Being harassed in game

Look… you gotta stop responding at all. On other characters or whatever. If you see him trashing you in trade chat, send in another harassment report. Keep sending in a report every time he does it. And stop trying to settle it yourself, even if you’re being polite about it. Let the reports build up on him more and more and make sure it’s all one-sided. It’ll take time, but you gotta let it play out. Say nothing and when he makes 100 nasty comments about you over the course of a week, report them all for harassment and the balance will shift dramatically. The GMs will see that balance shift and eventually step in. It’s not going to be immediate. It won’t change in a day. Or a week. A friend of mine was getting harassed in game like 10 years ago and it took a few months, but eventually Blizz resolved the issue. Be patient. Don’t engage and report every unwanted contact or inappropriate comment in trade.

edit to clarify before the peanut gallery chimes in (#dfmb):
I’m NOT saying to send in 100 reports a week. But if he’s going on a rant about you in Trade chat tonight, send a harassment ticket, and give the time/date of the tirade. And if he does it again tomorrow, send another. Eventually, it will build a record that Blizz can use to take action to either curb his behavior or eliminate him from the game world.

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If they have the harasser on ignore like they should have they will not see chat in Trade.

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Vrak didn’t “make” you say anything about your other character. Vrak didn’t ask, Vrak didn’t tell you to identify all your alts or else. YOU chose to reveal this alt’s name, just like YOU chose to respond every time this player allegedly tries to bait you into responding. You could’ve also immediately edited out the name, and Vrak would’ve been able to see the edit.

YOU control YOUR actions. YOU cannot control anyone else’s actions, or what they say. Anytime YOU respond, this is YOUR decision to respond, not anyone else’s. Anytime YOU reveal an alt’s name (which is easy enough to find, if someone was so inclined), YOU are the one who decided to do so. NO ONE is holding a gun to your head and demanding you type out things in chat, or on these forums.

You are 100% correct here, but not for the reason you think.

Quite frankly, that’s not your choice, nor do you have any standing to demand anything of the Blizzard staff. However, they DID investigate the situation. Vrak gave you the results of the investigation. There was no absolving the other person of what they were saying, but it’s not harassment because you continue to respond to him.

It’s not harassment just because you say so. It’s harassment when you put him on Ignore, leave him on Ignore, and he continues to contact you on different characters. You cannot put him on Ignore, take him off to respond to him, then Ignore him again.

See, you keep saying that, but you still posted it. No one prompted you to post it. In fact, Vrak appeared to believe the lie you told that it was your friend. All Vrak said was:

That’s the only mention of the friend. No request for you to identify the “friend”, name them, tell people that it was actually you. YOU chose to do that. YOU didn’t keep it incognito.

Of course, Vrak seemed to see through the lie, but not once did they ask you to come clean or identify the character by name. They purposely said “your friend” to not call this out publicly.

You see here, this is the issue. YOU. KEEP. TALKING. TO. HIM.

That’s the whole point of what Vrak said. Vrak is very clever and can see more than most players realize. You say they didn’t investigate who the friend was, but I guarantee you that they did, but was not saying because Vrak doesn’t throw out names around here unless it’s absolutely necessary.

Regardless of how the identity slipped out, it’s not relevant to the situation at hand. The situation is YOU KEEP RESPONDING TO HIM. STOP RESPONDING TO HIM.

Actually, that’s exactly what should happen…if that’s how much the other person is contacting them.

Someone contacts them: Report and put on Ignore.
An alt contacts them: Report that alt for Ongoing Harassment (a ticket, not just right-click report), and put on Ignore.
Another alt: Rinse and repeat.

It doesn’t matter if that sequence happens over the course of 2 weeks, or 2 minutes. Report it every time it happens…WITHOUT RESPONDING TO THE PLAYER.

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Reminder: you probably want to edit out the other person’s name, partly because we’re not allowed to call people out on the forums, but also because they probably love it. You’re just giving them more attention.

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I’m sorry, Natalaya, but I didn’t make you do anything of the kind. I didn’t ask you for the other character’s name. The most I said is that your friend should have reported the original incident themselves.

All I said was the story you were presenting here wasn’t accurate, since your original post claimed that you were the original focus at the start and the information you were saying elsewhere didn’t match up. The point being, if this was a different person the reports need to come from them about what they experienced.

As I said, I went back a couple of weeks. The incident you are referring to seems to have happened before that. Since you never mentioned your other character’s name in any of the chat I did review how was I to know it was another character of yours?

Which is the problem. As I stated before, you both have been what is considered mutually combative. In order to establish ongoing harassment we have to be able to establish a pattern of behavior. We do that by showing you as an unwilling participant, meaning you place the person on ignore and don’t engage with them and report the behavior.

You don’t send them whispers, or taunt them about a forum post you’ve made and you don’t talk about them publicly.

That isn’t how this works. You posted on a public forum, I reply publicly. If you wanted a more private discussion with Support the only way to do that would be to submit a ticket.

Which we understand. We get lots of folks here who aren’t sure what they need to do. Providing a general outline of the issue (i.e. there is a guy in-game who continues to harass me, disparage me in public, etc… I’m not sure what to do about it) would have been enough.

I’m sorry if you feel that I slandered you, Natalaya, but things weren’t lining up with the story you were telling here. I tried to be as vague as possible.

That isn’t how it works. We go off of reports. People are welcome to say practically anything in-game, we don’t police chat or otherwise intervene unless it is reported. If it is reported and it violates policy, then action may be taken such as a silence, suspension or even account closure for persistent violations.

That isn’t actually true. I ran chat on several characters, but as I had no reason to believe that the story you were telling, that the person originally harassed which started all of this was one of your characters, I had no way to tie that together.

Then please report it. If you are having trouble using the URL that has been provided several times in this thread then that is what we should be focusing on. I haven’t seen a single ticket on this yet.

Simply ignoring may not, but it is a start and what needs to happen for ongoing harassment investigations.

That hasn’t been what is happening. You are right, I didn’t see the original exchange that started this whole thing, with that character and who said what. I have gone back now.

The person in question used /Laugh at you. That was it to start.

You whispered them asking why they were laughing, including an lol. They emoted a few more times, /laugh and /rofl. They /spit after you said “a bit special I see”. The exchange stopped after that.

It picked up about 2 days later when you sent them a whisper. Something “tryhard frost mage” - which quickly devolved into an argument between the two of you. After that you contacted them later on this character and it has since continued to escalate. So while I absolutely do not condone anything that this person may have said, this didn’t start in a vacuum.

So, again. These are the steps to follow.

  1. Place them on ignore.
  2. Do not engage with them.
  3. If they contact you through another account, through other people or talk about you as you have described in public, report it using the Ongoing Harassment ticket.
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