Discouraging people from reporting the guilty

BenjaminKacher_ESO · May 2014

Hi All,
Today I wanted to talk about the policy that was stated a while back that excessive reports of innocent people could result in a ban against you. I would link the OP about it but for the life of me I cannot find it.

I bring this up today because I have taken up a new policy of reporting people I believe to be profiting off others exploits (please do not mention any specific exploits here) and have gotten a lot of feedback from the community that you cannot do that because you will get banned for reporting people.
I truly feel that by giving the imprsion to the community that they will be banned for reporting people they believe to be cheating will only encourage people to abuse exploits/exploiters more. I would like some @ZOS feedback on this to figure out at what point one may be considered for reporting too many people and/or if banning people for too many reports is even a real thing.

Thanks ahead of time @ZOS_AlanG‌ or @ZOS_JessicaFolsom‌ for replying.

EDIT:
Better yet, can we get a sticky post reassuring people it's ok to report those who they truly believe to be exploiting?

SirAndy · May 2014

I have been reporting many, many, many who i believe to be bots, spammers and exploiters and i will continue to do so.

GossiTheDog · May 2014

Mass reporting people for doing things you don't like is a slippery slope.

Sakiri · May 2014

GossiTheDog wrote: »

Mass reporting people for doing things you don't like is a slippery slope.

Depends. I report everyone I suspect of botting and I report blatant naming violations.

Theres "I dont like this guy" and theres "this guy has racist comments in his name" or "this guy is standing on a respawning jute node for 20 minutes picking it".

Especially since botters are now picking normal looking names and putting armor on.

awkwarrd · May 2014

Everyone is guilty until proven innocent!

I report everyone i see that is cheating, if i get banned for it, so be it.
I won't lose sleep over it, mainly because im really good sleeper.

GossiTheDog · May 2014

Sakiri wrote: »

GossiTheDog wrote: »

Mass reporting people for doing things you don't like is a slippery slope.

Depends. I report everyone I suspect of botting and I report blatant naming violations.

Theres "I dont like this guy" and theres "this guy has racist comments in his name" or "this guy is standing on a respawning jute node for 20 minutes picking it".

Especially since botters are now picking normal looking names and putting armor on.

I agree completely. The OP is in another thread saying he hopes another forum member gets banned for buying something in game. I'm just saying - it's a slippery slope if you start encouraging users to mass report things which aren't against the code of conduct.

BenjaminKacher_ESO · May 2014

GossiTheDog wrote: »

Sakiri wrote: »

GossiTheDog wrote: »

Mass reporting people for doing things you don't like is a slippery slope.

Depends. I report everyone I suspect of botting and I report blatant naming violations.

Theres "I dont like this guy" and theres "this guy has racist comments in his name" or "this guy is standing on a respawning jute node for 20 minutes picking it".

Especially since botters are now picking normal looking names and putting armor on.

I agree completely. The OP is in another thread saying he hopes another forum member gets banned for buying something in game. I'm just saying - it's a slippery slope if you start encouraging users to mass report things which aren't against the code of conduct.

@GossiTheDog‌ -
Please don't misquote me sir. and please provide a quote of what I say rather than throwing out random slander.

Perseas · May 2014

Now that you say, there is bots who put normals names and armor, I was at Lions DEN today veteran rank 10 mini dungeon at RIFT area

Its a hard for solo dungeon, so I asked in the chat, if there is any group nearby.

Nobody replied, but I saw about 4 people running and killing everything. Then as always, I tried to be with them, so I can take my kills. The thing is, these people didnt care for the dungeon bosses or quests, there is 3 very hard bosses inside that dungeon and many packs of trash mobs (not a group of 2 or 3 mobs, but 4-5). They repeated the whole area, but only the trash mobs. I found it strange. So I stop following them. I didnt make it to kill the bosses.

Because they didnt touched them and I couldnt solo them, its 1 hit and ur dead.

Ospie · May 2014

Perseas wrote: »

Now that you say, there is bots who put normals names and armor, I was at Lions DEN today veteran rank 10 mini dungeon at RIFT area

Its a hard for solo dungeon, so I asked in the chat, if there is any group nearby.

Nobody replied, but I saw about 4 people running and killing everything. Then as always, I tried to be with them, so I can take my kills. The thing is, these people didnt care for the dungeon bosses or quests, there is 3 very hard bosses inside that dungeon and many packs of trash mobs (not a group of 2 or 3 mobs, but 4-5). They repeated the whole area, but only the trash mobs. I found it strange. So I stop following them. I didnt make it to kill the bosses.

Because they didnt touched them and I couldnt solo them, its 1 hit and ur dead.

That's a public dungeon, people often form groups to grind public dungeons in veteran levels for loot to decon; especially glyphs (it's one of the easiest ways to get dropped glyphs in bulk).

I do my best to buy my quality increasing mats from real players and prefer to pay the slight premium to do so than from people selling near unlimited amounts of materials on the cheap simply because I don't trust them - I appreciate guilds might pool together their excess materials, but that's not likely to be the case very often.

I really do wish that the minority who do buy gold etc from these gold farmers would stop doing so, would quite happily see the lot of them banned (consumers and providers of rmt services).

A better way to report a bulk of bots would be nice too.. Scenes like this are pretty ugly to see http://i.imgur.com/RT3N2wQ.png (that's 3 seperate nodes just being permafarmed by 3 groups of bots - apparently they also carry a lot of soul shards on them cause even after 10 min of a bull netch aoeing on them they were still ressing right away each time).

Perseas · May 2014

these guys didnt have lots of soulshards, because i died many times i was trying to kill that boss and they also spowned with me, in the public dungeon entranse... so no bots. I didnt reported anything after all...

Here is a suggestion, even if the topic is not for it. There is few dungeon per area, that are not solo, they could give us the ability via the group finder to do it.

The world group search, never works, because it never did... So instead of world grouping, add these dungeons instead in the group finder search.

starkerealm · May 2014

BenjaminKacher_ESO wrote: »

Hi All,
Today I wanted to talk about the policy that was stated a while back that excessive reports of innocent people could result in a ban against you. I would link the OP about it but for the life of me I cannot find it.

It was in a thread where someone was saying they were reporting anything farming delve bosses for griefing. Not sure if that helps you.

eventHandler · May 2014

It would be nice to be able to drop a circle (like the first skill in the restoration staff line, mine is morphed to healing springs so I'm not sure the base name), and then a window pops up and you can check the names on it from a list of people in that circle that you want to report as bots. The bots stack and make it so hard to target them, and after half a dozen you start to forget which of the similar random string names you've already reported.

Once someone is reported, more detailed server logging should start for the account of the player reported on what they are doing so that GM's can look at it later and have a clearer picture of what was actually happening (if this isn't already done, which is should be).

It would also be nice to have a ticket/report history to help with remember whom you've reported, among other reasons.

Remember that reporting someone doesn't mean they get banned, it means they get flagged to investigate at some point in the queue. GM's can see a lot more details to know if they are actual bots or not.

Spammers might use such a tool to collect names for people to mail, but it doesn't change the fact that we need more tools. They already do a good enough job of it without it, and it would help us a lot more to report bots/exploiters while devs work on a filter system to fight spammers. Not being able to see a who list of people in the area or know who the people you were just fighting monsters with is very frustrating.

If the report tool is abused by someone to spam report everyone, obviously they'd get whatever penalties you get now for too many blatantly false reports (ie have the tool disabled on their account or something after a warning). If people are getting banned unjustifiably from it, that would mean the GM methods of investigating reports needed tweaked. The tool itself should still exist, because it would save us a lot of headache and time it takes, and more people would bother to report. It is an incredible hassle right now to report a single person in some cases, let alone a cluster.

eventHandler · May 2014

On a different note, there is a difference between quietly reporting someone so that a GM can investigate and slandering them on chat channels and forums. I think maybe people are unclear on the distinction, but I am not referring to anyone in particular. Reporting is not the same as condemning, and should always be done when in doubt; a false report helps the GM's just as much in their refinement of a system to filter out true exploits and bots (and helps them make tools to filter out/penalize people abusing report tools as well). Public accusations are not helpful, and are destined to cause conflict without solutions.