether or not action should be taken. The result is that players are being banned for joking with friends in private conversations, even though no one outside of ZOS was bothered.

spartaxoxo

I'm not going to vote because the poll is biased.

My answer is "sometimes" or "other" if those were included.

I understand scanning for certain criminal things to protect themselves from liability and also because it could save lives. I don't have a problem with that.

But, I don't think AI should be looking for things like rude language. If someone else reports you, that's a different story.

ArchMikem

Yes

It's their game, their servers. You don't have the right to privacy using their chat system.

Amottica

Yes

karthrag_inak wrote: »

Their system. Their responsibility. Their privilege.

Yep. Every aspect of our characters and game is owned by Zenimax, not us. They also have the right to investigate inappropriate behavior and actions.

Let's be real; they do not do such things randomly, as that wastes time. If they are checking a player's account, then a red flag or a report has occurred.

Edit: According to Kevin's comments that were quoted here, such a system would raise a red flag for something that was worthy of investigating further.

spartaxoxo

Amottica wrote: »

Let's be real; they do not do such things randomly, as that wastes time. If they are checking a player's account, then a red flag or a report has occurred.

They literally have AI checking it now

Groterdan

No

Wauw the amount of yes . Rly surprised by that . Sad to see freedom gets given away so easy 😭

JemadarofCaerSalis

Yes

Amottica wrote: »

karthrag_inak wrote: »

Their system. Their responsibility. Their privilege.

Yep. Every aspect of our characters and game is owned by Zenimax, not us. They also have the right to investigate inappropriate behavior and actions.

Let's be real; they do not do such things randomly, as that wastes time. If they are checking a player's account, then a red flag or a report has occurred.

Edit: According to Kevin's comments that were quoted here, such a system would raise a red flag.

If they have AI that takes action, without any human seeing the messages, then I agree that it is too far.

However, if it isn't AI and rather the system just flags the messages and a human looks at it, then I have no issue with the messages being checked.

As said, it is ZOS's server, their game, and their TOS that they can change and enforce as they wish.

Amottica

Yes

spartaxoxo wrote: »

Amottica wrote: »

Let's be real; they do not do such things randomly, as that wastes time. If they are checking a player's account, then a red flag or a report has occurred.

They literally have AI checking it now

Yes, I saw the comment showing what Kevin said and updated my post to reflect that and how that would find the red flags. That looks like a great use of technology, and it is good they are making the decisions themselves and learning from the experience.

the1andonlyskwex

Yes

ZOS certainly has the right, and I would argue that maybe your "jokes" with your friends are evidence of a toxic attitude that's not desirable in the community anyway.

An example:
Calling someone the N-word behind their back is at least as bad as calling that person the same thing to their face. The fact that your friends are okay with it doesn't make you any better, it just makes them awful too.

The_Meathead

No

If no one reports a private message, it's hardly a "crime" worthy of punishment.

It's ZOS' property, so they're obviously able and capable of doing whatever they like - but it's a silly path to choose for retaining customers.

spartaxoxo

Groterdan wrote: »

Wauw the amount of yes . Rly surprised by that . Sad to see freedom gets given away so easy 😭

Again the problem with the poll is it's biased. I don't mean in a point of view sense. I mean that the selection of response chosen forces people to select responses that may not reflect their true opinion. This is why even most questions that are often a simple yes/no include an "IDK/other" option.

In this case, many users may not agree with your example ban or banning for things like jokes. But, they'd agree with narrowly defined monitoring for criminal activity. That's a pretty common response.

So you're seeing comments like "No, unless it's criminal" or "Yes, but only for criminal stuff."

If you had included a survey option that captured this common response type either by correctly predicting it or including an option for "other" then you may have received less "yes" answers.

The_Meathead

No

spartaxoxo wrote: »

I'm not going to vote because the poll is biased.

My answer is "sometimes" or "other" if those were included.

I understand scanning for certain criminal things to protect themselves from liability and also because it could save lives. I don't have a problem with that.

But, I don't think AI should be looking for things like rude language. If someone else reports you, that's a different story.

And honestly, this^

Someone messaging their pal with "Hey F-word, what's hanging?" is obviously a ridiculous thing to act on, but there probably are legitimate outliers.

There should be humans making the final decisions, and those humans should have a great deal of familiarity with context, familiarity, slang, and humor that they take into account.

DreamyLu

Yes

ZOS has a responsibility like any other owners of a network (games or else). They are free to keep control on that network the way they want, and most probably, they also have some obligations too.

Personally, I find very good that they take their responsibility seriously and that this control feature is put in place. It will be a security in many ways.

Now keep in mind that of course, it will not work trouble free from the first. There will certainly be some errors at beginning, that will need some adjustments before it works properly.

Amottica

Yes

JemadarofCaerSalis wrote: »

Amottica wrote: »

karthrag_inak wrote: »

Their system. Their responsibility. Their privilege.

Yep. Every aspect of our characters and game is owned by Zenimax, not us. They also have the right to investigate inappropriate behavior and actions.

Let's be real; they do not do such things randomly, as that wastes time. If they are checking a player's account, then a red flag or a report has occurred.

Edit: According to Kevin's comments that were quoted here, such a system would raise a red flag.

If they have AI that takes action, without any human seeing the messages, then I agree that it is too far.

However, if it isn't AI and rather the system just flags the messages and a human looks at it, then I have no issue with the messages being checked.

As said, it is ZOS's server, their game, and their TOS that they can change and enforce as they wish.

I need to edit my comment. The red flag was not the AI but that the AI detected something that needed to be investigaged.

Amottica

Yes

spartaxoxo wrote: »

Groterdan wrote: »

Wauw the amount of yes . Rly surprised by that . Sad to see freedom gets given away so easy 😭

Again the problem with the poll is it's biased. I don't mean in a point of view sense. I mean that the selection of response chosen forces people to select responses that may not reflect their true opinion. This is why even most questions that are often a simple yes/no include an "IDK/other" option.

In this case, many users may not agree with your example ban or banning for things like jokes. But, they'd agree with narrowly defined monitoring for criminal activity. That's a pretty common response.

So you're seeing comments like "No, unless it's criminal" or "Yes, but only for criminal stuff."

If you had included a survey option that captured this common response type either by correctly predicting it or including an option for "other" then you may have received less "yes" answers.

We can choose yes or no; the question is a yes or no question with nothing to push a player toward either choice. That is unbiased by definition.

Amottica

Yes

The_Meathead wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

I'm not going to vote because the poll is biased.

My answer is "sometimes" or "other" if those were included.

I understand scanning for certain criminal things to protect themselves from liability and also because it could save lives. I don't have a problem with that.

But, I don't think AI should be looking for things like rude language. If someone else reports you, that's a different story.

And honestly, this^

Someone messaging their pal with "Hey F-word, what's hanging?" is obviously a ridiculous thing to act on, but there probably are legitimate outliers.

There should be humans making the final decisions, and those humans should have a great deal of familiarity with context, familiarity, slang, and humor that they take into account.

Kevin stated that the AI only flags things to be looked at and takes no action on an account on it's own. Humans look into the flagged issue and decide how to act. He also stated they are learning from their experience and making changes.

Sleepsin

George Orwell's 1984 was a cautionary story, not a how to guide. This constant monitoring of every written message in a game is extremely intrusive.

Pelanora

No

n333rs wrote: »

All entities have to operate within the applicable laws.

spartaxoxo

Amottica wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

Groterdan wrote: »

Wauw the amount of yes . Rly surprised by that . Sad to see freedom gets given away so easy 😭

Again the problem with the poll is it's biased. I don't mean in a point of view sense. I mean that the selection of response chosen forces people to select responses that may not reflect their true opinion. This is why even most questions that are often a simple yes/no include an "IDK/other" option.

In this case, many users may not agree with your example ban or banning for things like jokes. But, they'd agree with narrowly defined monitoring for criminal activity. That's a pretty common response.

So you're seeing comments like "No, unless it's criminal" or "Yes, but only for criminal stuff."

If you had included a survey option that captured this common response type either by correctly predicting it or including an option for "other" then you may have received less "yes" answers.

We can choose yes or no; the question is a yes or no question with nothing to push a player toward either choice. That is unbiased by definition.

No. It isn't. Again, I'm not talking about a POV bias (leading question) that pushes players towards a particular choice.

"Forced-Choice" in polling is when a survey is created that limits the number of options that a person can choose. This can sometimes lead to different types of response bias such as acquiescence bias (people just agreeing even though the response does not accurately capture their opinion), especially when the forced choices does not accurately allow for respondents to convey an opinion that is more complex than the forced choices allowed. This is why it is often not a good idea to make a poll using only yes/no responses, it can lead to response bias in your data set.

We have that clearly going on in this thread. The OP gave the example he was thinking of in the comment section. Randomly being banned for banter with their friends, even though none of their friends reported the interaction or were offended by what was said.

Many of the "yes" responses indicate that they would ALSO be opposed to such random enforcement. They do however carve out a special exception for criminal conduct.

A more accurate poll would have either accounted for this likely response type and included it in the forced choices or included an "other/idk" option for respondents to elaborate further.

edit: further information

Image from "A Catalog of Biases in Questionnaires"


Source:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1323316/#:~:text=Forced choice (also known as insufficient category). Questions

Microsoft Copilot wrote:

Forced-choice bias. When respondents are only given a limited set of options (like “yes” or “no”) without the opportunity to express other opinions or nuances, it can skew the results and not accurately reflect the respondents’ true feelings or thoughts.

colossalvoids

No

It's interesting to see that quite a lot of people would put up with when they have a private conversation with a friend, no matter how deranged it is, a person would interfere walking into a room and slap you on a face or hand, or simply saying "you shouldn't use words like that". It's definitely not a security threat here but a threat to the customer ability to consensually communicate in private. Basically using communication tool in-game is inadvisable which shouldn't be the case.

Soarora

No

If a tree falls in a forest and no one’s around to hear it, then did it make a sound? The community is quick to report and/or fight back against bad actors. If someone is not reported, then there is no problem that needs addressing. People can deal with each other, immediate intervention isn’t necessary.