Broken Toys

This wasn’t a public execution. It was a public suicide.

When you attempt to swap public opinion like that on message board, you’d better have your ducks in a row — and the GM was far from mean or even terse. He just had data backing his claims which was completely contrary to what the original poster was claiming.

Now, sure we can all question the validity of data because Blizzard is obviously a conspiratorial institution out to crush the hopes and dreams of it’s playerbase — but, I just have a hard time swallowing that. Then again, I’m also not wearing my tin-foil an soda bottle hat that keeps out the mind-control rays either.. so I could already be compromised.

Wow. Now I understand why my HS teachers say today that while discipline was possible in the schools 20 years ago, its impossible now. Even lightly punishing a small, spoiled child’s cheating unleashes a torrent of “how DARE you make my little Johnny feel bad!” from many people.

I was a senior in high school 25 years ago. We had an open campus and did basically whatever we wanted to. I remember being suspended from high school for three days when they changed the smoking policy from the cafeteria to the rear steps and I forgot and light-up in the cafeteria the first morning of the change.

Humiliation is not punishment. Never was, never will be.

You know, I’m surprised that no one’s really noticed what this actually *means* in terms of what Blizzard is tracking.

There are references to what appear to be in game chat conversations that have happened over a month ago. This is vastly more troublesome than the fact that someone was trying to scam the GMs. As far as I know there aren’t any codified rules for how Blizzard has to handle chat logs, mostly because they’ve never really said they are logging everything you say in game and storing those longs for at least a month and a half. There are some pretty severe privacy issues with this sort of thing, and considering how much slack Google got over the whole “gmail doesn’t really delete your messages” thing, I can’t see this going over well if people really start paying attention to the fact that it’s going on.

The only valid reason for keeping tabs on player *conversations* is for harassment petitions, and those typically don’t require that logs be kept for this sort of duration. But worst is that there really aren’t any clearly defined rules as to how and when Blizzard can go through the logs of all your seemingly private conversations with other players. And it’s not like it’d be hard to correct that. Delete chat logs after a short period, maybe a few days, put a warning on the harassment petition button that says “By submitting this petition you give Blizzard permission to access your conversation logs pertaining to the situation” and then explicitly prohibit GMs from accessing conversation logs in other circumstances. It’s not data that needs to be accessible in most circumstances, and it needs to very clearly be flagged as such.

But then, D-0ne, where’s the complaint? No formal punishments were levied and humiliation doesn’t constitute a punishment to you, so nothing happened. There’s nothing to complain about!

Humiliation isn’t a punishment… but it’s still mean. I see plenty of room for him to complain on those grounds. He wasn’t arguing that they shouldn’t be punished, he was arguing that if you’re going to punish them you should actually do it, and not just be mean to them.

Eolirin,

When I had a job (part time nights, rules enforcement) in the gaming industry 12-13 years ago we kept chat logs indefinitely. They were easily compressed and we would search them using key word searches to find exploits and cheating and to investigate players. Every text line had a date, time and ID associated with it.

I believe Leet speak came about because of this type of enforcement technique.

I digress. Point is, whatever you type in and these games servers “see it” it is probably stored somewhere forever.

D-0ne, that doesn’t mean it *should* be that way.

It’d be akin to the telephone companies storing all of your phone conversations without your knowledge or consent. The law hasn’t caught up to the new medium, but I really see absolutely no reason why internet communications should be treated any differently than telephone communications. Yes, data needs to pass through the game servers, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be stored indefinitely by the game servers.

Eolirin, the ToU you agreed to when you signed up for an account says that Blizzard can and will monitor all chat and communication within the game. I’d say that’s plenty of advance warning.

Good for the CSR. Making an example out of a cheat in such an amusing fashion is bound to be more effective than any private admonishment.

Maybe if more people were humiliated publicly, moronic behavior would lessen.

Chat logs are important for a LOT more than harassment. Yes, one would think that item dupers, for instance, would be smart enough not to talk about what they’re doing in-game when the EULA says they have no expectation of privacy. They do it anyway. Enough of them do so that grepping the chat logs for evidence of exactly how they did it and to find out who else is involved is an important part of an investigation. That can require months of logs. Many times, exploiting only comes to light when the exploiters get greedy, or get bored and don’t care if they’re banned, they’ve had their fun. (Rolling 30’s anyone?) Then those logs become not only a source of information to find out who was involved and how much damage they did, but also potentially evidence in a real-world lawsuit (either as plaintiff or defendant).

I’m rather big on privacy myself, as you might guess from the fact that I’ve been hanging around Lum’s general vicinity since the old days, and still nobody (except Lum) knows my name, age, gender, occupation, location, or really much else about me except that I play or have played a few popular MMORPGs. And this is a blog I trust; there are places I only post via an anonymous proxy. But I have NO problem with a MMORPG logging, and storing indefinitely, anything and everything I say in the game. I don’t have any expectation that anything I say to another customer in a privately-owned virtual world is going to be kept secret from the owners, and I never did. If I was planning to do something unscrupulous, I wouldn’t discuss it in-game, and any in-game coordination needed with my partners in crime would be via code words.

As for this idiot, remember that HE was the one who took the issue to the public forums. Blizzard quietly told him “no, we won’t give you 5k gold.” He tried to rile up public opinion to pressure Blizzard to give him 5k gold. When you tell a lie about me, I have the right to tell the truth to defend myself, and so does Blizzard.

Oh, and IainC, if I’m your boss, and you pilfer from the guild bank and get caught (or brag about it), you’re too stupid to work for me anyway. Really, though, how is that really any different than the guy in question bragging at the company Christmas party that he’s cheating on his income tax, and likewise making himself look untrustworthy?

Actually since 2005 stalking and harassment laws have had on-line activities added to them (Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act of 2005) so if you are being stalked IRL, and that person besides trying to call or show up at your house starts following you around on-line, those records would certainly be subpoenaed. So harassment can very well be more than just kids complaining, and thus any company might see a need to keep those records.

Of course, since SOX, usually companies actively delete old information and communication, rather than keep it around. No company wants discovery to turn up anything that will make them look bad, and instead want to delete it. But again, the company would decide to delete it based on their own self interest, not privacy.

Privacy would be something like, employees are not allowed to scan the records except to support help desk tickets, and employees caught doing so would be fired and perhaps prosecuted, depending on what they were looking up. That would be something I’d expect and hope Blizzard does, but not to simply not keep records at all.

But what I’m more curious about Eolirin is why you think it’s acceptable to store this information for a few days but not for a few months (let alone years)? If it’s an invasion of privacy then storing it at all should be a violation, even for a few days. Just like the phone company can not store your conversations at all except under certain circumstances. If the information needs to be retained to investigate harassment, then the timeline is pretty immaterial.

But the difference is you basically have to use a phone to run your daily life, same with snail mail, which is why laws have been written that state you have an expectation of privacy. Conversely, you don’t have to play a game. They tell you up front they are recording everything, and you can choose not to play.

But I can see a point in the future where certain on-line communications will not be allowed to be stored, as our lives become more dependent on the internet. But I doubt it will ever be true for a game, for the simple reason you don’t have to play any games.

It is very important to keep logs, we had a system and from time to time people will claim (un-intensionally) they did something and it is great to use the log to figure out what exactly has happened. However that is when our customers are all responsible adults.

However when you are facing millions of customers, if only 0.01% is trying to scam you, there is trouble. Not to mention trying to stir a riot on a public forum.

This is to D-One. If you don’t do customer service, you will never know the feel. When kids tries to scam you, once or twice it is fun, after a while it is just annoying. They need their lesson, and it is good to show the other trouble makers what could happen.

Blizzard does has more power, however it is within their own forums. They could have bad GMs, however the above case there are several GM involved, and I am sure it is not pleasant to go throw huge old files to find the data. Statically 99.9% posible it is the kids’ fault, and even if it is not it is still a lesson well learned (the world is not fair)

d-one
humiliation is in fact typically the most successfull component of discipline.

physical pain is transitory, and one can easily grow accustomed to it, howeer humliatory aspects of most punishments are what take it up from ‘ow that hurts grr’ to ‘oh god i don’t want to go through that again’.

for more information google well..let’s see…punishment, BDSM, psycology of corporal punishment….

and little johnny took it public and tried to start a coup against mean old blizzard, and got smacked around verbally for his trouble.

if we’re lucky he cried a bit because he didn’t get what he wanted for once in his life and will reconsider his borderline sociopathic me first ways.

if we’re really lucky johnny will assume that an epic mount with out work was his right and sue.

but most likely it was just some two bit scam artist that will move on to the next scam du jour.

Ok, I’ve been that CS guy who wasted an afternoon investigating a complaint that turned out to be a total fabrication. I can sympathise. From a ‘give them what they deserve’ point of view I totally understand the satisfaction of publically outing these people. From a CM and PR perspective though, the negatives far outweigh the positives in my opinion.

Oh, and IainC, if I’m your boss, and you pilfer from the guild bank and get caught (or brag about it), you’re too stupid to work for me anyway. Really, though, how is that really any different than the guy in question bragging at the company Christmas party that he’s cheating on his income tax, and likewise making himself look untrustworthy?

Except he’s not bragging about anything. Your example makes no sense and isn’t a valid comparison to the original point. If Blizzard didn’t out him no-one would know, he wouldn’t have been caught. People who cheat on their taxes are breaking the law, people who cheat in a game aren’t.

Humiliation might be a good way to raise your kids, I don’t know and I don’t care. I don’t however think it’s a good way for a corporation to deal with it’s customers. As someone above said, Blizzard is held to higher standards than its customers. if you play dirty then you’re broadcasting a strong message that you might not want to be sending.

As for the argument that this example could prevent a lot of similar cases or increase faith in Blizzard, no it really won’t. People have short memories and there will always be fresh blood thinking they can get away with old tricks. Furthermore those who want to believe that Blizzard arbitrarily deletes gold from player accounts will continue to believe it while the majority of reasonable players will assume that the OP is either mistaken or lying depending on their sympathy levels. All that holds whether or not you smack the guy down publically.

I’m seeing a lot of the same attitude in this thread that I saw last year, when Blizzard first published the Armory, and the accompanying April Fool joke about the Tinfoil Hat. Back then, Blizzard was being insensitive about the privacy of their players, and should most definitely give players an opt-out. Because what the players want is paramount! Blizzard must kiss their bottoms and wash their feet for them, they are always right!

Well, no. Sometimes, customers are whiny bitches, who tie up far more than their share of CS time, for no useful reason. Sometimes they are trying to scam you. Sometimes, the customer is just flat out wrong, and you’re better off without him.

Blizzard employees don’t seem to be going out of their way to be unpleasant to their players. Kiranth’s player could have been served up with a banning, for attempting to defraud a GM. What he got instead was a public pwning. I think he got off easy.

And if he quits over this (fat chance), is anyone going to follow him? Is his entire 200+ account guild going to follow him to… well what-ever game they’ll go to? I think not. I can conceive of reasons why “entire” guilds or other communities might leave World of Warcraft, but they don’t involve the “mistreatment” of a player who tried to scam Blizzard’s GM staff.

By the way, the Armory and its peripheral technology is now ingrained into the WoW community. It’s the basis of several web pages and UI addons. I’d love to see a report on how many people quit because “their” characters were published on the Armory. I bet we could count them on a Murloc’s toes.

“Sometimes, customers are whiny bitches, who tie up far more than their share of CS time, for no useful reason. Sometimes they are trying to scam you. Sometimes, the customer is just flat out wrong, and you’re better off without him.”

Formulating a policy and a support system backed by all levels of management that would deal with such “sometimes” situations has been the bane of far more organizations than Blizzard. Finding where to draw the line is hard.

I fondly recall when admins on MUDs were called Gods, because, well, that was what they were. If you didn’t like the Gods, you didn’t have to play their game.

Professionalism in community management is a decent thing and a good thing, but please let’s not advocate that CMs need to bend over backwards to protect people to a ridiculous extreme.

Players who defraud game companies can also defraud other players; as a player, I prefer to play with people who don’t attempt frauds (as I think most people do).

If this player had sent email and the CM responded via forum – that’s unprofessional. He used Blizzard’s forum to accuse Blizzard of cheating him. The CM responded in the forum in an honest, courteous fashion. Meanwhile, I derived amusement as well as satisfaction from knowing that this was an example people might learn from.

Far better than deleting the post and hiding it all away. Had the CM been cranky or rude, then that would have been unprofessional, but he wasn’t.

So the OP suffered embarassment. Big deal.