Blizzard, if you’re going to host a public forum, you need to moderate it. You need to do more than the bare-minimum, too.
This forum used to be pretty well-moderated. It has gone to crap this year - to the point where there was a post with a racial slur in the title at the top of the General Discussion forum for 12+ hours yesterday.
That is unprofessional as hell. It reflects badly on Blizzard as a company. Groups of unpaid randoms do a better job of moderating their communities than that.
Have a read over it. Can anyone honestly say this Code of Conduct is actually enforced properly and consistently on this forum? I certainly can’t.
It’s kind of an unpopular opinion within the wider Overwatch community, but I enjoy posting here. There’s a core community here that’s kinda cool, likes talking about Overwatch and has a bunch of different opinions about the game. But what isn’t fun is:
Threads devolving into personal insults for no reason
Threads being derailed into completely unrelated arguments
The repeated, duplicate threads created by the same individual accounts every single day
The troll posts created by obvious throwaway accounts
There is still a link to this forum on the Overwatch website. Every single post on the Overwatch blog links here. When Overwatch 2 launches, new and returning players will find this forum. Is this really the impression what Blizzard wants to make?
Do better - moderate your forum properly. The CoC has already been written. Enforce it.
Otherwise, just close the forum altogether and link to Reddit on your blog posts - at least r/Overwatch has active mods.
As I said, that’s not really a valid excuse. Blizzard is a multinational company. They can have 24/7 moderation. Communities of unpaid volunteers manage to do it just fine.
Threads like this are just giving trolls like that the attention they want. Some of you really need to stop caring what people on the internet say lol.
They literally had that, but then they hired the singular guy who did unpaid moderation work for them, and now he has to abide by blizzard’s community engagement rules, meaning he can’t moderate after hours like he used to.
What I love is Blizzard does the absolute bare minimum to regulate the forums, then they have the audacity to say the forums sucks because of us.
The forums needs an actual staff of moderators. Even if it’s just more of the MVP type from the community. We also need some way to dislike posts and comments. Right now the only way you can disagree with someone’s opinion is by saying something, actively boosting the thread as well.
The problem is that this forum could actually be a great site for the community. So we have to address the trolls to make it better.
I literally spit out my coffee laughing when I read this… it’s always been moderated with a SoCal junior college mentality… but agreed, its notably worse. Never forget when they removed a post simply noting the untimely death of Chad Bozeman when he passed, but I think we all know the utter crap posts left up as mega-threads…
This is a big one. Constant appeals for Pink Mercy, whining about OW2 and so on are getting old.
This is like arguing about beauty. One man’s troll is another man’s debater. Too many here now want a safe room to spout nonsense every day without challenge, like the fear-mongering over monetization and FOMO. I’d be careful on this one.
The problem is, if you ask for too much moderation then opinions often become censored for zero reason. Take Dead by daylight for example; Their forum moderators there take ALL feedback, censor it and ban almost all discussions because it may upset someone.
They went directly as far as punishing players that were making identical threads, but not the same person. So it just goes to show that if someone makes a similar topic. There is more than likely one person that agrees that there is a problem with a game. It also comes down to the issue that I would agree that people DO create bot accounts in attempt to sway the community to think one way or another. By making multiple topics and “seeding” a forum. But at the same time, nobody wants to sit there for HOURS sifting through a forum for someone that has a very similar opinion.
Then they wonder why their game community has tons of problems.
So unless someone is directly being rude or spamming, its a “no” for me.
Reworded that section. I was referring to those threads about controversial topics that almost always seem to be created by very new accounts - textbook examples of forum-trolling.
He was a forum MvP and had a lot more moderation power than the flagging system does. iirc, MvPs have access to all working CMs, not just US based ones, and could have them come over and force moderation “after hours”
Forum MVP’s have 0 moderation power. They’re regular members with fancy green names. They’re not employed by Blizzard. Not sure where you get your information from, especially after Wyoming has clarified what he could do.
When you tweet at the Blizzard CS about a thread, that worked for me to get the attention.
I’m not sure about this one. As a free speech supporter I prefer more relaxed moderation than heavy-handed moderation. But one thing they have to do is be consistent. And ‘trolling’ should not be a reporting category, it’s far too vague and open to abuse. E.g. “Someone disagrees or has an unpopular opinion, they must be trolling.”
Absolute free speech doesn’t exist here. There is already an understanding that this is an Overwatch Forum and that all topics must be at least tangentially related to that particular topic. The only question is the degree of freedom of speech that is allowed and to what extent the written rules are actually enforced.
That’s half correct. While they can’t directly moderate threads, they have direct access to any available CM so that they can immediately take action when something happens. And as I said, iirc this means ANY available CM, even the EU ones. They can flag specific threads/posts/users and send it directly to the CM queue for action.
True, but they got that name after doing a lot of constructive work towards their respective community. WM was running dropswatch, was regularly making threads for the OWL & contenders broadcasts, and had a direct line to the OWL side of things when there were issues obtaining drops. He as able to submit internal tickets for those issues, things he said himself.
