Is this a strategy you have a lot of success with? Insulting the people from whom you are asking for help?
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In a perfect world, that would be nice. The feasibility of it though? Even just on the RP servers, that is a lot to expect for a single person to sit in both Horde and Alliance city hubs and/or the local attractions where all the racy things tend to congregate for hours on end. They tried that once and it failed miserably.
It sucks, but it’s also on us as players to not let other people’s foolishness impact our game to that extent. There will always be trolls or off-server tourists who think it’s a hoot to come and harass people just wanting to play the game. Some may truly not know any better and that this is their first time on a RP server. Just like you can put blinders on to the nut who blows up the cathedral every other night and is spamming /yell editorialising it all - you just let it flow around you. It’s a name. It is irritating that people don’t respect the servers and the players on them who are there for the immersion and playstyle, I will never argue that.
But you do what you can by reporting something that you see, and Blizzard will take care of the rest. Those offending pixels only ruin your enjoyment of the game if you let them. It doesn’t excuse the other person’s poor choices, but we can choose what impacts us.
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We used to have active GMs in-game, I once was squelched for using a light, non-pointed swear word in person whispers with a real life buddy when I reported a person in my party for being utterly disgusting.
It’s a double edged sword, but it’s not unreachable. RP servers should be an isolated, specially moderated community otherwise it’ll fall to pieces. Sharding being the other dagger in the back for RP based servers.
Yes. I remember when they had one camped out in Goldshire on my server. It only made it all worse.
Right-click, report and go on enjoying your scene. I’ve never been on ED, but I’m of a mind that if one can survive the antics and personalities of Moon Guard? Anything else is a walk in the park. It’s not our business what happens to the offending person, it is only our business to report them. It may be that while it’s offensive to you specifically, it doesn’t break the rules enough that the GM dealing with the report agrees with you and they’re allowed to continue on.
I grit my teeth every single time I see the TRP overlap of names that begin in * ~ * and all of the other “sparkly” figures, but it’s not breaking the rules of the realm that they’re Princess Fluffy of Darnassus.
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That might be your opinion, but there are things that I do not wish my children to happen by popping up on my screen regularly in what was supposed to be a paid for moderated experience. In the TOS / Social Contract / Etc. we should not have to abide by lackluster enforcement. I get just as mad when I see people speeding around the block where about a dozen kids play every day. It’s hard to catch them all, but even with all the heads up we can give they don’t allocate enough resources to make a real impact.
Absolutely nowhere in any of the ToS or EULA is it stated that you are paying for this in any sense of the phrase. We pay for access to the servers. We are not guaranteed anything else beyond that. We’re not even guaranteed a set amount of uptime or downtime, let alone what you think you are entitled to.
We are expected to follow the rules, every single person who plays this game. And just like in real life, there will always be people who break those rules.
In a game of this size, with all the cities and zones with two factions and all of the realms on Retail, Classic, WotLKC - what you want is nigh impossible to provide unless they hire on an massive workforce to handle it. It’s not feasible. Even if you had what you want, there isn’t a guarantee that the offending person would cross the gaze of that moderator.
Blizzard handles reports as fast as they can. Idiots will still put the same name back in or try to work around the filters or get creative with alt-codes. There is no single way to avoid that unless someone is there moderating and approving everything as soon as it’s created before they’re allowed to log into the system. They also may not agree with what you think is offensive. The game is rated T for teens for the content provided by Blizzard, that is the only thing that is guaranteed. Past that, you have no clue what another player will say and do. You can put the chat filter on, but in any kind of MMO that lumps you into an experience with other players? They cannot control what a player does in real time. That is a choice a parent has to make in allowing their child to play something that cannot allow for the moderation you’re wanting.
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My kids don’t play, they occasionally come to see what Daddy is doing while I play. They’re a bit young, that being said, once again, the truly crude and disgusting things that I have to look at all day.
You’re making so many assumptions, based of a single sentence. I’ve played MMORPGs since 2001 and before that, Diablo and the Old RTS games.
It is absolutely reachable and accessible once they make the decision to enforce and utilize active moderation on their live servers. At this point in time, they could’ve probably downsized half the active retail servers in favor for better focal points for the entire Warcraft community.
It’s on them to push the quality of their product, making everyone check a box on a secondary social contract after a terms of service indicates a posture, but lack of follow through when it’s so wide spread.
They did away with PvP-centric servers, they did away with a majority of open world RP on RP servers when they created sharding. The least bit would be to enforce one of their own rules with naming policies that USED to be actively enforced. Or as an intuitive and cost effective idea would be to nominate community players that can help moderate their own primary servers to create expedited tickets instead of the petty bulk I’m mad at you reports. Just something.
I picked one thing to focus on, not make assumptions. I’m telling you what I have seen stated here on these forums pretty much every time someone comes here like you have.
Blizzard tried it. It didn’t work. What you want, you’re not likely going to get. I don’t know how to put it plainer. It will be your decision to make if you wish to keep playing World of Warcraft knowing that, or if you would prefer another game that is more likely to suit you - and I sincerely wish you well no matter where your gaming keeps you or takes you.
You are, of course, welcome to make your suggestions in the places where data is collected. This forum isn’t one of them unfortunate, due to the fact that absolutely no staff comes here outside of our SFAs, and it isn’t their jobs to relay suggestions when there are proper venues to do so.
In the case of this topic, the best forum would be General Discussion but there is the in-game suggestion and feedback tool if you would rather go that route.
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Pat time I counted, there were 242 retail realms in the US and that’s not counting Classic realms or realms in other regions.
I can’t see Blizzard forming the name police and increasing their staff to provide 7x24x365 name enforcement when there’s a usable solution at hand.
The price of my sub has remained the same for going on 18 years. I’d like to keep it that way.
Who in their right mind would want a career as the name police anyway? Sounds like a soul sucking job.
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They did that once. The problem got significantly worse. Players flooded the area doing and saying inappropriate things, trying to get the GM to show themselves. As well, players stopped reporting violations when they saw it because there was active moderation and they assumed the GM would see every violation. And that was one zone on one realm.
There are over 200 retail realms. There are over 200 zones. There are Horde and Alliance chat channels in every zone. There are chat channels on the instance servers (dungeons, raids, scenarios, battlegrounds, PvP.) There are multiple chat channels. Plus you have name tags on characters. And that is before you get to the Classic realms. How many people do you think it is required to do active moderation for all those? Where is Blizzard going to put these people because they are going to need desks and computer terminals?
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The online interaction with other players is specifically not covered by any sort of ESRB rating guarantee. It says clearly right on the rating stamp that online interactions aren’t rated.
As Blizzard doesn’t Mind Control their customers, they have no way of making people behave one way or another. They ask people to behave a certain way, and if the people do, then great. If they don’t, then it is what it is.
You can and will run into offensive names in MMOs, it’s always been this way, and it always will be this way. At least for the next couple of hundred years, until we either:
- Grow out of the incessant need to be edgy and offensive; or
- AI learns every iteration of every offensive thing on Earth, and also learns all 8 billion of our opinions on how each and every offensive thing makes us react, thereby allowing censorship tailored to each human being.
That last one is a seriously scary thought, but I digress…
You make a perfect analogy with this:
Yes, exactly. I know in the last sentence you really mean those making offensive RP names, but it could also apply to the speeders. No matter how many heads-ups you give the cops, no matter how many reports are made, your local police department will not allocate “enough resources” to completely eradicate speeding in a given area.
So, we adjust our own personal behavior because we know that despite the stop signs, despite the speed bumps, despite the bike cop that hangs out occasionally and gives tickets, some idiot will still speed down the street and run over a kid.
That doesn’t mean the cops don’t care or that the cops round-file your complaints or any of that stuff. It means humans can and will do “all the things” they can, be those good or bad, and we learn to live with that. No law or enforcement of any law has ever eradicated the crime for which it was written.
It’s not feasible to plant “yard monitors” in every instance of every area on every server in WoW, the same as it’s unfeasible to plant a police officer at every street corner in every part of the city to stop speeders.
We report (to the cops, or to Blizz), adjust our behavior appropriately knowing we will run into bad things, and move on. Well, at least that’s what I do.
/shrug
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No offense, but I would quit the game rather than subject myself to potential moderation by unpaid volunteers drawn from the pool of players. I positively shudder at the thought of someone like you being given a whistle and hall monitor vest.
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Didn’t an earlier game try this? EQ or RuneScape or something? And then the developer got sued by said volunteers because the work was well beyond what volunteers would put up with (edit) without being paid?
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Yeah I think Sony tried it.
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It was AOL.
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Gotcha. Not a game… But I can definitely see why Blizzard wouldn’t want to put power in the hands of players for similar reasons. 
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No. A two-tier reporting structure won’t work. It won’t stop the petty reports. It would give petty reports higher priority. Other MMOs have tried similar. It was abused by the players. The same way you can’t stop players from making inappropriate character names you can’t control what a vigilante squad of players would do.
The players not in that group would feel even more like their voice means nothing. They would feel coerced to play in a certain way or run afoul of one of the players in that group. That doesn’t mean they would follow the rules. That means that they would follow the directions of the player in that group. It would make for a much more toxic gaming experience.
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This is literally what happens in this Customer Support forum.
It is probably time to close this one but I wanted to touch on a few things.
Outside of a limited experiment that lasted a couple of months where we had a few members of an extremely small team actively monitoring behavior on a specific realm in a very specific location, we have never had “active GMs in-game”.
Game Masters have always responded specifically to reports.
We have always enforced social policies like potential chat violations reactively. Active moderation has never proved to be practical or feasible.
Again, it was never actively enforced. The policies were reactively enforced based on the reports that were received.
You are welcome to submit that feedback if you wish, but something like that is extremely unlikely. We are always looking at ways to improve the overall reporting system so we can get to more reports, faster, and limit the impact on those who may violate our policies and will continue to do so. The only community involvement that is needed is for players to report behavior they believe may violate policy when they see it.
No, it literally isn’t. The most that can happen when you receive a bunch of forum reports is that your post is temporarily hidden until a moderator can review it. The post isn’t deleted and is otherwise visible to anyone who wants to see it by simply clicking on it.
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