Anets naming policy

Please ban this person.
It is clearly abusing the system which has been shown to be extremely flawed, and even for personal gain as stated in the quoted post.
Not to know what the poster has of personal vendettas against so many people it seems unlikely to know, but it's rather ridiculous and serves only to make the game an unpleasant place where people are constantly threatened for no apparant reason.

Something important to take into account: there's been a few cases on Guru of people lying about their bans, or the reason they were banned. I remember a case where Regina came back on the thread to bust the guy.

Why ban the guild?

Players get forced to change their 'offensive' name (multiple times if required) - how hard can it be for them to have the same level of ruling for 'offensive' guild names/tags?

Yes - the report offensive names/guilds process is flawed - but the banning outright of a guild is so way over the top - especially when we know that there is a way to change a name without closing down the account(s).

Why are you attacking the example? Really... Why? Is your point that Anet does NOT ban randomly because of reports? If so then just say it and back it up, otherwise don't post. You clog up the thread.

This post itsself is a reply to a spampost and therefore spam, remove both please.

Two topics with multiple pages. The easiest and best decision is to NOT have a policy outside the filter.

Yes yes we all know everyone is a troll who doesn't agree with the majority opinion. Been there seen that all my life pal. Only thing that happens with that type of moderation is cults, groups and guilds become the TROLLS and wash out any other opinions that don't appeal to them or THEIR Opinions. Hardly freedom of expression or opinions with that type of group controlled forum moderations. And who the hell is slashdot.org? Some unknown forum of course can do silly stuff like that because as we all know those types of forums are gestapo ruled in the first place and silly kids and children come up with stupid ideas like that to control. No wonder people left, they didn't leave because it wasn't funny anymore, they left because they weren't allowed their opinion.

he wasn't attacking the example, he was just saying it's something to take into account. So it wasn't a spam post although I would say yours and possible this one could be considered a spam post.

Now we have to look for a language where "ban" is a rude word.

I've thought a lot about that method of auto-moderating, and part of me does feel it is the future for some websites. For example on technology or global news sites where the audience is generally more mature it tends to work very well. I think it would see far too much exploitation on Guru, when you could have problems like uber-guilds voting people up or down to push their own causes etc.

The best alternative that I can think of is having a toughly moderated feedback forum. The rules would have to be well written and strongly enforced. A lot of it would be subjective too, like why is balance idea x removed but balance idea y stays? (because balance idea x was ridiculous, but the OP obviously doesn't agree.)

You would need moderators with an exceptional understanding of the game, common sense, and a clue about game design. You would also need to make it very clear that absolutely no trash talk or derailing would be tolerated. You would also need someone overseeing those moderators to make sure there was no bias or opinion being involved in their decisions.

That forum would cover the more technical subjects like skill balance and game mechanics.

I would consider the up/down voting 'karma' system for a separate feature request forum. This forum would cover vaguer ideas like new class suggestions, mission ideas, any kind of content that would be described as 'fun' rather than 'technical'. This could also be a good place for the developers to pitch ideas and gauge reactions.

slashdot has this and it works. mostly because users get limited amount of votes and they can not vote most of the time,. thus pushing cause is nearly impossible.

Or there is "mageo" model, popular here in czechia:

OP of post has moderator rights over all replies (he can delete posts / assign other thread mods / ban people from it / etc.). It leads to well policed community as there is reciprocity of action; be douche and you are not getting replies (because they know you will abuse op rights; be troll and your comments won't stay on even minute.). Be well behaved and your replies stick and people will reply, even if people disagree because you are letting their posts on in your threads too. If idiot makes interesting thread, someone saner can repost.

I am mod on such board. I only had to solve trolling problems and thread-mod abuse about three times in past 4 years. Bulk of my work is to star good threads to appear on frontpage of server. way to mod

This entire thing is silly.

I do understand that a lot of immature kids are playing this game, but that is exactly the state of mind in which you need to be in order to get insulted by seeing the word "bitch" or "bite" or the like in any form.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitch

Grow up. Is GW trying to get holier than the Pope??? Are we going back to the middle ages with regards to the freedom and maturity of speech?

I literally laughed out loud at that. Silly unknown forum indeed .

I have a sensible question. I've seen it stated that accounts that get temp bans get a 'mark' on their account. Is there also a facility that logs the number of reports a user makes? IMO a user that logs 20+ reports a day should be taken less seriously than someone who makes an occasional report, at the least the data would be useful if a report goes to an appeal. Would be interesting to know.

I don't think I have enough faith in the maturity of the Guild Wars community to believe either of those systems would work accross a whole forum.

Too many times have I seen someone making a good point get shouted down by a majority due to lack of understanding or vision.

What is needed in these matters is a panel view, a number of people review the report, decide if it justifies action, contact the reported person/guild and advise of the action to be taken... this is know as rationalised consequence.

Allowing 1 person to be judge and jury without any impartial discussion, indeed without any thought process behind what they are doing is the worst draconian practice I have seen.

Unfortunately support is run on the ideals of the latter rather than the former, hence the reason why this game is up shit-creek in regard to it's company to player relations.
(I expect the stock answer of we cannot afford to use that level of support as we are developing GW2 yadda yadda yadda)

anyway, I think that the banning of the guilds mentioned in this thread is appalling, then to re-tag them (essentially taking away their identity) is ludicrous, a-net need to wake up and realise they are losing the playerbase more surely of recent times than previously and they need to examine their business practices.

As one poster stated earlier the game is rated TEEN thus should be treated this way, unfortunately it appears that the teen rating also applies to the average IQ of the support staff.

I still find these policies too overrated. Anyone can find anything offensive as they see it. Here's some examples:

http://guildwars.wikia.com/wiki/General_Bayel His name sounds like General "Bowel"

http://guildwars.wikia.com/wiki/Selvetarm "Tarm" means "Guts" in Danish

http://guildwars.wikia.com/wiki/Undead_Lich The word "Lich" comes awfully close to "Lick"

http://guildwars.wikia.com/wiki/Miniature_Pig The word "Pig" is pronounced as "Pik" which in Danish means "Dick", so in Danish it's a miniature dick following you.

My point: Anything is offensive. It should seriously be taken into consideration how far that kind of censure should be taken! I understand that a lot of swear words as "RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GO" or "Shit" and so on can be taken out to prevent the game for causing that kind of "Naughty language" and of course Racial slang such as "RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GO" or "Gooks" is extremely offensive as well as names such as "Hitler" (Even though there actually still are people called that who are in no way associated with the madman). But put up a limit! Banishing "SuKa" because it was offensive to a single player because it meant something in an entirely different language than the ones the rest of that guild and the majority of GW know of is, how should I say it, too extreme.

GW seems to suddenly have this notion that it must protect all its players from the evil language nazis who would corrupt our innocent young ears with horrid, horrid names! In trying to be as politically correct and linguistically sensitive as possible, it has become that which it seeks to prevent.

The word "bite" is not allowed in a name. Husband is in the process of forced changing all his characters from the Badas (NOT asS) family to something else because after nearly four years, someone can't read and differentiate between As and Ass. Four YEARS it's been fine and now it's OMG bad, evil and unacceptable.

Where do you stop? If you cannot reference major religious figures, better ban all men's names beginning with "Lord" because that clearly references Jehovah or G-d, a religious figure most would agree is major. Never mind that Lord is also an honorary title of landed or knighted gentry. All the Saint and St whatevers had better be banned, too. And on that note, husband has to also rename his characters with the name Budha even though it is NOT the religious figure figure named Buddha. Budha (with one d) means "one who is seeking enlightenment" while Buddha is "The Enlightened One".

Player ability to report is a good thing but vastly prone to abuse as has been shown. All it takes is an immature person or an ultra conservative person or someone having a really pissy day, and you, too, can be banned without warning and without recourse (since you're not given a reason, just told you can't play).

Do I expect Anet to know how to read and know the difference? No, because they have already proven themselves to be proven unwilling or unable to use common sense or logic.

I think this new, improved, policy might not be as bad as many people seem to think (yes, i'm an optimist. no, not a boat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimist_dinghy)

It might be a "backdoor".
lets assume, the devs registered a desire to be able to change character names, but couldn't, for whatever reasons, implement such a feature telquel.
(or lets assume they just didn't look at it that way or, worse, they know it won't work)

as far as I know, you can get characternames banned if you either manage to link the name in question to some obscure offensiveness, or get enough people to report you with the /report function.
getting people to do that should be possible by either offering ingamegold or assure them they won't get banned because enough other players report too.

this would enable people to change their characternames for the mere downside of a temp-ban.

It's quite amazing that almost all the time there's a thread like this, someone will come up with this notion. As if there exists a higher "logic" or a "common" sense that would supersede everyone, everywhere. We, human beings, are in constant search of what it means to offend or insult, looking to understand the intentions of others. It's no different for NCsoft support people, but they know even better than we do how difficult this is. This is why there can't be a perfect solution. But human nature is such that allowing "total freedom" is sure to lead Anet to loose a lot of customers, because irresponsibility is a "common phenomenon", which people will name "fun", "didn't mean harm", "didn't know", etc.

Just imagine for one second you're this guy at NCsoft support, moderating some stuff for another game (CoH/CoV or Aion) and a name shows up on the radar. How are you going to know the intention of the guy who created it? And what do you think your company would feel if you suddenly decided that because you can't know you won't do anything, thus ignoring all reports?

Some people don't mean any harm when creating their name, but they should also realise that to be able to live in a virtual world without borders you have to accept sacrificing a little bit for the "common cause". Of course it can and will be abused, but if it wasn't there, these virtual worlds would only be empty of people with sensibility or young adults. It's legitimate to question the general policy and its enforcement, but not IMHO the very principle of regulating what's allowed or not. I'm even sure that as virtual worlds grow, the RL law will catch up.

Interestingly, WoW has a long list of "offending" reasons (with a funny "pure gibberish" ):
http://www.wow-europe.com/en/policy/namingp1.html
The more people you have, the more of these problems you encounter, the more important it is to solve them.

Fril, it is not expecting too much, I don't think, for NC Support, Anet or whomever it is who runs the game these days to engage a little intelligence. Expecting everyone to somehow know that their guild ACRONYM means something off-color or possibly offensive in a totally different language is not only not intelligent, it is nonsense. Even though I am familiar (not fluid, however) in a couple languages besides English, I cannot know what names or words might mean something "bad" in, for example, Outer Mongolia or Timbuktu. Names that were deemed acceptable a year or three or four years ago are now forbidden. Now, I'm not talking if someone's acronym is c**t or other glaringly obvious examples of likely offensive terms/names. And I'm not talking about names in similar situations such as Motherf*cker (which, yes, I have seen halfway through the game in NF).

So no, I don't think it too much to expect a bit of common sense or logic in the ban sequence. Sure, stupid people will be stupid no matter what. But it should not follow that a support team must also suspend their own intelligence just because it's a "virtual world".

I'm not asking you not to, I was merely pointing at the fact that the same "common sense or logic" argument can be used by ANYONE to justify their point of view. AND something must be done, because allowing any names open not acceptable doors (the game may well be blabla-rated, we all know there are kids).

Of course, banning Shat was a quite obvious mistake, they should check that it's not the four initial letters from the guild name (and even that can be used by players to "visually assault" other players, I know, the "visually assault" seems strange, but somewhat this is what all this fuss is about) AND that they're not reputable (being here for 4 years doesn't mean that there's no problem).

I agree that Anet and NCsoft need to get their act together, allow a much more flexible mechanism (I bet it's too late for GW1, and I bet that modifying guildtags was exceptionnal because it involved going directly into bits of the server and one of the databases to change the name manually...). But you'll ALWAYS have greay areas, both because you can't foresee all cases and people will try to get around the rules (rules are static, people can judge dynamically).

Kudos to Martin for rectifying that. He proves that Anet is not stupid and they're listening.