Star Trek Online – A Letter to Jack

Star Trek Online – A Letter to Jack

Below is a copy of an email I sent to Cryptic Studios CEO Jack Emmert. This was written shortly after Al Rivera placed me on ignore because I was sending him information about #Trollgate on Twitter. Yeah, he really ignored me. So did Trevor, possibly at the direction of Al. He gave me no choice so I had to go over his head. I don’t know if this will even matter, but at least if I am gonna go down, I will go down fighting.

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Mr. Emmert

I am writing you today because of a major mishandling of an issue with one of your games that Cryptic Studios oversees.

To make things clear, I am aware that whenever there is an issue with a game, in this case severe harassment and impersonation, it is customary to submit an in game ticket so that a Game Master (GM) can look over it and resolve the issue. Usually, the problem is dealt with and play can go on as usual.

The issue here is that apparently filing in game tickets does nothing. You may be asking yourself why I am writing you and not someone else like a Community Manger or even the Executive Producer of the game in question (Star Trek Online) Al Rivera. The reason is simply this: Mr. Rivera, for some reason, has not resolved the issue. I know that it can take time for a problem within a game to be taken care of. I understand that writing code is not easy. However, removing or banning of an account that is brazenly harassing players, even after (in some cases) two months’ time seems like it should be quite easy. I am sure you are well aware of the process.

My question for you is, why, after months of filing tickets, updating them with screen shots of the harassment, and even showing your people at Cryptic Studios that the person responsible for the “trolling” is actually livestreaming it as it happens, have these accounts associated with these actions not been removed from the game?

For a long time, I have defended Cryptic Studios and your staff, stating that they are doing all they can. Mr. Rivera even stated in a thread on the Star Trek Online Forums that he was looking into the issue and trying to apply a fix.

So you can better understand what is happening, I will give you a brief breakdown.

Several players such as myself enjoy your game and often logon not only to play, but to socialize as well. Some of us are quite well known in the community. I won’t say I am incredibly popular, but I do have quite a few people that I talk to throughout a typical week. Because of my popularity, a certain individual has taken it upon himself to try and tarnish my reputation. How exactly are they doing this? Let me explain.

As you probably know, Star Trek Online uses names in the format of “Name@Handle.” We are able to have individual @Handles which can help people tell who we are. Often times though, players will only see the name of your character and not your @Handle. What this particular troll is doing is purposely creating accounts that are very similar to the @Handles of well-known players. For example, someone may have the @Handle of @CaptainKirk. The troll will then purposely create an account with a similar @Handle – something like @CaptainKi1k. They will then purposely make a character with the exact same name as a character that another player uses. For example, a regular player may have a character and handle as Picard@CaptainKirk so the troll will make a character with a name like Picard@CaptainKi1k. At a glance, a lot of people will not see the difference, especially when chat is scroll.

At this point, the troll will start spamming things like private challenges to random players or mission map invites. He does this over and over again. In fact, we have seen the culprit livestreaming his actions as he does it. From the looks of it, he is spamming countless players using macros and scripts. He does this over and over again, making the player receiving the spam angry to the point where they try to locate the person being impersonated and not the actual troll. Why? The troll will mark themselves as Anonymous, making it so they do not appear when there is a search done for that name. In this case, I will tell you about my experience.

One month ago, I started getting spammed by this troll. He would do it nonstop from the moment I logged on till I logged out. I placed the troll on ignore as any normal person would. Problem is placing them on ignore does not stop the mission map invites. They keep coming, nonstop. Even after adjusting my privacy settings, the map spam keep coming. Regardless of where I would be in game, the spam would come. Even if I placed myself as anonymous, still it came. I filed a ticket, hoping this would be resolved. Nothing happened. All I got back was a prefilled form letter telling me to just ignore them (even though I had told them ignore did not stop the spam) and they would look into it. Days went by and the spam continued. Finally, someone else who was a victim of this spam posted about it on the forums. I added in my two cents and asked for something to be done. More time passed and no official response.

As the days went on, nothing was being done. After about 10 days, the troll decided to change up what he was doing. It was at this point that he purposely created a mock account with almost the exact same name as mine. He then proceeded to spam people, anyone from the looks of it, nonstop. Of course, when you get a private challenge or a map invite, you can only see the character name and not the @handle. People are well aware of a particular character I play all the time. The character is very popular and this person knew that. From the moment he started spamming everyone using this mock account, I have been getting nasty private messages and in game mails from people, getting angry at me because of what this troll is doing using my name. Not only that, he also went as far as creating a fleet with almost the exact same name as mine and started using it to fool people even more. I returned to my ticket and updated them with what was happening. I even provided the @Handles this person was using to spam the invites and to impersonate me and others.

Days went by and nothing.

We (myself and the other victims) took to the forums again to try to get someone to listen. Again, days went by and nothing. Finally, after letting Trevor, the community manger, know of what was happening via Twitter, did someone from your organization finally address the issue. When I saw Trevor respond, I began to have hope that this would be taken care of. Again, days passed and nothing was done. We kept posting about it in the forums and all this time, I am still getting badgered with in game mails and messages from people who think it is me doing the spamming. I tried to assure people it was not me. Thankfully, my name bought me some good will and people began to see that it really wasn’t me, but a troll impersonating me.

Each day I began to update my ticket with new screen shots (they asked me for them in the ticket) and asking for updates. I never got anything more than the general “we’re looking into it” response.

Before I knew it, I was having to answer to several players a day to explain to them that it was not me doing the trolling, but someone else. After the explanation, most players understood as I told them what the situation was. I asked them to file a ticket (Trevor and Al both told me to tell players to do this) if the spamming continued and virtually everyone I spoke to said they had in fact filed (at least) one.

More time passed and the troll started coming into one of my channels and started using the member lists as a “hit list.” He would spam everyone in the channel endlessly. Again, I had to explain that it was not me. Being that the people in the channel knew who I was, they were quick to believe me (thankfully).

One other thing I should mention is that I do an in game item giveaway. Essentially, people donate unwanted items and then in an event, I dish out the loot to newer players or players who need something better like a beam array or maybe a bridge officer. I have been holding this giveaway almost daily since February and again, people have come to trust me because of this. They know I never make any sort of profit on the giveaway and that all donations go back into the community. I started it specifically because I felt the community was going downhill. I really like the game and I know most people that play are good, decent people and I wanted to show them that there are others out there like them that believe in the ideas displayed in Star Trek. I didn’t do it for attention. I did it because I liked the feeling of helping others. I still do.

Because of the trolling in the game, I was forced to move the giveaway from the Earth Space Dock location (a populated area of the game) to a channel that I could have more control over. The only reason I did this was because the troll, again using my name, started soliciting giveaway items for himself, essentially scamming people for his own greed. People thought they were sending the items to me when they were really sending them to the troll. Again, I had to do some cleanup and let them know to be wary of the troll. Of course, he kept doing it nonstop. Because of this, I moved the event itself to a channel. I have repeatedly removed this troll from the channel countless times, but he keeps returning. I know I can make the channel private, but the idea of the giveaway was to make sure everyone could participate, not just those in the channel so in a sense he was forcing me to cut off a majority of the player base. Yes, I know I can mute him but as I mentioned earlier, he uses the channel list to get names so he can spam more people.

Sigh.

I know this is a lot to read. I tried my best to condense it down as much as I could. I even left out a couple of things because if I didn’t I would have written probably twenty pages.

To sum up, it has now been a month that this has been happening daily. For at least one other person I know, it has been going on for over 2 months. Yes, for 2 months daily, another player I know has had to deal with the spam, the impersonation, and being the center of ridicule because people think he is the one doing the spamming. I find it hard to believe that 2 months can go by and nothing gets done. I took to Twitter to start trying to communicate with Al Rivera and Trevor to let them know what was happening. Mr. Rivera said they would implement a patch that would block all communication when a person was placed on ignore. I applauded this effort and hoped this would be the beginning of the end for it since Al was taking a lead role in addressing it.

The patch did not work. Patch day came and went and we followed the instructions given to us. We were told to place the offending party on ignore, log out and back in, and then we would no longer get any spam. Unfortunately, it did not function. The spam continued and so did the impersonation and harassment. I asked Mr. Rivera via Twitter why he would not just go into the database and remove the offending accounts. We had updated out tickets with them several times. Why could he not just go in, see what this person was doing, and then ban or remove the accounts? Mr. Rivera never answered me.

I continued to send him messages and updates through Twitter because my ticket was still sitting there with nothing having been done. I was getting incredibly frustrated with my game experience and could not understand how it could possibly take so long to address something that should have been nipped in the bud a month earlier. Then, I guess because he was getting sick of me, Mr. Rivera placed me on ignore. So did Trevor.

I am sure you can see the irony there. I had to laugh myself because as much as I have complained about this trolling issue, he had the nerve to place me on ignore. I was amazed at the audacity.

I sat a moment, thinking about how people had described Cryptic Studios and their customer support, saying how god awful it was. I had always though there was no way things could really be that bad. How foolish I was. I am seeing it happening right now. My ticket(s), now a month old, sit there still, and even as I am typing this letter, I am still seeing people in game complaining about the spam.

And still nothing is being done to stop it.

I am writing to you because Mr. Rivera has made it clear he has no interest in hearing from me. It is also obvious that the GMs are not taking their job seriously as trolls are becoming rampant in the game; harassing players, running off new ones, and destroying reputations. They know nothing will happen to them which is why they keep right on doing this. At first, I thought about contacting CBS. Then I figured it would be better to keep things in house so I am seeking you out to see if anything at all can be done.

I refuse to believe that nothing can be done about this. I refuse to believe that your people cannot simply go into the game and remove accounts used by individuals that have clearly violated the Terms of Service. I cannot, for the life of me, understand how your people can sit back and not talk to your customer base and let us know anything about what is being done to resolve this.

I am not writing this to get anyone in trouble. I am not just spouting off as most angry customers would. I am writing to you because I sincerely feel I have no other options. If customer support will not help, if the community manager cannot help, and if the producer of your game stops listening, who else is left?

If you require any additional information, please feel free to write me back. I have invested too much time, energy, and money into the game to simply give up on this.

Sincerely,

O

PS I am including the ticket number (141121-001670) and the @Handle of the troll accounts. I am not sure if those are of any use to you, but I figure it is better for you to have them and not need than to need and not have. Also, I am making this an open letter so that the victims of this harassment know that I am not turning my back on them.

@Olivia21l (that is a lower case L on the end, not to be confused with the legitimate account @Olivia211)

@zztroi

@Diabolica191 (notice that it is 191 on the end and not L91 as @Diabolical91 is actually a victim of the troll)

@Diabo1ical91 (Notice that the L in the middle is actually a 1, again another account created to harass the player who uses @Diabolical91

@joecool82 (this was the first account that started harassing me and several others)