An open letter to the community manager

The only solution to end voice chat harassment is by placing a moderator in every single game which, as we all know, is not doable. Otherwise, the system they currently have in place is all they can really do. Unfortunately, that’s life. Things are not perfect and an authority figure can’t always be there to save you, but they can at least punish someone after they’re notified.

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That is exactly the problem, no one really gets punished because no one fears the system.

“oh I got reported? eh who cares it takes 100s before anything happens”
“oh I got banned? guess I’ll hop over to my smurf now”

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i think they said they are working on a program that scans the chat for toxicity…

ubisoft already has such a scan program… it bans ppl who type “retard” in chat… (and the rainbow six reddit is being spammed with complains about it by the toxic players… they do want to keep spamming insults in chat and not being banned)…

it would be a step forward… but ppl can say mean things in voice chat as well. especially when they are in premades they feel more safe to insult others… because who will report them? only the one person that is not in their premade… so the chances for a ban are very low i think.

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Um, You are given the tools needed to deal with it.

Block, Avoid, and report. Those are tools.

The first option removes all verbal and textual contact with the individual which is generally the most common problem. The second is to avoid having them influence your team in any future matches, and the third is a step toward having them punished if their behavior is typical for them.

Those are all tools that remove the problem for you IMMEDIATELY. No matter how you slice it you have COMPLETE control over who you interact with in this game and have no excuse not to use them. Even less reason to complain.

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What are you talking about? They give us the mute button and the option to turn off voice chat.

That changes who you play with, that does not change the behavior.

…in a game where communication is essential for winning.

You are being very dense. What dont you understand about this…YOU CANT CHANGE SOMEONES BEHAVIOR.

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Yes you can, if they know they will be punished for acting a fool in public. Currently they KNOW they wont.

People are punished and banned or suspended everyday. What else? There are laws against speeding but people still speed. Laws for drunk driving or shoplifting but people still do it. Blizzard can only do so much, its up to everyone else to take responsibility for their actions (aka but an adult).

Report, block and move on.

How many more go unpunished? If you try to build a community ‘good enough’ is never good enough, the question should always be in the back of the devs minds, ‘what more can we do?’

its funny tho that you guys say… “hey, use the tools blizz gives us… get control over your gaming experience…”

it can be applied to all the symm players who suffer false reports…

  • use LFG
  • make your own group
  • tell ppl you will play symm
  • tell ppl you wont switch
  • result play with ppl who are fine with that behavior…

everytime i say it… ppl come up with “no no nono noo”.

i dont think you need to insult ppl…

Why does that at all matter? You cannot change someones behavior on the internet. You can only provide a means of mitigating the effect of said behavior on users who do not want to encounter it.

This is coming from the perspective of a person who ran 12 TF2 servers in a community of over 2500 people with an average of 50,000 server visitors a day. I had several admins DEDICATED to searching our chat logs for bad behavior and punishing it. We had a call admin feature which would send a steam message to all online moderator’s if someone was acting up in one of them.

Despite all the punishments dished out, Despite how active my moderator team was at all hours of the day (we did our best to have people of many different hours of availabilty), and despite doing this for THREE YEARS STRAIGHT these behaviors were as common and frequent as ever at the end as it was at the start.

You cannot change the overall behavior of a community through punishments. You can only mitigate the exposure and effect they have on your playerbase by providing tools for them to self moderate what they can and cannot hear.

you are very wrong… blizz already stated THEY DONT WANT THIS KIND OF PLAYERS IN THE GAME… THEY ARE NOT WELCOME…

muting them is not the solution… blizz said they have no place in this game.

People don’t understand that people using LFG are usually cool with people doing whatever WITHIN the group, but that doesn’t exclude them from being toxic jerks to someone outside the group.

I have been in games where I get a team using LFG, but its not a 6 stack, and people immediately go for the ‘blame the rando’ excuse. meanwhile I have to be the adult in the room and tell people ‘someone stay with them so they aren’t caught out, we can’t communicate with them but we can HELP them’

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well i just wanted to point out that ppl are just cherry picking their arguments…

They say this to appease those who are concerned but honestly they have no plan of action to fix this because the overall issue is not something Blizzard can change. There will be toxic people. You have to accept that and just learn to self moderate. Learn this and you will have a much better time of it.

Edit: they also had “no place” on the servers I ran. They were punished consistently. Yet, despite all of that we still had new instances of it from other users.

That is what people such as you are not willing to consider. That the underlying issue is not that that people are going unpunished. It is that despite punishments new players, accounts, and veteran players reaching burn out will create new infractions of the rules ANYWAYS.

You are essentially asking Blizzard to predict the future and figure out how to prevent the problem in the first place when that is impossible.

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Outside of LFG, the resources are very limited

Report: takes 100s to actually have anything happen
Block: unless its just that player you have just yourself out of the game. not to mention toxicity will affect a persons performance so even if you do mute chances are the damage is already done.
Avoid: 2 slots…2 slots dude…

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actually jeff said in a dev update that they have more plans to reduce toxicity.

also i know that its always good to accept certain things… i used to be toxic myself for a while, i played many games before and only in ow where ppl started to insult me i started to insult them back. i’m over this by now… i can deal with ppl calling me retard, idiot whatever… but there are certain things that needs to be punished hard… such as telling someone to get cancer, or to die. or getting racist, sexist.

you dont see the point… that if ppl experience less toxicity, they will also change their behavior automatically.