Please improve your system to deal with trolls

General Discussion
46

I’m going to jump in here and say that it certainly doesn’t feel like it.

It’s been nearly 2 months since a non-bot Blue account has posted on these forums. Basically radio silence.
The last one was AZJackson on October 20th, and in the past year, only he and BlizzKGU have posted at all outside of the Bug Report forum.
And aside from BlizzKGU’s updates on the AI changes (which was very welcome, but unfortunately rare, community engagement), the majority of Blue posts are generally fluff. We get very little meaningful information from them.

In other words, they hardly engage with their forum community anymore. If they’re here, they’re not really making any effort to let us know.

Meanwhile, drop in on the Reddit, and they show that they are entirely willing to engage with the community – but only on that platform.
The Reddit barely goes even half a week without a Blue posting on there. They even make multiple posts a day on some days, and they probably average no less than one post every 2 days. They are way more active over there.
A lot of that is responding to bug reports and the usual fluff, but other meaningful information also makes a regular appearance, such as potential changes they’re considering, the internal stats they have access to, their current priorities, etc, etc.

Also, remind me where all the AMAs happen? Is it on the official forums of the game? lol No.

It absolutely feels like Blizzard employees don’t take the forums seriously.
Radio silence from any Devs for long periods of time.
Only 1 or 2 Devs who actually post at all.
Mods tightening restrictions, dishing out harsher punishments, and rather arbitrarily enforcing “rules.”
Blatant disregard for the problems caused by actual abusers, like report spammers.

It feels like they’re just trying to let the forums die off. There’s been a bit of an exodus of many of the old forum regulars over the past couple months. Even I’m starting to burn out, and anyone who knows me here knows I’m rather… tenacious, shall we say.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Blizzard eventually just decides to go the way LoL did – shut down the forums and declare the Reddit their official platform for engaging with the community. They basically act like it is already.

1 Like
47

Very, very true.

They really like relying on their stick. They need to use a carrot more often.

48

I’ve also posted my idea with the endorsement system for the second time.

1 Like
49

LMAO pleeeeaase, the forums here in comparison to reddit has been constantly in poor quality and filled with a cesspool of complaining on the front page, what exactly are they going to respond when the front page is filled with forum games and people just insulting them or doing some of the (legitimately and actually) worst ideas ever suggested?

It’s not that they don’t want to respond, there’s nothing to respond to when they go there on that specific time they are getting in that is worth responding to, also complaining and forum games.

1 Like
50

There’s plenty of that negativity over on the Reddit too, probably more since it’s such a large platform (though the way their system works helps bury the garbage posts by default). Even then, they’re still way more engaged over there, easily by 20x.

There are easily a dozen or two threads made a day on these forums.
That adds up to hundreds of threads a month.

If a Dev can’t find a single thread or post worth responding to out of 2 months worth of threads (which is probably around at least a thousand threads and several thousands of posts), even if it’s just fluff, then either they spend almost no time here or they just aren’t interested in engaging with the community here.

51

Link?

52

I guess you don’t browse reddit that much to conclude this in the first place, reddit post are much better to the point that they have a rule that shutdown low quality posts, you know… the thing that radiates this place in the first place?

Whether being negative or not they don’t at least fall into this which this forum keeps falling into in a large frequency.

A large quantity of posts are also self repeating or something that was responded to before.

And crying for a response won’t make it any faster.

2 Likes
53

I can’t find it anymore. Possible that the thread got deleted

54

Literally a 2 minute jaunt through New and I’m seeing about as much negativity and nonsense on there as I do on here. There’s half a dozen threads complaining about Hogger’s price, a couple about matchmaking, several asking for various nerfs or buffs, etc. Pretty standard compared to the forums.

The only reason Reddit is less negative is because Reddit filters by Hot by default, which means posts with lots of replies, upvotes, or awards are the only ones shown. That is definitely an improving factor, but the fact that Reddit has a bit more positive community does not justify the Devs basically ignoring the official forums of the game.

55

Of course, it’s just self explanatory, the forums is constantly negative and garbage with top posts of forum games (that some of them are good I have to admit), the chances of response here is dramatically less because Reddit content is always changing, forums are not that some of the self explanatory threads are still there after years or so.

This is what I don’t get every time people do a superiority complex of which place is better with how much a mess this place can get, or already is if you were paying attention to the last 8 months lol.

56

I’m not saying the forums should get more attention than the Reddit. The Reddit has more traffic and generally a healthier environment.

The issue is that they Devs are basically completely ignoring the official forums. It’s been nearly 2 months since one of them last posted here.
That’s why it feels like they’re just waiting for it to die.
Combine that with the way the Mods are wielding their power rather loosely, bordering on irresponsibly, and it begins feeling like they’re actively trying to help it along. They’re certainly not doing anything to help make this place more positive and healthy by harshly punishing regulars for imagined slights while letting false-flaggers and actual trolls and flamers run mostly unchecked.

That’s why I’m annoyed. They seem to have just given up on the forums, yet this remains their official liaison to the community.

57

Then blame the mods who got us here :slight_smile:

58

Oh, I do. They are certainly the main culprits here.

But I’m still annoyed that the Devs haven’t done much to try to help to fix this situation. Instead, it seems like they’ve just jumped ship.

3 Likes
59

I might sound pessimistic, but I think they always ignored the forum in favor of Reddit.

Just how it’s been since the inception of this game. They hate this place. The only one who ever did any meaningful communication was AZJackson and even that was fairly recently.

The fact they can’t even bother to update any avatars for ~2+ years only adds to the perception the team nor the company couldn’t care less. There’s not even an Imperius avatar yet.

60

AZJackson

25 Sep

For what it’s worth, I read these forums pretty much every day, so there’s very little that happens here that I don’t see.

61

If you believe him then your really naive

62

Trolls have a grand time in HOTS. If you get triggered then all the better, because then they can report you. If you play Abathur you’ll especially be familiar with more subtle forms of trolling like players hearthing back then lingering at base giving the enemy team an advantage bit by bit. My favorite is the pro trolls who will pad their stats then deliberately get caught out of position late game so they get a lengthy death timer. The team wipes in a subsequent fight and the game is lost. What better way to troll than to make people play half an hour and make them think they are going to win?

63

there have been posts that developers have made which make it clear why more posts are written there by them.

Mostly because due to there being more high quality topics/discussion there.

I also think you are severely overestimating how often they comment there Because you’re counting comments that the art team developers are making.

If you want to ask why the art team isn’t frequenting the forum given that the art section is essentially dead, well. I think you do understand why they wouldn’t there.

In the last 28 days, there have been 3 technical posts by developers on reddit. Two back to back about the matchmaking changes for SL. One about Gazlowe balanced.

in the last 21 days, there have been zero non-bug, non-artist posts on reddit.

From that point, 28 days ago, you have to travel back another 30 days or so to get anything beyond artist posts or “thank you”.

I’m not counting hogger/new hero interactions, as that is pretty much all fluff and not informative.

But that still leaves massive gaps where nothing meaningful is posts, and most of the posts are by artists.

Yeah, that’s dumb. OR even if they don’t happen here, take questions in a thread at least.

IF that is the goal, they’re really bad it.

Look at the SC2 site for example. It has direct links to their reddit and Teamliquid.

64

My experience with knowing this game since beta:

The toxicity in this game is a direct reaction of bad matchmaking that Blizzard was never able to fix. If you put players into the same team that have a huge skill gap and the good players feel that they can’t make any difference because everything they achieve is just ruined again by the weaker player that die 15 times and do questionable plays then this causes the toxicity in the first place.

It is not like this game is flooded by trolls because they like to troll. It is more like people have become heavily frustrated to lose 10 matches in a row and not being able to do anything against it because no matter which game mode you play, you always have the feeling that your own game play does not change anything and the game is decided by which team has less bad players.

If you put players into the same team that on the one hand really like to play a competitive team game (no matter which game mode because ARAM and QM are also about winning) and then those that just want to yolo around for 1-2 matches then this just will never work. Never. HotS clearly shows that. It is like opening a restaurant that both targets people that really like to eat meat a lot, every day and in masses and vegans, that don’t even like to smell meat at all. It won’t work.

HotS and Blizzard is basically like the Sorcerer’ Apprentice: Blizzard was unable to fix matchmaking thus creating frustration and toxicity among the players and then began to build up their reporting, silencing, suspending and banning system to deal with their own created problem which in the end even caused more harm. If people would be honest they would see that the reporting system has not made the game better but worse because nowadays you just report anyone for anything.

1 Like
65

alot of things in this game is trash, mostly MM, reporting and other plays afk’ing

This game could have be great and lived a long life like OW, but stupid decisions after stupid decisions after “fixing” things 2 years after, promising something that never came…

I really don’t know what goes on in their offices to just divert player and game problems. Their focus looks more towards stupid aesthetics.

If management diverted their focus on aesthetics to actually fixing serious issues, then player trolling, reporting and raged players would be to a minimum