Cancelling the Lounge, Flashpoint Friday and Super Saturday

[Jimer Lins]

Effective immediately. See below.

We are contacting you to notify you that we have found your Star Wars: The Old Republic account, ******, to be in violation of our Terms of Service.

After completing an investigation of your Account, we have identified the following violation:

Character: Jimer
Server: Juyo
Violation: [1 - General] []: I'm live on air for Super Saturday! Tune in at http://listen.siradio.fm for music and SWTOR chatter. If you have a request, let me know!

If you continue to violate our Terms of Service it may result in a suspension or ultimately a permanent account closure depending on the severity of the situation.
To help avoid this, please take some time to read and familiarize yourself with our Terms of Service which can be found here:

http://tos.ea.com/legalapp/WEBTERMS/US/en/PC/

We appreciate your understanding in this matter. .

If you feel you have received this warning in error, please contact us at swtoraccountdisputes@bioware.com

Sorry, everyone. It was fun while it lasted but I'm not going to risk being banned.

[Reese]

Wait, do they consider that a commercial posting in General Chat? Dumb.


Sent from my JesusPad using Tapatakanudo

[Furiel]

As I said in vent, I have no real words to say how I feel about this. But none of them are positive. Well, except for my support for your decision. None of us want to see you get banned either. It's unfortunate but I think you made the right decision to cancel them. The server and the game will be less without them but it's Bioware's game and if they prefer it to not have a good community what can you do.

[Jimer Lins]

On Feb 26, 2012 4:23 PM, "Star Wars: The Old Republic Customer Service" <support@swtor.com> wrote:

Dear Corey Snow,

Account Name: Jimer_Lins
Email address: cyclometh@gmail.com

Thank you for contacting us regarding your complaint about ticket number 4033867.

We have now completed our investigation into your complaint. After reviewing your case, we can confirm that it was acted on correctly, in full compliance with our policies and procedures. As such, we will not be pursuing this issue any further.

Please note that, while we welcome such positive and creative participation in our community, you should consider that posting these announcement repeatedly in general chat might not be welcomed by all other players in chat. You should therefore reduce the frequency of your ads in order to avoid aggravating players who are not interested in our shows.

Thank you for your diligence in bringing this matter to our attention. As a valued customer, your feedback is very important to us.

Yours sincerely,

Robin
Star Wars: The Old Republic Terms of Service

My response:

Well, thanks. All my shows are cancelled effective immediately. Thanks for your contribution to the SWTOR community!

Joun, please feel free to delete the alvisradio subdomain, database and all that at your leisure. I wish it had gone differently.

[Dodd Formeianna]

Hey Jimer - really sorry about how things played out. Sucks royally.

FYI - On the FB page, I created a message about the show and initiated the facebook cancellation process. The page is now flagged for deletion and will be removed within the next 12 days.

[Durai]

Nice ****ing policy, Bioware. Way to encourage people to get into the game a bit more.

Where's my "Go screw yourself!" Emoticon?!

Damnit, it's all I can find.

[Sir Psyko]

FYI - On the FB page, I created a message about the show and initiated the facebook cancellation process. The page is now flagged for deletion and will be removed within the next 12 days.

And I've cancelled it... I'm not giving up so easy. I've got to get some questions answered, and do some other things, but I'm still working on this.

[Blackferne]

I've written to David Bass. I think he might be a good contact for this. He is probably really busy this week with the SWTOR summit, so I understand if he doesn't get back right away.

[Dodd Formeianna]

FYI - On the FB page, I created a message about the show and initiated the facebook cancellation process. The page is now flagged for deletion and will be removed within the next 12 days.

And I've cancelled it... I'm not giving up so easy. I've got to get some questions answered, and do some other things, but I'm still working on this.

No worries. If for some hypothetically-rhetotical reason the show were to persist, I'm leaving it entirely to you to decide on what to do/cancellation, etc.

[Cuspar]

"Reducing the frequency" of ads is not "NOT advertising at all". I think you guys need to fight the fight here - it's impossible not to see the benefit of the show existing, and BW maybe just needs some massaging.

[Blackferne]

I wrote David Bass he wrote back and I got him and Jimer talking. It may be a bit before they figure everything out, but hopefully a mutually beneficial solution can be met.

[Sir Psyko]

"Reducing the frequency" of ads is not "NOT advertising at all". I think you guys need to fight the fight here - it's impossible not to see the benefit of the show existing, and BW maybe just needs some massaging.

That's part of what I want to know... did just one person report Jimer, or did a dozen? How often can we post in general? People spam the fleet chat with items for sale when there's a GTN a few meters from them and that bugs the hell out of me, so they'll now get reported for not using the proper in-game means to sell items. Guilds spam recruitment all the time, and every single one will be reported for spamming chat with information that I don't need to know (since I'm guilded). We promote a show a couple times a week while on the air and someone gets a burr up their ass? Do they not know there's an ignore function? So instead of telling the complainer to simply ignore Jimer, they threaten to ban Jimer? Bullshit, and that's why I'm not giving up on this...

Their "PR Droids" need to get a lesson in actually listening to the problems instead of reading scripts. I'm sick of getting tickets closed and "resolved through email" when all they do is say "we don't know, we'll forward it to people that may look into it, and look out for patch notes since we'll never talk to you about your problems again".

[Furiel]

BW's customer service gives shitty a bad name. I got a ToS warning this evening. For what, i have no fucking clue. Well, ok, I think I know what it was, which is going to lead to an interesting conversation with customer service.

This was the email I got:

Dear Chris XXXX,

We are contacting you to notify you that we have found your Star Wars: The Old Republic account, Furiel, to be in violation of our Terms of Service.

After completing an investigation of your Account, we have identified the following violation:

Character: Furiel
Server: Juyo
Violation: Rules of Conduct

If you continue to violate our Terms of Service it may result in a suspension or ultimately a permanent account closure depending on the severity of the situation.
To help avoid this, please take some time to read and familiarize yourself with our Terms of Service which can be found here:

http://tos.ea.com/legalapp/WEBTERMS/US/en/PC/

We appreciate your understanding in this matter. .

If you feel you have received this warning in error, please contact us at swtoraccountdisputes@bioware.com

Yours sincerely

Christopher
Star Wars: The Old Republic Terms of Service

Ummm ok, so tell me again what I did. I'm disputing it merely because it doesn't say shit about what i supposedly did. I'm guessing it's because I was doing my dailies on Belsavis, had a mob camped out waiting on respawn, and a guy kill stole it on me so I called him a fucking asshole then said he doesn't understand the concept of basic courtesy. And if that's what I was reported for then yes, I won't dispute I broke the ToS, but by their actions they are rewarding the guy who kill stole from me and damaged my gameplay experience by warning me as well. How exactly is that fair? And I'm going to ask them that question and I will continue to pursue it until I get an answer that is satisfactory.

[Jimer Lins]

I'm pretty bummed, but I just didn't feel like fighting it. I mean, what was the point if I'm doing all this good stuff and not only does BioWare shit on me, but forum droids get their self-righteous on and tell me I'm not as good as they are because they write for some pissant website?

My feeling was and to a certain extent still is that I'm not interested in helping a community that would rather eat shit than steak. It was very much a shot in the pills to get the warning and maybe I overreacted. Still, I guess I got some attention, heh.

I have to say I'm humbled and a bit flustered at the outpouring of support- I've gotten a lot of whispers in game and not a few emails urging me to chin up, so I'm trying to be positive. What I don't want to do is shortchange the incredible contributions of Joun, Pysko, Dood, Dodd and Miragel (in no particular order) in making this show happen, and if you guys want to fight for it, I'm willing. We've got an email out to David Bass and the community team and I laid out my position, quoted below. We'll see what they have to say.

And I want to give special thanks to Joun, Psyko, Furiel, Gris and Cuspar- you guys have been amazingly supportive and I truly appreciate it. Never think for a moment I didn't love the show and all we did with it.

Patrick, thanks for following up with David.

David, thanks for taking the time to look into this. In the end, I don't want any special treatment; but I also don't feel that I violated the spirit of any rules. The TOS does not include restrictions on posting URLs in chat and are pretty vague. As a friend of mine pointed out, you're techncially violating the TOS by reporting a bug to BioWare. I really was trying to remain on the right side of the rules- I don't want to annoy people or spam general chat, which is behavior I find obnoxious in others.

I was a bit disappointed to receive the warning, as it just struck me as arbirtrary and capricious. We've been doing this since before launch and have had great feedback. We've been building community around these events since the first broadcast of The Nar Shaddaa Lounge on Dec 21, the day after launch. We're not a podcast, we're a live SHOUTCast stream that is most akin to live radio. It's not like a podcast where you can simply listen when you want, pause it and come back later, etc- it's also not scripted, edited or rehearsed (much). We're literally doing it live, and it has been a huge hit.

Because it's live and immediate, we spend time in Nar Shaddaa and I will occasionally say "We're live on the air with The Nar Shaddaa Lounge, a 2-hour SWTOR talk show. You can tune in at http://listen.siradio.fm! Or something similar. I usually say it every 10-15 minutes. I try not to overdo it, but I do want to give people who have recently arrived a chance to hear about it without being up in their grill. Sometimes people start having conversations about the show- agreeing or disagreeing with what we're talking about, etc. This is often done by /say commands so people from both sides can hear. We've done in-game item giveaways and contests (nothing major) and have toyed with trying to do a PVP tourney, swoop or pod racing, trivia games, and other stuff.

That's the Tuesday night show, The Nar Shaddaa Lounge. On Fridays, I did a show called Flashpoint Friday, where I would show up as Patrick describes below on the fleet and play matchmaker for Flashpoints- encouraging people to run them, using my guildmates as a reserve corps to help people looking for that last character to fill out a group, or what have you. I'd be curious to hear if you can detect a spike in Flashpoint activity on Friday evenings between 6 and 8 PM Pacific time on the Juyo server. I'd like to think we've had an impact, and I know people really enjoy the show. During the shows I might say something every few minutes like "We're here to run Flashpoints and chew gum and we're all out of gum! Tune in for Flashpoint Friday at http://listen.siradio.fm and if you're trying to get a group together, let me know!" If people need more members I'd try and find them, or flog it on the air ("Johnny X is looking for more DPS to run Athiss, help him out, wouldja?"). It was a lot of fun.

On Saturdays, I did a show called "Super Saturday". I'd arrive on the fleet and do a 2-hour music set with some SWTOR chatter - brief observations on the latest patches, flogging the next Nar Shaddaa Lounge sometimes, or like the most recent one talking about the ongoing raid of Eternity Vault that my guild was taking on. During that show, just like on Tuesdays and Fridays, every 10 minutes or so I'd say something in general chat like "Super Saturday is live on the air at Split infinity Radio- we're playing music and talking SWTOR. I hope you can tune in to the SHOUTCast stream at http://listen.siradio.fm! or something similar. I usually try to change it up because i don't want people to think I'm running a bot. Sometimes I'll say I'm taking requests. Again, I tried not to overdo it or wear out my welcome with anyone. I assumed that if someone was truly dead set against hearing about it they could easily put me on ignore, although in point of fact my volume of chatter in General chat was far outweighed at all times by people looking for group members for a flashpoint or heroic, spamming their guild ads or just chattering about whatever.

At any rate, I would have hoped that an understanding that what I'm doing is not a violation of the rules- certainly not of the spirit of them- and that if you disagree, maybe the rules need to be able to accomodate certain ways of engaging the community. I'm not selling credits or gear, I'm not making any money, and I'm certainly not getting anything out of this other than fulfilling my desire to create the kind of community I want to game in.

[Reese]

I have changed my mind on all of this.

From now on I am simply going to say that Jimer and Furiel are just 1 general chat 'Fuck' away from having free time in their lives.

They should start the "One Fuck Away From Free Time" sub-group of the guild for all those that are threatened with a ban.

[Durai]

I have changed my mind on all of this.

From now on I am simply going to say that Jimer and Furiel are just 1 general chat 'Fuck' away from having free time in their lives.

They should start the "One Fuck Away From Free Time" sub-group of the guild for all those that are threatened with a ban.

I've been a member of that since before I met up with my fellow Alvians...

[Jimer Lins]

The lounge is un-cancelled, at least for tonight. Please tune in.

[Sir Psyko]

Jimer, Miragel and I had a fairly lengthy discussion about the future of the show after we went off the air tonight, and I think I can safely say that we'll be continuing into the future, though perhaps with a slightly different approach.

As a side note, I really shouldn't try to PvP while on the air...

[Dood]

I tuned in for a bit of the show while I edited/uploaded the Drink of the Week bit. You guys sounded awesome.

Keep Miragel on the show.

[Cuspar]

I didn't check the forums in time to tune in, but I'm really glad you guys are keeping it going.

[Fynn]

Jimer, Miragel and I had a fairly lengthy discussion about the future of the show after we went off the air tonight, and I think I can safely say that we'll be continuing into the future, though perhaps with a slightly different approach.

As a side note, I really shouldn't try to PvP while on the air...

Sorry for not being on much this week, and thus missing this thread. Man, what a roller coaster of emotions it was to read it! I'm not a kid any more...you guys can't do this to me! Great news that you've decided to keep the show going. It is entertaining, informative, and has a way of making me re-evaluate some gameplay aspects.

"Reducing the frequency" of ads is not "NOT advertising at all". I think you guys need to fight the fight here - it's impossible not to see the benefit of the show existing, and BW maybe just needs some massaging.

Even the Canuck wants to fight it! I think that pretty much means you have to

[Maizan]

Am I getting this straight. Bioware does not want you to post the URL in public chat? So couldn't you just say 'send us a whisper for the a link to the show' instead?

BTW, this Canuck also wants to fight! But I will include excuse me and a thank you.

Maizan of the Blackrose

[Sir Psyko]

Am I getting this straight. Bioware does not want you to post the URL in public chat? So couldn't you just say 'send us a whisper for the a link to the show' instead?

Honestly, we have no idea what we can and cannot do. There's no stipulation anywhere in the ToS preventing posting a URL in chat. They can't seem to tell Jimer what rule he broke (he's asked), just not to break it again or he'll be banned. And therein lies the problem.

[Maizan]

Ah. Classic corporate structure. The left hand does not know what the right hand is doing.

[Happyclam]

Am I getting this straight. Bioware does not want you to post the URL in public chat? So couldn't you just say 'send us a whisper for the a link to the show' instead?

BTW, this Canuck also wants to fight! But I will include excuse me and a thank you.

Maizan of the Blackrose

I think the issue might be that someone felt that Jimer was perhaps spamming the chat with links to the show. Increase the intervals with which you advertise?