Posted about this in the PTR Forum but opening the conversation here.
Blizzard recently updated the reporting system, where if you report a player in-game, you will be told if action was taken. This is good, particularly because “in real life”, most institutions do not tell you if your reports resulted in an action taken.
However, this does not do anything for the forums. As it stands:
For every other Blizzard forum, the forums operate via BattleNet ID without the numbers at the end. This prevents players from jumping from forum-targeting to in-game targeting or harassing via the BattleNet chat interface.
The Forum Ignore system is limited to only a certain “tier” of trust. Any player should have the right to ignore any other player
The Forum Ignore system is per character. In-game, if you put a player on ignore, their whole account is ignored but only for the character that you were on when ignoring. If you jump to an alt, the person is not ignored. If the person ignored deletes that character in-game, they ignore is removed and thus the account is un-ignored.
People alt-jump to give the illusion of support.
People alt-jump to bury posts they don’t like via false reporting.
People alt-jump to bypass ignores and continue harassment, or continue trolling.
Reporting is used to bury posts people don’t like.
The Code of Conduct is unclear in many aspects, due to ambiguity of language and the fact moderators have evidently different standards between each individual in my personal experience.
The fact when you report a post there is no mandatory box explaining why you are reporting leads to a lack of communication between players, moderators, and the supposed standards.
My suggestions:
Make the WoW Forums in line with every other Blizzard game forum and either make it BattleNet without the final numbers (thus preventing any player from being targeted in-game or in the interface) or a ForumID system of some sort. This would destroy all Alt-Jumping.
The ForumID system is probably better since a lot of people used personal-identifying information in their BNet names when choosing them unfortunately.
Add examples to the Code of Conduct of what is not and what is permissible.
Force players to type out what part of the Code of Conduct (or why otherwise) they are reporting a post. This extra effort would dissuade players from simply using the report feature as a dislike button, and would allow moderators to engage with the reasons why players are reporting a post.
Allow players to continue sending in reports even after a post is “buried” with this explained report function, to give more evidence and provide greater nuance or arguments against the post so moderators can deliberate with greater care.
Implement on the Forums the same “report confirmation” that is being done in game. If a post we report results in an action taken (or not), tell the players who sent in the reports.
Revamp the Forum MVP system to help with this end, perhaps to help deliberate internal standards.
Make ignores on account both in-game and in-forums, rather than per-character.
Edit:
It’s been changed today that Ignore ignores all characters in-game of the person ignored for your whole account! And that ignore will be given to any user of the forums independent of Trust Level.
Would appreciate if account-based system was brought into the forums in some capacity.
Say what you will about communist countries, there is one thing they do well:
Parades.
When was the last time the US ever paraded ICBM launchers down the streets of a major city? Or gigantic portraits of the president? Never was the last time.
I want to see a parade with a giant Joe Biden head rolling behind a Minuteman III.
No, it has the numbers too. You can hover over any avatar on the other Blizz forums and see the whole Battletag. It does not DO anything though as nobody can bother you unless you accept a friend request from them.
This is already something the CS Forum Reps have addressed and forwarded up the chain to get resolved. It should not be that way.
Yes, this is a problem on the forums. It should be Bnet account wide.
They should change it to Btag - WITH the numbers just like every other Blizzard forum. You have to have the numbers of you can’t tell people apart. That would ensure that Trust levels, likes, flags, and Ignore are Bnet account wide, not character specific. It resolves a lot of problems at once. Just display the Btag next to the Char name so people can still pick a posting avatar character.
People just play rules lawyer and walk the fine lines. The Code of Conduct is pretty detailed already. The areas that are grey are grey on purpose so people can’t try to weasel around it creatively.
NO NO NO NO NO. No. MVPs are not Blizzard staff. The Forum Moderation team is paid by Blizz to do a job. MVPs are not doing that for free - and CA law does not allow it. Bad idea. You don’t want us as Mods.
Yes, a comment box when reporting would help explain to Mods about patterns of behavior. Sometimes an individual post is grey, but is part of a pattern of harassment.
Most of this was all discussed in the first post on this topic today.
Oh, and if people have personal info in their Battletag, they should use their free Btag change to fix that. I would even go so far as to give all WoW players who already used theirs, an extra one to ensure they can pick a Bnet tag they prefer on the forums or other Blizz games. We were warned at Btag creation that it is a PUBLIC facing name so should already be something safe, but still.
Just wanted to touch on this quickly. It was brought up in the CS forums and it turns out that this is unintended. They’re looking at ensuring that anyone of any trust level will be able to put someone on ignore. From what I understand, they had it set that way originally, but it’s possible that a forum-software update may have inadvertently changed that.
Oh, and I am also for using BattleIDs with partially masked numbers for posting
Didn’t Lore already make a post about this, and even added your name in that post?
So you decided, “I’ll also make an entire post saying the same thing, nearly word for word. Just in case people didn’t read the part where Lore mentioned me in his.”
There are alot of issues with harassment, Alt Posting, and False Flagging. It would be nice of Blizzard dealt with them.
I am not in favor of BTags or Real Names, but a singular WoW Forum ID that included every Character on the account sounds good.
Yeah. Some new Forum ID System would tie all the Alts to one ID, and diminish Trolling, since most of the Trolling is done on Low Level Alts by people too cowardly to post on a Character they care about.
As far as Flagging… they should punish people who False Flag. Maybe after 5 of your Flags are overturned, you can’t flag for a month.
No I’m not. I’m suggesting that sometimes the internal standards may not be in line with larger societal standards.
Consider that for example, through the lawsuit it was revealed that Blizzard until recently forbade an internal women’s group and internal LGBT group (and something tells me there is no internal POC group) for the employees.
Same way that in-game, players were originally banned for trying to make an LGBTQ guild.
I’m suggesting that the MVP system should be revamped entirely for devs to consult on specific issues if needed. Like player working groups, essentially.
It was another player’s post and it was 404’d within 7 hours for unknown reasons
True forgot about the number = differentiation issue
I think a Forum ID system would be best, because it’s happened where Forum Harassment becomes Game Harassment.
