What will Blizzard do about toxic players?

[xanzul]

Is this kindergarten?

Put them on ignore and move on.

Unfortunately most people will flame you for this despite Blizzard flat out saying the same thing. They don't consider it harassment if players don't put their harassers on ignore. It implies willingness to communicate with your supposed harassers which tells Blizzard you aren't terribly bothered by the contact.

[mmines]

Those of you wanting to hop on the OP's bandwagon should take a look at this thread first:

http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...He-is-a-newbie!

He defends some rather toxic behavior while being incredibly insulting and condescending to those who disagree with him. He is the last person who should be complaining about toxic behavior.

---------- Post added 2013-06-17 at 12:36 AM ----------



Look in a mirror buddy. You are no better than the people you are constantly attacking.

This isn't really hopping on his bandwagon this is an issue of bettering the wow community. That doesn't diminish the fact that toxic behavior is a problem.

[xanzul]

I doubt you can exclude every method of grieving.

But there are ignore buttons and report buttons for starters...

Exactly this. Again in the customer support forums whenever anyone claims Blizzard doesn't care it always turns out the behavior players are claiming Blizzard condones was never ever actually reported or not reported in a manner that gives Blizzard the specifics to take action. There was a thread in the customer support forums the other day claiming what the OP is claiming and a support forum agent pointed out the person complaining had never actually submitted a ticket.

[Seefer]

When harassment is correctly and concisely reported Blizzard takes action. 9 times out of 10 on the customer support forums the reason why Blizzard does nothing is because they aren't mind readers and don't know the specifics of the issues players are reporting because they aren't being specific. Also quite often it turns out the people whining about being harassed were doing the harassing.

Bullshit, they tell you to use the right click feature and not to open tickets, I have reported the same people over and over and nothing has been done, so again..........they get the money they don't give a shit.

[xanzul]

It is simple, report them. the option is there. Blizz keeps tracks of reports on players and when they add up the bans start, progressing until it is permanent. The thing is YOU have to report them, not just come here screaming 'mummy Blizzard mummy Blizzard there is a nasty person make him stop'.

YOU can add them to your ignore list, no matter what server they are on, and you will never group with them again so they will never bother you again.

If someone has 1 bad day and behaves badly once, nothing will be done.

If it is an ongoing problem and multiple people report it, action will be taken, but people have to report it. If they do not, Blizzard will not, usually, ban someone for 1 episode although there are exceptions.

Also, Blizzard has to agree that what they say is toxic. I, on occasion, call whining brats in game 'bed wetters' before I put them on ignore which means I do it once. Blizzard has never found that toxic enough to ban me though I have been, according to the nappy brats, reported, sometimes by a group of friends trying very hard to get me banned. They may object to me calling a 16 year old a bed wetter but Blizzard does not, but I think he probably thinks it so toxic because he is one. Toxic may just be your point of view.

Case in point there is a player who every few months will start a thread in the customer support forums claiming ongoing harassment and refuses to go into details either in her own thread or in her tickets to Blizzard and finally someone managed to get her to explain the situation. What she considered such egregious harassment deserving of multiple threads and tickets was that players were putting train sets down near her. That's it. Nothing else.

[Seefer]

Exactly this. Again in the customer support forums whenever anyone claims Blizzard doesn't care it always turns out the behavior players are claiming Blizzard condones was never ever actually reported or not reported in a manner that gives Blizzard the specifics to take action. There was a thread in the customer support forums the other day claiming what the OP is claiming and a support forum agent pointed out the person complaining had never actually submitted a ticket.

Yeah sorry only believe 1/3 of what any Blizzard employee says about anything.

[xanzul]

They're going to make it worse. The way you build a good community is to make player reputation matter and make it impossible to achieve things alone. That way players have incentive to work together. LFD/LFR do the exact opposite: you can achieve everything alone, so you're free to be as big of a douche as you like.

Nobody is going to care about your "Summoner's Code" and Blizzard can't start mass banning "toxic" people because they are losing too many players as is.

Player reputation never mattered. In fact if anything the lack of cross realm dungeons/raids and queues made it so some of the most toxic players in this community were able to hold their realms hostage in terms of progression. Guilds and players who wanted to progress in some meaningfull way had to put up with a lot of bullshit with zero recourse. Now players have significantly more options in who they play with. This is what builds community and it doesn't take away from it which I fully believe is why some of the most vocal toxic players dislike LFD/LFR so much. People can finally tell them to take a hike and be able to play the game.

[Seefer]

Player reputation never mattered. In fact if anything the lack of cross realm dungeons/raids and queues made it so some of the most toxic players in this community were able to hold their realms hostage in terms of progression. Guilds and players who wanted to progress in some meaningfull way had to put up with a lot of bullshit with zero recourse. Now players have significantly more options in who they play with. This is what builds community and it doesn't take away from it which I fully believe is why some of the most vocal toxic players dislike LFD/LFR so much. People can finally tell them to take a hike and be able to play the game.

You can't have a community if you never play with players on your server, all this cross realm crap made it so you have 0 need to.

[xanzul]

Short answer: Nothing.

Longer answer: Nothing, because BLizzard no longer gives a rats ass about it's player base, as the continuing decline of the game is proving on a daily basis. The changes they continue to make to "improve" the game are laughable, as are the "policies" they refuse to enforce.

I, for one, have went on week long tirades of being a terrible person to others in both random bg's and in trade chat, partially because I was angry, partially because I was bored, but mostly because there are no repercussions for behaviour anymore. LFG, LFR, cross server pvp...these all make the community insulated and ensure that trolls never get what is cming to them. Ther eonce was a tiem when people wouldn't group with you if you were a douche, and eventually you couldn't get daily heroics/quests/etc done. Actions had consequesces. Nowdays, everything is so impersonal and insulated, behaviour is no longer self corrected and the trolls are multiplying at an alarming rate. Blizzard has no-one to blame but themselves for the direction the community is headed.

Yet more proof that the people who complain about community are the worst of the worst and the cause of the issues they bitch about incessantly. If I don't like how a player behaves in LFD/LFR I put them on ignore as that prevents me from being queued with them again. How is that not a consequence? Piss off enough players and your queue times go up. Plus despite the flaws in the vote kick system players can generally get people out of their groups who are making things unpleasant which is again more consequences. Like I keep saying the reason why people like you dislike queues is because if you don't behave you get kicked which means you can no longer force your toxicity on others. I have no sympathy for people like you at all.

Blizzard didn't make the community bad. People like YOU have made it bad.

[PenguinChan]

Player reputation never mattered. In fact if anything the lack of cross realm dungeons/raids and queues made it so some of the most toxic players in this community were able to hold their realms hostage in terms of progression. Guilds and players who wanted to progress in some meaningfull way had to put up with a lot of bullshit with zero recourse. Now players have significantly more options in who they play with. This is what builds community and it doesn't take away from it which I fully believe is why some of the most vocal toxic players dislike LFD/LFR so much. People can finally tell them to take a hike and be able to play the game.

This doesn't build a server community. Hell, what you described isn't new or introduced with the systems in place; it just facilitates groups of friends in the by-product of convenience. Although I don't see how you can say player reputation never mattered.

[Seefer]

Soooo... because that person's character didn't immediately burst into flames in front of your eyes the minute you clicked the report button you have definitive proof that no action was taken on their account?

Blizzard purposely doesn't inform you of what they do to people's accounts when they are reported. This is to protect privacy with their paying customers and more importantly to keep people from trying to game the system to punish their "enemies".

As someone who has dealt with having an account banned on more than one occasion for digging into someone's ass in the game, I can tell you that there are certain things that will get action on your account faster than others (racism/homophobic slurs). Either way, Blizzard will keep points on how many times you are reported for semi-offensive behavior.

A lot of times GMs throw out a report when they go back and review a chat log and determine that it was a actually a 2-sided argument and the person who got their feelings hurt decided to report the other even though they were a more-than-willing participant. Ask yourself how many times this pertained to the situations that you made your reports.

So it takes over a month for anything to be done after being reported every single day for a month? Yeah I give up thinking they do anything.

---------- Post added 2013-06-17 at 01:13 AM ----------

Yet more proof that the people who complain about community are the worst of the worst and the cause of the issues they bitch about incessantly. If I don't like how a player behaves in LFD/LFR I put them on ignore as that prevents me from being queued with them again. How is that not a consequence? Piss off enough players and your queue times go up. Plus despite the flaws in the vote kick system players can generally get people out of their groups who are making things unpleasant which is again more consequences. Like I keep saying the reason why people like you dislike queues is because if you don't behave you get kicked which means you can no longer force your toxicity on others. I have no sympathy for people like you at all.

Blizzard didn't make the community bad. People like YOU have made it bad.

Kinda hard considering you can't ignore someone until after the dungeon/LFR don't ya think?

[xanzul]

They'll do nothing.

I play on a PVE realm (Mostly as alliance though I have horde characters as well). During an Oondasta raid a couple of horde kept pulling all the dinos nearby into the raid causing some wipes. Unlike a PVP realm where you can just keep killing them for doing it, there is no defence as they weren't flagged. I reported this and basically got told that they had as much right to be in that area as the raid did.

Blizzard, as usual, will wait until the horse has bolted before closing the stable door. I'm sure they are reasonably aware of numbers of peopleleaving the game due to similar asshattery.

Kymei - just because there are options doesn't mean you aren't affected. If I want to do something and some idiot decides it would be fun to screw it up for me, that is affecting my game. The fact I could go away and doing something else is irrelevant. Toxic behaviour isn't exclusive to communication. Actions speak louder than words.

And what did you actually report to Blizzard? That they were disrupting game play or that they were just annoying you in general? Again this is a situation that occurs frequently in customer support forums and it is generally always the case that a lack of action on Blizzard's part was a direct result of a player not reporting the issue correctly or with enough specifics in order for Blizzard to do something. Also a lot of times players will take canned responses to mean Blizzard is going to ignore the issue when that just simply isn't the case.

[Normie]

Those of you wanting to hop on the OP's bandwagon should take a look at this thread first:

http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...He-is-a-newbie!

He defends some rather toxic behavior while being incredibly insulting and condescending to those who disagree with him. He is the last person who should be complaining about toxic behavior.

Look in a mirror buddy. You are no better than the people you are constantly attacking.

In what way is a guy RAF/boosting a clueless new player "toxic behavior"? That's the "toxic behavior" I'm defending. Because it's not toxic behavior, it's mildly inconvenient behavior.

I swear, I don't think you even read what I wrote. I went back and re-read it and I am fine with all of it. But that's off-topic and I'm not going to go there. Just shut up and contribute usefully to this thread if you can.

[Halicia]

The thing is, Riot has more to gain from banning players in LoL than Blizzard does.

Banning players only needs to be done in the most extreme cases, in which players refuse to respond to 'education' and correction. The existing ban system is quite effective.

Greater enforcement of the ban system will NOT fix the problem with toxic players however. As Riot showed, some basic system changes can help alter the nature of players' interactions, and this may also be possible in WoW.

Would it be beneficial to WoW if you got say... +5 vp per person you queued with in a dungeon/scenario/LFR ? You'd still hit the same hardcap, but it would encourage socialization again to maximize time & effort.

Heroic scenarios are an extreme example, as they give a HUGE boost in VP compared to dungeons & raids, and also *require* that you bring 2 others with you... but I think this shows that people WILL be social if its in their best interests. The problem has been though, that the game has rewarded socials and antisocials roughly equally since LFG was introduced.

It used to be, if you were a dick... people didnt want to do dungeons or raids with you... which meant you couldnt get gear, or got it more slowly than those who were nice/social. *regardless of 'skill'*. Granted, this created a huge problem for guilds that got sick of running new recruits through old raids and such in order to 'catch them up', and the changes in quality of life over the last expansions have largely cured this... what fell by the wayside though, is the communities' ability to selfcorrect itself by avoiding toxic players.

Which is why we need modifications to existing game mechanics that encourage positive play.

[xanzul]

The most surprising thing in this thread has to be how many people are actually indirectly defending the toxic players somehow believing that they have a right to be toxic. A newsflash for you is that toxic behaviour beyond a certain degree has never been tolerated, and that the only reason why most toxic players are still around is that it's extremely hard to punish everyone, especially when much of the griefing and toxic behaviour happens outside of reportable text.

It doesn't need to be text though. If players are specific enough in what happened and who was involved and where Blizzard is usually able to check logs to determine what exactly happened and take action from there but unfortunately a lot of players have decided it isn't their "job" to tell Blizzard what happened and for some inexplicable reason Blizzard is obligated to be a mind reader to handle these issues.

[xanzul]

It's not as much as defending the player that is being a douche as it is to decry blizzard for being ignorant of the problem. We all know they won't get banned, and the player that is being a douche knows it as well.

There have always been asshats on WoW and I've only seen people get banned for cheating indiscriminantly. Never for personal relationships.

Blizzard is only ignorant when players like you refuse to be part of the solution and expect them to know what exactly players are upset about. There are hundreds of realms with millions of players and dozens upon dozens of ways for players to violate various rules. Again Blizzard isn't a mind reader so if they are "ignorant" it is because players are keeping them in the dark about what it is exactly they are complaining about.

[Redmage]

They have already done all they need to do, and that's give you the tools you need to deal with them how you like whenever you encounter them.

vote to kick
/ignore
report spam
gm ticket for griefing

In addition to this they have slowly modified the games mechanics over the years to make 'toxic behavior' harder to do, like the new loot system making ninja looting less of an issue.

Really what more do you want them to do?

The only real toxic behavior left that hasn't been sufficiently addressed is botting, especially in BGs, beyond that I see nothing to complain about.

[xanzul]

Blizzard has been ineffectual in dealing with the negative elements in the game culture.

Given how you are no longer able to harass people on official forums I think that you know better than most that just simply isn't the case.

[Normie]

Bullshit, they tell you to use the right click feature and not to open tickets, I have reported the same people over and over and nothing has been done, so again..........they get the money they don't give a shit.

If you look at the official forums you'll see that over the years one of the things Blizzard doesn't take action about is anything along the lines of "someone being mean to you." They are quite specific that a certain amount of rude behavior is tolerated. Only when it becomes outright harassment (when the victim has placed someone on ignore and the unwanted conduct continues) does Blizzard do anything about it.

Well, obviously, Blizzard can't make everybody be nice. But on the other hand, the standard could be different.

If you look at the problem of, say, trolls in LFR/LFD, the problem is that when you report someone and ignore him, that really has no effect on YOU. Even if he is banned from the game, there are thousands of other unpleasant people awaiting your company.

There really needs to be a way for Blizzard and/or the community to take IMMEDIATE action on someone for a minor infraction. A mild, immediate punishment for a minor offense.

[xanzul]

Yep and there is little or no profit margin to placing people on your salary to overcome the loss of a $15 a month customer, better to just let the dice roll. Chances are the person who had a crap time in the game will leave anyways and the toxic player is still willing to pay. So even in the best of scenarios it will result in a loss and an amplified loss if there is specific employees addressing it.

How can you claim Blizzard won't ban players because they are a subscriber and then in the same breath say Blizzard will lose subscribers due to not punishing players? I'm sorry but that makes no sense and given the fact Blizzard has been in the industry for well over two decades and have had numerous hit games I don't think you or anyone else can realistically claim Blizzard is oblivious in how to retain customers.

---------- Post added 2013-06-17 at 01:31 AM ----------

Easy. If player collects too much bad reports their avatar will be put on display for 1 day (even when they are disconected) and other players can trow rotten tomatos into them.

Implying that all reports are accurate. They aren't. Not even close. I see things constantly reported as harassment on the customer support forums that just simply isn't harassment or against the rules.