Syldras wrote: »

I find it rather disappointing that one gets accused of being an "anti LGBT bigot" just for having the ideal of approaching things calmly and factually.

Yo, Syldras, my man! What happened to the "leaving it at that" and "making short, factual statements"? No one has accused you of being an LGBT bigot, but that's some nice several walls of text there. Your texts are roughly the same size as OP's but he has a lot of actual information and precise lines of reasoning in them, yours are just stating how you "prefer to communicate", repeatedly. You have mentioned not letting emotions cloud your judgement: I think it's a good idea and you should do that.
I really don't want this topic to become "let's psychoanalyze Syldras and make it personal", it is difficult, however, since you talk about genuinely really personal things (personal to you, that is) not really paying attention to what is happening in the thread. Aesthetics of reason and calmness instead of actually doing those in reality.
You have made a somewhat naive comment, you have been made aware that your comment was somewhat naive ("naive" can be a judgmental word, we were talking more about "not fully relevant", until you escalated) - in a really nice manner, too - and now you are blowing it out of proportion. Could you please please keep to the original arrangement and indeed "leave it at that"?
I'll say to you one thing: "hypersensitivity is in the eyes of the beholder". I thought of saying it before, but decided that'd be a little mean: your comment was a miss, but it was well-meaning, after all.
Syldras, you are being ill-behaved, inattentive, conflict-seeking. Please stop.
This thread is "meta enough" not to get moderated harshly, but we are all walking on really thin ice here, you are making it impossible to avoid the escalation you are creating, at this point. This thread could get moderated too much, cut at all the really valuable discussion, and I would hate to see that. And it would be your fault. Not because you are a "bigot" or whatever. Behave.

I did state I didn't want to follow you into making it personal, but I'll give you this: you have made a somewhat naive comment, found it out, got upset. The rest is the out-of-proportion consequence of that. Maybe there are some deeper issues of your life connected to this, but this is none of my business and not the topic of this thread.
You've given advice you thought would be useful. Thank you. Now please move on.

Imperial_Archmage wrote: »

It’s deeply disappointing, though entirely unsurprising, to see so many dismissive comments. It’s clear that so many people saw “LGTB” and immediately decided “woke snowflakes” are blowing things out of proportion.

Great comment, THANK YOU for posting it. I, myself, focus on competence rather than empathy, and the general problem here is that competence is treated as something optional rather than a must (which it is). As a result: a myriad of mildly insulting messages about nothing, the issue has already been resolved, all useful things said many times over, yet it goes on. People saw the mention of LGBT+ and it was ALL they could see, arguing against the points no one was making, thus escalating, and so much more.
I am specifically saying "thank you" because what you posted doesn't feel good to post. Hammering your point over and over ignoring all reality feels nice, that's why many people do it, and that's why forum discussions can get, let's say, counterproductive (looking at you, Syldras.) That's why some people (like myself) prefer to stay away from forums and discussions whenever possible (although seeing what is going on, I am hoping to provide a better alternative and contrast, that's why I'm participating; doesn't feel good to me, either.)

@Gegensmith I suggest you and I both ignore this thread, or at least ignore the less useful messages of it. The job is done *handshake emoji*. You are right in pretty much all you say, it's just that (and I am speaking from personal experience) the more you engage with selfishness and (cognitive) laziness, the more you take it upon yourself to solve other people's problems - the more they "relax", the more they escalate, and the more problems there are for you to fix. There's no universal answer here, but imo, you've done all you needed to do, we both did. Also, maybe our friend Syldras can reflect on where his judgement had an error once he gets some breathing room, cools his head and processes all that's happened.

Greetings,

As the core issue behind the thread has been resolved and to ensure the back and forth does not continue to escalate and cause unnecessary action, we are going to close the thread.

At the end of the day, does it matter if it was because of bigotry or because of spamming or because of some bored person or any other reason? Nothing can be done about the broader community, the only thing you can do is continue on and foster the community you desire within the guild. What is important is this stops happening at the customer support level because that’s actually something that (1) shouldn’t be happening to begin with and (2) can be resolved. And Kevin said they’re working on it.

Gegensmith wrote: »

This is the problem with the "just the facts, ma'am" attitude of some posters here (let alone the trope of "I'm gay but...", which is structurally equivalent to the "some of my best friends are [insert whichever identity category you're currently piling onto]").

Can you please elaborate? Since right now this reads like, because I have a different view on this possibly LGBT-related topic, my opinion is not valid, even though I'm also gay? Am I not allowed to contribute my own perspective as a gay man if it seems to oppose some "mainstream opinion"? Who defines this opinion that "the gay person" is allowed to have? Why is my view supposed to be worth less than that of another gay person?

Gegensmith wrote: »

As to the stunningly patronising attitude and "advice" of Syldras: I would say, words fail me, but — they don't. This back-of-a-cornflake-box psycho-babble may pass for insight where you are,

What does "where I am" mean? My culture of origin, my nationality, my race? Please elaborate.

In case someone is actually interested in the source I used: The info I cited about negative events leading to negative expectations leading to wrong conclusions and overall more anxiety, unhappiness and less resilience can, for example, be found in "Treatment Plans and Interventions for Depression and Anxiety Disorders" by Robert Leahy, which has been a standard work on the topic for several decades.

Gegensmith wrote: »

but from where I'm standing I am most struck by your failure to do what every psychological approach insists upon as a foundation: to consider and integrate into the analysis your own position and motivations -- your apparent desire to "rescue" those poor deluded *** from their self-created phantoms of persecution.

Maybe it would help to read and contemplate what I wrote more calmly, then it's clear I never wrote that LGBT-phobia doesn't exist.

Gegensmith wrote: »

When I receive zone-chat messages saying AND I QUOTE "We need an lgbtq+ holocaust" and your response is to tell us to stop imagining things, be more resilient, and think about how it looks to uninvolved others to speak about homophobia and transphobia in public, I can only respond by telling you to take your vacuous positive thinking *** and your boy-who-cried-wolf narrative and shut the *** up. Yes, an emotional response. Deservedly so.

Unless mods remove my writing rights, I have the same right to voice my opinion on this topic like everyone else.

Why don't you take another look at some of the posts you've made:

In response to:

hiyde wrote: »
it's logical to suspect

"It is one possibility out of several different ones. Just because one person belongs to a group that is affected by cases of bigotry (which is sad enough), that doesn't mean everything bad that happens to that individual is related to that."

You were literally discussing MY conclusions drawn from the evidence I'd offered in my original post.

You then switch your mode of address to the general, true. In that mode you offer these startling titbits:

"Focussing [sic] on being victimized might lead to the exact opposite, by becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy: Because with the expectation to be hated and persecuted, people will interpret everything accordingly, real attacks as well as completely unrelated events."

You then attempt to garner some semblance of authority for such a disgustingly reactionary response to our ability to identify actions motivated by anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment with:

"Psychology calls that cognitive distortion. Cognitive distortion includes things like (not saying that all have to apply, but to give you a short idea of the concept) making negative assumptions about people you don't know at all and their intentions, assuming a majority of people is against you or an aspect of your identity, overgeneralization, labelling, emotional reasoning (making your fears cloud your view of reality), jumping to conclusions, etc, you get the picture."

Sure, you are not explicitly saying that I have made negative assumptions, assumed a majority of people blah blah, overgeneralised, engaged in emotional reasoning, jumped to conclusions — but you've offered these pearls of wisdom in response to a post I made in which, by any reasonable assessment, I most certainly did not overgeneralise, assume a majority were against me, or, indeed, any of the other flaws of reasoning or modes of acting out that you in your patronising benevolence were helping us all to guard against.

I can only assume that you have no actual experience or knowledge of psychotherapy, given the absurd statement "focussing [sic] on suffering only increases suffering". Are you serious? That *** might fly on the back covers of the latest fad MBS publications, but as a proposal for actual psychological health -- let alone a politically engaged existence -- it reads more like a manifesto for self-repression.

You write: "Thinking "out there are people who try to harm me", no matter if it's true or not, [my emphasis] will influence your way of thinking and your feelings negatively. Does this benefit the community as a whole or the individuals being part of it? I don't think so."

If competence with psychological principles is too much to ask of you, how about the most rudimentary historical awareness? Hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, speak-no-evil denial as a proposal for addressing the realities of homophobia, sexism, and transphobia? How has that tended to work out, ya think? Again, are you serious?

"I very much advocate for keeping a clear mind and vision and not jumping to conclusions" and "one should be careful when it comes to assumptions in an unclear situation and rather try to resolve the situation calmly and consideredly before making any accusations" followed, having lectured us all on how we may be falling foul of emotionally distorted perspectives, illogical reasoning, and acting-out our persecution.

That you can offer all this cornflake-packet wisdom in response to the calm, reasoned, logical and detailed analysis that I first posted in this thread is mind-boggling. That you have not taken a moment to consider what you are doing psychologically, interpersonally, and politically when you posture in the manner that you have is striking and speaks to the worthlessness -- not to say, actual harmfulness -- of the "advice". When you apply, as you identified, principles derived from "Treatment Plans and Interventions for Depression and Anxiety Disorders" to perfectly reasonable, logical, rational, evidence-based discussions concerning LGBTQ+ issues, you pathologise us. We are not depressed nor suffering from an anxiety disorder. We are attempting to address a legitimate concern.

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Hi all, just wanted to follow up here. Thank you for escalating this. We’ve had a chat with customer service to revert the change to the guild name. We are also investigating why this change happened to begin with.

Like some others have expressed, it seems like CS and other content moderation teams are operating in silos. And a lot of the standards or beliefs that your team may have about things may not be the same as theirs. Events like this really paint CS in a negative light because it seems like they're not exercising any discretion on reports.

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

We just wanted to highlight that we believe the change error occurred because of an incorrect change from a customer service agent. We do want to reiterate that AI was not used as a part of this process and was facilitated by customer service staff. We are looking to figure out exactly where the error occurred so that we can refine the process to avoid the issue in the future.

More detail is warranted when it comes to the role of AI in these situations. You've said a few times that AI itself doesn't perform disciplinary actions, but there's no clarity on what its role actually is. In the recent past, it sounds like some new tech was rolled out and there were training issues on using it.

Whether it's AI or not, there's still some technology giving CS things to action, right? I would think some technology is flagging messages, names, and other transactional data. If you don't want to explain this every time it comes up, which is way too often, then go into detail on how they review this stuff. Just using an example:

"CS using XYZ monitoring platform that flags messages using a predefined but configurable dictionary of words and phrases deemed offensive or unacceptable. They also review reports and then review chat logs/names and compare against internal dictionaries that are informed by the ToS."

That's the level of detail you need to go into. I get it's frustrating to keep repeating yourself, but clearly the explanations thus far haven't calmed the concerns. Try something different.

It'd be nice to get that detail, or even just start answering basic questions like this.

Desiato wrote: »

I might find this event interesting if I wasn't already completely sick of ZOS constantly trying to engineer how people play via promotions.

I don't care about a single reward I've received from golden pursuits. I only resent that it is an annoyance I can't turn off. Yet I hate the constant reminder that TIME IS RUNNING OUT!!!!! Even though I don't care, it's still stressful. Why can't I opt out?

I miss how I played ESO in 2015. I would log in and ask myself "what do I feel like doing today?" Or maybe I didn't log in at all because I didn't feel like it and there was absolutely nothing to lose by doing so.

I completely agree. And this isn't unique to ESO. I've noticed more and more and more games are adding tasks and limited events and passes and 500 other things that try to lock you into that game being your primary game. Hell, even Sims has added stuff like this to the current title and it's 100% a single player game. But the companies can't sell things if you're not playing so better lock the playerbase in and keep them there are long as possible.

I, too, miss gaming from a decade ago where fun was allowed and my presence as a metric was a little more subtle.