Grab a tea and sit down, this is going to be a long read.
Dear Amazon Games, please check your customer support team. You need to audit your customer support as soon as possible, they are providing a sub-standard service to your customers and you might not know about it until it becomes a catastrophic issue.
I’ll describe below the main reasons for what I believe are the key aspects of the issues, please bear in mind that all of the reports are player reports, sure there are people lying and trying to scam their way back into the game after cheating or have their ban justified, but with the amount of comments/reports of people trying to get unbanned, their stories and after several tries really getting unbanned, we can speculate that this is a real issue.
First let’s talk about the bans:
Cultural/Localization/Context on bans;
The Moderation Team, those that reviews the reports before the ban, needs to be more flexible. Currently we know that the “ban hammer” is very trigger happy, with the amount of people being banned for mass-reports, jokes or even slightly offensive language, this is huge. And I believe it’s because the moderation team lacks context, cultural knowledge and localization on the reports they are reviewing.
The game and it’s servers push for different languages; German, French, Italian, Spanish (EU), Polish, Spanish (SA), Portuguese, English (both EU and US). This is a huge accomplishment, but with this comes huge responsibility as well. You cannot let a software translation be part of this (or even someone with basic skill in another language), since as said, it will lack cultural context.
Let me give you a few simple example;
- The 877-Cash-Now joke, long story short, the person was making a joke about all the spam the gold sellers were doing on the global chat, anyone from the USA would immediately know that this was a joke, since the TV commercial are also “spammed” during commercial breaks. Instead the person was probably banned by either providing a public phone number or was being treated as a real RMT (with a phone). This person got a permanent ban and after several appeals was finally reviewed and unbanned after 2 weeks. This is a great example of lack of cultural context.
You can see more about this story here: https://www.reddit.com/r/newworldgame/comments/q2zyie/update_to_877cashnow_permaban_mods_removed_my_old/
- The next player got banned for having an offensive name. His name was LICKATUNG. That’s a pokemon, in case you didn’t know. But a simple translation could undestand it as a sexually offensive name.
You can see more about this story here: https://www.reddit.com/r/newworldgame/comments/qbd9e0/this_can_be_serious_offensive_name_ban_amazon/
There are many more
Mass Reports ban;
It’s a known issue, there’s no denial that this game has issues with opposition factions mass reporting others. Some people might even say that the reporter even ‘acted in an abusive behavior’, but I believe that the “moderation team” reviewing is being manipulated on the amount of reports and not the real context on the issue. There are even stories about some company Discord channels specifically to target people for mass reports. This needs to stop immediately. How? I don’t know! But if I may suggest on your report list, add in a category for the faction & level that the reporter and the reported are. If there’s a massive amount of ONLY the opposition faction targeting someone, it will be flagged as a “maybe false-flag”. Having the level of the reporter would matter so that people do not make ALT characters just for mass reporting. Other than that, I have no other suggestion on how to tackle the issue, without having a more efficient or flexible moderation team. If you have any other suggestions, please write it down below.
Here are a few people that claim they have been banned from mass reports;
- There’s even streamers asking their viewers to ban people (it’s a Brazilian streamer, so it’s in Portuguese, but you can get the feeling);
STREAMER pedindo Mass Report contra jogadores
Mute
Why isn’t there a 24hr/48hr (or even a Permanent Mute) as a disciplinary action against players with offensive language? The only bans should come only from VERY SERIOUS offensive language.
Ban Reasons
This has been slightly changed a couple of weeks ago, after the first dupe wave. Before we used to only have “Abusive Behavior” bans, now we have the infamous “Cheating” and a new one “Hacking”, These are not enough!
You need to let people know exactly why they got banned; “Serious Offensive Language”, Abuse of exploits/bugs", “Griefing” this would be an Abusive Behavior, “Use of bots/macro/3rd party software”, “Website advertising” or “Real money trading”, “Win Trading”, “Account Sharing” and many others. This is not only good for your telemetry, but it’s also, by many countries, a right of the consumer under protectives laws to know the specific reason the service/product was not provided/delivered/sold.
For people that doesn’t know, you can request your Private Data from Amazon.com, which includes a lot of Amazon Games personal data as well. Under that there’s a file called AmazonGames.Moderation.Penalties.csv. In there you can see any moderation penalties you have received (not sure if “warnings” appear in it). There’s a PenaltyType and a PenaltyContext column, but the penalty context are always empty, as you can see on the image below.
And please, if you’re going to ban someone for Offensive Language, include the chat lines where it was offensive.
For anyone that is going to bring up the Terms of Service / Code of Conduct, remember that it states on their ToS;
“We reserve the right to determine what constitutes unfair play and to take corrective action we deem appropriate.” - That is a very abusive practice and players should not take that lightly.
Here’s a great example, what every appeal should look like the least;
- Player was banned for gambling on /dice. I didnt even knew that it was against the rules, as it is not specified on the ToS. But the appeal agent actually described the reason why he was banned.
Live Chat - Customer Support
Now that I’ve explained a little bit of the whole system, let’s talk about the main issue; customer support. Remember that you are paying customers, you have rights (and obligations), and it does not matter if you have played the game for 1 hour or 720 hours.
The lack of preparation and customer service skills of most agents are horrendous. This is coming from someone that has had over 15 years working at the front line of the customer services industry, including call center. I know that there’s a lot of rude customers out there, I would be the first in line to say that. But that doesn’t excuse customer support to be disruptive.
We understand that Live Chat does not have the technical skills, nor access, to review any bans. But they should be able to at least give you the proper reason for your ban, as some have done. See below;
But don’t even give you the chance to talk about the issue so that when they escalate / propritize they give additional information about it, they just want to clear the queue and move on. Here are a few good examples of live chat agent, just closing on you;
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Agent purposely waited over 4 minutes to reply, replied that the chat was “idle for 2minutes” and disconnected, this is the best example of customer support malpractice; Imgur: The magic of the Internet
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Agent was asked on how to detect duped items so that the player can avoid it, gave false information AND closed the chat; https://i.imgur.com/vrreMDu.png
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Agent asks for 2 minutes, and after that closes the chat - https://i.redd.it/1jny167ka7181.png
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And we shouldnt exclude forum support from this issue either. Here’s a Forum support replying to thread 5 days later of the issue;
Web Ticket - Ban appeal - Customer Support
This issue deserves a whole thread, but only requires one main point; Why isn’t there a Ticket ID Number when you make an appeal? This is beyond basic “ticketing”.
Without a Ticket Id # we are unable to track the ban appeal (or even a tech support ticket). Is this intended so there’s less transparency?
It even does not allow player name to be less than 4 characters, but ingame you’re allowed to;
Ban Appeal Support / Customer Support
Simple and short: The “moderation team” does not review the appeals properly, at least most of them don’t, there are a lot of people saying that they needed to appeal 3, 4, 5 even 9 times to get their ban reviewed and eventually ended up unbanned.
It’s understandable that with this amount of customers, a vendor / company is required to manage all of the support, it’s normal in any industry. But most of the time, there are several internal regulations, policies to follow, audits and minimum customer satisfaction to be achieved (and I’m not even going to touch on the subject of compliance), which clearly has not been the case of Amazon Games support. Even if you compare Amazon.com customer support, you will notice there’s a huge satisfaction gap.
Amazon Games needs to do an urgent audit on their “moderation team” vendors, because there are several issues with it.
- And the best example there can be; Player made a JOKE about gold selling (He literally said at the end of the phrase that it was a joke), got reported and permanently banned. After 13 days of several appeals, he never got unbanned, but after posting on the forums, Dev LawRich decided to finally look into it, and saw that it was wrong to ban him. Now do we all have to bother a Developer with a PM or a forum thread to look into our bans? Because the “moderation team” should be able to handle it, yet they didn’t.
And I don’t want to sound like a dick, but why that player only? Was he special? Several other “community managers” have said the forums are not the place to deal with bans, yet here we see that it was dealt with and it was very efficient and swiftly.
- Someone got a warning message ingame about abusive behavior, and was instructed by Live Chat to raise an appeal ticket to check the reasoning of the warning. He received an email back saying that the Ban was confirmed and wouldn’t be changed, but there was never a ban. It’s ridiculous how transparent that the moderation team DOES NOT REVIEW the appeals properly.
- Some agents don’t even care and just copy-paste the reply, resulting in HTML issues, making the email unreadable.
- Some don’t even bother editing the email;
- Some ticket appeals are even ending on different inboxes, even if you appeal directly through their website.
- Unbanned after several appeals
- Player was unbanned after getting different appeal emails, even an email AFTER the unban;
- Player was in the “incapacitated” state for 7 days, support wasnt able to help him;
- Here are just a few more people telling of how bad the customer support is;
These are just a few examples, which I took a little of my time to sum up the whole situation with the customer support. There are plenty more, if you use the search options on Steam Discussion, Official Forums or Reddit you will get the vast magnitude of the issue. These are players that want to play your game, they feel that they have been falsely banned, want to get back into playing the game, but can’t reach the appropriate personnel to help them.
