Changing your char name, transferring, etc makes you start over with post count, trust level, etc. Other Blizzard forums don’t have this issue because they use Btags.
Flags and likes are per character, not Btag (this is not how the rest of the forums work) and it allows people to abuse the reporting system. Yes, some get penalized, but it is rare. Abuse of reports is common.
People sock puppeting to self promote, to argue with themselves, cause drama, etc.
People switching alts to circumvent the Ignore features.
Posting char name-server means people can message you in game without your permission, and add you a friend on that char to track you, without your permission. Btags require you allowing contact and don’t let anyone pester you in game.
Switch this forum, like all the other Blizz forums, to a Btag format would resolve those things, mostly. Or force them to use separate Btags with new accounts/payments to get around it.
Nobody is saying your char identity would be erased. But it would be sub to your main Btag. The example above is what I would love to see.
None of these necessitate battle net user name to fix, though. Not a single one. Stop multiple char flags, stop multiple likes, convert mute/ignore to account wide etc. And it’d reckon the amount of work to make these changes will be just as much anyways, since they’ll have to rework how to the forums work.
Hmmmmm, it’s wildly unpredictable what effect that could have on character identity, but I’m not sure I buy your argument. People will say the big name, not your char’s name. You switch, they’ll still say your account name. It’ll de facto erase the character identity which I don’t really vibe with.
All the other Blizzard forums already have the Btag features and work the way I described. That is the default forum functionality. I want to go back to the default, mostly. They all allow avatar choice and we have that in place from that char select here already.
So no, it is not a crazy amount of work.
What was work was having to modify the WoW forums to make them work differently in Discourse vs all the other Blizz forums.
The problem is that the forum software is third party and has -zero- understanding of characters or battlenet accounts currently. It’s all implemented with a massive hack that creates a forum account for every character. So what you’re proposing would require building on top of the existing hack to somehow get Discourse to recognize that all those character-accounts are actually the same account, which is not straightforward or simple.
With btag based accounts, it’s easy because there’s a 1:1 mapping between bnet accounts and forum accounts. Your chosen character is then just an extra bit of metadata tacked onto the forum account – mechanically, far more simple.
If you want to borrow this post of mine that has a reasons list as wella as the example image, feel free. You can put it in the first post if you want to quote it. If not, also fine
I’m going to explain this as simply as I can. Hopefully you will understand.
My battletag is for my friend to find me in their friends list no matter what character I am on. It is a name they recognize as me.
The forum toon I post on is for everyone to see. It is usually the name of whatever my main is at the time. Sometimes I switch to make a joke, or show off a neat punny name I got in game. A few times in my playing career I have dealt with ongoing harassment and switched to a single different character for a time. In fact, I’ve earned TL3 on multiple characters over time depending on what name suits me at the moment.
With your proposal, even if I choose a different display name, my harassers will still know it’s me because of the forced battletag. Even if I pay real life money to change the battletag all the harasser needs to do is to go find an old post under my old name to get the updated tag and find whatever toon I’m posting on.
This doesn’t prevent harassment.
My entire argument is that.
The forums have always allowed us agency to appear as our main, or to hide if we want.
Attaching a battletag would make it so victims of harassment can be stalked and harassed easier by their harassers.
A vast majority of the actual trolling comes from low level characters and classic alts and can be reduced by raising the bar of access.
This whole proposal is trying to solve a problem with moderation without actually acknowledging it’s a moderation issue.
There are some serious unintended (at least I hope they’re unintended, I’d like to think most people are against harassment) consequences to your proposal.
There are other, better, smarter, more elegant solutions that don’t enable harassment. You know, using a chisel instead of a jackhammer.
For example:
Letting us enter a reason for our reports like the old forums used to do.
The mods cracking down on the bad faith LGBT+ spam thread posters and other troll thread posters.
Making the minimum character level for toons to post on general be the level cap of the previous expansion and locking classic characters out. They have their own general just for them.
Having a cool down on switching forum toons.
I see you subtly misgendering me. That’s cute.
Now. The proposals I am seeing users post have both character name and battletag. This means they will see both character name and battletag at the same time.
Even if I didn’t give them my battle tag, they’d know it from the forums and if I was to switch characters so I could have some peace from their nonsense, they’d still know it’s me because of the battle tag and continue harassing.
I do not get why this is so hard to comprehend.
Trust levels should be account wide. I’m sure they can impliment this without opening people up to harassment seeing as how some users have all of their toons automatically added to a forum group for beta testers.
Who cares if people like their own posts? Likes are a pointless attention currency. They don’t mean anything at all.
Flag switching happens. Some people abuse it but most of the time when people are changing alts for more reports they’re not reporting the same post over and over again, but instead reporting many egregious posts in a thread that honestly should have been moderated better. Take for example the daily LGBT+ hate thread that gets hundreds of sometimes quite gross posts.
We need more than five reports unless real action is taken.
Who cares?
Report them if they’re not doing it to be funny.
Report them.
Forum blocks should block all characters on an account.
I use badboy with squelch. People who are trying to message me on low level characters typically don’t get through.
Ignore in game also tends to block all toons. It’s a one and done.
And do what?
Like. Really, what are they going to do?
I think that getting consent for character friending would be nice but that’s an in game problem.
At the cost of enabling harassment and other unintended consequences.
Respectfully, still reporting this post, cause intent or not, it’s an insult.
I am against Battletag on the forum and will still voice opposition anytime it’s raised.
I’m for preventing you from liking your own post with an alt, replying to yourself with an alt, and making forum ignores account-wide.
I’d even be fine with battletag if the full battletag wasn’t visible. (Like if my battletag was Maizou (it’s not) then Maizou#12XXX instead of Maizou#12345)
But we’d also need a way to choose a character to represent our battletag, because if you’ve ever looked at overwatch, etc. forums, they are insanely blank and devoid of any character.
