Is AI Automatic Moderation Killing the RP Scene?

Ruthless

Let us know your thoughts?

TaSheen

Don't know. I don't RP.

[Clarification: I RP my girls in my own mind; I do not interact with others in game.]

Destai

Yup

It certainly makes me nervous to use in game chat.

Avran_Sylt

Yup

I don’t RP.

But if AI automatically moderates chat without any user reports, then it also cannot tell the difference between consensual conversation between two parties, and non-consensual conversation.

As such, all parties subject to any inappropriate language are victims, and all parties using such language are aggressors, even if such a scenario was consensual.

Basically, it lacks context. And I assume RP is all about that (Having assigned roles and all that).

I guess this would hurt more lore-based RP (racism abound), heavy topics being discussed in-game (not necessarily even RP), and ERP (for obvious reasons).

I’ve only heard about this Auto-AI chat moderation getting people banned from snippets here and there on this forum and Reddit, so I cannot say how much of an issue it really is (or how often players just use something like discord).

But at a fundamental level it does cause chat to become a minefield even within a trusted group.

Servadei

Yup

It's not just the rp community but players in general are scared to use chat.

Madarc

Yup

I have little contact with RP groups at the moment, but the little I do get to see has already changed, or only takes place to a very limited extent ingame..

ArchangelIsraphel

Yup

My guild has taken all RP outside of the game entirely to avoid the AI system misinterpreting a post. The themes of our stories involve war, political upheaval, and betrayal between the alliances- which of course leads to (entirely fabricated) arguments between characters and strong words being thrown back and fourth. As we do not want any of this to be seen as real when it is not, we have totally withdrawn all chat activity from inside of the game.

We used private housing, guild chat, and party chat and did not publicly roleplay. However, seeing as we no longer feel safe roleplaying within the game, we also no longer recruit and our events have become rather limited.

Sakiri

Yup

If it's not in a public area it shouldn't be moderated. My house? Safe space. I can dictate if people came come in. Groups, voluntary. Don't like the chat, leave. Instances? Same thing. Whispers? We're perfectly capable of reporting them.

They can do this but not stop invite bots.

manukartofanu

Nope

Where did you even get the idea that there is some sort of AI moderation here?

Varana

Yup

Not here, in game.

Avran_Sylt

Yup

manukartofanu wrote: »

Where did you even get the idea that there is some sort of AI moderation here?

I’m tempted to go into a solo dungeon instance and see if I can’t trigger auto moderation myself (with innocent misspellings as if I were typing fast) myself, to see if it’s actually a thing or not.

If I get flagged for text in a place where literally no one around sees the text, that’s heavily indicative of overreach.

Marto

Nope

I don't think so. And it doesn't seem like most of the RP community thinks so either.

I was there when it happened. Literally in the same Discord channel as the user whose case started this controversy when they received a warning on their account (not even a ban). If I recall correctly, it took less than 48h for the warning to be removed, and over the next couple days the other affected users were unbanned.

Many of us were certainly scared, but as more and more information came out it became clear this was nothing more than a string of false positives caused by overly strict moderation guidelines. Pretty much exactly what Rich Lambert confirmed.

It's not the first time that happens, either. I've been in the RP community since 2015, and I remember around 2019 moderation got a bit more strict, leading to some friends getting temporary bans when RPing mature themes. But that was short lived, after a few months things calmed down.

ZOS moderation guidelines are stricter than they should be. I agree with that. And by all means, bring attention to it. But don't act as if this is ZOS purposely trying to ruin your day. False positives suck. They really do. I get it. But they happen because the devs want to catch people who are genuinely toxic.

Right now, there doesn't seem to be many, if any cases. I've not seen anyone in big RP communities getting wrongfully banned for a couple months now. I don't think we have anything to worry about.

Avran_Sylt

Yup

Marto wrote: »

I don't think so. And it doesn't seem like most of the RP community thinks so either.

I was there when it happened. Literally in the same Discord channel as the user whose case started this controversy when they received a warning on their account (not even a ban). If I recall correctly, it took less than 48h for the warning to be removed, and over the next couple days the other affected users were unbanned.

Many of us were certainly scared, but as more and more information came out it became clear this was nothing more than a string of false positives caused by overly strict moderation guidelines. Pretty much exactly what Rich Lambert confirmed.

It's not the first time that happens, either. I've been in the RP community since 2015, and I remember around 2019 moderation got a bit more strict, leading to some friends getting temporary bans when RPing mature themes. But that was short lived, after a few months things calmed down.

ZOS moderation guidelines are stricter than they should be. I agree with that. And by all means, bring attention to it. But don't act as if this is ZOS purposely trying to ruin your day. False positives suck. They really do. I get it. But they happen because the devs want to catch people who are genuinely toxic.

Right now, there doesn't seem to be many, if any cases. I've not seen anyone in big RP communities getting wrongfully banned for a couple months now. I don't think we have anything to worry about.

Oh interesting, wasn’t sure this was something that was addressed by mods already, I’ve only heard hearsay. There a thread with the responses?

NotaDaedraWorshipper

Yup

manukartofanu wrote: »

Where did you even get the idea that there is some sort of AI moderation here?

There's a lot of evidence with people being banned for no reason. Most recent was some kids uncle or such on reddit, who gifted ESO to his niece and nephew and both were banned for cheating while one was in the tutorial and the other in character creator.

spartaxoxo

NotaDaedraWorshipper wrote: »

manukartofanu wrote: »

Where did you even get the idea that there is some sort of AI moderation here?

There's a lot of evidence with people being banned for no reason.

There's definitely something happening that seems to be having a very negative impact on new players. No idea what. But I've seen mention of it on Steam too.

Ugrak

NotaDaedraWorshipper wrote: »

manukartofanu wrote: »

Where did you even get the idea that there is some sort of AI moderation here?

There's a lot of evidence with people being banned for no reason. Most recent was some kids uncle or such on reddit, who gifted ESO to his niece and nephew and both were banned for cheating while one was in the tutorial and the other in character creator.

That's unlikely to be AI chat moderation.

Rather, there have been cases where the anti-cheat software of other games have been in conflict with that of ESO; triggering early bans such as that.

The evidence for AI chat moderation is the people sanctioned for private chats where no player reported anything. According to ZOS, it is not fully automated, but uses AI to monitor and flag concerning chat for a human to review. Presumably outsourced to some large customer service ticket handling outfit, due to the manpower required to process the output of an MMO in a timely manner.

Not much better than full automation through AI, as understanding of context may be limited at best. Not to mention the potential that if the subcontractor management is pushing workers to close more tickets faster or some such KPI-chasing, they may just default to quickly going along with whatever the automated flagging says.