Community Management and Toxicity

[Halite-bonechewer]

Thank you for the clarifications and very informative text!

@Mirasol-mannoroth

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.

I remember having the live GMs occasionally monitor people way back when, and yes, that was absolutely a disaster. I don’t necessarily think live GMs will ever work, but it does feel like we need someone, whether they’re GMs or otherwise, to be more actively engaged.

@Mirasol-mannoroth

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.

All of this, yes! Especially in regards to how things don’t feel like they matter. By the time an abusive post is removed, a thousand more might have popped up. And by all the reports I have made in-game, I have never actually seen any of them take any effect - I don’t expect all of them to be noticable, but some proof of change would be nice.