ZOS Not Responsive Enough?

Knightpanther

Turelus wrote: »

kylewwefan wrote: »

They had a new guy that tried. It took 3 seconds before people started ripping on him. You can quickly see no one from zos is gonna be able to say anything without it being taken out of context or it even being a generally good thing.

So we’re not gonna get open meaningful conversations. Most you can hope for is an insightful, agree or awesome.

Knightpanther wrote: »

Turelus wrote: »

Knightpanther wrote: »

Turelus wrote: »

This has been a conversation since release.

The moderators/admins who clean up the forums generally do this as it's part of their job. Communication from the company has to come from the community team or developers and they normally have to go through some level of confirmation before just posting.

ZOS staff do sometimes go and engage or have a laugh with the community, however often you get those people who then come in and attack them for something, as it's not what they wanted. End of the day don't expect changes to happen, ZOS is better than they used to be but won't ever be the involved and communicating company many desire.

Agreed, ive been here from day one and sadly we have become used to the lack of communication but i say again its financial suicide not to engage your customer base and provide regular updates, other MMO company's do this way better even if it is to provide the bad news that something will not be fixed for a while.

Sticking your head in the sand and hoping that things will go away is not the right way of doing things.
I worked for one of the largest company's in the world and when things were bad the most important thing was information, damage limitation and in these days of forums and social media the importance of controlling information, even if it was not what stakeholders wanted to hear.

All i am saying is things could and should be better, there is no excuse.

Be Safe

All that said though, ESO is continuing to grow and make Zemimax money so... As much as we dislike this approach to how a company is run, it's not harming them business wise.

I respectfully disagree mate, it is harming them, as a long term gamer would i recommend a new player to come here? Nope not a chance, they may not see a downturn in profits or a reduction in the existing player base but they seem very short sighted on potential growth.

Be Safe

But everything we're seeing and hearing about the game is showing it's doing great regardless of contact.

Even contact won't change player retention, because the contact may not be what people want. Also you take a look at CCP/EVE Online which is one of the best examples of great player/dev communication and that game is slowly over time losing players.

End of the day the things which matter are content and quality, ESO is great on content (four yearly updates) and good enough on quality. It could be better, but it's not so bad they're bleeding players at an alarming rate.
Most of the people I know who left didn't go because of communication but because they simply grew bored of the game and wanted something different.

We can both agree this is a great game, not disputing that and if i didn't care about it i wouldn't
A) spend a subscription on it
B _take up my valuable time to offer constructive criticism - i would simply walk away.

I really hope that your first line is not the 'Official' line from the developers because it really sounds a little arrogant and as though they do not care about losing long term players.

I don't get bored of this game, if i play its heart and sole, i started Everquest in Beta and im still there which shows you my commitment to a decent game, BUT its just so bloody frustrating when things don't work properly or visual bugs that wind you up.

None of us are asking for miracles, we just want to know that things will be fixed and that there are folks actually working on these issues without the blinkered approach to just keep churning out content for and filling the store with overpriced reskins.

Be Safe

Darktrox

Turelus wrote: »

None of us are asking for miracles, we just want to know that things will be fixed and that there are folks actually working on these issues without the blinkered approach to just keep churning out content for and filling the store with overpriced reskins.

Be Safe

I understand where you come from. I don't think he mentioned because ZoS Told them to do so, and yeah, great communication is always a good thing, but you know... that's, really hard to pull off. Often, ZoS gets bashed just because it didn't fill the whole issues of some x players, for example, thing that they would like to avoid I guess. Altho I've seen many posts when big issues are involved that "they're working on the fix", and eventually, fixing it, they aren't as many as the issue right now with the game, and communication can always improve, so I just hope for them to improve on it. I guess hope is all left.

BisDasBlutGefriert

We were able to get this response once;

ZOS_Adrikoth wrote: »

Thanks for sharing folks! It's cool to see what everyone likes to listen to while playing ESO

In a thread I started about music you listen to while playing. So that was pretty neat! But too rare of a feat.

Dusk_Coven

CassandraGemini wrote: »

I can't speak for the french forum, but when I was looking through the german forum a bit a while ago, I saw that they handle this very differently. Granted, the german forum has much less traffic than the english one, and as far as I could see they have only one or two main admins for interactions with the playerbase, but those at least behave like actual people writing actual, personal sentences, instead of just using pre-formed text-blocks.

Are those forums also more civil and respectful? That could account for a LOT.

Royaji

At this point I don't even know. Just looking at the latest article on the website shows that they actually are capable of good customer communication.

Also, please be aware that because all of France is on a work lockdown, we have been unable to record the French voice actors necessary to include French VO in Update 26/Greymoor. Because of this, when that update launches, there will be French text and subtitles as normal but only English voice-over for new content. As there are no plans yet to re-open French recording studios, we don't know when French VO will be ready. Please note that in normal conditions it takes 2-3 months to record and update the game with VO for a Chapter.

Pretty much everything here is done right. The problem is stated, the reasoning is explained and there even is an explanation which steps will be taken to fix the problem and an estimate how long they might take. Seriously, this is damn near perfect. No matter how angry you might be with the devs there is just no way to actually say anything bad about this kind of communication.

But then, in the very next paragraph, they write this.

We’ve had some really fun ESO events this month, including our ongoing Anniversary Jubilee, so we will all be watching for any issues caused by an already large population playing ESO getting even larger.

How do you manage to mess up that bad immediately after the previous one? Of course you are goind to get all the angry comments after this one. You don't just say "we will be watching" to people who are already experiencing very real issues. This just makes them feel like you don't even know what is actually happening in the game.

Is it specifically perfomance topic which they avoid so bad? Do they have something to hide? Why didn't they just say, "hey guys, we've seen perfomance issues which are happening due to heavier load, we will try A, B and C to alleviate them, this might take X to Y amount of time".ZOS deserves all the toxicity they get, because they have caused it themselves. Keeping people in the dark about very real perfomance issues is equally as toxic as snarky comments about the dev team.

CassandraGemini

Dusk_Coven wrote: »

CassandraGemini wrote: »

I can't speak for the french forum, but when I was looking through the german forum a bit a while ago, I saw that they handle this very differently. Granted, the german forum has much less traffic than the english one, and as far as I could see they have only one or two main admins for interactions with the playerbase, but those at least behave like actual people writing actual, personal sentences, instead of just using pre-formed text-blocks.

Are those forums also more civil and respectful? That could account for a LOT.

Yeah, true. As I said I just browsed it a bit, but from what I could see, it really does seem like certain lines don't get crossed nearly as often as they do here, in the way people interact with each other. I've seen some examples of the contrary as well, but even then things didn't get out of hand like they tend to do here.
As for the reasons behind this I can only guess that maybe it's because everyone on the german forum obviously has a similar cultural background and adheres to the same social norms, whereas here sometimes different societal views just seem to clash. Also there really are a lot less people all in all who frequent the other forums, and fewer opinions usually equal fewer problems, so... yeah, I guess this plays a part in the different admin behaviour as well.

eso_lags

eso_lags wrote: »

Raltin wrote: »

If you frequent the forums, you've seen it quite often. A discussion, a poll, a question... the vast majority left unanswered. But what of the few who are lucky enough to get a response from a forums admin, or any other Zenimax employee? The following image is generally the typical example.




While there are exceptions to this, they are far and few between. That being said, I'm not ungrateful for the work the admins do to keep the servers clean, at times it is very much needed, but at the end of the day, what little involvement there is that we can see just feels rather... impersonal? There's never any positive feedback where an admin weighs in and voices support towards a discussion, or engaging and encouraging thoughts from the staff hinting at potential content or the like while interacting with player questions, so on and so forth...

Personally, I just kind of wish ZOS would get more connected with their fan-base? When it comes down to it... pretty much everything I've seen from them on these forums is clean, cold, and... well, robotic. No personality or investment, just "We have snuffed insubordination, continue conversing, human persons", and that's it...

I'm eager to hear your thoughts; do you too long for a more responsive and personal forum team, who are interactive with their community?

Just post some compliments and the mods will answer you. I mean i know its not their fault, they are not devs, but I feel like they could 100% do more to ease peoples problems.

[snip]

[snip]

[snip]

I would love to see mods be more interactive, even if they cant give direct answers on certain issues they could still help with others. They have no problem popping in a thread to tell people to chill, so why not try and help as well? I would also like to see them give people some actual reasoning for shutting down threads or deleting posts, instead of "check the forum tos". And I would 1000% love to see some consistency with them when it comes to editing/removing threads and posts, and banning people.

[Edit for discussing disciplinary action.]

🤣🤣

Nanfoodle

Not all games have a forums. It's a great courtesy of any game that does. Zeni should be given kudos for hosting and responding at all.

eso_lags

Tandor wrote: »

poe wrote: »

I have seen so many posts removed because of so called "rules" and threads closed with not apparent reason. The thing i see is that, especially if its about criticizing ZOS and the ridiculous state of the game, they use the "against the rules" card and close it. So I agree totally with OP on this.

What surprises me even more is that there is none, really NO, acknowledgement that the game's current state is totally broken during the holdiays, weekends or prime time. For me personally, if there was some kind of admission from ZOS, I would have some respect for them and be much more patient. But for now there is no transparency or even any roadmap on how to fix the server issues etc..

It's a shame that some players still believe this. The evidence on this forum is totally against it, as there are a lot of complaint threads and most of them stay open and unmoderated. All the evidence supports the view that it's not what you say, it's how you say it. That's what leads to moderation. If I had a pound for every complaint thread left open I'd be a wealthy man indeed, whereas if I had a tenner for every one that's closed down I'd be a lot less well off. Be constructive and polite to both developers and players alike, and avoid the temptation to create the gazillionth thread on the same topic, those are the keys to avoiding moderation. It's nothing to do with praising the Crown Store instead of criticising the game, it's to do with being constructive in your criticism. If you were running a private forum would you put up with anything less?

As for your second paragraph, how can you claim there's no roadmap on how to fix the server issues? Have you not been following the Performance Improvement Plan monthly updates (on the website with links from the forum and the launcher) along with Dev Tracker generally? You can argue with its content and delivery if you wish - constructively! - but to deny the existence of a roadmap is something else altogether.

You'll defend anything zos does. I know for a fact they pick and choose what rules to follow depending on who is making what post. Idk if its to do with how different mods interpret the rules or if its just because they dont like dissenting opinions but they did it to me so they could do it to anyone, and I have all the evidence to prove it.

You cant let hundreds of people do something every day and then use the same thing as an excuse to ban people, without banning anyone else, that isnt fair by any means. But I cant say anything else or they'll remove my post for talking about disciplinary actions. Funny how that works, so you cant tell others if they have done something.

And ya you're right they do have a road map, but its not a very good one. We haven't seen any results. And what good is it when they waited like 3 years to acknowledge the problem? And almost another year to get to a point that was supposed to help performance? And It didnt. If i recall they said, before elsweyr, that Q3 and Q4 of last year would help. I think Q4 specifically for lower end pcs and consoles. Well it just made it worse, much worse.

As an xbox solo pvp player trust and believe I am happy they have acknowledged the problem, finally. Im happy to see the road map they have, even though it looks like we wont see results to performance for a loooong time, if ever. What gets me is that they still keep barfing out updates and focusing on random unnecessary things like block changes and LA weaving. This should be priority number one, they make more than enough money to take one update to put every able hand on improving performance.

toafarmer

Raltin wrote: »

I'm eager to hear your thoughts; do you too long for a more responsive and personal forum team, who are interactive with their community?

I gave up ZOS games due to poor customer support and forums censorship.

MrGhosty

They have become so much better about communication than when the game first started. Even customer service is tons better. The problem with asking ZOS to say "we've seen this but we haven't been able to iron out what's causing the problem" is that while most reasonable people would go "okay, that makes sense." Many more outspoken folks will take and run with that statement as an admission of guilt/conspiracy/whatever other crazy gets tossed out.

That is just the most obvious example, imagine the harrowstorm that would crop up if a forum mod stepped up and expressed a very unpopular opinion. Can you imagine the sheer volume of "ZOS doesn't understand their own game" posts? We the community are the reason we can't have nice things. What should be heartening is that despite how quickly some of these things blow up they're still making improvements with when/how they put info out for us.

If we're talking a perfect world, I would love to see them hire another community liaison who has a specific forum related job title so there would be someone here much more regularly. As nice as that would be, I get the impression that folks at ZOS are asked to wear a lot of "hats" which could also explain why we maybe don't see as much interaction as we would like.

x48rph

I personally feel like they have been getting a little better lately at least acknowledging things when there is a problem. A lot of posts and stuff are things they can't and/or won't comment on. Like say complaints about a class or ability or whatever. Until they have a definitive plan on what if any thing they might wished to do, there's no comment and that's kind normal as any comment would be taken as an official statement. I do think at times they should be more open to talking and chatting with their fan base informally but that's kind of hard to do on a public forum with so many people. If you ever go to one of their RL events, at least in my experience, you'll find them happy to chat and discuss things. The recent off cycle PTS testing and subsequent scrapping of the changes based on feedback says a lot and is a welcomed change of direction. Lets give them a chance here.

Also the Mods job is just to police the forums, their not here to make any kind of official statements. Now as to whether you agree with something or not, that's between you and them, but I'll say lots of things are very subjective and I don't envy them their job of reading all these posts and trying to decide what to allow and what not to.

Raltin

toafarmer wrote: »

Raltin wrote: »

I'm eager to hear your thoughts; do you too long for a more responsive and personal forum team, who are interactive with their community?

I gave up ZOS games due to poor customer support and forums censorship.

Then... what are you doing here on the forums, still? Don't mistake my question for an insult, I am genuinely curious.

eso_lags

MrGhosty wrote: »

They have become so much better about communication than when the game first started. Even customer service is tons better. The problem with asking ZOS to say "we've seen this but we haven't been able to iron out what's causing the problem" is that while most reasonable people would go "okay, that makes sense." Many more outspoken folks will take and run with that statement as an admission of guilt/conspiracy/whatever other crazy gets tossed out.

That is just the most obvious example, imagine the harrowstorm that would crop up if a forum mod stepped up and expressed a very unpopular opinion. Can you imagine the sheer volume of "ZOS doesn't understand their own game" posts? We the community are the reason we can't have nice things. What should be heartening is that despite how quickly some of these things blow up they're still making improvements with when/how they put info out for us.

If we're talking a perfect world, I would love to see them hire another community liaison who has a specific forum related job title so there would be someone here much more regularly. As nice as that would be, I get the impression that folks at ZOS are asked to wear a lot of "hats" which could also explain why we maybe don't see as much interaction as we would like.

So much better? How? They have gotten better compared to a couple years ago when they would completely ignore the performance issue. But its still not great, especially considering the terrible shape this game is in right now when it comes to performance. And even things like bug reports are still ignored, im guessing because they dont want to fix a certain bug. Like undo, i've been posting about it for over a year and still cant find anyone from zos saying they're working on a fix.

I just think they need to learn to admit when they are wrong, or to admit when something doesn't work to fix what they want (like every performance fix that has made things worse).

FierceSam

Whatever ZOS (or any game developer) does it will never satisfy the voracious appetite of the playerbase.

Far, far better to have a coherent communications strategy, with regular (not regular enough for some) communications coming from a select few sources. That way the information is coherent and under their control and no one’s getting flamed or burnt out simply keeping players informed.

Players on the forum are voracious .... you get 100 of them and you’ll have 101 different opinions and 102 different demands

TheRealCherokeee3

So very much agree...except in the housing forum. That's the one shining unique example where I've seen devs reply and at least add a more personable tone and commentary. Housing is the one oasis of an otherwise dry forum dev atmosphere.

Raltin

TheRealCherokeee3 wrote: »

So very much agree...except in the housing forum. That's the one shining unique example where I've seen devs reply and at least add a more personable tone and commentary. Housing is the one oasis of an otherwise dry forum dev atmosphere.

Oh, true, although I doubt they wanted to respond to my thread encouraging players not to buy the khajiiti life pack... because one: you release an entire year's worth of elsweyr content and make moonsugar cane a CROWN exclusive plant? *** that, *** you, that should have been gold-bought at furnishing vendors, triple-*** you. Two: we've had three separate designs for khajiit wells since the base game. Moonsugar cane and the new well they were selling were the primary incentive to buy that pack if you wanted a unique furnishing. This was before ZoS released that big, rather impressive elsweyr well from the master crafting vendor, but I put together several unique designs that could pass for a 'make it yourself' khajiit well and encouraged players to make one of those instead of buying the pack.

robertthebard

Raltin wrote: »

If you frequent the forums, you've seen it quite often. A discussion, a poll, a question... the vast majority left unanswered. But what of the few who are lucky enough to get a response from a forums admin, or any other Zenimax employee? The following image is generally the typical example.




While there are exceptions to this, they are far and few between. That being said, I'm not ungrateful for the work the admins do to keep the servers clean, at times it is very much needed, but at the end of the day, what little involvement there is that we can see just feels rather... impersonal? There's never any positive feedback where an admin weighs in and voices support towards a discussion, or engaging and encouraging thoughts from the staff hinting at potential content or the like while interacting with player questions, so on and so forth...

Personally, I just kind of wish ZOS would get more connected with their fan-base? When it comes down to it... pretty much everything I've seen from them on these forums is clean, cold, and... well, robotic. No personality or investment, just "We have snuffed insubordination, continue conversing, human persons", and that's it...

I'm eager to hear your thoughts; do you too long for a more responsive and personal forum team, who are interactive with their community?

Nope. Because as soon as a dev says "Hey that's not a bad idea", we'll have "(insert idea here) confirmed" threads, along with lots of flaming being deleted, and another thread discussing the impersonal nature of dev responses.

Youyouz06

It boils down to who manages them. A leader sets the example.

Humancentipede2

They are not communicating enough and they will never improve on that part, it doesnt matter how often they say that they will improve their communication. They say this every 3-6 months and they change nothing. As long as there are enough sheeps playing and buying crownstore stuff, they wont change anything. A year ago they released their performance roadmap, now, close to one year later i still have huge delays in Cyro and often small delays in Battlegrounds. The PvP in this game is absolutely meaningless from a gamedesign perspective, but its also totaly meaningless in playerskill because of the lag and delays. And i dont think this will ever change. As soon as new good MMOs come out, ESO will start to bleed very hard. Because the only reason it good so big is because there are not much other options in the genre.

Anotherone773

I only skimmed the replies but, OP, you should be aware that most of the ZOS_XXXX you see on the forums will either be a Moderator or Administrator. They are not developers. It would be like expecting random hospital employees to treat you assuming all of them have the same jobs,skills, knowledge, and education of a medical doctor.

Each ZOS employee fulfills only their role and,IIRC, the forums are subcontracted out for moderation/management. Regardless, moderators have a specific job and that is to moderate, not talk about game development. The same with Admin. You will not see them do jobs outside of those that are their own. You will never see Gina and Jessica snipping comments even if the thread is full of violations. At most they might bring it to the attention of mods but that will be it.

dotme

Performance is so bad on console, and it does feel like the feedback is falling on deaf ears. I have not even seen a post from a ZOS representative that they have actually played in Gray Host on console and experienced what we're experiencing.

That's where it all breaks down. Has anyone at ZOS experienced PS4 NA (or EU) PvP lately? Have they played for a good couple of hours to really get a feel for what it's like? If so, are they working on a fix? How's that going?

Instead, it's pretty much crickets...

Khatou

The problem with ZoS, they offer a service that they don't even seem to know the meaning of!

In principle the basis of a Forum is a form of exchange, between player but also developer, as well as "CM", which for some countries, the "community manager" sometimes gives the impression of being a wandering shadow with a title to give himself a genre, but a Forum is not only used to throw a news or other in the face of players and let them mess with it.

It's by this principle of exchange, listening and ANSWER that some games have evolved in the right direction when devs know how to listen to their community who like to invest in a game.

and this can be summed up in one word: Respect!

Afterwards, don't be surprised if the forum ends up being full of disgruntled or even hateful topics and repetitive topics !!!

"Cause -> effect"

TineaCruris

The title of this thread implies that there is a measurable degree of responsiveness to begin with. I heard there were unaddressed issues before coming to this game, but I had no idea until I saw first hand that state of Cyrodiil what people were complaining about.

oXI_Viper_IXo

WilliamESO wrote:

[snip]

I hate to tell you, but freedom of speech in no way applies to a private company's private forums.

Raltin

Anotherone773 wrote: »

I only skimmed the replies but, OP, you should be aware that most of the ZOS_XXXX you see on the forums will either be a Moderator or Administrator. They are not developers. It would be like expecting random hospital employees to treat you assuming all of them have the same jobs,skills, knowledge, and education of a medical doctor.

Each ZOS employee fulfills only their role and,IIRC, the forums are subcontracted out for moderation/management. Regardless, moderators have a specific job and that is to moderate, not talk about game development. The same with Admin. You will not see them do jobs outside of those that are their own. You will never see Gina and Jessica snipping comments even if the thread is full of violations. At most they might bring it to the attention of mods but that will be it.

True, that's why I didn't say 'Developers' in my OP. I know they're not the people who make the game, they just control the forums. However, communication between the mods and the devs, and maybe even the marketing team how decides on what content the devs make WOULD be welcomed. Although, that's assuming the mods would even care to hint at a few things that are happening behind the scenes, but that's more or less a pipe dream.

Raltin

oXI_Viper_IXo wrote: »

WilliamESO wrote:

[snip]

I hate to tell you, but freedom of speech in no way applies to a private company's private forums.

Mmmmmnnnnnnn I believe you are correct in this regard. Legally, this is not a public forum, in the same sense that a library, town hall, etc etc are. 'Private forum' isn't the right word, there's a specific legal term to it, but I cannot recall the name. Basically, ZoS has the full right to censor speech, and moderate conversations as they see fit; they control the content that is released. Now, on sites like youtube and facebook? That's where it becomes iffy, because it's the users that control the released content... and are, technically, public forums, despite company ownership.

There's actually quite a few law suits running at present, in regards to certain shady practices those aforementioned sites are engaged in, going over whether or not those sites have the legal right or authority to censor, publicly or discretely, content that gets posted on those sites unless they are outright in violation of state or federal laws. Here in this forum though, ZoS has full-on censoring and moderation rights. Something that may be annoying to some, but I respect the rule of law in this regard. If ZoS wants to be china with their property, well they can darn well be china if they please. All we can do is complain and hope someone is listening.

robertthebard

Raltin wrote: »

oXI_Viper_IXo wrote: »

WilliamESO wrote: »

Got like 6 warnings for fake reasons.

I want my freedom speech

It looks likes China sometimes...

I hate to tell you, but freedom of speech in no way applies to a private company's private forums.

Mmmmmnnnnnnn I believe you are correct in this regard. Legally, this is not a public forum, in the same sense that a library, town hall, etc etc are. 'Private forum' isn't the right word, there's a specific legal term to it, but I cannot recall the name. Basically, ZoS has the full right to censor speech, and moderate conversations as they see fit; they control the content that is released. Now, on sites like youtube and facebook? That's where it becomes iffy, because it's the users that control the released content... and are, technically, public forums, despite company ownership.

There's actually quite a few law suits running at present, in regards to certain shady practices those aforementioned sites are engaged in, going over whether or not those sites have the legal right or authority to censor, publicly or discretely, content that gets posted on those sites unless they are outright in violation of state or federal laws. Here in this forum though, ZoS has full-on censoring and moderation rights. Something that may be annoying to some, but I respect the rule of law in this regard. If ZoS wants to be china with their property, well they can darn well be china if they please. All we can do is complain and hope someone is listening.

It doesn't have anything to do with "wanting to be China" though. Nobody's going to be showing up at anyone's door to disappear them if they say something "dicey". The forums are supposed to be a place where players can get together to discuss the game, and if some posters are making that experience poor through what they have to say, they can be removed. If we were in a bar, and a customer is being unruly, they can be removed in the same way, I used to do that very thing for a living. At one point, I was also a moderator on an MMO forum. Posts that are disruptive are removed, because it creates a non-friendly atmosphere for other people that may just want to participate in the dialog. We're free to post whatever we want, but the ToS states that "offensive" stuff can be removed, and that we can be removed for any reason, including being banned, and we all agree to it when we're making our accounts.

Contaminate

ESO is a high-churn game, meaning they don't want you to stick around and they have no interest in fixing their game so long as the new blood keeps coming in, buying their stupidly overpriced cosmetics, and then if they leave? ZOS my as well be telling them "good riddance" with how terribly they treat the users with their complete lack of care for the game's basic functionality.

Contaminate

robertthebard wrote: »

Raltin wrote: »

oXI_Viper_IXo wrote: »

WilliamESO wrote: »

Got like 6 warnings for fake reasons.

I want my freedom speech

It looks likes China sometimes...

I hate to tell you, but freedom of speech in no way applies to a private company's private forums.

Mmmmmnnnnnnn I believe you are correct in this regard. Legally, this is not a public forum, in the same sense that a library, town hall, etc etc are. 'Private forum' isn't the right word, there's a specific legal term to it, but I cannot recall the name. Basically, ZoS has the full right to censor speech, and moderate conversations as they see fit; they control the content that is released. Now, on sites like youtube and facebook? That's where it becomes iffy, because it's the users that control the released content... and are, technically, public forums, despite company ownership.

There's actually quite a few law suits running at present, in regards to certain shady practices those aforementioned sites are engaged in, going over whether or not those sites have the legal right or authority to censor, publicly or discretely, content that gets posted on those sites unless they are outright in violation of state or federal laws. Here in this forum though, ZoS has full-on censoring and moderation rights. Something that may be annoying to some, but I respect the rule of law in this regard. If ZoS wants to be china with their property, well they can darn well be china if they please. All we can do is complain and hope someone is listening.

It doesn't have anything to do with "wanting to be China" though. Nobody's going to be showing up at anyone's door to disappear them if they say something "dicey". The forums are supposed to be a place where players can get together to discuss the game, and if some posters are making that experience poor through what they have to say, they can be removed. If we were in a bar, and a customer is being unruly, they can be removed in the same way, I used to do that very thing for a living. At one point, I was also a moderator on an MMO forum. Posts that are disruptive are removed, because it creates a non-friendly atmosphere for other people that may just want to participate in the dialog. We're free to post whatever we want, but the ToS states that "offensive" stuff can be removed, and that we can be removed for any reason, including being banned, and we all agree to it when we're making our accounts.

Yeah and if that bar has a roach infestation and the bartender is keeps spitting in the drinks, then it's not "unruly" to be vocal with complaining. It also would actually get the business shut down if a bar treated their customers that way. Unfortunately the gaming industry gets buy on a lack of legislation against crap like this.