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Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

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Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#221

Post by arcturus17 »

theshrike79 wrote: post #167
jug wrote: post #55

This makes me anxious about my long time Gmail address. Back then I got it just because it and Google was cool, and their services had a good reputation. It was a different Google back then. If they had launched it this year I would never have got one because chances are it would have been cancelled by 2025. Gmail is really the only valuable thing that actually ties my life to Google. And it's not that hard to replac…

Start the process of getting out right now. Get an email address that you own, on a domain you control. Switch to a provider that takes your money for whom you are the customer - not the product. I did this with Fastmail and Iki.fi, a Finnish non-profit[1], who have been selling people "permanent" email addresses since 1995. [1] http://www.iki.fi/

> Switch to a provider that takes your money for whom you are the customer

Google now sells domains, as well as email through GSuite.

I use them a lot on new projects, because I find them so insanely convenient, but I can't help shake the feeling that now I'm both the product and a paying customer.

So I'd probably nuance your words with: "select a provider whose livelihood depends on your custom".

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#222

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

onion2k wrote: post #121
spicyramen wrote: post #51

Hey Google here is a feature: account reputation, anyone doing business with you, has that flag enabled and human reviewers will be supporting them

The implication here is that the fix for this problem is to make sure it doesn't happen to anyone who does business with Google, as if other people aren't important enough to concern yourself about. That is 1000% the wrong approach, and exactly the sort of thinking that gets tech businesses in to this sort of mess. The correct approach is to make sure it doesn't happen incorrectly in the first place, and that it can…

I think "not treating business partners like trash" is the absolute base minimum. If they can't get that right, what hope do customers have? Feels like that needs to be solved first — particularly if it's an issue of scale — then the customer issue dealt with afterwards, if it remains an issue.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#223

Post by avh02 »

philjohn wrote: post #67
hn_go_brrrrr wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's virtually no chance that the automated system that banned him knew the account belonged to someone with whom Stadia was doing business. Even if we assume there's a list of high profile people/accounts not to automatically disable, I can't see him being on it.

It's possible to have a system that marks high profile accounts that shouldn't have automated actions applied ... that it appears Google doesn't have something like this is worrying.

they then become high profile targets for takeovers, and can run amok for too long before being disabled.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#224

Post by ztjio »

ramraj07 wrote: post #138
gundmc wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Cloud actually has pretty good and reachable support including by phone in case you have login issues.

It has pretty good support _today_. Who knows what will change with Google tomorrow given its track record? Amazon otoh has been exactly consistent in its customer support starting from amazon.com till AWS.

This is a bizarrely biased view. There are no shortage of nightmare testimonials out there for Amazon customer service, unfairly banned accounts, and all of that.

Amazon might be slightly better than Google with regards to finding a person to speak with, but, not any better with finding a person who can do anything when you've been wronged.

That said, it seems that "Amazon" and "AWS" have entirely separately run customer service organizations. I have no reason to believe GCP customer relationships are managed in anyway resembling the way they manage their cattle on their free services where the user is the product anyway. Why would they?

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#225

Post by lima »

ashtonkem wrote: post #160

You’d think that there’d be a “this person is high profile and any automated bans will cause a stink” flag on accounts to require human review on such decisions, but apparently one of the richer companies in the world just can’t be bothered to hire a few extra people to avoid a PR problem. That or they’re convinced that they’re this close to fixing the automated system, which they obviously are not.

> That or they’re convinced that they’re this close to fixing the automated system, which they obviously are not.

Knowing Google's engineering culture, you're probably spot-on. Ignoring long-tail events like this one is a common failure mode of this kind of relentless metrics-driven optimization (and they should know better).

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#226

Post by danpalmer »

amirhirsch wrote: post #68
euph0ria wrote: post #17

The company I work for has banned the use of Google Cloud due to how they treat their Play Store developers, in particular that there never seems to be any human being that you can talk to and find out what you need to do to fix the situation. We do not want the same to occur to our servers or if there is an overflow from Play Store ban to GCP etc.

Can you imagine any serious new project starting on Google Cloud with their lack of human support? I wonder if Google knows this is why they will never compete with Azure or AWS.

I use Google Cloud and the support has been pretty good. We have an account manager, engineering support contacts, all sorts. We also have SLAs so they can't just cut off our account.

There's a difference between someone with a Gmail account who added a card to GCP and spun up a VM, and a business with a business account. Google support isn't there for the former, but there's plenty of it for the latter.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#228

Post by danpalmer »

theshrike79 wrote: post #182
gundmc wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Cloud actually has pretty good and reachable support including by phone in case you have login issues.

What if my Google Cloud account gets nuked because of something not related to it? Can I still contact the Cloud support to get my account back open again?

The answer is that you don't have it entirely dependent on your account. You have a business account with an account manager, and while any one dev who's linked to your account may get banned, your account shouldn't, or at the very least your account manager would be able to re-instate it because they know the relationship.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#229

Post by ratww »

echelon wrote: post #202
jug wrote: post #55

This makes me anxious about my long time Gmail address. Back then I got it just because it and Google was cool, and their services had a good reputation. It was a different Google back then. If they had launched it this year I would never have got one because chances are it would have been cancelled by 2025. Gmail is really the only valuable thing that actually ties my life to Google. And it's not that hard to replac…

What's the best way to back up your data? Google Takeout? Is that easily ingestible into other email programs?

I've used this project, but it's been a while: https://github.com/joeyates/imap-backup . It's a CLI app, though, so it's maybe not the best solution for non-technical end-users.

Some email providers have IMAP import, where you just give them the password and they'll do it for you. Not the best solution in terms of security but might be ok if you're getting rid of your account anyway.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#230

Post by 2pEXgD0fZ5cF »

spicyramen wrote: post #51

Hey Google here is a feature: account reputation, anyone doing business with you, has that flag enabled and human reviewers will be supporting them

Google already kind of practices this feature, it's just that the "reputation" part is external:

Is the public reputation of the owner of this account high enough that the ban will make the news?

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