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Comment by nperez | Hacker News Reader

I started the wiki linked in the article (codconsumer.org). Long time HN lurker and was pleasantly surprised to see this here!

I was only banned for a week, but I'm absolutely certain that there was nothing sketchy happening on my side. It's pretty annoying when they're charging money for time-limited events like Battle Passes, then you lose some of that time. Of course, it's a much bigger problem for the many who have been permabanned and don't know why. And it's still happening to others.

I would really like for this to end quietly with some better policies on account reviews, and more transparency on the findings of those reviews. I don't think that's too much to ask after being locked out of a $70 purchase. So far they have been completely silent on the matter. So the wiki stays up and we hope to someday get a word out of them.

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if there's a thing called permabanned and they still take the money from the banned person, that should be criminal

Paying a few bucks doesn't give you a free pass to, say, spam racist epithets over and over in chat, or sabotage every multiplayer game you join by running into the enemy team every single match. That said, yeah, "being blocked from a $70 game for no actual discernible reason" should be prevented by some form of consumer rights that can't be waived by agreeing to a EULA.

The frustrating thing about this is that it's still extremely common for people to spam the n-word over voice chat, that's been a problem for years, and I haven't noticed any significant progress in reducing their numbers.

Riot Games recently started testing an AI based system for detecting slurs and other abuse in voice chat, we'll see if they announce results

I recently got temporarily-chat-banned (and lost all Honor ranking) in League because the players on my team were sabotaging the game purposely and I swore at them. I didn't use any hate speech or slurs whatsoever, but apparently just swearing at people is enough to warrant such penalty, without even a warning first. Coincidentally I had actually just hit the highest possible tier of "Honor" in the game just days earlier, obviously indicating my swearing at people is not a normal thing. I haven't played since.

Oh, even more frustrating about this is, the game has a swearing filter enabled by default. If those players saw swear words from me, they quite literally specifically opted into that by turning off the swearing filter! Meanwhile they were allowed to sabotage the game for me and ruin my night AND get me chat-banned.

It's surprising to me to hear that LoL actually does something about chat moderation.

I play DotA, which seemingly does nothing (at at least, very little). I eventually decided to just disable text and voice chat entirely rather than put up with salt in every other game. Toxicity is contagious.

Yay more random bans of people with accents! They deserve it for not speaking correct USA english /s

Not to mention that some languages(Chinese especially) have words which sound exactly like the n-word, so yeah, well done for being banned for not speaking English.

Also, some romance languages use some derivation of the latin word for black (niger), the same root as the English n-word - "negro" in Spanish, "negru" in Romanian, "negre" in Catalan.

It just means dark brown in italian, but it's not very used.

When i was small it was the normal word to refer to black people, but USA has decided that's racist so now it's "persona di colore", even though as a child i've always found it funny because every person is of some colour :D

If I refuse to serve you (eg in a shop when you want to buy a snack) because I think you are foul I don't get to take your money /then/ tell you while putting your money in my pocket. If I decide to withhold part of my service (eg stop mowing your lawn and leave because you are foul) I don't get to keep all the money for completing the job. This stuff isn't hard. Think about what it is in life when there is no "cpu attached to a network" as a necessary part of the transaction. It's the same.

Taking your money for no product delivery, charging you fees for no service is theft even if you are completely foul. Pointing to a "condition of entry" sign at the door of your premises does NOT change the law.

Your analogy falls flat and is a poor interpretation of the situation of being banned from online games for the reasons I cited.

When you buy a snack, you get a tangible good in exchange for money. The implied agreement is the most basic of exchanging goods for cash.

When you purchase an online multiplayer game, there's an agreement you have explicitly agreed to that you will not, for example, call other players the N-word or sabotage the match by repeatedly running into the enemy team (griefing). These are really quite clearly-defined rules you agreed to. You bought the game knowing full well these are the rules, also knowing you _will potentially permanently lose access to the game_ if you violate those rules.

In my prior example (and the one I just wrote here), there is zero comparison to buying a snack in a store and then the store owner snatching it back and keeping the money.

Like I said, I think there should be consumer rights in place to protect the player against losing access to the game they paid for if they were abiding by the rules. I'd say that is a pretty reasonable expectation.

Edit: A more apt analogy would be that you go into a store, buy a snack, eat some of it and then begin pouring hot sauce on other peoples' snacks and yelling in their faces. You don't get to just happily stick around and keep enjoying your snack while you're completely ruining the snacks of others.

Except the rules are _not_ clearly defined.

The list of "bad words" isn't listed for you, and the matching of bad words is not necessarily well tokenised.

You're not always sure what you've said or done, to be removed. And in some cases, they won't tell you what sin you have committed, either.

If there was a legally-protected right to access the service you pay for unless violation of agreed-upon rules has occurred (barring other situations like "company going out of business" or "gaming shutting down forever"), this would almost undoubtedly elicit the need for better-defined rules and substantiation of claims when bans occur.

If random bans get more common the developer risks a game of whack-a-mole with private servers and cracked clients if not players packing up and leaving for a competitor.

Legal protection sounds like it would actually benefit the cheaters given how long an average court case takes.

In my experience, private servers deal with cheaters and bots better than Activision/Blizzard

>the developer risks a game of whack-a-mole with private servers and cracked clients

This would be Felony Contempt of Business Model[0], which would be enforced with every move in the legal playbook.

>Legal protection sounds like it would actually benefit the cheaters given how long an average court case takes.

I see the thought here, but it would do so by providing transparency to the license-revocation (banning) process, which greatly benefits customers who are getting screwed as hard as OP is. This in turn should lead to fewer cases of paying customers getting screwed.

>In my experience, private servers deal with cheaters and bots better than Activision/Blizzard

This is the case because they're moderated better. The companies are raking in cash. They can hire people to fix the problem. They don't because the current model maximizes profits.

[0]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/felony-contempt-busine...

You're really bending over backwards trying to defend people who get their kicks ruining things for others.

It's just like sticking up for the rule of law and equality before it is sticking up for rapists and murders, right?

"You want E2E encryption? Why are you sticking up for the terrorists and child porn rings?"

Terrible, terrible argument all around.

> The list of "bad words" isn't listed for you

is totally different to:

> You're not always sure what you've said or done

Listing the "bad words" ahead of time (or even at all) is self-evidently not workable because people will just use different works to abuse/harass/bully people while evading the banned words list.

That said, it's important to tell the person after the fact "you're banned because you harassed / bullied someone" or "you were caught using anti-cheat software." Maybe some date ranges so the person understands what they did and why they won't be reinstated. BUT you don't need to list out the _exact things_ they did because you're just opening up the toddler argument of "why is that so wrong?" which is just bad actors trying to waste your time and "legalese" their way back into the system.

The lack of listing is fine, so long as the second half of the sentence, which you didn't quote, doesn't apply.

If the system matches on substrings, then you need to know what to avoid - you can't even self-censor, if everything is ambiguous. You end up with the memes of getting banned from Club Penguin, otherwise.

Except, Club Penguin does as you suggest - it tells you that you used a "rude or inappropriate word". Even if the regex is matching something that it shouldn't.

I do agree that insta-banning for _just_ using a rude word without warning is huge overkill. Giving fair warning (and telling them their account will be banned if they repeat offend) should be the baseline. The fact that it's not, in too many cases, is definitely something to criticise.

> you're just opening up the toddler argument

That's not the only thing you are doing. You are also creating an opportunity for false positives to justifiably challenge their bans.

If you are going to keep the user's money, I think you absolutely have to provide recourse for false positives because otherwise what you are doing is simply theft.

> Listing the "bad words" ahead of time (or even at all) is self-evidently not workable because people will just use different works to abuse/harass/bully people while evading the banned words list.

Tough: you have to stay ahead of the bullies if you want to get money for an online service. It's not in any way acceptable to ban people without telling them specifically what you are accusing them of, so that they can challenge you if you are in fact wrong. The fact that it makes the job harder is not in any way an excuse.

Now, if you were to return their money (or at least part of it based on how much time they actually played or something), then yes, you would have an argument that you have a right to unilaterally rescind the contract. But you can't keep the money and say "you know what you said".

> Now, if you were to return their money

So they can just re-buy the game under a new account and just carry on as before? Try this: go to a football match, shout racist abuse at a player then demand a refund for your season ticket. I know for a fact you won't get it.

> It's not in any way acceptable to ban people without telling them specifically what you are accusing them of

> "you know what you said"

Note that what I said wasn't "you know what you said" but "you violated these rules within these date ranges." For example:

* "You were detected using a cheat tool on 13th-15th November"

* "You harassed a player throughout March-August 2022"

* "You were repeatedly abusive in private chat in September 2022"

You're not being accused of murder in the Crown Court, you're being banned from interacting in a video game community. If you want access to the exact information, sue for it.

--- Caveat ---

Should you be banned from playing the game locally / single player? Absolutely not. This I would agree with you on.

When we move to GaaS (gaming as a service) as the norm, it will be more like purchasing multiplayer online = buying a ticket to a sporting event. If you misbehave, of course, you can get kicked out.

Fairly soon you'll need to maintain a subscription just to play.

Oh yeah, that has literally already happened: Xbox Live Gold and PS Plus!

It's not yet the norm.

When it becomes the norm, it will replace purchasing a game at the store [this has already started to happen for PC]. We will no longer be able to play games except through platforms like Xbox Live or PS Plus.

This will eventually give companies like Microsoft and Sony complete control over their platform's IP. When it happens, we'll never be able to collect these games as part of nostalgia growing up playing these games.

> sabotage the match by repeatedly running into the enemy team (griefing).

Wait, you can be banned for being bad at the game?

Usually yes, if it's deemed that you've been doing it maliciously (just like you would be kicked out of a real-life football match if you were the goalie for your team but you were consistently hovering next to the other team's goal trying to score).

Um, being benched by your coach is totally different than being banned by the organization putting the event together. Most sports have some sort of anti-cherry-picking rules. In your football example (I'm using the proper football here), there are offside rules. Hockey has the rule about the crease. NBA has the 5s rule for being in the paint. NFL has illegal formation. Baseball actually encourages getting into wrong positions by allowing stealing, but have other rules to ensure runners finish in proper order rounding the bases.

As many times as I would love to see a ref be able to issue yellow cards for continued blatant offside calls against a player, they cannot be kicked out for breaking said rule.

I'm not talking about a professional team (which would anyway absolutely kick a player out if they were repeatedly griefing their own team - a power which is usually not given to players in online team games).

I am thinking of an amateur tournament - I am quite certain a player who was blatantly acting against their own team would be kicked out by the organizers, even if they weren't explicitly breaking the rules of the game.

the point is that they are denying access to the single player experience, even if you cheat in single player, that should not matter.

In real life, if you go to a sporting event or a show, and start harassing the other patrons and causing a disruption, you can expect to be kicked out without a refund.

Refunding people who deserve to be banned would only encourage them to create new accounts and continue causing problems.

Event ticketing is, imho, one of the most fundamentally corrupt industries I've ever encountered as a consumer so taking it as the example is problematic, (unless you know someone, right? Just queuing up for tickets is naive beyond my expectations of people around here).

But whatever. Do they confiscate the season tickets you were using with no refund? What if they weren't yours? What if they were stolen? What if you know the coach? Can they not like your "offensive beard", take your season tickets and re-sell them? How about your date's utterly vile "Ross Perot was right!" shirt? Can they terms of service you out of the cash for next week? (Wouldn't surprise me on one hand how bad that could be but I somehow doubt it).

Kick them the hell out for being foul by all means, your house, your rules.

"And you take your damn money with you and not come back because I ain't no thief, even from scum like you, you vermin!"

> Event ticketing is, imho, one of the most fundamentally corrupt industries I've ever encountered

That's irrelevant to the discussion. It's a thing that happens, people expect it and the only people who complain about being kicked out are... well being kicked out for being a horrible person.

> But whatever. Do they confiscate the season tickets you were using with no refund?

Absolutely, yes, they do.

On the other hand, they'll probably also tell you _why_ they're doing so. They also won't take your money for _future_ season tickets.

On the other hand, if you went to a sporting event or a show and due to some computer error on the organisers' part you were wrongly denied admission - you would expect a refund.

I can't simply start a fake theatre, sell tickets for $100 each, then turn away all ticket holders at the door even if legitimate theatres do have the right to (e.g.) turn away drunk patrons without breathalysing them.

If a venue kicks you out, you'll definitely have neen told what you did wrong. If venues started just escorting people who are doing nothing out and refusing to say why, people would get similarly frustrated.

Right to trial is a thing, though. The claim that the majority of bans are happening over racist epithets is unfounded, and honestly probably so much hogwash/bunk.

Activision/Blizzard aren't courts of law, but they do represent to some degree a "controller of a market", they are absolutely shirking their responsibility here. Maybe after the SBF fiasco Govts outside China will finally start cracking down hard on all these illict online markets with zero rules.

They should have to specify the cause and provide evidence. If, say, you’re a Nazi and spammed threats in chat that’s very easy to demonstrate and very few courts are going to even blink at the idea that it’s a terms of service violation which doesn’t warrant a refund.

Where that’s harder would be things like “our ML system thinks your input timing wasn’t humanly possible” and it’d be great if this forced companies to be more nuanced about how they handle things like that by doing things like requiring multiple independent checks.

Microtransaction games will happily ban players without recourse or explanation after they spend hundreds of dollars. No refunds, they make the rules and regulators don't care

If the person was cheating then tough shit. If anything, ruining entire online economies by cheating should be what is criminal. Fuck cheaters.

If they were cheating. Otherwise it's called stealing.

In this particular case, we're talking about people being banned sometimes before ever even playing their first multiplayer game because of an anti-cheat system with a kernel-level driver and ML-assisted autobans producing a lot of false positives.

But yes, people who are actually using cheats are manipulating/attacking the service they're using and deserve nothing from the companies who are trying to defend against it.

That’s fine if they’re banned from the multiplayer component. Not fine if they ban you from singleplayer.

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