We’ve got another report of players behaving poorly and abusing an otherwise benign system to malicious effect. Isacoh, a LGBTQIA streamer of games including New World, reported over the past weekend that he was temporarily banned from the game as a result of “a homophobic mass report attack.”
The wave of reports point to the name of his company, Queers, which is a guild for other LGBT+ players to come together. The ban was instilled yesterday for 14 hours due to an “offensive company name,” and Isacoh suspects that the mass report was a tactic used by others to not only harass players like him but to shut his company out of a territory defense on their server. The ban is scheduled to be lifted today.
The banning was brought up on the game’s forums, which drew forth an official response stating that the devs are unable to discuss bans and directing the OP to a link that Isacoh could use to appeal the ban. Readers will note that Amazon Games further claimed in a post regarding an unrelated ban case in early November that, “There is no autoban from player reports. Whether someone is reported one time or a million times, their case was reviewed by a moderator/investigator who made the call that the behavior was against the TOS/Code of a conduct.”
“This is not the first time that members of Queers have been abused by mass reports from homophobes in-game,” Isacoh writes. “I am a New World Content Creator who uses the Queer and Genderqueer tag on Twitch, also owned by [Amazon], to bring our community together.”
“This ban was made in error, and should not have occurred. In our efforts to move swiftly to protect the LGBTQ community, we acted too quickly on reports of the company name being homophobic and therefore in violation of our Code of Conduct. We quickly reversed the ban once we learned of the company’s intent, and regret the mistake. We will continue to improve our processes while taking action to protect our players.”
