2 weeks, 3 bans -- a recap

Simply Kedde — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 18:57:05 GMT

Oshi.

Yet again, I'll probably have to add this to avoid another ****storm from potential mods or stupidly sensitive people coming here.

WARNING!
This wall of text is huge.
It contains links to a site which is known for insensitivity, profanity etc.
It contains swearing on it's own, including name calling.

Also, you'll probably have to read pretty much all the way through the linked threads to have it all make the most sense you can.

Yeah, where to begin this.
Some people will know, others will think, deserved that you ****** while others yet will sympathize.

Actually, this title is wrong and fails, it's been more than 2 weeks, but why care.
3 bans you say? You only had 2 guilds right?
Well, yes, but kicking me from this place for public QQ'ing combined with shedding light on this matter is something I count as well, whether you like it or not.

If you happen to look at this, you'll probably know what guild I resided in little more than a couple weeks ago, for the ignorant, it was the guild of extinct birds, also known as [DoDo].
Little did I or any of my friends know that playing with words and calling a bird that died out and went extinct "****ty" was wrong.
After all, it had to be a pretty retarded design, justifying us calling it out.

Apparently, that lead to some random person never to be found out, to get us banned by reporting us to support for an inappropriate and offensive name, nonsense I say.

Response (GM Cykor)03/26/2009 07:35 PM
Hello,

The guild "Endangered Feces [DoDo]" has been banned for having an inappropriate name. Guilds that are banned are no longer able to enjoy the normal benefits of a standard guild, and they will have to be disbanded and reformed to regain those privileges. It is very important that guild names do not violate our Rules of Conduct or User Agreement, as they are very visible and we do not tolerate names that are directly profane or obscene by insinuation.

This decision is final and irreversible. Please let us know if you have any further questions.

Regards,

GM Cykor

This was one of around, perhaps, 10 identical responses following our first ****storm of emails to support as to why the game suddenly claimed we were banned when trying to guest invite people.

Obviously, support is already lying here, as evidence later proves.
Hint, irreversible bans.

Hello,

I'm leader of a very active and highranked GvG guild. A few days ago someone played a prank on us which got our guild banned. Someone reported our guild name (Endangered Feces [DoDo]) for being offensive. This of course a joke, not a single person in the world is crazy enough to consider this offensive. There is nothing offensive about it. It's a funny play of words, and the dictionary clearly states "feces" is NOT offensive.

However, this prank has fargoing consequences. The 25 players we have in our guild are now suddenly unable to play this game. We are not able to play the Monthly Tournament coming up this weekend. Considering we are a big competitor for this tournament it will turn out to be a big joke without our participation. I actually suspect one of our competitors pulled off this prank so they lose a strong rival.

We understand a mistake must have been made by the administrator who banned us. Please correct this mistake. Right now we feel disappointed and betrayed. We feel just like the soon-to-be-executed soldiers in Kubricks "Paths of Glory." Everyone in their right mind knows this ban is ridiculous.

Please, i beg of you to understand the ridiculousness and futility of this ban. It serves no purpose but to hurt the game and it's playerbase. Please understand you are shooting yourself and the competitive community in the foot by doing this.

With hopeful regards

Now this was obviously exaggerated a bit to prove the point, but that changes nothing as to why it's utter nonsense.

We apologize for the far-reaching impact of this guild ban, but we are not able to reverse it. We have a variety of team members who monitor character and guild names, and this is a very borderline name that could rightfully be banned, or we could have let slide. There are differing opinions amongst even our team on whether this name should have been considered inappropriate or not, but that is natural considering the scatological nature of the name and the various perspectives you could take on how offensive it is. Ultimately, once we have banned a guild, it is irreversible, and so this action will stand. Again, I would like to apologize for how much this effects everyone in your guild, but given the tools we have at our disposal this is the reality of the situation.

We appreciate your active involvement in the PVP community and wish you the best of luck in reforming and in future competitions. Please ensure that all subsequent guild and alliance names do not have overt or subtle inappropriate references in them.

Best regards and good luck,

GM Cykor
The Guild Wars Support Team

and another one because I can

I am sorry you are upset by this, but the decision is final. It is especially important that guild names are not inappropriate. Please be more careful of this in the future.

GM Cykor
The Guild Wars Support Team

After having received these answers, we were obviously upset, feeling betrayed when so close to a goal we'd had for several months and completely disagreeing with support who were still lying about bans being irreversible.

Now to proving how that was and still is a lie if they ever tell you so.

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...03#post2696803

This thread shows how that lie which was repeated many a time is indeed a lie, right in our face when the whole time, we knew it was possible.

I heard communication and community relations were good!

Hello Cykor,

My guild and I appreciate the quick response. However we are very dissatisfied with its content. I trust that you do not have the ability to reverse a guild ban, but there is absolutely no way I believe a guild cannot be unbanned. I'm convinced ArenaNet can unban us one way or another.

You see, banning a guild isn't remotely the same as (temporarily) banning a player for language abuse. First of all, it hurts only one player, and the damage is all but permanent. Banning a guild hurts dozens of players, permanently. Considering we are talking about the small but tight GvG community this ban has the impact of an atomic bomb.

This is not the first time a comepetitive GvG guild has been accidentally banned. Battery Powered Best Friend [vibe] got banned before. Anet apologized and reversed the ban. This means DoDo can be unbanned as well. Not to mention [vibe] is an infinitely more "offending" name. Although of course it isn't offensive at all unless you have mental issues. Here is the link to the official ArenaNet response: http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...03#post2696803

Gaile Gray: "Last night, I was made aware of the blocking of a Guild Wars guild. The reason given was that the name was offensive. I scratched my head and wondered, for while the name was a double entendre, it wasn't something that would be likely truly to offend anyone. The fact that this guild had been active for a long period, the fact that they had placed well in the Celestial Tournament and had only recently received their silver cape trim made the incident even more hurtful, to the guild, and puzzling, to me.

I've spoken with our support team, and they confirm that yes, due to a communication issue, one of the team members did block the guild. The team lead was fully on board, as was the European team lead, that the name was acceptable. Suggestive does not equal offensive. But in all honesty, I can see that it's not an easy call to make at times. This decision was made months ago and the guild was not actioned early on because it was agreed that the name was ok. The problem was that this wasn't communicated to everyone.

We apologize for the block. We are going to reverse it immediately. We do not know how a reversal of a guild block will work -- we don't know if that has been done before. But we're hopeful that everything will be in order and all will be restored to the guild. If that is not the case, please write community@arena.net and we will do our best to try to correct anything that we can correct.

Again, both ArenaNet and NCsoft are sorry for this situation. We reacted as quickly as we could once we were made aware of it. Please note that other guilds, recently pointed out to the team, will likely be blocked. We've not been as watchful as we should, and regrettably a few guilds have stepped far across the line on naming. They'll be blocked, and there will be no appeal. In this case, we are not reversing the action because of complaints; we are reversing the action because the team made an error, we were made aware of it, and we do our best to correct our errors and, as you can see, we do it publicly and with apology."

Right now we are in an almost completely similar situation. The guild name isn't offensive at all. The guild has existed for many months. The guild has been very active, very succesfull, and very popular in competitive gvg. I do not see why we cannot be unbanned.

Competitive Guild Wars is my passion, and not just mine, my entire guild's. For over five months we have dedicated over twenty hours a week each into this guild. If you do the math you will realize tens of thousands of manhours have gone into this guild. This is the reason why we react so passionately to this guild ban, which has obviously been triggered by a lame prank.

A fitting anolog would be this: The New York Knicks get forbidden by the government and banned from the NBA. This because Knicks is a word play on "nig" or "******s." The riots following this would be huge. I hope this analog give you insight in the impact, and stupidity of this ban. The only difference is my guildies do not care about basketball at all, we care about guild wars.

Please, if you do not have the power to lift this ban. Contact ArenaNet, because they do. I understand this may mean extra work for you, but you have to realize that this ban isn't a small issue. My guild and I put 5 months of passionate work in it just to see it being destroyed by pranksters. I cannot cease to emphasize the importance of this issue me and my guildies.

Thank you.

This was our last true response to the matter of our old guild of extinct birds.
It never received a reply worth noting other than them, once again claiming how it was impossible to unban a guild, followed by how a biologically correct term for waste was offensive.

Not because kids who are the ones to be protected by censoring would even know what "feces" means.

Sadly, that meant that same day as the last response, our tag was changed to the infamous [ban], and even later that day, it was reformed and therefore, disbanded after more than 1600 matches in 6 months, including a 66% win percentage, after having been in the game for a year at that time and after having been the most active guild on the ladder, having helds halls, been on guildwars TV (observer mode) and having participated in multiple monthly tournaments.

Truly, a sad day.

We kept our spirits high and the guild was quickly reformed to the banned super ***** team, also known as [SuKa].

We continued from where we were left lying down and being kicked in the nuts, but we continued.
And that so, succesfully.
After 2 weeks, we had played a massive ~300 matches, and again with a 66% win percentage.
It was time to start doing this thing called AT's again to qualify for the monthly tournament, after all, that requires a lot of 14-day memberships which proves an old point in players needing sufficient time to qualify.

Back on track though, that's all well enough, but as it happened, we were trying out a bunch of people who were all wanting to join our guild, being very active and quite succesful.

We'd had a handful of applicants, pretty much all of them failed and were booted again, all nicely with no offense and them taking it nicely and all.

The guild was groving into a quite big one with friends and applicants coming in (which made the ****-up so much worse in magnitude).

We happened to trial this guy noone really wanted in, but our mighty leader.
He wanted to give him a chance.
So he had that for 3 days like the others did, he failed to live up to our expectations and level of play, especially since he'd always been claiming to have a pretty high-level experience.

That proved not to be the case, he was booted in the same fashion as everyone else and got a good luck on the way.

Apparently, something in the brain of this kid went wrong, which is to be proven later.

Some days later, someone gets annoyed at a random applicant and kicks him for the fun of it.
We try to reinvite him 10 mins later, but o**** guys.
We're unable to, because it says the guild is banned.
What the ****?
Nice joke?

Err...
Noone really understood that.
We had reformed with a name that couldn't possibly be offensive in any way, it was just a simple plagiarism of a popular top guild.
That left us majorly confused, starting, once again with a load of emails to support and some public QQ combined with a lot of "Wtf".

http://www.teamquitter.com/phpBB2/vi...=193306#193306

This thread is what describes it the best.
Threads were also posted here (unfortunately, Bella dislikes me and my threads, and on guru).
http://guildwarsguru.com/forum/showt...php?t=10367402

Now, we're once again left without a clue due to Anets way of handling bans.
No contact is made, which is simply unreasonable.

We had our suspicions.
Originally, it was our french alliance guilds that were blamed, simply because they're french. (demon language, bad frenchies, french in general, long story, no offense)
That was mostly a joke although we in all seriousness couldn't find anyone straigth away.

However, we quickly got a much better picture of who it was.
Shortly after the QQ thread was up, someone had made up an entirely new account with a new spiting us and posting a support ticket/response of having us banned.
Now, as the user account was new, we couldn't identify this retard, but our suspicions fell on this guy who had been posting a lot on the forum lately.

The post mentioned contained a lot of fail english just as his posts did, and another funny coincidence was, that we had, had this applicant who was the only one to be pissed off and feel all insulted by being rejected.

Hm, hm.

As we have our connections, we happen to know people acting as moderators on QQ.
We had one IP check this new account and sure enough, it turns out to be this failed tryout.

Sure enough, on page 5 of said thread, he admitted to doing it, in a spiteful tone again even.
What a major douchebag.

We now knew our target and a bit of namecalling happened, naturally.

The thing is, that couldn't help us in any way other than letting the entire competitive community know what a ****** he was. (no offense to colourful people)

We did however email support once again as earlier mentioned.
One of the mails here:

Hello,

I still think our name wasn't offensive, but it's nice to see you updated and clarified the rules on making guildnames. Seeing as DoDo was not going to get unbanned we disbanded the guild and reformed under "Super Kaon Action Team [SuKa]". We considered many names but voted this as our favorite. Partly because we figured this name isn't offensive and therefore not bannable at all. Also for many years there was the very famous guild "Seppo Hovi Action Team" [pre][Shat][/pre] which also hasn't been banned.* We actually wanted SKAT as tag but that wasn't allowed, urbandictionary.com revealed why. So we took SuKa. We took up gvging straight away. In exactly two weeks we have already done 250 games averaging almost 20 games a day. I'm certain this is actually a record, no guild in the history of guild wars has played more games within this short amount of time ever.

Now i log on after a succesfull and fun day of GvG to be absolutely blown away. The guild got banned. Again. I cannot even begin to describe how I feel right now but you can imagine i'm pretty pissed off. How is it possible that this guild name gets banned? Why? Haven't you read my previous e-mail at all?! You cannot just ban a guild like that! It is not even nearly the same as banning a players account, banning a guild affects hundreds of people permanently whereas banning an account only effects 1 player.

Previous time i did my best to keep my emotions out of the e-mails and stay polite. Only after being BETRAYED twice now, and with a name that is UNQUESTIONABLY inoffensive i'm quite literally exploding with anger.

Please unban this guild, and after that please leave us alone. All we want is to play your game without being interfered with. If you do not want us to play this game, why not just cut the chase and ban our accounts?

In addition to support, this was also sent directly to Martin Kerstein, the european district community relations guy, or what title he goes under.
Bottom line is, he's a pretty cool guy and a friend even knows him in real life.
Surely, he'd try and help us out.

Sure enough, that was all it took:

Hi Kaon,

Your guild will be uncensored, but your guild tag will be [Ban] - I think you might actually like that

expect an email from support later on

take care

Martin

He even has a well developed sense of humour. :afro:

Well, yay I guess.
That was quite nice.

Having that resolved was a good thing, however, the root of the problem had yet to be touched.
The guru thread is the evidence here.
The topic is still hot and it's been made quite clear that something is wrong here.

Someone even managed to get [pre][Shat][/pre] censored despite us constantly saying we for whatever deity you like, did not want any abuse towards any guilds mentioned.

That's where it's at now.

Apart from all this, all there is left is this.
Page 9, QQ thread:
They just banned massive for abusing the report system. Nice!

**** you right back, ******.
For anyone ignorant, that's deserved.

Hope anyone might enjoy a read, hope it might shed light on recent events.
At least it seems to have succeeded in catching Anet's attention.

Large picture.

Spoiler

Rocket science !

Simply Kedde — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 11:59:49 GMT

Just thought I'd put up my latest tribute <3

Much carebear wuv to Akirai for this.

GWOnline - Blogs - Simply Kedde

2 weeks, 3 bans -- a recap

Rocket science !