I don’t RP, but I can chime in on how the report system works and what the roles are for Blizz staff.
Reporting and Automation:
- Right click report captures the reported name or text and sends it to the GMs. Those GMs review the report and decide if a Silence is warranted or not. Silences remove social abilities within the games and are Bnet account wide, not just WoW specific. Each time one is applied to an account, the duration doubles.
- On Automation. The actual Silence is not automated. If an account gets a LOT of reports in a quick time frame there is an automated Squelch that has been in game a long long time. It was designed for gold spammers but if a group abuses it, they can trigger it. The Silence penalty is applied only after an actual GM reviews it. They don’t get to all the reports though, esp if it is a single report and that account does not have other reports against it. Those would be lower priority in queue.
- Real life threats and doxing are serious issues - and those have a priority report system via ticket. Support > Contact Support > WOW > Categorize issue > in-game > report a player > real life threat https://us.battle.net/support/en/help/product/wow/197/478/solution
- On the forums, we obviously flag things for the Forum Moderation team.
- Future: there has been talk about integrating some AI flagging and action systems but that is not in operation that I know of, yet.
Blizzard Organization and Job Roles:
Community Managers (CMs) don’t take tickets. They have a very different role at Blizzard. Their job is to take feedback across forums, reddit, streams, third party websites, etc. To write and publish patch notes, news posts, forum notices, game changes. They also do engagement campaigns, promotions, and outreach. They engage and work with the media, streamer community, focus groups for raid testing and all the coordination that goes with that.
While CMs have the ability to moderate forums, that is not something they usually do. That is handled by the Forum Moderators who review forum reports that we flag. Those same Forum Mods are like the GMs who handle reports from the game.
Here is a recent Associate Community Manager role job posting.
Blizzard Entertainment games don’t just begin with game ideas or end once those games are released. A lot more goes into the creation of a Blizzard product than the work of developers—and we support our games for years after they’re in the hands of gamers worldwide. Operations teams support, evangelize, and improve our games. The Global World of Warcraft Publishing team is seeking a community professional who is passionate about player communities, brand communications, marketing, and customer support. They would join our community development team, who is dedicated to creating and maintaining relationships with our community of players.
The ideal candidate is driven, creative, and is a self-starter who possesses strong task management skills with a proven track record of successful community management and development experience in the entertainment industry. They are a tireless advocate for the voice of the player, constantly seeking to build bridges, trust, and foster constructive dialogue.
Responsibilities:
- Act as public-facing representative of Blizzard and communicate on behalf of the brand across multiple channels and at events
- Contribute to the design and execution of community development programs for World of Warcraft
- Support communication plans and channel management
- Create and maintain relationships with community partners including fansites, content creators, and volunteers
- Engage with players at in-person and online events Work closely with the various teams developing and supporting World of Warcraft
- Compile and relay meaningful feedback on the sentiment, suggestions, and concerns of the community
- Support the live operations of World of Warcraft with public-facing messaging tailored to our audience Develop official communications for upcoming game changes and content
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in communications, marketing, or related field or equivalent work experience
- Minimum four years’ experience with brand communications, forums, and social media
- Experience with channel management, publishing calendars, reporting & analytics
- Familiarity with project management and process improvement
- Ability to meet deliverables amid a fast-paced, high volume environment
- Able to travel, including international travel, and work long hours including weekends as needed
Pluses- Advanced degrees in communication, marketing, or related field
- Third party relationship management experience
- Project management training and experience
- A passionate gamer possessing ample experience with World of Warcraft and/or World of Warcraft Classic
- Experience with content management systems, html, or other publishing platforms
- Existing strong personal network within Blizzard’s communities Fansite, creator, and/or streaming experience within the WoW community
- Video production and/or graphic arts experience
Game Masters are the ones who handle the in-game report tickets, get you unstuck when the auto tool does not work, can help with Billing and Account Access issues, etc. Here is a great post on what GMs can, and can NOT do. Spotlight on: Game Master Help
QA are the folks who take the Bug Reports via in-game report or Bug Report Forum. Their job is to validate it, reproduce it, document the steps, get it into the system, etc. They don’t usually comment publicly and they are VERY different than the GMs. GMs don’t take bug reports or fix bugs.
On Goldshire - Blizzard did try having in-game live GMs for that back in Vanilla. What happened was that people got worse just to see if they could engage the GMs or get punished. Others just stopped reporting thinking the GMs would catch everything. It was a mess and they never repeated it again.
The right click report makes it easy to report now though seeing as it captures the chat logs with no effort from the player. Data is all there for GM review.
My own issues have to do with Blizzard communications. Players don’t understand the different ways to go about using the systems in place and don’t know what the different roles for Blues are. It impacts expectations pretty severely at times. People get upset if they think a GM can fix a bug when they can’t. People get upset when they think they can ticket for game hints, and GMs are not allowed so they point to Wowhead.
I also feel moderation is not responsive in a timely way which contributes to a feeling that “nothing is done”. It can be hours, or even days before threads containing very nasty insults, profanity, threats, etc are removed. Same goes for removing people in game who are being terrible. People wonder why they even bother reporting if nothing is done.
There are some improvements where we can get an automated message saying our report helped but that is rare and most things just feel like they get lost in a black hole and nothing gets better.