Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
increased moderation and baning of lifetime accounts
bhug
Member UncommonPosts: 944
10.8.19
Turbine has changed it's CoC policy (community guidelines) and will enforce a '10 "infraction" limit' to ban ANY account, especially lifetime accounts.
"Violating the Community Guidelines or Code of Conduct can result in warnings or infraction points against your account.
Infraction points are both permanent and cumulative, although many infractions will automatically expire from Active status. The number of infraction points issued may vary according to the severity of the incident.
Temporary and permanent bans will be automatically issued by the Infraction system when your account reaches the following thresholds:
10 Active points: 1 day
15 Active points: 3 days
20 Active points: Permanent
A total of 2 infractions* (Free accounts): Permanent
A total of 10 infractions* (Premium or VIP accounts): Permanent
The Community Team reserves the right to assign temporary and permanent bans at will based upon the severity of an infraction.
* Automatic bans based on the number of infractions take all infractions into account, regardless of their Active or Expired status. If an account was above the limit when this change was implemented (August 2010) it will be banned if any further infractions are issued against it."
Plus further abuse can cost one their internet connection 'privilege'
"All visitors to the Community Sites are logged by IP address. We may occasionally ban a user by their IP address. Further abuse by users who have been IP banned may result in an abuse report to the user's internet service provider."
Comments
-Letting Derek Smart work on your game is like letting Osama bin Laden work in the White House. Something will burn.-
-And on the 8th day, man created God.-
Certainly sounds like a "Cock" policy to me.
The last time I played LOTRO the player base was anything but unruly. This has to have been put into effect due to the antcipation of the tidal wave of disorderly and bored MMO tourist gutter trash they are expecting on the FTP servers.
If you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, riddle 'em with bullets
Partly this, and partly Warner Brothers as well, i think. Notice every major announcement from Turbine now starts with "Warner Brothers is proud to announce Turbines Lord of the Rings...."?
WB calls the shots now.
-Letting Derek Smart work on your game is like letting Osama bin Laden work in the White House. Something will burn.-
-And on the 8th day, man created God.-
Me, I'm not a griefer and I don't flip out in-game so I am actually happy to see that they are being pro-active by putting this policy in place BEFORE F2P goes live. Because really, while LOTRO is a very good MMO it's not the most exciting and I think the community is one of, if not THE biggest draw to the game. If the community is destroyed I don't see the veterans sticking it out until they release new content. I think F2P is somewhat of a gamble on their part due to this very reason so if they want to bring out the BANHAMMER on new f2pers intent on being disruptive and generally asinine I am happy to see it.
No, it doesn't.
But with the rules written in regard to banning contradicting themselves in the same paragraphs, it does give the right for anyone being banned ( legitimately earned or not ) to get any money they spent back, which will costs Warner Brothers more money than just the money being returned, it will also costs them the fines associated with getting a high number of chargebacks and possible removal of the ability to accept any credit cards for LotRO.
I have no problem with them banning anyone, lifetime or not, if they deserve it. But their rules provide for two important things they shouldn't:
1.) a person can be banned simply because the mod decides they should be banned regardless if the person doesn't even have an infraction
2.) supposedly "expired" infractions suddenly aren't "expired" if they want to use them to ban you.
They simply need to clean the new rules up if they want to avoid hassles in the future.
Either they use an infraction system, or they use a moderators choice system. Both don't work together.
Also, does this apply to both the forums and ingame?
Because if you get banned from the game from having 10 infractions on the forums, that's easy enough to get a chargeback also, as they could have simply banned your forum account while leaving your game account active.
-Letting Derek Smart work on your game is like letting Osama bin Laden work in the White House. Something will burn.-
-And on the 8th day, man created God.-
In the OP you stated specifically that they were especially targetting lifetimers with this change but I don't see a single piece of evidence to support that, merely your opinion. This is obviously intended to keep freebs in check more than anything.
Looks like pretty much the same rules that have always been there. Maybe a few changes but nothing that specifically states Lifetime accounts. This thread was pointless.
In America I have bad teeth. If I lived in England my teeth would be perfect.
This is the same rules they added when DDO went F2P, long beefore WB got involved.
You really think WB care about how forum moderation is handled in their new company who are experts in online communities?
Its a conspiracy!
If WoW = The Beatles
and WAR = Led Zeppelin
Then LotrO = Pink Floyd
If the problem is on the forums, ban them from the forums, not the game.
parrotpholk-Because we all know the miracle patch fairy shows up the night before release and sprinkles magic dust on the server to make it allllll better.
lulz trollz crying about being banned, epic thread.
Forum moderation cost money so pretty sure WB does care (but only numbers wise not really in the why and how..untill the number are above the budget :P). Also do not forget you might always have people in parent companies who THINK they know better, whatever the child company is an expert or not :P
Why are you worried anyway?
You should be behaving yourself ingame for that matter, and it´s not like they perma ban your lifetime account for saying "douche".
Simply behave like a normal, mature person and in a couple weeks you won´t even remember this announcement.
Rawr.
As others have indicated, this policy modification is most likely designed so everyone knows the rules when F2P hits.
I imagine that Turbine will have the ban hammer out in force in order to protect the community from complete collapse when the 1337s hit the severs.
If the community collapses (as a person above noted) the older player base will abandon the game.
I know that on the beta server early on, the F2P crowed (not screened) were quite foul.
Sounds fine to me - I am glad they have kept the right to make decisions outside of the rules. . or incorporated that into the rules.
As far as charge backs go: Lifetime subbers mostly paid years ago so good luck with that. It depends on the credit card company but I can't imagine this going well unless Turbine / WB doesn't respond to the chargeback.
As others have said. . with F2P coming they need something. . not sure it will help though . . people will just make new accounts if they want to be total jerks.
Wa min God! Se æx on min heafod is!
That said, it is not (or maybe not always) up to the company dealing with jerks but also/rather to the community. So if the older players complain about the community they should as much complain themselves for their disability to deal with it.
I have a kinmate of mine who has been pretty vocal on the forums against the move to F2P and he got a permanant ban for saying that someones point was "crazy" . They qouted his post as stopping others ability to use the Lotro forums. They dinged him multiple times over two days to finally ban him forever. He is a great guy in his 50s who loves the game and the community and is honestly very laid back person in general. There is no doubt in my mind that they are using this to quiet disent on their forums as well as keep the F2P crowd in check.
This won't do squat to help police troublesome F2P folks. With F2P, essentialy anyone who wants to cause trouble can make a "throw away" F2P account to do it with. Since there is no gatekeeping function (i.e. credit card or payment) required to create the account. Turbine will have no way of positively identifying the account with an individual human being....and there will be no cost to creating as many accounts as you want (other then the 5 minutes time it takes to create a new g-mail account)....so no real disincentive to getting them banned....just make a new throw away account to use. Playing whack-a-mole with banning F2P accounts basicaly is a futile effort for anyone that gets major traffic.
The IP ban is pretty ineffective as a threat..... 99.95% of consumer internet connections get thier public ip's assigned through DHCP.... In order to pick up a new IP all you do is shut-down your cable-modem, count to 30 and turn it back on again. What's worse, issuing a ban against one of those IP's...will end up hitting the NEXT guy who happens to grab that IP, even though it had nothing to do with the account the ban was issued against other then using the same ISP for internet access.
Pretty much the only semi-efficient way to deal with trouble-maker "throw away" accounts is to severely limited what a newly created account can do until a user puts in some serious effort to pass some goal post to lift those restrictions. That way at least the user suffers some consequences (waisted time) from loosing access to that account. Still not fool proof, just slows them down.
Mostly this sort of thing only really effects long term users/subscribers.....as those are the only people who have any real investment in thier accounts...and a reason to CARE about loosing access to THAT particular account.
Sounds like a good way to get rid of some of those pesky lifetime accounts that don't generate any revenue...
They are going f2p. They had to impliment something. Though I really think it should be higher, especially for lifetime accounts.
f2p promotes the worst possible behavior. They want the money, but they don't want the trouble.
THIS is one of the things f2p brings. I don't know why ANYONE would consider f2p to EVER be good. I may be playing this game right now, but its only my main game until SWTOR and/or RIFT come out. So this doesn't bother me. And both those games are P2P. I'd even pay more money every month to ensure they remain P2P.
Hmm you know the part of all this that really bothered me was the fact they have an " automatic " system in place to determine and award infractions.
Ummmm what happens if a patch bug, power surge, or just a really bored hacker decideds to see how many accounts he can get auto banned.
Not to mention I have an infraction on my account already because someone got angry at me and start cussing me out, so because I was part of the issue even though I made zero comments and did nothing wrong my name was still in this guys rant in chat we both got infractions.
Moderators are dangerous.
Also slightly concerned this just may be a tactic to get rid of those lifetime accounts that turbine is now losing money on.
Some people are blowing this out of proportion just try try to drum up some drama. This system/announcement is not uncommon, there is nothing shady about it, and anyone that’s not an asshat has nothing to worry about.
There is also nothing that targets lifers, so can we stop witht he fox news like headlines and lies please, thanks!
----------
"Anyone posting on this forum is not an average user, and there for any opinions about the game are going to be overly critical compared to an average users opinions." - Me
"No, your wrong.." - Random user #123
"Hello person posting on a site specifically for MMO's in a thread on a sub forum specifically for a particular game talking about meta features and making comparisons to other titles in the genre, and their meta features.
How are you?" -Me
hahaha "Cock policy" love it
and I dont see anywhere on that policy that says "We will *Especially* Ban lifers"... lol, Drama queen or what :P
I think it depends. If the community is strong enough, trolls etc. will choose other games to spread their hatred.
I am starting a kinship and hell yeah im up for giving them a hard time when f2p comes out. if gm's start banning F2P rightaway i'll be right on it to see them leaving as fast as coming
.