What is with the social banning?

AngelicaDLynn

I was attempting to send a guild mail out for my guild raffle. For some reason I was hit with a social ban for this. Honestly if this is some automated thing it is totally wrong to ban someone then investigate rather than having a red flag and then a person looking into it first. Right now my account is locked and I have no idea if/when it will get unbanned. I am pretty much hamstrung as I cannot mail anything or even talk privately to any guildies. This has me truly thinking of just canceling my sub and finding a game where the people running it seem to actually care about the people that play the game. Yes I do realize that there a lot of cheaters out here, shoot I have reported bots myself. I find it amazing that I get the social ban so fast while These bots continued to play for days after being reported. Honestly if there is a list of words that we cannot use in the subject line of guild mails we SHOULD be informed of these. This is a major problem and quite honestly has me really stressed out.

AngelicaDLynn

Oh and thinking about it for a minute I'm not so sure it is IP based. For one I got about 60 mails off the second time before I got hit and my other alt account works just fine, at least for now. All three from the same computer.

MissBizz

What addon were you using? Sounds like it's not spacing the mails enough...

wenchmore420b14_ESO

timidobserver wrote: »

I approve of the ban. Tired of raffle mails.

sylviermoone wrote: »

NewBlacksmurf wrote: »

Maybe it's a really good reason why this is happening. Doesn't seem to be a bug

It isn't, though. This happens to guild leaders FAR too often. And it isn't just raffle mail that gets sent (raffles and other fundraising events that are crucial to the ability of a large trading guild to put the bids necessary to win their locations), some guilds like to provide their members with selling tips, what's hot and what's not, other guild events such as hide and seeks, trivia, skyshard hunts, etc. Putting guild leaders on a ban for attempting to coordinate and inform their membership of what's going on in the guild because ZOS can't be bothered to put in a better system within the game is just ridiculous.

In addition, because as guild leaders we are forced to rely on addons to communicate with our guild, it means that anyone and everyone has that same ability. Rather than lock the permission to mail the whole guild to JUST the leadership, anyone and everyone can download an addon and send whatever mails they want without the permission of leadership.

Hopefully there is an end in sight to this issue; when I was at PAX NW, I was told there would be some guild management fixes coming in the next few updates, but because 1T was so huge they were on a bit of a back burner. Let's hope that some of these fixes include mail management, and they start with update 13.

I use the MailR add-on as it times out the sends and sends to whole guild or to just ranks and haven't been banned yet..*Knock on Nightwood***.
But as a GM of a 500 ppl social guild, we HAVE to be able to communicate with our guildies, and not just raffle spam.
The MoD is SO limited as to number of spaces available, and in our case, we up-date MoD daily with the new pledges, our cross-guild events, trader donations, member birthdays, etc, so we need to use guild mail.
In my case, every 2 weeks or a month, I send out our "BlackHorse Courier" newsletter with trader info, new events, shout out's to exceptional members, guild changes, etc.
I also send out every so often "Days of Our Lore", which covers and tells about Tamrielic holidays and their lore, and not just the one's Zos has, i.e..Old Life - 30th Evening Star (30th December)
On the last day of the year the Empire celebrates the holiday called Old Life. Many go to the temples to reflect on their past. Some go for more than this, for it is rumored that priests will, as the last act of the year, perform resurrections on beloved friends and family members free of the usual charge. Worshippers know better than to expect this philanthropy, but they arrive in a macabre procession with the recently deceased nevertheless.

More and better guild tools have been a issue and discussed here since launch, and being able to do mass guild mail without being banned is definitely one of them.
My 2 golds...Huzzah!

AngelicaDLynn

Godsend, same as i have used for 10 months without an issue.

AngelicaDLynn

wenchmore420b14_ESO I completely agree. I try to keep things to a minimum but you can only take it down so far. The guild gets two mails a week, one for raffle and one for auction, two different accounts send those. I shouldn't have to limit how I interact with my own guild.

sylviermoone

MissBizz wrote: »

What addon were you using? Sounds like it's not spacing the mails enough...

I've used GodSend for nearly 2 years; it isn't a spacing thing so much as a volume thing, I think.

AngelicaDLynn wrote: »

Oh and thinking about it for a minute I'm not so sure it is IP based. For one I got about 60 mails off the second time before I got hit and my other alt account works just fine, at least for now. All three from the same computer.

That is an interesting result. When I last received a social ban, I had gotten about 60ish mails in on my main account. I logged to the GM account and got about 10 mails in. I hadn't sent any other guild mails from the GM account that week, but had sent 2 from my main account, in addition to raffle receipt mails, etc. I didn't try from a third account, as the social ban came through on Saturday morning, and I didn't want to leave myself unable to run our guild auction that evening (with no guild bank access, ability to trade with people, send or receive mail, etc). I do know that while I was logged in the GM account on my system, I had all the effects of a social ban, but when my officers were logged into the same account from a different machine, they were able to interact without the effects of the social ban.

Regardless of all that, the point remains; as guild leaders, we NEED the ability to connect with our guild through mail, and we need to be able to do this without living in fear of being arbitrarily banned. Now that we've got the kiosk flip time taken care of, let's hope that a more robust mail system that doesn't penalize us for doing our jobs is on the horizon.

Annalyse

I agree that the MoTD is not enough. I hate constant notifications bothering me so I (and many others) use an addon to stop getting them when the MoTD changes. Therefore, I do like one raffle mail reminder because it reminds me to buy tickets if I have forgotten.

There should be something put into place at least for guild leaders to avoid this ban possibility.

AngelicaDLynn

We definitely need a better system than we have. There is no reason that we still have to use add ons to send mass mails at this point.

code65536

What's more ridiculous is that they don't even notify or warn people about social bans.

For example, here's a recent thread by @Argleblaster who thought that they had hit a bug:
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/310747

sylviermoone

On the upside, I've always had a fairly quick response time to having a social ban removed once I reached out to support and explained that I was a Guild Leader. The only exception was when the ban came through on a Saturday morning; in that case, I had to wait until Monday for it to be completely off (which left me unable to bid on my main account or GM account, but luckily I had other options...).

So, here's hoping for a speedy response for you from ZOS!

AngelicaDLynn

code that is EXACTLY how my second account got hit. I thought it was just another add on bug. Now they are both banned. I mean honestly why am I paying for a game that bans me without warning?

AngelicaDLynn

Well I am at 24 hours now and have heard nothing so far. I am only a few days from my sub being done and right now I am seriously looking at canceling it. If I do that I will uninstall and never be on here again. I love my guildies but this stress of this is ridiculous. If I was cheating or taking massive advantage of an exploit that would be one thing, but all I did was try to mail my guild.

Argleblaster

I was hit with a social ban after sending out a message with MailR. Funny thing--I was trying to inform my guild that we got our guild trader back and encourage folks to fill the guild store. MailR locked up after sending 8 mails, and I was banned.

brandonv516

I look at the MotD every day. Must be a console thing (not having mods and all). Sucks to get a ban for mass mailing though.

AngelicaDLynn

Brandon I am on PC not a console. I go to guild just going to roster or looking at bank. Some people look at the MOTD and some don't, I don't.

SaRuZ

I appreciate it once a week. Also to clarify what day to pay dues is good too. What I dislike is 7 MoTDs a play session from the same guild. That gets so annoying.

Pops_ND_Irish

You might just update the Guild message about the raffle. All the guildies should see that.

Hand_Bacon

SaRuZ wrote: »

I appreciate it once a week. Also to clarify what day to pay dues is good too. What I dislike is 7 MoTDs a play session from the same guild. That gets so annoying.

Amen!

Especially when its a formatting issue, they keep changing their mind on word color or some silly thing.

Prof_Bawbag

Yup, the only thing that's more annoying than some guilds constantly popping messages are those arena score notifications. At least with the latter you're able to turn them off without any adverse effects. Turn off guild notifications and it's easy to forget or overlook important guild notices. I don't look at the message of the day thing, so I tend to keep my guild notifications on. Some guilds just need to realise not everyone appreciates getting umpteen notifications in succession about the same thing.

svartorn

Giles.floydub17_ESO wrote: »

It sounds like you were hit by a mechanism to prevent spam. It is legitimate, however Zos should have provided a means for guild leadership to send out mail to their members without needing an add on so spam filters would not kick in.

Proof yet again I'm not even sure they play their own game.

Elsonso

.

svartorn wrote: »

Giles.floydub17_ESO wrote: »

It sounds like you were hit by a mechanism to prevent spam. It is legitimate, however Zos should have provided a means for guild leadership to send out mail to their members without needing an add on so spam filters would not kick in.

Proof yet again I'm not even sure they play their own game.

They play the game, and they live with the same guild restrictions as everyone else. I would imagine that they run a ZOS/Bethesda guild for all the employees on all of the megaservers, as this would seem to be a natural thing for them to do while in the game.

There is a difference between wanting a feature in the game, and getting that feature prioritized about all of the other features that need to be added to the game. When they cannot do that, it becomes "something they would like to do".

This is just the way that these things go when there is more to do than what can be done.

idk

It sounds like you were hit by a mechanism to prevent spam. It is legitimate, however Zos should have provided a means for guild leadership to send out mail to their members without needing an add on so spam filters would not kick in.

AngelicaDLynn

That is something that has been asked for for at least the last year. I totally agree that it would be a much better solution. I know I can't be the only one this has happened too and I would bet people have left the game over it. But still here I am with a basically useless account right now.

Stopnaggin

I believe if you send over 20 mails in suscession it locks you out. The differently gears do videos and this was one of them

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCLdrA9chwU[/embed]

Here's the link to all their videos which off subject but hilarious. https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/221725/the-differently-geared-episode-9-resource-management-new-episode/p1

AngelicaDLynn

The thing is most large trade guilds do this on a weekly basis. I have been doing it myself for about 10 months and never had an issue until this week. They like getting bigger gold away from us via traders but none of us will be able to afford the higher bids of good cities if we can't send mail.

vyndral13preub18_ESO

AngelicaDLynn wrote: »

The thing is most large trade guilds do this on a weekly basis. I have been doing it myself for about 10 months and never had an issue until this week. They like getting bigger gold away from us via traders but none of us will be able to afford the higher bids of good cities if we can't send mail.

One of the other trade guilds probably purchased 5000 crowncrates so Zos would ban you and they can get your location.

timidobserver

I approve of the ban. Tired of raffle mails.

AngelicaDLynn

timid if you don't like them then don't join a trade guild, it is really that simple. I send out one mail a week, that is all. I do know of some that send out at least 2 if not 3 or even 4. I try to make things as simple as I can for the guild and some actually would prefer getting a mail rather than trying to remember to look at the MOTD.

timidobserver

AngelicaDLynn wrote: »

timid if you don't like them then don't join a trade guild, it is really that simple. I send out one mail a week, that is all. I do know of some that send out at least 2 if not 3 or even 4. I try to make things as simple as I can for the guild and some actually would prefer getting a mail rather than trying to remember to look at the MOTD.

Or ZOS can social ban you which also solves the problem.

NewBlacksmurf

Maybe it's a really good reason why this is happening. Doesn't seem to be a bug

AngelicaDLynn

Well since you aren't in my guild as far as I can tell it doesn't have anything to do with you. Oh and if you are in my guilds then honestly you should probably leave as you don't really belong there anyways. I treat my guild at least as well as any GM in the game. I give tons of my personal items and time to the guild and get nothing in return outside of knowing I helped them. The truth is it is crappie attitudes that make the game difficult for people. That and selfishness.

Fudly_budly

OP,
Please disregard this post if you're already aware that there are add ons that space out your mail to avoid this problem. Just trying to help.

AngelicaDLynn

Smurf I have never cheated, or anything along those lines. Yes I send out mails informing the guild of our weekly raffles, but that is it. Not like I am sending random mails or anything like that. I send one a week where many send multiple. We are a trade guild and unless you have ran one you don't truly understand how much we spend nor the time and effort we put into these. I spend 15 plus hours a week strictly on the guild, along with a lot of my mats and such on the game. The worst part is even if they take the ban off they will never tell me why they did it. How exactly can we stop doing something when it is never said to be wrong nor told it is? This is like making a law up after the fact to make what you did illegal and not even telling you what you were charged with.

timidobserver

AngelicaDLynn wrote: »

Well since you aren't in my guild as far as I can tell it doesn't have anything to do with you. Oh and if you are in my guilds then honestly you should probably leave as you don't really belong there anyways. I treat my guild at least as well as any GM in the game. I give tons of my personal items and time to the guild and get nothing in return outside of knowing I helped them. The truth is it is crappie attitudes that make the game difficult for people. That and selfishness.

Nothing against you personally. I dislike receiving non-essential guild mails, so I am okay with the social banning.

Lady_Rosabella

I use the Mail'r addon to send out my guild mails. It spaces out the mails sent and have been using it for two years now. Never been socially banned, yet, lol.

AngelicaDLynn

I use GodSend and know tons of other GM's that do as well.

sylviermoone

NewBlacksmurf wrote: »

Maybe it's a really good reason why this is happening. Doesn't seem to be a bug

It isn't, though. This happens to guild leaders FAR too often. And it isn't just raffle mail that gets sent (raffles and other fundraising events that are crucial to the ability of a large trading guild to put the bids necessary to win their locations), some guilds like to provide their members with selling tips, what's hot and what's not, other guild events such as hide and seeks, trivia, skyshard hunts, etc. Putting guild leaders on a ban for attempting to coordinate and inform their membership of what's going on in the guild because ZOS can't be bothered to put in a better system within the game is just ridiculous.

In addition, because as guild leaders we are forced to rely on addons to communicate with our guild, it means that anyone and everyone has that same ability. Rather than lock the permission to mail the whole guild to JUST the leadership, anyone and everyone can download an addon and send whatever mails they want without the permission of leadership.

Hopefully there is an end in sight to this issue; when I was at PAX NW, I was told there would be some guild management fixes coming in the next few updates, but because 1T was so huge they were on a bit of a back burner. Let's hope that some of these fixes include mail management, and they start with update 13.

AngelicaDLynn

See timid this is the issue. If you are in a trade guild the raffles are essential to keep a good trader location. You probably don't know how much is actually spent on the traders, as honestly most people think it is wayyyy less than it actually is.

Reverb

This happened to me once when some guildies bounced mail off me when I was offline. I logged in and the mail all bounced back right away, boom social ban. It was equal parts irritating and funny.

AngelicaDLynn

Thank you Sylvie. The thing is if an add on can be created for this purpose then it should be easy enough to incorporate it into the game itself. I really try to keep mail to a minimum but we need to send for the auctions and raffles. It is necessary. Honestly I hate sending them as while you are mailing you can pretty much do nothing else.

AngelicaDLynn

Reverb this has gone being being funny. Right now I can't even process raffle tickets, which also helps promore sales because I can't mail any receipts. Now they will build up so and I will have a ton of receipts going out at the same time so I am at risk again.

GawdSB

Can't you just update your guild's message of the day for things like this?

AngelicaDLynn

GawdSB yes but not everyone looks at the MOTD. Shoot I have to remember to even change it on a weekly basis and I never look at them personally, even in the guilds I don't GM. When I get a mail I remember to buy tickets.

Elsonso

AngelicaDLynn wrote: »

I was attempting to send a guild mail out for my guild raffle. For some reason I was hit with a social ban for this. Honestly if this is some automated thing it is totally wrong to ban someone then investigate rather than having a red flag and then a person looking into it first. Right now my account is locked and I have no idea if/when it will get unbanned. I am pretty much hamstrung as I cannot mail anything or even talk privately to any guildies. This has me truly thinking of just canceling my sub and finding a game where the people running it seem to actually care about the people that play the game. Yes I do realize that there a lot of cheaters out here, shoot I have reported bots myself. I find it amazing that I get the social ban so fast while These bots continued to play for days after being reported. Honestly if there is a list of words that we cannot use in the subject line of guild mails we SHOULD be informed of these. This is a major problem and quite honestly has me really stressed out.

I am pretty sure that ZOS is not staffed for cheating and ToS enforcement, so they use automated tools to identify people based on sketchy behavior. @ZOS_KaiSchober has revealed and defended this, which is how we know they look at players using behavioral criteria and act upon it. If they were properly staffed, the tool could notify someone at ZOS so they they could follow up and take the appropriate action, but it is just easier to let some computer program do the work.

I know guilds like yours have multiple officers that have various roles. Are you the person that is always sending out the raffle announcements, and is that the ID that has been Social Banned? I ask because there are enough people who are not getting this ban to suggest that they look at changes in the individual account behavior. If someone else routinely sends out these mails, and you rarey do, then sending out email to 500 players could represent a big change in behavior.

My sympathies that this happened to you, and here's hoping that Customer Support will resolve it quickly.

Erasure

That sucks Lynn, hasn't happened to me or mine recently but it does occur.

I don't think they're ever going to announce what the filter rule is or remove it or even really comment on it at all, as any of those actions would allow the people we WANT to be blocked (gold vendors, inane spammers, website advertisement etc) to develop workarounds to the silencing. The only action left for you is to send less mails at a time when next you're allowed to, I think.

Zenimax should provide an official guild mail feature. Leaders getting silenced for informing their guilds of a guild function makes very little sense.

Elsonso

Erasure wrote: »

Zenimax should provide an official guild mail feature. Leaders getting silenced for informing their guilds of a guild function makes very little sense.

I am pretty sure that this has been brought up to them.. Notifications are why I think ZOS feels that mass mailings are not needed.

Ankael07

Giles.floydub17_ESO wrote: »

It sounds like you were hit by a mechanism to prevent spam. It is legitimate, however Zos should have provided a means for guild leadership to send out mail to their members without needing an add on so spam filters would not kick in.

If there is an addon to bypass the game's spamming filter, whats the point of having one?

moonbat

I look forward to the guild updates especially the raffle updates. If I don't see a raffle mail by Wednesday I usually forget to enter the raffle.

Thank you GMs for sending out the reminders, it is important to me as a trader that we keep our spot.

sylviermoone

Ankael07 wrote: »

Giles.floydub17_ESO wrote: »

It sounds like you were hit by a mechanism to prevent spam. It is legitimate, however Zos should have provided a means for guild leadership to send out mail to their members without needing an add on so spam filters would not kick in.

If there is an addon to bypass the game's spamming filter, whats the point of having one?

The addon doesn't bypass a spam filter, it makes it possible to send the same mail to 500 people without individually copy/pasting and typing in the name of every one of your 500 members, ONE MEMBER AT A TIME. That is the system that ZOS has given us. The addons are a definite QoL improvement as far as that goes.

The MOTD is not enough. I change it, and still have people asking me for the answers to questions that they could literally answer by pressing 'g' and reading for 30 seconds. The mails are essential, not just for trading guilds, but for any guild that wants to keep it's membership informed in game.

As an experiment, the last time I received a social ban on my main account, I logged to our GM account to finish sending the mail. Though I had not sent ANY mails to the guild from that account, I was immediately social banned when I started the GodSend. One of my officers was able to log onto the GM account and send a full guild mail, though. This leads me to believe the social bans are IP based, not account based.

moonbat

sylviermoone wrote: »

Ankael07 wrote: »

Giles.floydub17_ESO wrote: »

It sounds like you were hit by a mechanism to prevent spam. It is legitimate, however Zos should have provided a means for guild leadership to send out mail to their members without needing an add on so spam filters would not kick in.

If there is an addon to bypass the game's spamming filter, whats the point of having one?

The addon doesn't bypass a spam filter, it makes it possible to send the same mail to 500 people without individually copy/pasting and typing in the name of every one of your 500 members, ONE MEMBER AT A TIME. That is the system that ZOS has given us. The addons are a definite QoL improvement as far as that goes.

The MOTD is not enough. I change it, and still have people asking me for the answers to questions that they could literally answer by pressing 'g' and reading for 30 seconds. The mails are essential, not just for trading guilds, but for any guild that wants to keep it's membership informed in game.

As an experiment, the last time I received a social ban on my main account, I logged to our GM account to finish sending the mail. Though I had not sent ANY mails to the guild from that account, I was immediately social banned when I started the GodSend. One of my officers was able to log onto the GM account and send a full guild mail, though. This leads me to believe the social bans are IP based, not account based.

I ignore the MOTD most of the time because there is this nice bug wherein it will keep popping up regardless of whether or not there are any updates. This is why, as a member of a few trade guilds, I prefer the emails to keep me updated on what is happening.

AngelicaDLynn

Actually lordrichter I have 2 accounts that got hit with this. The first one we use specifically and exclusively for raffle and it sends them out every week. I thought maybe something had gone wrong with the add on and tried it on my main account. That one was hit too. Hadn't actually thought of that Sylvie, and that might work.