If there was a legally-protected right to access the service you pay for unless violation of agreed-upon rules has occurred (barring other situations like "company going out of business" or "gaming shutting down forever"), this would almost undoubtedly elicit the need for better-defined rules and substantiation of claims when bans occur.
If random bans get more common the developer risks a game of whack-a-mole with private servers and cracked clients if not players packing up and leaving for a competitor.
Legal protection sounds like it would actually benefit the cheaters given how long an average court case takes.
In my experience, private servers deal with cheaters and bots better than Activision/Blizzard
>the developer risks a game of whack-a-mole with private servers and cracked clients
This would be Felony Contempt of Business Model[0], which would be enforced with every move in the legal playbook.
>Legal protection sounds like it would actually benefit the cheaters given how long an average court case takes.
I see the thought here, but it would do so by providing transparency to the license-revocation (banning) process, which greatly benefits customers who are getting screwed as hard as OP is. This in turn should lead to fewer cases of paying customers getting screwed.
>In my experience, private servers deal with cheaters and bots better than Activision/Blizzard
This is the case because they're moderated better. The companies are raking in cash. They can hire people to fix the problem. They don't because the current model maximizes profits.
Listing the "bad words" ahead of time (or even at all) is self-evidently not workable because people will just use different works to abuse/harass/bully people while evading the banned words list.
That said, it's important to tell the person after the fact "you're banned because you harassed / bullied someone" or "you were caught using anti-cheat software." Maybe some date ranges so the person understands what they did and why they won't be reinstated. BUT you don't need to list out the _exact things_ they did because you're just opening up the toddler argument of "why is that so wrong?" which is just bad actors trying to waste your time and "legalese" their way back into the system.
That's not the only thing you are doing. You are also creating an opportunity for false positives to justifiably challenge their bans.
If you are going to keep the user's money, I think you absolutely have to provide recourse for false positives because otherwise what you are doing is simply theft.
> Listing the "bad words" ahead of time (or even at all) is self-evidently not workable because people will just use different works to abuse/harass/bully people while evading the banned words list.
Tough: you have to stay ahead of the bullies if you want to get money for an online service. It's not in any way acceptable to ban people without telling them specifically what you are accusing them of, so that they can challenge you if you are in fact wrong. The fact that it makes the job harder is not in any way an excuse.
Now, if you were to return their money (or at least part of it based on how much time they actually played or something), then yes, you would have an argument that you have a right to unilaterally rescind the contract. But you can't keep the money and say "you know what you said".
So they can just re-buy the game under a new account and just carry on as before? Try this: go to a football match, shout racist abuse at a player then demand a refund for your season ticket. I know for a fact you won't get it.
> It's not in any way acceptable to ban people without telling them specifically what you are accusing them of
> "you know what you said"
Note that what I said wasn't "you know what you said" but "you violated these rules within these date ranges." For example:
* "You were detected using a cheat tool on 13th-15th November"
* "You harassed a player throughout March-August 2022"
* "You were repeatedly abusive in private chat in September 2022"
You're not being accused of murder in the Crown Court, you're being banned from interacting in a video game community. If you want access to the exact information, sue for it.
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Caveat
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Should you be banned from playing the game locally / single player? Absolutely not. This I would agree with you on.
The lack of listing is fine, so long as the second half of the sentence, which you didn't quote, doesn't apply.
If the system matches on substrings, then you need to know what to avoid - you can't even self-censor, if everything is ambiguous. You end up with the memes of getting banned from Club Penguin, otherwise.
Except, Club Penguin does as you suggest - it tells you that you used a "rude or inappropriate word". Even if the regex is matching something that it shouldn't.
I do agree that insta-banning for _just_ using a rude word without warning is huge overkill. Giving fair warning (and telling them their account will be banned if they repeat offend) should be the baseline. The fact that it's not, in too many cases, is definitely something to criticise.
The list of "bad words" isn't listed for you, and the matching of bad words is not necessarily well tokenised.
You're not always sure what you've said or done, to be removed. And in some cases, they won't tell you what sin you have committed, either.