Broken Toys

Holy shit that was awesome.

A thing of beauty, that.

Oh, snap !

I sure hope Blizzard has all that exactly right… You know cause if the person in question didn’t attempt to defraud anyone and it turned out that the text records were as they were due to a data base bug…

Habeas corpus and all that.

Ah what’s it matter it’s just one customer and there are millions of others to take his/her place. Besides, it sets a good example for the other peasants.

Blizzard should hold more public executions the peasants love that stuff. Hell, no need to even accuse them of anything at all, just tell them in front of the mob what they’ve done and then have at them!

You’re right Pat. Not about the libel, part but the getting over it part.

I should know by now that the entire point of a gaming community is to replicate, in as much detail as possible, an Orc society, right down to the cannibalism.

Thousands buy gold everyday and how many are publicly humiliated on the Blizzard forums? He/She/It should have just bought the gold.

Sorry if my reaction isn’t one of, “Super cool OWNAGE!” but one of “Heh, a GM found a mark…”

Hell if WoW had public executions I’d sign back up in a heartbeat just to watch them. Maybe they could litter Elwynn Forest with crucifixes of characters with signs around thier necks
“Scammer”, “Gold Miner”, “Exploited Holes in the Latest Dungeon”, “Griefer”.

Heck, even rename the things in the Stockades after people who’ve been banned. It’d be… fun walking in there and then gloating over /g that you whacked the slob who hid up the wall in the BG’s last week out of your threat area with the flag.

Not to rain on the fun “look at the moron” parade, but since that information’s not publickly available, it’s pretty easy for Blizz’s moderation team to cut out the bits that have inconvenient truths in them. Not saying they would do that or anything… but hey… food for thought. Data Protection Act 1997 and Freedom of Information Act 2000 anyone?

Blizzard’s database is not transparent. There is no independant verification process to which we can prove the CS’s statements. We just have to take their word on it.

Public executions are entertaining, but if anyone finds out blizzard made the wrong move… well, actually nothing will happen. They haven’t been held to standards since the illegal character moves in early ‘05.

Everyone seems to be forgetting that the person on the receiving end is a paying customer. This paying customer’s armory is public knowledge, by no choice of the customer.

The gaming industry is apparently still very young.

Wanderer,
I imagine they banned him and made a public example of him. I’m completely on board with the banning but not the specific added punishment of public humiliation.

I play games online with my son and daughter both of whom are younger than 18 and frankly, I can see a frustrated kid making this kind of mistake. Especially a kid. My children don’t have the means to buy in game currency, which is the common means to advance once frustrated in these games.

Just ban them, no need for their friends to get to see some ownage of them on the Internet as well.

Rest assured Dad will see the banning email and handle the education part about cheating in games and how such things can lead to wasting hours of time and hundreds of dollars.

A new perspective on online gaming? A player’s perspective and as the father of player’s perspective. I imagine Lum’s own child is old enough to play these things?

I’m perfectly fine with this and find it entertaining. I wouldn’t expect Sprint or Time Warner to do something like that, but that’s because they’re not managing a video game.

As far as the mental scarring that being owned online may cause, I’m of the opinion that if your child is 13 or 14 and wrapped up in the game so much it’s causing him mental anguish for being called out publicly for cheating, they probably shouldn’t be playing the game for a while anyway.

…frankly, I can see a frustrated kid making this kind of mistake.

It’s not a “mistake”. A mistake is DE’ing your epics. This was a choice, a deliberate deception, and one carried out over a period of weeks. It was a plan to try to cheat in a game, followed by an attempt at recruiting unwitting players to support the cheating. Getting on the wrong bus is a mistake. Holding up the bus driver is a choice to commit a crime. So, in an in-game way, was what this guy did.

Rest assured Dad will see the banning email and handle the education part about cheating in games…

The same Dad who didn’t teach his kid that cheating is wrong in the first place?

As for the crushing public humiliation: people know that Kiranth got caught lying, cheating, and trying to steal. Kiranth. Not Billy Smith of 123 Main Street — Kiranth. The character. The account. Not the real-life individual, unless he chooses to tell them. Non-issue.

Clinton,
The idea of “ownage” being o.k. has to be stopped. It’s unhealthy and doesn’t belong in any society or community.

Young people have a poor concept of consequences and for example they may make very poor judgments about what is and is not acceptable in the name of “ownage”. For example the eight teens in Fla who kidnapped, beat/tortured, and witness tampered a young girl all in the name of Internet ‘ownage”.

For customer support personnel to participate in “ownage”, in my opinion that’s just wrong.

OH this is so cool! Too bad I didn’t see his posts.

It is a good place for young people to learn their lessons, better been hung in a virtual world than in court (Can you believe how many annoying young scamers are out there?) make a level 1 toon and you will drawn in the “god-mod/toobox cheats” whispers.

Since kidds nowadays can’t learn responsibility in schools anymore, maybe they can be thought online.

I can’t see how this could be mistaken by the Offending Player. The reason being, this is not simply 10 gold or even 100 gold that the Player suggested they misplaced or lost, it was 5000 gold. That is an enormous sum of money within the game, and not an amount that someone would simply forget about or lose.

The response is:

It is unprofessional for customer service personnel to humiliate customers in a public forum.

In particular, hyping the current trend of “ownage” at any cost is particularly unprofessional.

The rest is just ballast.

In the olde texte worlde days, we used to log absolutely everything, from in-game random numbers generated to every single packet that was ever sent to the players. It’s amazing how being able to tell someone “no, you didn’t lose carrier when you died, because you were still typing when the killer blow was struck” can cut down on user complaints by a factor of 90%.

I recall one attempted scam just after we’d launched MUD2, when we received a phone call from “a customer” complaining that he’d bought our game and the floppy was corrupted. He demanded his money back. He said he was at school and had spent all his pocket money buying our game.

Except, MUD2 wasn’t sold in the shops, it was entirely online, and there was no such thing as a MUD2 floppy.

We took his name and address, passed it to the police, who informed his father. We were told “I don’t think he’ll be doing it again…”.

Richard

Yes it is an issue. When you’re facing a civil suit because an ex-customer got fired and he’s blaming it on the fact that his boss was in his raid group and found out that he’d been skimming the guild coffers thus fostering an atmosphere of mistrust in his real-life dealings it can become an issue.

Even in that far-fetched strawman of an argument its still the ex-customer’s responsibility for doing something dishonest and revealing their real life identity to another player.

There is no character/MMO company privilege. Jsut like you don’t own any of your items. You don’t have any claim to any of your actions in game, they’re free to do or not do as they please with them.

Now there is an argument to be made that it was unprofessional but at the same time the overwhelming majority of customers reading that post enjoyed it and applauded the action. And showing what happens when you try and scam Blizzard is a whole lot more poignant than a dry list of rules. This little outing likely saved them 100s (or more) of CS tickets.

Are issues like this routinely resolved publicly on the WoW forums?

For all those saying that this was unprofessional and that it should have been kept private, do you fail to note that it *was* private for the first three weeks of the incident? Then, when the customer made a (very nasty and telling) post on the public forums, the CS rep responded with the research that had been done prior to this. The customer (who did not get banned as far as I can tell, but was told that he COULD be banned for this) then proceeded to delete his posts to cover his own tracks.

Frankly, I am of the opinion that good customer service is helping the customers that want help, and denying those that want to abuse/scam you. If the customers that you deny take that public, you respond publicly with the information available to you in the investigation that you have already done. This has a twofold effect of making the customer see the error of his actions and no longer thinking of you as an easy target, and also showing other potential scammers that the investigative process is extensive and complete making any attempts they will make unlikely to succeed. It costs you more time up front, but saves you time in the long run.

I only worked in various types of CS for 8 years however, so maybe my opinion is less important!

I like this argument chain. So far I’ve established the following though and will be taking these points and koans away with me from this thread

- People will want to exploit anything they can.

- Logging of all game content is one of those mandatory processes we need in game.

- Some people are very sure that character and publickly viewable account is seperate from identity. This is, in my humblest of researching opinions, total rubbish. But peoples different perceptions of this cause some interesting topics to crop up. Especially anonymous pwning of n00bs.

- pwning is about as useful as a chocolate teapot, but recieves a confusingly large amount of attention.

- It is far easier to rip someone to shreds when you can delete thier posts and ban thier accounts. And possibly edit posts…

- Trust is easily given to the person with blue text you pay the salary of, if only because if we didn’t trust them, we wouldn’t trust the game. And that’s not a good state to be in. Still, all authority should be comfortably questioned if only to maintain a level head and a healthy lack of fanboyitis

- A lot of us want to see people get hanged for thier crimes against the playerbase in game. For everyone who reckons that this is too extreme, or that people could be hanged while being innocent… well… the gameworld already supports ressurection, and if you can do state execution events, you can do state pardons as well. Assuming of course people even get attached to thier characters.

- Lum’s in need of a UI designer. Where do I send my CV and would I need to relocate from the UK?

Anything I missed?

At first I disagreed with D-One, but I have come around to agreeing with him.

The problem with public executions is that the executor usually comes across as sanctimonious assholes. Theres a skill to executions, and basically unless your very good at it, you usually end up with a bloody mess and shit all over yourself.

Your the master of your domain in the official forums, and the temptation to go 11 on uppity jerks that call themselves your customers is pretty overwhelming. Its not the egregious scam pwnage thats the problem. Its the bad habits that you pick up dealing with the scammers that color everything else you do with the rest of the players.

Case in point – just about every SOE bee eater to hold the position of “customer spokesperson.”

Ack, sorry, I wasn’t specific enough – I know they do the “public execution”-style takedowns fairly often, but do they resolve routine matters – and resolutions in the customer’s favor – publicly as well?

If they do, then presumably the OP knew that the resolution of his issue was going to be public, and he took the calculated risk that he’d win.

How is it an execution? This is more like being sent to the principal’s office. No penalties were actually levied. You can go watch criminal trials if you want. They’re all public by default (though this is for the protection of the defendant). When the prosecutor presents evidence that conclusively proves the defendant is guilty, you can be there and watch the defendant’s public humiliation. If it’s a big trial, a journalist will write all about it and slap in the paper so you don’t even have to go to the trouble of visiting the courtroom. The difference is that in WoW said trials are private by default, and it was the customer’s decision to make it public.

The would be scammer got his just reward. He chose to take it public and a public call-out was justified. The fanboi’s “dancing on the grave” in that post need to wipe their chins.

I understand all the arguments and potential conflicts in the situation, but if one doesn’t trust the game and/or the people running it there are more practical concerns than just getting publicly berated. Several commenter’s have made that point, but if I think the company in question is really lax throughout their organization they ain’t gettin’ my credit card number.

A troubling part of the whole situation is “server roll back”. I’ve been playing WoW since a month after launch and am either blissfully or ignorantly unaware of any roll backs – there were plenty of times the boards erupted with talk of the need for roll backs, but I don’t recall ever noticing one. A search turned up nebulous discussions of rollbacks, but nothing seemed very concrete – other than a note on roll backs in a blizzard support document.