What’s up guys, Rogue-9 here and today I want to briefly discuss manually reporting
other players in Rainbow Six Siege.
The reason for why I want to discuss this issue now is that this Wednesday the Rainbow
Six Esports Director put out a Tweet ridiculing a community member for suggesting that Ubisoft
should maybe consider manually banning blatant cheaters in the game.
Now I’ll go into a little more detail about this whole interaction in a bit but the thing
that really stood out to me in this initial Tweet is that a very senior member of the
Siege dev team seems to be publicly suggesting that manual bans are sooo ridiculous that
it warrants calling anyone who might suggest such a thing a clown.
But hang on a minute … manually reporting players in Siege has been a thing for a long time, no?
When you go to the Ubisoft customer support portal, there is a dedicated “Report a Player”
category, where you can submit a ticket with relevant evidence.
But if manual bans are such a crazy idea, then what happens to these reports?
Well, as it happens I can tell you right now (spoiler alert) that if you have ever submitted
a player report ticket or if you ever plan on submitting one in future, there is a very
realistic chance of you getting a response thanking you for taking the time to report
your issue and then your report will be promptly binned.
Let’s take a closer look at this entire issue.
I want to start out with a brief insight into the whole Twitter debate that kicked all of this off.
This is the first Tweet that showed up in my feed but let’s wind back and see how this started.
All of it came from a relatively innocuous comment about fake PNG files online, which
then attracted an unrelated and mildly passive-aggressive response hinting at a lack of commitment regarding
the Rainbow Six project.
As online harassment goes, this is pretty minor but I can understand how comments like
this can get under someone’s skin after a while.
So this then triggers a response that is equally passive-aggressive and probably more about
venting frustration than starting a genuine debate and this is where the response regarding
manual bans comes in and with that we have now come full circle.
And it is this Tweet that then started attracting some very reasonable responses from prominent
community members.
But the retweeting didn’t end there although, thankfully, the tone became a bit more measured
when responding to Pengu.
All in all, this little tirade of snippy, passive-aggressive retweets from a director
on the Rainbow Six project really demonstrates a lot of frustration and I understand where
that can come from.
But at the same time, I personally really, really don’t think that there can ever be
anything positive that comes from publicly picking fights with the customers of the company you represent.
Even if you’re in the right, even if your arguments make sense, the only thing you are
achieving by giving in to your frustration and calling fans clowns, is creating more
negativity and ill will, not only towards you, but also towards your employer.
One of the best examples of this is Battlefield 5, where the sometimes aggressive and seriously
disrespectful public communications by EA and Dice staff members towards longstanding
fans played a significant role in damaging the game’s image before it had even been released.
I get it, when you are constantly bombarded with shitty comments and harassment, there
comes a point where anyone would lose their temper but it is undeniable that nothing good
will ever come of letting your emotions fly lose when dealing with customers.
But that aside, the bottom line here is that Wei’s Tweets imply that manual bans are
not worth the effort and that leads me to the next part, the customer support tickets.
The reason I know that not all player behaviour tickets are actually followed up on is because
I submitted one for myself over a year ago.
I was in an unranked match and had a teammate who’s only mission was to grief the rest of us.
He would constantly play Rook and then destroy his armour, just as I was picking it up or
he would follow me around destroying my gadgets or shoot me in the leg every now and then.
Pretty dumb stuff really but towards the end of the match, he did something else to try
and grief me and I responded over voice coms with something like “well, at least I’m
not at the bottom of the scoreboard with a negative K/D"… and he really didn’t like that comment.
His response was a homophobic tirade, not just directed at me but also other players
on the team who tried to calm him down.
And that was definitely enough for a temporary toxic behaviour ban.
Now in the past, I could have simply DM’ed a quick clip of the coms to a community manager
on Siege but that time, I decided to see what would happen if I didn’t have direct contact to the developers.
What would happen if I had to go through the official channels?
I uploaded an unlisted video to my channel, watched it once to check it had uploaded fine
and submitted it as a link attached to a support ticket.
The short answer to the question “what would happen” is: “Fuck all!”
A few days after submitting my support ticket, I received the standard copy and paste reply
thanking me for my report and telling me that matter was being handled but that I would
not receive any update about it.
If this customer support guy had really reviewed my video, it would have shown up as a new
view… and if anyone on the “securities team” had investigated the matter at any
point that also would have created a view.
But, as is clearly evident from my YouTube stats, nobody ever clicked on the video link
I provided, ever.
Sure, this is just a one off case but it is already enough to prove that not all support
tickets are genuinely followed up on.
At the time that this happened, I also put out a community post asking viewers about
their experiences and there were many responses that echoed my own experience.
Nothing ever happened beyond a copy and pasted thank you email.
Now what percentage of player reports is deleted without ever being followed up on?
I have no clue and we will almost certainly never know the full truth.
Maybe it depends on how busy the customer service or player behaviour teams are at any
given time, so they clear a certain number of reports but when their capacity is reached
all further reports simply get binned.
Or maybe the whole player reporting section of Ubisoft’s support page is just one big
hoax to make players feel better and none of the reports are ever followed up on!
Who knows?!
The one thing that is undeniable, is that if you submit an official report, there is
a chance that it might end up being a complete waste of time.
The Rainbow Six Esports director has basically publicly announced as much and my individual case proves it.
I personally think it’s a real shame that customer complaints are (at least sometimes)
handled in this way but at the same time, I also get it.
Following up on each and every report of a cheater or toxic player would be a massive
job that would draw a huge amount of resources.
But at the same time, I also agree with Pengu’s stance that, as things stand right now, having
one or two people manually dealing with the most blatant cheaters that are currently infesting
the game at high MMR, could definitely be a step in the right direction.
After all, whatever other automated measures are being taken are clearly not enough right now.
And that’s it!
What are your thoughts on the matter?
Do you think calling customers clowns for making a suggestion is acceptable?
Or have you ever submitted a player report ticket and if so, what was your experience
with that process?
Let me know in the comments section below and with that, many thanks for watching and
I will see you in the next episode!