Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked • Hacker News Board

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

#551

Post by cableshaft » Mon, Feb 08, 2021, 4:40 PM UTC

brmgb wrote: post #404

thetanil wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's also probably easy to do this with stadia since it's effectively 0 users. What would he say if steam treated devs like google does?

If Valve treated game developers like Google does, Steam would have followed the path of Stadia which is failing despite being technically a good product. That's my personal take on the current situation: despite owning one of the largest digital store, Google sucks at being a publisher. The actual automated ban is mostly inconsequential. Every large publishers have technical issue from time to time. What's unique to…

> If you are an indie dev with a track record and works with Steam, XBLA, Epic or Nintendo, you will be in touch with a company representative.

Yep. I worked for a small video game publisher with only four people in the entire company and we had a designated account representative at Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft we could (and did) contact when we had issues.

Might be harder as an indie dev, but if you have any track record, like you said, I'm sure they know someone they can contact.

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

#552

Post by foobarian » Mon, Feb 08, 2021, 4:40 PM UTC

Ansil849 wrote: post #548

Here's the thing people need to realize: your email address, phone number, and any other digital identifier can be stripped and taken from you by whoever owns the service at any time. It doesn't matter if you host your own domain/mailer daemon, the host and/or registrar can choose to suspend your account as well. So really, there is no solution. Other than the realization that our communications channels are not ours…

The PGP trust graph is the ultimate fallback here. As long as your public key is out there you can even not have DNS and change your IP address and still be able to prove the identity.

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

#553

Post by zxcvbn4038 » Mon, Feb 08, 2021, 4:41 PM UTC

Smerity wrote: post #150

zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google only takes calls for ad sales and gsuite support as far as I know. Beyond that shaming them on social media is the only way to get their attention. I used to work for a top five web site and even we couldn’t get ahold of anyone - one day Google decided to start crawling us at a rate of 120k rps and it was killing the site by pulling ancient content that was 100% cache miss. No way for us to get in touch with G…

In the past I had written about my experiences with crawling[1], from accidentally getting banned by Slashdot as a teenager doing linguistic analysis to accidentally DoS'ing a major website to being threatened with lawsuits. The latter parts of the story were when I was part of Common Crawl, a public good dataset that has seen a great deal of use. During my tenure there I crawled over 2.5 petabytes and 35 billion web…

With some planning we could have accommodated the 120K rps rate and more, but just out of the blue it caused a lot of issues, the database shards for historic information tended to be configured for infrequent access to large amounts of historic data, their access completely thrashed our caches, etc. We did want Google to index us, if there had been an open dialog we could have created a separate path for their traffic that bypassed the cache and we could have brought additional database servers into production to handle the increased load, we even had a real time events feed that updated whenever content was created or updated that we would have given Google free access to that so they could just crawl the changes instead of having to scan the site for updates, but since they would not talk to anyone none of that happened.

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

#554

Post by tpl » Mon, Feb 08, 2021, 4:41 PM UTC

Move your email off Gmail immediately is all I can say. Google cannot be trusted to provide continuous access to something as important as email.

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

#555

Post by thekyle » Mon, Feb 08, 2021, 4:42 PM UTC

Ansil849 wrote: post #548

Here's the thing people need to realize: your email address, phone number, and any other digital identifier can be stripped and taken from you by whoever owns the service at any time. It doesn't matter if you host your own domain/mailer daemon, the host and/or registrar can choose to suspend your account as well. So really, there is no solution. Other than the realization that our communications channels are not ours…

Yes, in practice you always have to rely on someone. Even before the internet you'd have to rely on the USPS to carry your letters.

Unless you are physically speaking to someone in person, then there is always a middleman.

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

#556

Post by foobiekr » Mon, Feb 08, 2021, 4:42 PM UTC

benlivengood wrote: post #537

blunte wrote: post #477

Google uses non-human automation to make some decisions, including banning accounts. As others have mentioned, this is not unreasonable as long as there is a reasonable (in terms of time and effort) path to disputing a ban - i.e., speaking to a human about the issue. But Google (and Facebook, and probably some other companies) don't have reasonable processes for disputing or resolving these situations. Some have said…

> But Google certainly could hire and train humans to follow a process for reviewing and assisting in resolving these cases. They don't. It is doubtful that they cannot afford to do this; I haven't checked their annual report lately, but I'm guessing they still have a healthy profit. They'd waste 99% of their time with spammers, scammers, and attackers trying to social engineer account access. There's no reason to wa…

The problem is no different than their content moderation problem, and I'd point out to you that they do mostly solve that, and mostly through masses of human contractors.

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

#557

Post by Aerroon » Mon, Feb 08, 2021, 4:43 PM UTC

enumjorge wrote: post #530

dathinab wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So I get why they would try to automate bans. The problems are less the automated bans but the missing human support after you got automated banned. I you got banned go through a reasonable fast human review process then temporary reinstated a day later and fully reinstated a view days later it would be super annoying comparable with all google services being down for a day, but no where close to the degree of dama…

> And lets be honest google could totally affort a human review process This is the part I find baffling. Why can’t they take 10 Google engineer’s worth of salaries, and hire a small army of overseas customer reps to handle cases like this? I realize that no customer support has been in Google’s DNA since the beginning, but this is such a weird hill to die on.

They could start with having support for all the accounts that make significant amounts of money for them. If an account makes Google >$100k a year then isn't it worth it to have support personnel that will handle the 2 tickets the account might have in a year? And the rest of the time they can focus on other tickets.

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

#558

Post by benlivengood » Mon, Feb 08, 2021, 4:43 PM UTC

enumjorge wrote: post #530

dathinab wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So I get why they would try to automate bans. The problems are less the automated bans but the missing human support after you got automated banned. I you got banned go through a reasonable fast human review process then temporary reinstated a day later and fully reinstated a view days later it would be super annoying comparable with all google services being down for a day, but no where close to the degree of dama…

> And lets be honest google could totally affort a human review process This is the part I find baffling. Why can’t they take 10 Google engineer’s worth of salaries, and hire a small army of overseas customer reps to handle cases like this? I realize that no customer support has been in Google’s DNA since the beginning, but this is such a weird hill to die on.

> This is the part I find baffling. Why can’t they take 10 Google engineer’s worth of salaries, and hire a small army of overseas customer reps to handle cases like this? I realize that no customer support has been in Google’s DNA since the beginning, but this is such a weird hill to die on.

My best guesses:

1. The number of automated scams/attacks and associated support requests is unbounded vs. bounded human labor so it's a losing investment.

2. Machine learning is sufficient for attackers to undo the anti-abuse work on a low number of false positives from human intervention. Throw small behavioral variants of banned scam/attack accounts at support and optimize for highest reinstatement rate. This abuse traffic will be the bulk of what the humans have to deal with.

3. They'd probably be hiring a non-negligable percentage of the same people who are running scams. The risk of insider abuse is untenable.

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

#559

Post by CPLX » Mon, Feb 08, 2021, 4:43 PM UTC

KMag wrote: post #463

Hamuko wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You could of course sue Google Unless you've waived that right when you agreed to the Terms of Service.

I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that U.S. courts have found that suing is a right that can't be waived by contract. Certainly an agreement to enter arbitration can be introduced as evidence against you in a a lawsuit, but any decent lawyer should be able to prevent an arbitration agreement from getting your lawsuit thrown out.

That's not an accurate description of current consumer arbitration precedent in the US.

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

#560

Post by accounted » Mon, Feb 08, 2021, 4:44 PM UTC

Going against popular sentiment, I dont know how people can't get in touch with a human at Google.

Whenever I have needed something that required human support, such as resolving a false DMCA claim against my content or help with my G Suite account, I had no trouble getting email and phone support. I'm not a big company or influence of any kind either.