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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

#242
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…

Pay $25/mo for GSuite enterprise if your email matters to you.

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

#243
post #4

As usual, some Googler browsing HN will reactivate his account, everyone will forget and Google won't change a thing to his unbanning process.

People at Google really do want to fix this... But it's a minefield of: * Legal stuff (eg. some algorithm detected child porn in his account, is an employee legally allowed to look at it to confirm the algorithm was correct? no.) * Internal Politics (eg. one team has found this account DoSing their service, while the account is perfectly normal in all other ways, but due to Googles systems being so complex a single-s…

Many other companies of similar size manage to provide customer service just fine.

This is a solved problem - you just have to be willing to realise that magic AI sprinkles aren’t the answer.

As for cost - this continual stream of screwups is costing them a ridiculous amount of goodwill and future business. It’s probably the best ad for AWS there is.

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

#244
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…

> Gmail is really the only valuable thing that actually ties my life to Google

For me it's google photos. While there are lot of great gmail alternatives these days there's still nothing like google photos unfortunately, is there?

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

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'm the first one to jump onto the Google-hating train, but Google is literally throwing engineers at us for free so ours are ready to migrate large workloads off from our platform onto GCP. It also helps that we're one of the largest telcos. Google has humans, but only for contracts big enough.

Have worked on a big, high impact Northern Europe GCP customer.

Support was hit and miss:

- once 2 actual engineers, onsite, recreating problems

- another time: some hapless, bottom of the barrel support technicians who must have been following a script similar to the old "have you turned on and off your modem"-scripts from early internet days. No clue whatsover.

- another time, some brass tuning in, promising a fix in next rollout. Didn't happen.

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

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People at Google really do want to fix this... But it's a minefield of: * Legal stuff (eg. some algorithm detected child porn in his account, is an employee legally allowed to look at it to confirm the algorithm was correct? no.) * Internal Politics (eg. one team has found this account DoSing their service, while the account is perfectly normal in all other ways, but due to Googles systems being so complex a single-s…

> due to Googles systems being so complex a single-service ban is very hard to implement Now that sounds like a technical problem that could be solved!

Indeed - and they have made a little headway here...

* You can be banned from Google Pay and all payment based services, yet still have a Google account which works for free services. There are lots of gnarly corners and bugs for users in this category, since any call to a billing API will fail. Want to use google Meet for a video call? You can't because that calls Google Voice to check your balance for phone calls, and that fails... You can end up on this list if your bank tells Google that they have evidence of committing fraud for example.

* Adwords can be banned separately. Usually done for accounts who abuse the "$100 of promotional credit" things... Prevents use of paid chat in youtube as a side effect.

* Various Youtube features can be banned separately from the account. Used for copyright strikes etc. Causes side effects like for example Google photos can't sync videos as part of an android backup because it's the same backend and rules.

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

#247
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the good old Don't Be Evil days. I've asked so many people if they can remember Google's old slogan. Nobody does.

Their new slogan is hilarious. It's not even one slogan, it's three: * Respect the user * Respect the opportunity * Respect each other The first one is obviously a joke, because nothing says "respect the user" like canceling a beloved service with millions of users, or "updating" the product while losing half the features. The last one makes you wonder why they had to put it into a slogan. Isn't it the baseline expec…

Respect the opportunity is double speak for 'we only bother if we can get to a position where we can use monopoly pricing and tactics'. It goes against 'respect the user'. Orwell is the right thing to invoke, Google thinks they are our big brother.

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

#248

I just wish that regulation would step in and make behavior like this illegal for the corporate giants. It is definitely possible to limit the power of the TOS, and it's already done in some cases in Europe (certain common TOS clauses are just void and do nothing). One simple thing I'd really like to see is forbidding companies from terminating service without stating a reason, which seems like a really basic require…

> One simple thing I'd really like to see is forbidding companies from terminating service without stating a reason, which seems like a really basic requirement. Once you have that, the next step could be legislating that there has to be a way to appeal service termination

In this case Google provided a reason - a ToS violation. If you want to get in the details ( action X on date Y violates ToS section Z), that might be pretty useful to bots and spam accounts ( know which actions get caught and what to avoid), which are probably the vast majority of what is getting banned.

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

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can sign up to AWS and get world class service on day one with just a credit card.

That’s the bar.

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

#250
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the good old Don't Be Evil days. I've asked so many people if they can remember Google's old slogan. Nobody does.

Their new slogan is hilarious. It's not even one slogan, it's three: * Respect the user * Respect the opportunity * Respect each other The first one is obviously a joke, because nothing says "respect the user" like canceling a beloved service with millions of users, or "updating" the product while losing half the features. The last one makes you wonder why they had to put it into a slogan. Isn't it the baseline expec…

A good slogan should have an inverse that is also a plausible slogan. E.g. "move fast and break things."

Neither Google's new nor its old slogans are good according to this criterion.

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