I wanted to create a post where we can all share our experiences, especially recently, dealing with moderation and any associated issues. I was hoping this would be a way for us to explain what it is like from the creator point of view to possibly help fix or adjust the process. I did NOT want this to turn into a thread where we all just complain.
I hope that if people from the Epic side can better see what it’s like for us, it might help them to adjust the process for the better for everyone. I’m not looking for official replies, and I understand that they may not be able to comment on these issues. But more understanding might help in some way.
I do think it’s important for the creator community to have a place where we can talk and discuss our experiences about this topic. Please share your stories here. Even if the a take down was justified did you struggle trying to figure out what the issue was?
Here is an example of one of my recent moderation issues.
I updated a map with a few small elements. This was a map that was previously in Epic’s Picks. It is a non-violent map with no eliminations at all. No weapons. The only thing I added was a beach ball, two golf carts and save data. The map goes through fine and gets approved.
11 days later I get an email that the map has been taken down after careful human moderation. 1.18 Island Content Disclosures - The content within your creative island.
From my point of view I was first very confused. Then I was questioning if adding the golf carts somehow was considered violence. It couldn’t be the beach ball. I ask around in the uefn community. Some people say to appeal right away but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do that as it seemed like a very long process and not very helpful most of the time.
I decide to republish a version and I redo the IARC question and say that there is violence because I assume that the reason was the golf carts. So violence it is, and it’s up close as the carts are close to the player.
That goes through and gets approved. OK, that must have been the issue.
Then the map that was taken down, goes back up. To be up front this was a map that was tweeted about from the official FN. I was very happy that it was fixed (and I really appreciate any help from Epic on this, you all rock) but I know that most of the time maps don’t receive this type of immediate attention. It was said that the take down was an error but it’s still very confusing from my perspective becaue until the old map went back up I never really knew if there was an actual issue or not. If the old map was not brought back I would have just left it with a higher IARC rating even though it didn’t really call for that.
These are some questions I am left with:
If there was actual human moderation what was it that flagged this map?
why did the map get taken down 11 days after getting approved?
What in the process would cause someone to flag a map if there is nothing to cause that?
I feel like there is some legal reason but I’d love to know why we can’t get specific reason in the email.
If we had specific reason we could jump in and either fix those issues or check them to see if they are false flags.
Again, I’m not looking for an official reply to this but just hope Epic can better understand our frustrations with a system that gives very vague reasons. I’m trying to keep this as constructive as possible. I really do appreciate the fact that Epic is a huge company and it may not be a simple process to have different divisions enact changes for these types of things.
Here is my experience. Two months ago, my map got featured on the Discover Tab and it was filled with players for days. I finally achieved the long-awaited “Calibrated” status for the map, and it started granting XP. The map was updated, and most of the errors were fixed as I had been working on this map for a year; it was literally the second map I created a year ago when I started. I had never had any problems with the moderators. Suddenly, I received an email saying that the thumbnail of my map violated the rules, (previously accepted thumbnail by your moderators) and due to a complaint, they had removed it and taken it out of Creative. Thanks to this moderation, my map went back to having 1-5 players out of the 1000 it used to have. It’s very difficult to appear in the Discover Tab, and you can’t succeed in Creative without appearing there. Without the push from Epic Games and these errors from moderators, it makes us feel very, very frustrated with the work we put so much love into.
We recently had a map that was taken down for the thumbnail. It would be awesome if Epic could tell us EXACLTY what the reason was concerning thumbnail violations. Especially when it had been approved recently. There is so much gray area and confusion.
Moderation? what moderation lol. I see the same accounts day in and day out doing scummy thumbnail changes for weeks/months and nothing gets done about it. nothing. nada.
Don’t they state in the email? I think the wording was if it is thumbnail or background image then they do list. Though I only got Content within your island.
We used the ranked icons in the image. The violation was “Keep it Authentic” and “The Promotional Image” was flagged. We suspected it was the icons from asking around on Creative forums/Discord, but no one was sure, but the violation did not specifically state. We removed them and so far so good. But other maps in Discovery at this moment have the ranked icons in their thumbnails…so I don’t know???
My many 3+ releases are often rejected, then I apply and sanctions are lifted. They never told me the real reason for “content within your island”. Note that IARC rating was correct and did not need changing.
It is annoying and stressful and takes time ( waiting for appeal to finish) when you simply address an issue, improve environment etc.
Another issue is expired rating. I used to have a pistol in an non combat game to destroy blocking props. I had a 12+ rating ( though pistol didn’t work on players etc). In newer releases I removed the gun completely and got a new rating. The problem is old rating has expired and even if I wanted to switch to one of the previous versions, for example if I found a game breaking bug, then I could not. I would expect that rating is per release and doesn’t expire so quickly.
Yes we can share our experiences here but it can’t replace proper creator support. Player support doesn’t deal with many creator issues. I requested dedicated creator support but right now no one is going to help you, we have zero support.