Professor Falmea on Aug 25, 2021 wrote:

Hello KingsIsle community!

Last time on KI Live we talked briefly about how to report harassment or inappropriate behavior in our games, but I wanted to take some time to elaborate.

First, know that our Customer Support and Community teams keep watch of any concerns that appear both in the game and elsewhere in the community. All reports are reviewed to determine an appropriate action. We are as vigilant as possible in preventing player abuse and related concerns, but we still need the community’s help to ensure all concerns are seen and reported properly.

If someone is bothering you and you want them to go away, you can use the Ignore option. Poof! You won’t see their chat anymore and they can’t send you messages. The Ignore feature is there for cases which don’t necessarily violate the Terms of Service but may still cause you to want to stop interacting with someone.

If someone does violate the Community Code of Conduct or Terms of Use, including:

• Inappropriate language or conduct
• Abusing exploits/using 3rd party tools
• Circumventing the Chat Filter
• Tricking someone into providing access to their account
• Falsely reporting someone

These are great ways to help you and to help us take action:

• Ignore them so they can’t bother you anymore.
• Report the individual if you have the ability to do so. Just a few words on why they’re being reported is enough – for example – “Foul language”.
• If you cannot report, please submit a Customer Support ticket with as much detail as possible. An example of a really helpful ticket: “Hello, my username is ProfFalmea333 and I am in The Commons and I just watched Wolf Stormblade say inappropriate things in chat. My character name is Drake WinterHammer.”

The least helpful way to report someone is to not use these tools and go directly to social media. Wizard and Pirate names are NOT unique per account, so posting on Twitter that the dastardly Wolf Stormblade was harassing people doesn’t really help us as much. We also can’t guarantee we will see your post (though we are out there and we try!). We have much more information readily available when you submit through our system, and can more quickly and efficiently track down what happened.

If the same incident was reported with the method above, Customer Support starts with:

• A message in their queue with a summary of what happened
• A timestamp of when the incident happened
• A confirmation of which account was being inappropriate and a chat log

Customer Support response is not instantaneous, but they will review and process every ticket as quickly as possible.

We are currently reviewing our in-game tools to see if we can make any improvements. After listening to the community’s latest comments, these are two topics of discussion we’ve had:

1. Yes, only paid players can use the report function. We have this in place so that bad actors cannot simply create accounts and mass report. Submitting a Customer Support ticket, which everyone can do, is the important part of the process, but reports are helpful as well. We’re considering ways that we may be able to separate these “throwaway” accounts from legitimate non-paid accounts and at that time, we could open up the ability to report to these legitimate players.
2. We want to make sure that reports can be made without fear of retaliation. Yes, we sanction players for false reporting, but that doesn’t help in the moment when it happens. We’ve discussed some options, including removing immediate notifications that someone was reported.

We care very much about the community's well-being. For an overview of our player policies and what you can do to help us in keeping the community a safe place, please review the Community Code of Conduct as well as the Terms of Use.

Thanks for helping each other to build a positive experience in the Spiral!

See you in the Spiral,

Leah “Professor Falmea” Ruben
Game Director