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@Nexon: Walling off NA?

aylbdraylbdr
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in General Discussion
What exactly is the point in banning people who are not in North America anyway? It's not like they're gonna take your jobs, lols.

Seriously, we've been very proud of the fact our guild is multi-cultural and international. We have friends here in Vindictus from Europe, Australia, Japan, Canada, and all over the world. You just banned at least 2 of my most honest and loyal guild mates. And one of them you'd just unjustly banned only a few months ago already, then apologized and re-intsated his account. I even made a forum post to thank you for doing the right thing. He is the most loyal and honest person I've ever met online too, and the other guildie is his irl friend he grew up with, and is also just an all around great guy. These are my very good friends, and very good friends of many others here too.

But even beyond all that, this is still just absurd. These people help keep this game alive and you just banned them for no better reason than they have brown skin. Please stop killing the game (and your own profits). You're ruining it for everyone, including yourselves. :/
F8teBabyDanimere0ries

Kommentare

  • CloakshireCloakshire
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    edited February 28, 2020
    aylbdr wrote: »
    These people help keep this game alive and you just banned them for no better reason than they have brown skin.

    This is the only statement that I take issue with. I personally do not subscribe to the notion that these people got "banned," because of the color of their skin. This is just blatant race baiting. These players did not suffer because of their skin color. They suffered because they're outside of Vindictus's indented support region which does not equate to race. Suffering from geographical location =/= suffering from skin color.

    Do I personally agree with Nexon's decision to block people based on where they are globally? No, I do not agree with it b/c I believe that having a diverse playerbase enriches the social experience offered by your typical MMO. A guildy of mine who played from Ukraine just got nailed by this earlier today.

    unknown-2.png

    He was a good player & friend and I'm disheartened to see this happen to him. However, just b/c I disagree with Nexon's decision doesn't mean I'm going to instantly jump on making accusations involving race. I can see from a technological standpoint why Nexon did this.

    Since the game uses a peer2peer system, any person playing outside of the supported region runs the risk of having a poor experience due to latency issues. This issue also works both ways wherein an NA player will have a poor experience when connecting to a foreign host. Since NA is the intended region & target audience for the NA server, I can see the reasoning. By enforcing region restrictions, they help reduce the likelihood of their target audience having a poor experience by connecting to foreign hosts. It's that simple.

    Not trying to flame you or anything, I just didn't appreciate your utilization of one's skin color in your argument. I also would like to reiterate that I do not agree with Nexon's decision; I'm just able to see an actual reason instead of baseless race-baiting.
    ElynsaGhengisJohn
  • aylbdraylbdr
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    edited February 29, 2020
    Cloakshire wrote: »
    Since the game uses a peer2peer system, any person playing outside of the supported region runs the risk of having a poor experience due to latency issues. This issue also works both ways wherein an NA player will have a poor experience when connecting to a foreign host. Since NA is the intended region & target audience for the NA server, I can see the reasoning. By enforcing region restrictions, they help reduce the likelihood of their target audience having a poor experience by connecting to foreign hosts. It's that simple.

    After I made this thread and logged off, I had a feeling someone would get bent about that. But I didn't change it because that would be their issue, not mine. It sure would've been nice if you really don't agree with nexon, if you had lended your support instead of nitpicking this one thing you failed to understand. That certainly would've done more to help the community.

    But fine, lets explore your issue. Firstly, it's been years since they merged our servers, and Australia is much much farther away than South America and the latency issue is far worse. Secondly, your friend is the first and only non Latino that I've even heard of so far that got banned, and yesterday I didn't even know about that one. Not only that, but he got a very different message than my friends from Argentina. Their message simply said playing from outside of NA, and had nothing whatsoever to do with government restrictions. My friends from everywhere else in the world were not getting banned. So factually, whether it does have anything to do with racism or not, it wouldn't be a baseless accusation (even *if* it was an accusation (more on that later), since that is *based* on what facts I actually knew.

    Not only that, no one that I've ever heard about ever complained about latency caused by players from South America (or anywhere else) being a big problem. People are always putting "Asia host" etc in the mega, and everyone was doing fine with that. I'm in NA, more than 140 miles from nexon (I used to live right down the street) and when I host people sometimes have latency issues too. It's the same for many of us here in NA. I have a few friends here who host no better than my friends from Argentina that they just banned. Besides, from what I've seen the much larger problem with lag comes from the weak servers that have been an issue here for at least 8 years that I know of personally, and that's easily more of a problem for everyone than players from outside of NA hosting.

    Regardless (and here is where your issue comes into play), the fact is I made no such accusation. What I typed was: "you just banned them for no better reason than they have brown skin." I never said that was the reason they banned them. I just said the reason was "no better than" because I didn't see any other valid reason, and I still do not. Did I suspect that racism was involved? I did actually, and still do (change my mind). But did I assume that is the reason for sure? No, that would be illogical, and that is why I worded it the way I did. So that no one who understood basic English would take it wrongly. I chose those words carefully, and that is why when I suspected someone might take issue, I felt no need to edit them.

    Also, they are doing the opposite of making the game more enjoyable for people from NA. Instead they are creating a smaller player base and for a game that's always so close to dying, that's so obviously only making things worse for everyone, with the only possible exception I can think of being those who hate brown people. Are you starting to see my point yet? They've known a huge portion of their players are not from NA for at least 3 years now and have done nothing to change that. Do you really think they just woke up and decided they would start caring about latency all of a sudden after all the server issues they've ignored for so many years?

    On top of all of that, it is very well known that nexon has hired at least one extremely blatant racist before. So why would you completely ignore that? Not to mention the climate of extreme racism here in America at this time is far too obvious to ignore as well. No, I think I have many valid reasons that have bases as firm as anything could be in this situation. Certainly firm enough to pose the question, but I did not even go that far. The most I can factually be accused of here is implication.


    So you said you "do not subscribe to the notion that these people got "banned," because of the color of their skin". But unless you are an employee of nexon, there is no way you would know that, so that's simply a blatant assumption you made based on nothing but perhaps a desire to think that nexon are incapable of bad behavior.


    Lastly I have to ask: do you agree or not? You say you don't agree, but then turn around and say you can see a reason for it, witch is at least partially agreeing. That's a bit of a contradiction. I mean, sure I see what they say their reason is, but all things considered it's hardly a valid reason and so I have different suspicions. Despite all of this though, I wonder why you personally take such great exception to someone thinking it might be driven by racism. Not intending to flame anyone either, but in my experience the term "race-baiting" has only ever been used by racists. No one else would even have a reason to use that term. So are you a racist? Partly asking because the only ban you seem to care about is your friend from the Ukraine. Witch btw I am sorry to hear about.



    mere0ries
  • TheDazzIingTheDazzIing
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    too long didn't read!!!!
  • ZeroheartZeroheart
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    edited February 29, 2020
    My opinion, they are blocking countries that have banned LOOT BOXES and GATCHAS cause they are gambling , bad influence to children (Why won't anyone think of the children), and prey on players to spend more to get that "high" of getting that item.
    They can force their laws to us but once another law conflict with their money flow they rather blocked them.
  • CloakshireCloakshire
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    edited February 29, 2020
    aylbdr wrote: »
    ~Snip~

    Just because your thread was long, I didn't feel like including it in a quote nor splitting it up into multiple quotes to which I'd reply. However, since you ordered your points into eight nice and neat paragraphs, allow me to bullet point my eight replies to yours.

    • Yeah, going out of my way to nitpick something I apparently failed to understand *more on that later* compared to just chiming in with something more supportive/voicing disagreement towards nexon would have done more help. I get that, but at the same time, I think that you could have done more help by not bringing race/skin color into an issue where it has no place. I said before that race =/= geographical location or nationality. Being banned for playing from Argentina =/= banned for being Argentinian.

    • You said that your friends from Argentina got hit for playing outside of NA whereas your other friends from everywhere else in the world are fine. Let's first establish playing on NA from an outside region typically requires a VPN, and players utilize these VPN's to bypass region restrictions. So at the end of the day they're circumventing what Nexon has in place to prevent. Wouldn't it be equally fair to assume that the method your friends in Argentina were using to bypass the region restrictions are simply no longer able to fly under the radar? And subsequently their accounts were detected to have been connecting from outside of the intended region? Which begs the question of how much longer your other friends from elsewhere can continue to fly under the radar? I mean realistically speaking, do you think that there's someone at Nexon HQ that said, "Hmmm... I think we're gonna screw over the Argentinians today?" I doubt it.

    • I agree that the main issues with lag come from the weak servers, and it's neat that some of your Argentine friends can host better than your NA friends. However, there will always be exceptions like yours, but I would say that the general likelihood of experiencing latency issues is much higher when connecting to people outside of NA's supported regions. This is the logical reason I concluded for when people are nixed for not playing within NA. Nexon's trying to reduce the second-most probable cause of latency issues which happens to be foreign players even though I still do not agree with it. Instead of banning people outside of NA, they could try investing in beefing up their servers but nope, they wanna take the cheap & easy way :(

    • There's a fine line between making an accusation and making an implication just like there's a fine line between the phrase, "no better than," which is what you said and, "if for no reason other than," which is probably what you were trying to convey. Irregardless, the turn of phrase means that you're acknowledging the existence of other reasons which you are currently unaware of, but you believe that your stated reason is the main one. I choose my words carefully too, and even if what you said was a mere implication, I'll reiterate that race/skin color has no place in this discussion nor should it have been included in your OP; at least in my opinion. I also do not see the logic in how you skipped over various possible reasons, and jumped straight to skin color.

    • I agree that what they're doing is the opposite of good for the game. By blocking players that want to play/support Vindictus, Nexon is literally shooting themselves in the foot. A lower player count means less revenue which leads to a degradation in game quality, and ends up effecting the people that can play. You're right in saying that everyone is affected, but I don't see how you're coming to the conclusion that it could be b/c of race. Is everyone in Argentina brown? No. Does nexon request your ethnicity when you create an account? No. Therefore I conclude that it doesn't have to do with skin color. Sometimes companies just do dumb stuff that doesn't make any logical sense on the surface, and sometimes not even under the surface. Also... c'mon, this is Nexon we're talking about.

    • There's only one person I can think of that fits your description of blatantly racist. I remember seeing posts here a while ago about a racist Vindy discord mod. Ellie I think it was? If that is the person you're referencing, then I don't think they were hired by Nexon. Last time I checked, the discord mods are simply volunteers that aren't on Nexon's payroll, and have no power other than your average discord mod + the ability to have a higher priority when it comes to reaching Nexon. If I've got the wrong person, then I dunno who you're talking about. Regarding your little comment about the current racial climate here in America, I'll just mark this as a spoiler for you to read if you'd like.
      I personally don't believe that we have a climate of extreme racism. I'm not saying we don't have it here and there, but it's not extreme. What I see today is that everyone is so obsessed and concerned with what color that are, their sex, sexual orientation, and what group they belong to. These aspects of a person are not important. The only thing that should matter is WHO you are as an individual, not WHAT. Over the years, we made great strides in overcoming our history and progressed towards judging others by their character and who they were because that is truly how you define someone. In current day, it seems like we're taking steps backwards. My only guess is that many people in the current generation feel like their character alone isn't is special enough, and so they've taken to these identity prefixes to get a hollow sense of self-worth & importance. Whenever this hollow sense gets shattered, they get upset and call whatever -ism lines up with their invalidated "what." They conflate who and what which doesn't work out in the end, but I'm not too worried. They'll grow up eventually. I'm part of this generation btw; I'm twenty-eight, and I'm ashamed to be a Millennial based on how most of us act today.

    • I don't think Nexon's incapable of bad behavior. I just don't think that they're acting on the basis of skin color like you've contemplated & implied.

    • I do not agree with Nexon on this matter. Acknowledging a reason for something you disagree with doesn't mean you're partially in agreement. It is possible to see the other side of an issue without taking it. The reason I took great exception to you thinking that an issue in an obscure MMO might be driven by race lies in the simple fact that you went there. You could have sat down & taken five minutes to come up with a more probable reason, but instead you jumped straight to race because it's an easy excuse. The reason I detest when people do this is because it has the potential to indirectly perpetuate actual racism. Morgan says it best here (https://youtu.be/Mh8mUia75k8?t=36). Race-baiting has many definitions surprisingly, so let me clarify the way I meant it which is Using implications of racial discrimination and/or disparity to support one's disagreement/issue with another. I would say that this definition lines up with the part of your OP I took issue with. Lastly, am I racist? Hmmm, well I do laugh at off-color humor as well as stereotype jokes, but that's only because I have a sense of humor and know when it's appropriate to make/laugh at said jokes. But to answer your direct question of if I am; No I am not. (After working many years in the retail scene, you come to hate everyone equally :p)
    ZeroheartEmerthyst
  • GhengisJohnGhengisJohn
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    aylbdr wrote: »
    Cloakshire wrote: »
    Since the game uses a peer2peer system, any person playing outside of the supported region runs the risk of having a poor experience due to latency issues. This issue also works both ways wherein an NA player will have a poor experience when connecting to a foreign host. Since NA is the intended region & target audience for the NA server, I can see the reasoning. By enforcing region restrictions, they help reduce the likelihood of their target audience having a poor experience by connecting to foreign hosts. It's that simple.

    After I made this thread and logged off, I had a feeling someone would get bent about that. But I didn't change it because that would be their issue, not mine. It sure would've been nice if you really don't agree with nexon, if you had lended your support instead of nitpicking this one thing you failed to understand. That certainly would've done more to help the community.

    I'm a pretty liberal guy and half Mexican myself so it's not like I don't empathize with brown people here. But I took objection to that accusation (it's pretty serious) as well.
  • KirraKirra
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    Cloakshire wrote: »
    aylbdr wrote: »
    These people help keep this game alive and you just banned them for no better reason than they have brown skin.

    This is the only statement that I take issue with. I personally do not subscribe to the notion that these people got "banned," because of the color of their skin. This is just blatant race baiting. These players did not suffer because of their skin color. They suffered because they're outside of Vindictus's indented support region which does not equate to race. Suffering from geographical location =/= suffering from skin color.

    Do I personally agree with Nexon's decision to block people based on where they are globally? No, I do not agree with it b/c I believe that having a diverse playerbase enriches the social experience offered by your typical MMO. A guildy of mine who played from Ukraine just got nailed by this earlier today.

    unknown-2.png

    He was a good player & friend and I'm disheartened to see this happen to him. However, just b/c I disagree with Nexon's decision doesn't mean I'm going to instantly jump on making accusations involving race. I can see from a technological standpoint why Nexon did this.

    Since the game uses a peer2peer system, any person playing outside of the supported region runs the risk of having a poor experience due to latency issues. This issue also works both ways wherein an NA player will have a poor experience when connecting to a foreign host. Since NA is the intended region & target audience for the NA server, I can see the reasoning. By enforcing region restrictions, they help reduce the likelihood of their target audience having a poor experience by connecting to foreign hosts. It's that simple.

    Not trying to flame you or anything, I just didn't appreciate your utilization of one's skin color in your argument. I also would like to reiterate that I do not agree with Nexon's decision; I'm just able to see an actual reason instead of baseless race-baiting.

    Of course the white guy has to nitpick this lmao.
    mere0ries
  • SwornKnightSwornKnight
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    So if countries of NA were to pass laws to bann "Gacha boxes" would they also block us like those said countries?
  • CloakshireCloakshire
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    edited März 12, 2020
    Kirra wrote: »
    Of course the white guy has to nitpick this lmao.

    WKUK +best

    Also saw your "CHONK Chart." Oh lord he coming XD
  • DancingStarDancingStar
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    edited März 19, 2020
    What's the big deal?? Just use the VPN to skip the launcher region restriction then turn off the VPN before the main menu and play normally...
    Ppl do that since ages. Also ban and IP restriction are 2 different things.
    Mirr
  • TheDazzIingTheDazzIing
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    idk :3 idc
  • FlameSama1FlameSama1
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    Kirra wrote: »
    Of course the white guy has to nitpick this lmao.

    Cloak just likes to whiteknight this game for some inexplicable reason. Maybe calling them racist was going too far, but saying 'it's for connection purposes' is BS. Isn't that up to the players to decide? They can literally just leave any boat that's a one bar for one reason or another and not play with them, if they don't like it.

    Taking a game that averages 300 players a day according to Steam Charts (I and many others use the Nexon Launcher so what, maybe 600 players a day?) and adding barriers to entry like this and the ridiculous boat token 2.0 fatigue system turns away what few players it *does* have.

    mere0ries
  • CloakshireCloakshire
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    edited März 23, 2020
    FlameSama1 wrote: »
    Cloak just likes to whiteknight this game for some inexplicable reason.

    Nah, I'll call Nexon's BS when I think it's necessary. Otherwise, I'm just calling what I perceive to be other people's BS because that's how I get my kicks. There's nothing wrong with voicing complaints when they're needed, but if I think the reasoning for one's complaints are invalid, that's when I tend to chime in b/c I'm that guy. I'm also very argumentative as you probably already know :)

    Also, that white guy line was just Kirra poking fun at the chonkster XD
  • F8teF8te
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    There used to be more servers. It was crunched because the game population was too small. Now they are enforcing region restrictions, which of course will exacerbate the issue. With everything walled off below the Equator as abruptly as the fatigue system was added, one at least must consider racial implications. It may be convenient to ignore since otherwise it is a connection quality issue that Nexon themselves caused. I have played with people claiming to be all over the world, most with less issues than an average RAR. The very fact that the system is peer-to-peer rather than server based allows people both to choose who they are connecting with, and allows even those distant from NA to play with other players near to them without problem. If I elected to risk a poor connection and play with them that should be my decision, as it used to be. From a business perspective? Outside of games that censor themselves for China this is the strangest decision I have ever seen. Literally refusing service to half the world is a terrible business practice.
  • F8teF8te
    Posts: 2
    Mitglied
    There used to be more servers. It was crunched because the game population was too small. Now they are enforcing region restrictions, which of course will exacerbate the issue. With everything walled off below the Equator as abruptly as the fatigue system was added, one at least must consider racial implications. It may be convenient to ignore since otherwise it is a connection quality issue that Nexon themselves caused. I have played with people claiming to be all over the world, most with less issues than an average RAR. The very fact that the system is peer-to-peer rather than server based allows people both to choose who they are connecting with, and allows even those distant from NA to play with other players near to them without problem. If I elected to risk a poor connection and play with them that should be my decision, as it used to be. From a business perspective? Outside of games that censor themselves for China this is the strangest decision I have ever seen. Literally refusing service to half the world is a terrible business practice.