Comment by bearjaws | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bearjaws | Hacker News Reader

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This happened to me for a different reason, but it was the same level of frustrating.

After months of playing MW and Black Ops, one day I queue up with friends and after waiting 5+ minutes no server would be found. We try over and over finally we realize its me.

Googling around shows that I am "Shadow Banned" and everyone is like "go away cheater" online.

I've been playing online games with an in game name that contains the word "Erotica" for a while now (4+ years) and have had zero issues.

Turns out the word "Erotica" is BANNED by Activision, and they synced their identity management with Blizzard it got flagged.

I found ONE random thread on Reddit where a guy ran into the same problem and gave a link to directly log into their system.

Once logged in I got "Your username contains adult content and must be changed".

After changing it, and waiting 3 days, it 'synced' and my account was unbanned.

The whole thing was absolutely stupid, I had paid $60 and could not play any of their games.

It pretty much ruined the game for me, I haven't given them a dollar since.

It usually doesn't take a lot of work for engineers to do some brainstorming around who will be affected and send a direct email letting users know what's up. That would have saved you days of fumbling around and frustration.

I have a growing enthusiasm for companies that consistently care for users, and conversely a callous distain for companies that don't.

I feel as though the list of companies that consistently care for users is shrinking by the day.

In fact, I can't really think of many businesses where I feel appreciated or cared for as a customer, but the few that I can are all small businesses and most of them are local to me.

Why would they care, if people still give them money, when they get banned, instead of demanding a refund, they search for workarounds, and even after that, they buy a new games when it's released.

When people start demanding refunds or even start a class-action suit (especially if getting banned in multiplayer prevents you from playing single player missions), things will change.

> When people start demanding refunds or even start a class-action suit

You can thank a clever lawyer for thinking of mandatory arbitration clauses that are making class-actions a thing of the past.

>You can thank a clever lawyer for thinking of mandatory arbitration clauses that are making class-actions a thing of the past.

Those "lawyers" aren't nearly as clever as they seem to think they are: https://www.cernovich.com/patreon-lawsuit-owen-benjamin/

This is fundamentally a support and UX problem, not a dev failure. Big production user management and authentication systems can get pretty complicated and trying to figure out every weird edge case when combining them is not low-effort by any measure. "What if someone's username wasn't caught in their profanity filter but gets caught by ours" seems like a pretty rare edge case in a huge pool of big problems to solve. Their shortcoming was not giving their users proper guidance on how to address the inevitable kinks that pop up.

Anecdotally, having worked on identity management systems, and merged a number of them, this hasn’t ever seemed like an edge case for me. It’s pretty high up on the list. I’d imagine the folks they’ve got working on these systems are paid an order of magnitude more than myself.

> I’d imagine the folks they’ve got working on these systems are paid an order of magnitude more than myself.

I wouldn't assume that. Game companies are notorious for pinching pennies. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if these systems were outsourced completely.

You seem to be confusing when two systems don't mutually support certain names due to technical limitations, with what happened here.

It's not a bug that a filter caught names that the merged companies now collectively do not allow in their collectively owned games.

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The only miss here is more of a UX issue: they handled username bans the same way they handled all bans, with a shadowban.

Shadowbans are great for most infractions since you burn some time of the offender before they start again and give them little information to find loopholes with... but for something rectifiable there should be a way to nudge and explain why they're banned.

I think it's really easy to say that without knowing anything about what they actually did.

I don’t think it’s solely a dev responsibility, but having worked in a UX role on a project that merged two systems with user accounts and millions of users, we (UX, dev, product) spent a lot of time thinking of scenarios exactly like this.

You’re right, this was a support failure, but it was also a failure of the team(s) that performed the merge.

And who knows how many other scenarios they considered? The reason it's a lot of work to ferret these situations out is because there are a ton of things that can go wrong. Who knows how many other situations were considered? For this to be a development failure, we'd need to see a pattern. One instance doesn't make a pattern.

1. How would you know about the users that were missed? Just because they haven't complained, it doesn't mean that everything was alright.

2. Why do you think that B/A haven't spent a lot of time thinking of scenarios like this?

The correct answer is a notification in the game every time you try to play. Not an email saying you’re secretly banned.

That is insane. Had similar issues but not really banned... just "error-less" issues coming up that would lead you to believe the problem is something else entirely.

wow, amazing you were able to figure that out... most people would have given up

Sounds very annoying. Conversely, many of activision’s users are minors. In the games you mentioned it’s some what rare to encounter adults, especially as a new player. Perhaps not the best place to advertise ones love of erotica. Personally it bothers me when I walk past my 10 year old nephew and the other players in his squad have names that are sexual, racist or inflammatory; so I report them. If the people that I report have to work hard to realize that they are disrupting a community and making people uncomfortable I am ok with that too. +1 for activision in my books.

How is getting punished without getting to know the reason useful for anyone? How do they learn anything from such an experience?

It sounds like you were the only one who was uncomfortable. Your nephew probably thought it was funny.

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