I agree with you, I can understand that my post didn’t make clear that I was only talking about a portion of the group.
I also don’t think ALL PvE players blindly resist balance changes. There are a fair amount of them who do, often because they feel earlier balance changes were too extreme and they would rather a thing stays OP than risk that thing being “balanced” to the point of uselessness
But there are PvE players who are open to the idea of “nerfs” on severe outliers.
I wasn’t making the attempt to paint All players of either type with too broad of a brush, but I could have made that more clear
Truest post on pvp I have ever seen. Even when you spam, deep down you know if your clan stays off line for 3 days, it will get wiped by offline raiders. We only lay all the zmfemce stacking to make it a slower process. I know ince we got tired of a server and had vaults of FARMED mats, we would build as many walls as we could, and DeShawn all the loot. Then check 8n about 4 days. Laugh at the fact a clan spent 6 hours blowing thur our base for nothing. Not even thralls to fight.
I think its not hard to recognize a spam done for grieffing, and a base done to resist on a pvp server, resist to god attack, trebuchet, ton of c4, but you need to play the game to know that, and its about survive, build, dominate. and in video you provide it’s obvious that the guy claimed to build later anticlimb for the pillar and prevent access to his base. if this guy is ban, its mean that 99% of pvp players can be ban, only newbie that build one door and 10*10 are safe to not be ban apparently… and also those who uses bug base that cannot be spotted are in paradis now, they rule servers.
I think people that issues those ban got no understanding at all of the game, there is a skill problem, i heard, and i wonder if it is true, that in fact work is outsourced to zendesk who is another company… do znedesk play and know conan ?
i can confirm that non understable ban are issued actually probably due to bad judgement and no understanding of gameplay on pvp server, as sadly its happened on my server were 20+ people of multiple differents clans have been ban,and theywere legit and very old player of the server, more than 2 years, and we still wait to know why after did offficial request to zendesk there is more than 24h.
and zendesk seem to be a sub contractor, and work is outsourced to them… if this is true ?because its what i heard today
Well you heard wrong, Zendesk IS a contracted company but they just process tickets, they do not do any actual enforcing. I was told that by a Mod on this forum.
I mean, it’s not like Zendesk is somehow hidden from the rest of the internet and we can’t find out what they do. You literally just have to type “zendesk.com” into your browser and read.
Just in case people don’t want to click on the link, here’s a quote from Zendesk’s front page:
So no, there’s no work outsourced to Zendesk, they build customer service software and companies like Funcom use that software.
yes i always thought zendesk was just a software but so i wonder why using the normal channels of funcom community management, answer is that is out of their control actually.
in past those people were in power, i can tell it for sure for numbers of reports i did, and their work even if taking time was done well when report precise.
so with recents events i saw, doing more research and seeing that what happened to me and community of my server was not isolated, i think it’s will be good to clarify for information to be sure that this is still funcom who is taking in charge the admin check of server and report, and jugement and assess of violation of rules. i wish you to not have happen to you what i saw happened last friday on my server and to be honest i though initially it was hack done as it was impoosible for me to believe it was an admin action. and i still stay in this doubt, as i still dont know the reason and wait for answer of zendesk.
I am honestly not sure what this sentence means, but I’ll try to reply anyway. If I misunderstood what you were saying, I apologize.
I don’t know why Funcom decided to use Zendesk, because no one officially explained it. However, I believe that it was because there were many of us on these forums that were vocally dissatisfied with their old reporting procedure and kept asking for something better.
And if you stop and think about it, Zendesk – or any other dedicated system – is better than simply sending private messages to the community manager group on the forums. The forums are designed primarily for public discourse, not for bug reports or rule infraction reports. Likewise, the role of community manager is not really the one of customer support or server administration.
It’s certainly not Zendesk. You don’t have to take my word for it, you can go see for yourself. Zendesk is just a software solution.
Did Funcom outsource the actual customer support work for official servers to a third party? That’s something that only they can answer, but I doubt they’ll come here to entertain us with answers to theories like these.
I personally believe you’re way off. It seems like you believe that the way it used to be before Zendesk is that one of the community managers – e.g. Hugo or Nicole or Ignasi – would see the report in their private messages and then go log into the server and do the work themselves. Although it’s not theoretically impossible, I would be astonished if that were true, because that’s not what a video game community manager normally does.
That’s another in-game aspect that has room for improvement: it would be much better if the event log was clear and unambiguous about admin activity, e.g. “Sandstone foundation was destroyed by Server Administrator”.
Of course, just like the “give them a warning before taking action”, this feature would require development effort and prioritization.
So without going into too many details regarding the specific ban, we finally received confirmation from Zendesk that we recently received a 14 ban for spam or building abuse. Since my clan did not spam foundations, it must have been due to one of the players having a very large base (please note though that it was a fully functioning base with crafting rooms, etc and not just land claim).
Honestly if it was truly destroying server performance then fair enough.
Couple of points though to consider:
Warnings would have been nice. The player in question had already downsized his base to a degree because he heard that there were issues with large bases. He would have downsized more if he knew that it was still “excessive”.
There were players in our clan who had not been on the server in over year and they have been banned from all official servers as well. Unfair for them to be punished and would be nice if some way to not ban players who have not been active on the server for reasonable amount of time.
If building size is an issue then Funcom needs to somehow alert us to whether we are reaching a limit… I would recommend either some sort of land claim flag indicator or limit to the number of building items we can have.
I’m glad you came back and posted that you got a response from Zendesk. Thanks for that. The evidence presented earlier in this thread did not look good for them in my personal opinion.
To your points:
A warning system like this is very similar to hard limits. FC saying “too much”, “too much”, “just right” is, in my mind, hardly different than simply giving us a line not to cross. Except needlessly more complicated.
As I said before I’m inclined to agree with you here, but as there is no way currently to know who placed what it is the only way. If they could ban only offenders it would leave an opening for abuse, even if we don’t want noobs to suffer the sins of others we should recognize this.
Hard building limits present a host of their own problems. There’s pages of discussion on that in the forum. It would be nice if people posted images of bases that got them banned so we could get an idea of what FC is trying to accomplish - that I think would be valuable to those both for and against the rules as is. It would have to be in good faith and presentation only though, as it seems this subject is at constant risk of TOS breach.
If we as a forum could remain cool headed enough we might could actually come to an understanding/consensus. The eye of Sauron is watching though…
Yeah the lack of some sort of clear “line not to cross” does result in quite a bit of confusion and anger.
Honestly had we received a warning that our base exceeded that line and that we had a limited amount of time to correct it (before being banned) then we would have done so and not complained (too much at least lol). As is, we got the 14 day ban hammer, with no warning, which results in us losing everything that we did for the last 3 years on that server (and other servers that we have been playing on).
It’s a tough choice on FC’s side. Hard limits is a hefty axe in what is arguably CE greatest success, few games let you create what you can here. It’s also a large part of CE’s endgame progression, more so with the introduction of thrall limits. I suspect they just want to leave as much freedom in the hands of players as possible while also maintaining a reasonable user experience.
As the rules are written FC shoulders a large portion of blame for bans in order to provide that freedom. It’s a cost/benefit analysis from their end as well as ours.
Hmmm… not sure I really agree with this concept. I can understand limiting giant bases that impact server performance but if a server can, in theory, handle 40 players (on official) then why can’t a clan have multiple bases? Realizing that this is also an impressive building game, folks like to build their own bases (even if in a clan).
In our case, we were the oldest clan on the server (going back 3 years). As a result we would have people join the clan, build bases, then leave the game with the result that we inherited a number of bases. Not thinking there was a problem with having multiple bases (and some were very well designed) we would keep a number of them from decaying (not thinking an issue). Funny enough we recently dismantled a number of them so that we really only had 3 bases (one of which was very large).
If there is really an issue with having multiple bases on a server and a clan can only have one base then it just gives ammunition to the idea that the game needs a real land claim system vs. the current “build what you want but hope it doesn’t cross some sort of imaginary line otherwise you will be banned 14 days with no warning”.
Also, changing subjects a bit, it was a bit frustrating that the clan that apparently reported us (and many of the other long term clans on the server) had themselves recently been confirmed by Zendesk to have been actually cheating (per the email Zendesk sent to one of our players who reported them whereby Zendesk said they would take action against them but then our bases went “poof” soon thereafter lol) and the only bases that got wiped were the ones that the cheaters had been recently trying to raid. That leads to the question as to whether raiding clans will now just use Zendesk to take care of problematic bases that their cheats are not allowing them to easily raid (one of the driving factors for people having large bases). Admittedly a bit off topic but related.