14 réponses à ce sujet

[Fissure]

http://social.biowar...index/6459941/1

Or
"talking crap" in a forum, or chatroom. Calling a company a devil, so
you make it so the guy can't play his own  game. Are you all crazy.
That;'s gonna look good, he insults you so you ground him from playing
the game. Get over yourself EA, some people think your a **** company,
CRAP LIKE THAT IS WHY

[Stanley Woo]

I don't know where my previous post went so I'll repeat it here: you guys are making it difficult to keep this thread open. Let's please remove the bickering, swearing, name-calling, and insults from the discussion. Thanks.

[Stanley Woo]

Xsquader wrote...

StanleyWoo I do agree that the extent of things going on are a bit much but I think it would calm down some with an official word from bioware on the matter... Just saying sometimes a little public relations helps ya know

This whole issue began after the office had closed, and dealing with it kept me at the office several hours later than I'd intended for today. As of this posting, it is 10:45pm. All I wanted was a "stay of execution" until tomorrow morning. Ah well, the internet...

[Stanley Woo]

17thknight wrote...
Stanley's not arguing the point at all. In fact, he flat-out said the company can and will do this to people. THAT'S the issue, that they can and will do this.

I have not commented on the issue at all, nor will I. I will notify the appropriate people tomorrow and hopefully, that will be the end of my involvement.

Also, I'm pretty damn sure the moderator of a forum can see people's IP addresses, and I'm pretty damn sure he could tell if they're the same person in about 3 clicks of a mouse.

I can not, or if I can, I haven't figured out how yet. Perhaps I'll have one of the other Moderators take me through a tutorial. It would make things so much easier in the future. Thank you.

[Stanley Woo]

Again, let's please keep the insults and name-calling out of the discussion if you wish this conversation to continue.

[Stanley Woo]

Esau_of_Isaac wrote...
Could you please give some word on the situation?

The office is still closed, I'm still here to keep everything from exploding (which is easier now that I've left a thread open and those people posting racist caricatures and messages and wishing death on me have gone to bed), I'm still planning on notifying someone about the issue tomorrow morning, and this thread is still open.

EDIT: Sorry, I should have clarified that I've been home for a couple hours already, thanks for the concern.

Modifié par Stanley Woo, 11 mars 2011 - 07:14 .

[Stanley Woo]

I'm here because I love this community, and partly because this kerfuffle happened while I was moderating and I didn't want the forum full of posts all saying the same thing when the office opened tomorrow morning. So, in my zeal to keep the forum clean, well, y'all saw what happened. When I needed to go home, I left a thread open in the hopes that it would keep the discussion in one place. And it has (thank you).

[Stanley Woo]

This is a reminder that discussion of software piracy is not permitted in our forums.

[Stanley Woo]

Again, let's keep software piracy out of the discussion, please. And now, let's please keep the real-world politics from invading the discussion. Thank you.

[Stanley Woo]

aries1001 wrote...
Because Stanley Woo wanted to find out what happened? And that he actually stayed untill about 11PM last night to try to clear this up, should tell us something about how Bioware do care.

More like 2am, but you know, like, whatever.

[Fernando Melo]

Let me try to summarize and clarify a few things...

With any game or service, you typically need to agree to abide by the rules governing its use. 

For those of you that have been on these forums for any length of time you probably already know how this works. 

We don't ban people for swearing or criticizing us or EA. 

We often opt to remove the more colorful language (and replace with a 'removed' notice) in order to keep the post alive, rather than deleting a post or the thread.  And as a friendly reminder to the poster of expected conduct.

If someone is persistent in an infraction, we will warn them via private message.  Often, this is done several times and may include talking with that person to clearly identify what they need to change in their behavior to others.

Where necessary, when continuing to break the rules, we will temporarily ban the person from this community site.  This has no impact on any other EA site, nor the game, or otherwise limit the account in any way.

Once the ban passes, if they continue to break the rules we will temporarily ban them for a longer period of time.

If this problem continues, then we will escalate and request to permanently ban them from the site.

In rare cases, we may escalate further - at this point it would impact the account more substantially, including preventing the ability to access a game's online features.  It should not prevent a player from playing their game offline. 

It is possible to further escalate this to the extent that it will affect all EA games/sites or disabling the account outright - but that is an extreme measure.

It is also possible to fast track through some of those levels mentioned above.  We entrust our moderators and employees to use common sense in these cases - and this is typically done for rare situations where clearly the individual is out to abuse the system, impact other players, or for things like getting rid of spambots.

So normally, in order for someone to get to the level of impact we are talking about on their account, they REALLY need to be working purposefully, and systematically at it. 


What happened in this case (the error in the sytem) was human error. 


We apologized to the player, and have fully reinstated the account once we were able to complete the investigation into it and realized what happened.  And we are currently going over this incident very seriously internally to improve the process moving forward, including better training on this system.


To be clear - this was not an issue with any of our volunteer moderators here on the site (the folks with the moderator tags). 

I do want to call that out specifically, as it would be hugely unfair to them, if any of you - our community members - felt any doubts about this group of highly dedicated individuals on this site based on this incident.  And to take the opportunity for me to re-iterate our trust in these individuals. 

Many of them have been with us a long time and have consistently shown that they embody the same core values, care and passion we do, in wanting to create a great community that welcomes any opinions - even when those are critical of what we do.

Lastly, the rules of this site have not changed with this incident.  Every EA community may have its own quirks or house rules which we may not necessarilly follow or know about - but what is above is what you should essentially expect on our site.  It is in-line with the general conduct rules you signed up to as part of creating your account, and part of our commitment to you.

F.

Modifié par Fernando Melo, 12 mars 2011 - 01:47 .

[Fernando Melo]

Ostagar2011 wrote...

But was this a one-off fix because of the PR disaster it was becoming, or a system fix? To my mind, this is only 'fixed' when they say that preventing someone from playing a lawfully purchased product on the basis of a forum opinion, can now never happen again. (EULA change, new guidelines to mods, separate forum bans from licence bans in the software). I'm not interested in a one-time 'we made an exception with this dude because even google was auto-completing searches for this case' (but the rest of you who don't like DA2 - be warned, we can still do this to you).

I agree, and I'll cover what I can below.

For some of the other posters - believe what you will.

This was a genuine mistake made by an individual.  And clearly there was a failing in the system that actually allowed them to escalate this directly to a full lockdown of the account contrary to how it should flow. 

This was never an issue that warranted an account level ban (which, I have to call out is incredibly rare in any case), but normally this would never go beyond a temp ban of the forums with zero impact to games.  Trying to portray this as a purposeful or vengeful act 'just because' is immature, not to mention inconsistent with how we actually operate if you care to observe. 

As I mentioned before this is a serious issue that we need to fix - as in properly fix, as you suggest.  It is not acceptable that something like this happens accidentally, even once.

The purpose of this system is not to feed our egos and dangle axes over player's heads in some sort of power trip  - it is there specifically to protect players.  To maintain some structure and order to our communities so they don't degenerate into what many other forums look like, and allow you to have a place where you can have a reasonable discussion, or ask a game related question without a some kind of explicit picture being thrust in your face, and yes - in very extreme cases to distance persistent, deliberately malicious individuals from other players IF necessary as a last resort (or at least until they realize it, cool off and get their act together).

Still, that person is supposed to be able to continue to play offline.  The goal is to close off the online features where this extreme measure is needed (again, this should be extremely rare).  But what we realized with this incident is that while you can completely keep playing offline with an existing game, you can't register a new game since when you login to register the account comes back as invalid.  This is new for us, and not intended.

Anyways, long story short (as its late here) - before we rush in with our torches and pitchforks, we need to properly figure out what happened.  That will take some time to sort out.

In the meantime, what I've already heard is that the EADM team is going to start working on a fix for game clients to ensure that players will at least be able to register and play offline, even in these rare extreme scenarios.  That won't be an overnight fix, but it's a start. 

Again, believe what you will.
F.

[Fernando Melo]

Let's keep the discussion focused.

If you'd like to discuss whether we included Securom (which by the way, it still not true) - you can go discuss that here:
social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/141/index/6194280/29#6490247

[Fernando Melo]

Nathander Von Eric wrote...

And I can play every single game I bought from Steam offline.

......er..............now that I think about it. I have all of the DA:O DLC. Do I need to be online and signed into my EA account to access it?

No, you should not need to be online

Nathander Von Eric wrote...

And what happens if an EA account gets suspended. Can a person still access their DLC if banned?

In the extremely unlikely case where this happens - if you already have it, you can just keep playing it offline.  Off-hand, I don't know the answer to getting new content - it may be the same as the game currently where the login would fail preventing you from doing so.  I'll make sure this is investigated as part of looking into this whole thing.

[Fernando Melo]

Garak2 wrote...

I have to log in to use my DAO DLC. If I
click resume too quickly after loading the game I get an error about
unauthorized DLC and I have heard this is quite common.

I'll answer the login point in the response to Emoking.  But the error on the quick resume is that the DLCs haven't finished loading properly into the game by the time you hit resume and it tried to load into a save that requires DLC.

Emoking wrote...

Fernando Melo wrote...

Nathander Von Eric wrote...

And I can play every single game I bought from Steam offline.

......er..............now that I think about it. I have all of the DA:O DLC. Do I need to be online and signed into my EA account to access it?

No, you should not need to be online

No, you do need to be online to access DA:O DLC. It logs into your social.bioware account to check you have registered/bought the DLC, and it does this each and every time you start the game.

I realize that is the case for some players, but that's actually a very elusive bug.  The system was designed to allow you to do a one time check and then allow you to play offline. 

DAO uses the updater service to download content as well as check for entitlements on the account - this service works great for the majority, but it is also the culprit in 99% of the remaining cases where it either does not install correctly or requires a manual restart or requires the player to always be logged in to work correctly.

That's not the case with DA2 (we don't use that system anymore).