A Serious Issue with Dungeon Vote Kick System and Player Toxicity

Gameplay Dungeons, Raids and Scenarios
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Hello Blizzard team and fellow players,

I’ve been leveling multiple alt characters recently through Chromie Time dungeons, and I’ve encountered a recurring and increasingly frustrating problem: being unfairly kicked from dungeons. This issue has reached a point where it feels absurd and disheartening, and I feel compelled to share my experience in hopes that it sparks a conversation and action.

The Problem: Unjust Vote Kicks

After numerous dungeon runs, I’ve been kicked repeatedly, and while at first, I didn’t understand why (since the system doesn’t inform you of the reason), I later discovered the reasons thanks to a friend who accompanied me and could see the messages behind the votes. The patterns are deeply concerning:

  1. “Not Enough DPS” or “Useless” (6/10 cases)
  • In a non-competitive leveling dungeon, players are voting to kick others simply for not meeting arbitrary damage thresholds or, even worse, by labeling them as “Useless.”
  • This demonstrates that their “criteria” for kicking players is often baseless, relying more on personal whims or a desire to remove someone for no valid reason.
  • What’s worse, these kicks often happen right at the final boss of the dungeon, wasting all the time and effort invested.
  1. Minor Inconveniences or Personal Annoyances (2/10 cases)
  • I’ve been kicked for using addons that announce interrupts in chat or for something as trivial as saying “hello” in the group chat.
  • It feels like any small thing that a toxic player finds “annoying” can lead to a vote kick.
  1. Targeted Discrimination (2/10 cases)
  • I’ve been kicked purely based on my server. For example, one player said, “Oh, someone from Quel’Thalas? Yikes!” and two minutes later, I was kicked.
  • In another dungeon, I was kicked for voting “No” when someone else tried to unfairly kick another player.

These examples illustrate a disturbing misuse of the vote kick system. It’s not being used to deal with legitimate issues like AFK players, trolls, or truly disruptive behavior. Instead, it’s often weaponized for petty reasons or personal grudges.

The Bigger Issue: The Desertion Debuff

The most frustrating part of this situation is the “Deserter” debuff.

  • Being kicked for unjust reasons, I still receive a 30-minute penalty as if I had abandoned the group myself.
  • Why is there no differentiation between being kicked and leaving voluntarily? This system punishes the victim rather than addressing the root problem.

Imagine being a new player who is trying to learn the game. Instead of receiving support or guidance, they’re punished with a 30-minute penalty simply because they didn’t meet someone’s unrealistic standards. This kind of experience drives players away—both new and returning ones.

The Impact on Player Experience

This situation has profoundly affected my enjoyment of the game.

  • As a positive player and guild leader, I always try to foster an inclusive and supportive environment. Yet, this toxic behavior has left me feeling discouraged and even considering quitting altogether.
  • Worse, I’ve spoken to several newer players who’ve had similar experiences and have already quit or are considering it. How can we expect players to stay when they face hostility even in casual, low-stakes content?

Suggestions for Improvement

To address this issue, I’d like to propose some potential solutions:

  1. Transparency in Vote Kick Reasons
  • Allow the kicked player to see the reason for the kick. This would provide clarity and allow Blizzard to monitor abusive patterns.
  1. Reform the Desertion Penalty
  • Being kicked should not apply the same penalty as voluntarily leaving. Separate these two scenarios in the system.
  1. Stricter Review of Vote Kick Patterns
  • Implement automated systems to flag players who abuse vote kicks or frequently initiate unjustified votes.
  1. Encourage a More Supportive Community
  • Leveling dungeons should be a safe space for learning, not a competitive environment where only experienced players thrive. Consider in-game prompts or rewards for patience and helpfulness in group content.

Final Thoughts

This issue reflects a growing toxicity within the community that needs to be addressed. Players abusing the system create a hostile environment, and Blizzard’s current mechanics unintentionally punish the victims rather than the perpetrators.

If this trend continues unchecked, I fear more players—myself included—will stop playing altogether. Blizzard, I urge you to take these concerns seriously. We need changes to protect players from unnecessary frustration and to foster a more welcoming and enjoyable experience for everyone.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I hope the community and Blizzard moderators can work together to resolve this issue.

Sincerely,
[JavyWorld]

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You need to recalibrate your understanding of the system. The only criteria for being kicked is if 3 of the other 4 players no longer wants you in the group. No reason is required or asked for. It is solely up to the discretion of the members of the group to decide for themselves if they no longer want to play with someone. As a result, there is no such thing as an unfair kick. If a group of people doesn’t want to play with you then you just need to move on.

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Nice job ignoring the entire section about the 30 minute penalty that those players get to impose on anyone.

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If the entire premise of the post is about unfair kicks, and unfair kicks are impossible, then none of the rest has any relevance.

But since you’ve brought it up specifically, the 30 minute penalty for being kicked was necessary to stop even worse community behavior, and remains an unfortunate necessity.

The primary purpose of the group finder is for groups to finish the content they’ve queued for. This is important. It’s about group success, not individual success. When tanks or healers are able to demand kicks to circumvent the deserter penalty so they can avoid undesirable dungeons, the group they’ve left behind is given a replacement who will likely do the same thing. This group then gets stuck in an unfinished limbo. When that happens frequently enough to be the norm, the system isn’t working and needs to be adjusted.

Getting kicked and receiving a 30 minute penalty feels bad, I get it. But it’s not common enough to be considered normal, and it doesn’t hinder the primary purpose of getting groups to complete the content.

The group finder is entirely optional, and if people don’t like it they are free to not use it. Honestly, the game would be better without it, so I hope enough people decide to make groups manually that they can finally just get rid of it.

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here we go again.

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What a bizarre rationalization for a system that’s clearly abusable. If you vote kick enthusiasts want to protect these “rights” to play with who you want, why aren’t you also campaigning for the ability to freely leave a group without penalty? Surely it’s not a weird power trip.

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necessary due to player actions in Cataclysm.

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I’m one of the most vocal proponents for no punishment leaving in M+, despite almost never leaving a key until the group decides to stop.

If you’re talking about group finder then of course not. The whole purpose of the automated group finder is to serve the needs of the group, without allowing an individual player to diminish the experience of the rest of the group. The whole reason kicking exists is so that groups can remove a player that whose demeanor, poor play, refusal to help, being a nuisance, or anything else, makes the group feel like they would be better off without them.

Is it abusable? If you insist that being removed by a majority vote is abuse then sure. It’s an automated system so it inherently lacks nuance. But it’s better to err on the side of 4 people collaborating to be jerks to someone than allow an individual troll the ability to ruin the experience for four people at a time. Might there be groups of people queuing up for the purpose of trolling people? Yeah, probably. But what percentage of automated groups do you think they represent? I’m guessing that, unless I’m one of the luckiest people in all of WoW (and my loot rolls would beg to differ) these groups are pretty rare. In fifteen years of using the LFG tool, I have never once encountered a group of 4 who just booted me for no reason at all.

And let’s be realistic. There isn’t going to be a panel of people who will arbitrate eviction hearings on a case by case basis for each automated group dispute, with each side presenting their evidence for and against, settled by some verdict where the panel either instructs the evictee that they are, in fact, bad, and will be removed forthwith, or instructs the group that their reasons are invalid and will now be compelled to finish the dungeon with this person they tried to kick.

LFG is a blunt instrument, meant to help people quickly match with other people looking to do the content. It doesn’t pretend to help you find good players or nice people, just 4 randos who can all hope for the best. And once in awhile it doesn’t work out, and that’s fine. And if it’s not fine, just opt out of the tool.

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You keep saying 4 because it makes your overwrought argument sound better, when you’ve already said you know it’s only 3 required to votekick. What a weird exaggeration. You can pad out your post with as many words as you want to try and sound authoritative, but you’re tilting at windmills here bud. No one is saying that you shouldn’t be allowed to kick out undesirables. They’re saying that the 30 minute punishment isn’t something that players should have control over.

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Or it was an error because I was thinking about 4 other people in the group, which I referenced later…

Besides which, it doesn’t materially change anything. 3 people being required to collaborate to cause harm is still better than giving one person unilateral control over trolling people, obviously.

I’m not the one arguing against a system that isn’t going to be changing lol…

And they’re wrong, because the community has already demonstrated that they can’t handle themselves when given the opportunity to circumvent the system. It’s 30 minutes ffs, can you all just get over it?

I have never once in 15 years been kicked by people trolling. If this happens to you more than once in six months I can almost guarantee that it’s not for no reason. You’re doing something to provoke people.

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My take on this (admittedly as somebody who hasn’t done a dungeon in months) is that the incentives are misaligned.

The kickers pay virtually zero penalty for kicking, because they’ll get the next person in line to fill out their group. “Virtually zero penalty” really is key, because it makes it really easy to kick somebody at the slightest whiff of whatever peeves you. When somebody initiates a vote-kick, do the other players pause thoughtfully and review their damage meter? Maybe, but why bother? They’ll get another player in 2 seconds (especially if it’s a DPS).

The kick-ee gets a pretty darn stiff penalty, assuming running LFG dungeons is what they wanted to be doing with their time. I know that if I found a solid hour in my schedule to play WoW and then some 14 year old kicked me because I haven’t played in a while and my DPS ain’t so great, and then my hour basically turns to zero (10+ mins in queue, 30 mins deserter, 20 mins remaining is not enough time to queue up and do a dungeon again), I’d be understandably upset.

Basically what I’m saying is that there should be some real disincentive to kicking somebody. Ideally this would be cumulative. I just don’t think that people should be kicking other players routinely. Sure, you get a bad apple, you can kick them, but if you’ve kicked 4 people on this dungeon run, it’s very likely the problem does not lie with the folks you’ve kicked.

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I agree.

A timer penalty on your next kick that builds daily if you are the type to continually kick people makes sense to me.

Surely you would not get two people in a row that met your kicking criteria? And if you do, that person can learn to deal with having someone that doesn’t meet their expectations until the timer runs out.

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Do you actually believe that there is a large number of groups kicking multiple people per run???

This is already part of the original group finder system. The more frequently you kick someone the less you are allowed to. I suppose this may have been removed, but I don’t remember hearing about anything about it not functioning this way anymore.

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Given the large population of people in wow, it’s very difficult for me to say.

I will say that my one experience with dungeon kicking was simply the dungeon leader looking for people to blame.

Maybe that’s not the norm, but it seems reasonable to have some disincentive to kick people, because as it stands, there’s virtually no reason not to kick somebody for the slightest “offense”, whatever you make that to be. And the lack of disincentive makes it really easy for the rest of the group to go along with the first person to get annoyed and want to kick somebody.

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They just made changes to the system this season. Declaring that it won’t happen because you don’t think it should is just delusional.

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Ok, I’ll bite. Which changes suddenly encourage people to randomly kick others with no provocation?

Declaring that it is unlikely to happen because I’ve never seen it happen in 15 years, not to me and not to anyone in groups I’ve been in, is accurate.

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I think they should make you type out a confirmation box (like typing delete to trash certain items) so the quick reaction would be to hit [decline] because aint nobody got time to stop to type out a codeword.
If someone is truely deserving of being kicked, people will take the time to type it out.

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Like you I have been banned just for being from Quel-Thalas or stupid reasons, sometimes even due to confusion and that is really frustrating, sometimes it has taken me on bad days.

I have also known people who have left the game, it is not fair to pay a Monthly + Expansion, farm months to hit really decent, to reach a Dungeron/Mythical or raid and have a random guy kick you out of the Dungeon just for being a Dwarf or do 0.1% less damage than average.

Including more solo content could fix this, as well as reduce debuff time; leaving that part of mythics and group dungeons as something for that toxic elite that has been created in WoW

Delves are great, but they don’t allow you to scale as well as doing Mythics,
sometimes I just want to play calmly and reach a good ilvl, but it is impossible with others, the ecosystem in the End Game is terrible