This is going to be a very unpopular opinion but I think the community needs to take matters into their own hands and come up with a solution to curb the sheer amount of toxic behaviour and key abandonment in Mythic+. Blizzard as we currently know them aren't gonna do crap because they only care about their bottom line: money.
Blizzard literally automated their report systems to only punish frequently reported players without any prior investigation, all while firing customer support and esports division staff so they could line their shareholders' pockets. They're very much complicit in their brand's decline.
No other publisher would tolerate the sheer amount of toxicity I've witnessed in this game. It's so bad that toxicity is the prime reason I came very close to quitting recently.. Like... there is nothing cool about having players abandon a key and call you a "boosted re**rd", among other nasty things - all because you didn't bloodlust in time during the first boss of a +11 SD for example.
That's the kind of behaviour that should be an instant /gkick and exclusion from M+ groups.
Classic-era WoW was good before the days of cross realm matchmaking because you had a reputation on your server. Being a douche would immediately get you excluded from entire guilds on the server.
One idea I propose is a community-run blacklist. This blacklist would:
- Be distributed via a addon available to download on a third-party website.
- Consist of a periodically updated database of toxic players, available for public viewing.
- Document players who behave in toxic ways in dungeon and raid groups. Toxicity would include abusive chat, hate speech, key abandonment, etc.
- Require corroborating evidence of toxic behaviour, such as screenshots, video clips, Twitch clips, logs, etc of poor player behaviour to back up each case.
- Keep blacklisted players on the list for a predetermined length of time until their records are expunged - depending on the severity of their actions. If their actions are repugnant enough I'd argue they should stay on indefinitely.
- Be curated by a trusted team of players, preferably people from a raid or M+ learning community.
Wowrep.io is the closest I've seen to such a behaviour ranking addon, but it has a small user base and is open to abuse.