In-game chat desperately needs moderation

Support Customer Support
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Chat channels in-game are hellholes of toxicity. It’s not possible to ignore everyone, and ignore doesn’t solve the problem when the chat is dominated by a toxic person and people replying to them.

This is the biggest reason why I do not play retail anymore. WoW is primarily a chat service backed by a game that provides conversation starters. Without chat, WoW - especially Retail - is a single-player game with NPCs driven by other players rather than an AI.

However, chat is so toxic that my decisions whether to log in and play are primarily governed around whether I feel up to wading through the massive mountains of garbage that people spew out because there are no consequences to their garbage.

There are several ways this could work:

  • Blizzard employees who monitor chat and step in to warn/mute/ban people for toxic behaviour.
  • Volunteers who can warn/mute people.

In all cases, there should be a system to report moderator abuse, especially with a volunteer system. With volunteers, all mutes should automatically forward a chat log and reason for the mute to Blizzard for review to escalate to a ban if the player was egregious enough, or for mod censureship if the mod is repeatedly muting people without sufficient cause.

In a volunteer system, volunteer mods would need to face removal if they were repeatedly failing to do their jobs well, or outright bans if they abused their moderator powers.

Regardless of the system chosen, we desperately need chat moderation.

To head off people complaining about freedom of speech: You don’t have freedom of speech on a privately owned platform. And while I always wholeheartedly support freedom, freedom comes with responsibility, and if you cannot engage with the community in a way that’s welcomed by the community, then you don’t have the right to inflict your toxicity on that community.

Anonymity always breeds toxicity - we see it everywhere in the internet - and a lack of moderation outright feeds this toxicity.

I would love to be able to play the game without having to steel myself against edgelords and worse. The point of the game is to have fun and make friends, and this cannot be done when everyone is leaving these chats because they’re too toxic - let alone that LookingForGroup cannot be used to look for a group because people are using it as a world chat to spew their toxic content.

As a separate issue… we also desperately need an official world chat so that people stop using LookingForGroup as a world chat.

Thank you for considering this request. I know many people who have unsubbed or are on the verge of unsubbing because of this garbage.

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I think you underestimate the number of realms and chat channels. It would take a LOT of employees to accomplish this over hundreds of servers, two factions, multiple chat channels per faction per server…24 hours a day, 7 days a week…vacation days, sick days…I could go on, but I doubt you’d be willing to pay the increased monthly cost for such a huge endeavour.

Sony tried that and got sued. They have to be paid if they’re going to do actual work for the company. It’s why, just as an example, green posters are not able to moderate anything either. We’re not paid to be MVPs, so we can’t do the work that Blizz employees do.

All that said, the CS forum are not a feedback or suggestion forum. The development team doesn’t come here for feedback/suggestions.

You’ll want want to post in the General forums or edit your original post to move it there :wink:

Edit: Don’t forget that you can also report any in-game chat that violates the rules too. That will put the poster on a temporary ignore for your logged-in session.

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I think you underestimate the number of realms and chat channels. It would take a LOT of employees to accomplish this over hundreds of servers, two factions, multiple chat channels per faction per server…24 hours a day, 7 days a week…vacation days, sick days…I could go on, but I doubt you’d be willing to pay the increased monthly cost for such a huge endeavour.

I really don’t. This is one reason why I’ve suggested a volunteer moderation system where the moderators have rules and penalties for abuse, and their powers are limited to mutes with mutes being automatically forwarded for review. This would greatly decrease the workload required by employees.

But even so, I would easily pay twice as much for my sub if I could be free of the kind of toxic garbage and spam that I currently have to deal with - and Classic isn’t (yet) nearly as bad as Retail for that.

Sony tried that and got sued. They have to be paid if they’re going to do actual work for the company. It’s why, just as an example, green posters are not able to moderate anything either. We’re not paid to be MVPs, so we can’t do the work that Blizz employees do.

Link please? Plenty of places use volunteer moderation without getting sued.

All that said, the CS forum are not a feedback or suggestion forum. The development team doesn’t come here for feedback/suggestions.

I looked for a suggestion forum and couldn’t find one. If I’m blind, please point me in the right direction.

Edit: Don’t forget that you can also report any in-game chat that violates the rules too. That will put the poster on a temporary ignore for your logged-in session.

I do, but see my preamble about how ignore is insufficient, and the problem is getting worse, not better. The lack of (apparent, at least) response to reports is demoralizing at best.

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There is no “suggestion” forum. That’s why I recommended the General forums instead as it’s a catch-all for game suggestions.

They did away with the Suggestions forums as it became a huge mess basically and now whichever non-support-based forum is closest linked to the suggestion is actually the best place for it with GD being the catch-all.

I didn’t say to ignore them, I said to report them. They’re two different systems. The report system doesn’t have a cap that I’m aware of.

Well, that would be because they don’t actually respond to reports beyond those of cheating/botting. Those will get you an in-game mail if action is taken. Reports for normal moderation like language, won’t get you a reply as it’s really not needed.

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While Blizzard does not tell the reporter what happened with a chat report, they do have a rather significant system for dealing with it.

  • First you right click report so you don’t see that person for the rest of the session you are logged in. That is step one and very important!

  • Enough in-game reports from different accounts results in an auto squelch for that person until a GM reviews it. This is primarily designed for gold spammers and advertisers, but can sometimes apply to the worst toxic folks if they are heavily reported.

  • Even things that don’t get heavily reported are reviewed. If a GM feels it violates the game rules they Silence the person. The person can still play but can’t engage in most social interactions.

  • Silence starts at 24 hours. Each time that is applied the penalty doubles. Eventually people find themselves with a year or so of Silence. It has no cap.

  • The penalty is Bnet account wide now, not just within a single game. For example, due to a bug Silenced players can’t even make a game in D3 during their Silence. I only say this to illustrate the penalty is account wide.

  • Egregious enough speech can result in a ban.

If you want to see results hang around the CS forum (or sometimes the D3 forums) where people come to complain about how they got silenced “for nothing”. Then a Blue comes along and looks at the reports… yeah.

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While Blizzard does not tell the reporter what happened with a chat report, they do have a rather significant system for dealing with it.

While I appreciate this notion, what I’m referring to is the lack of any apparent response or consequences. That, coupled with how egregious and pervasive the problem is, leads to people giving up on reporting. It’s why people don’t bother reporting bots and gold sellers any more.

Given how severe the problem is, clearly the “report and Blizzard will (maybe) act sometime later” approach does not work, and we need a change.

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Reporting does work, please do not underestimate the power of the community. Or their willingness to actively report.

You will get a response if any of your reports on cheaters or bots are found to actually be in violation of the rules. You may not get feedback directly on chat violations, but understand we get players in here (this very forum) who always seem to question why their accounts were sanctioned.

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Here are a few examples. Some very recent, some from 2020. These are only the tiny fraction who come here to discuss it. If there is a blue post, always read it. They tend to be interesting.

This one you need to read the whole thing starting with the first post.

Another thread
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/being-griefed-with-false-reports/909306

A quote from one - mild example showing yes, silence exists.

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You and Mirasol have presented enough evidence to show that reporting does work to some extent - so I will continue to report. Thank you for that.

However, I still maintain that we need something more, as the levels of toxicity in chat have completely overwhelmed the chat to the point where it’s unuseable for anything. The reporting system is clearly insufficient.

I have stopped playing Retail literally because of this problem. It’s not a minor problem. “Report more” is not a solution.

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I have seen what happens when you let players moderate other in other games. It wasn’t very pretty. Hell, Classic players and Retail players whine here constantly about being reported in game for this and that.

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This is the why of clear requirements and punishments for the moderators if they abuse their powers.

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Unless you wanna see the cost of playing this game go up…not likely gonna happen. Plus most players are untrustworthy and I would let them hold a penny for me.

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I doubt the costs would significantly increase, and I’m fine with this if it does.

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That’s a myopic viewpoint. Just because YOU maybe fine with it, a majority of other players won’t.

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Thing with increases to subscription some people are on fixed incomes and even a minor increase is the difference between playing and not playing what maybe a small minor increase to you would be a huge difference to another play hence the backlash to the new game time plan blizzard did.

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And you are not privy to Blizzard’s financials, so you can at best guess as to whether this is cost-prohibitive for them or not. I’ve made a request to Blizzard, not you. There’s very little value in what you’ve contributed here since it’s all purely speculation.

Please, let Blizzard reply, or add something with evidence to support your position. Us peons speculating doesn’t provide any value, period.

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Neither are you.

As you was told, Blizzard doesn’t collect player feedback on the CS forums.

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The dynamic of social interactions is really quite simple. Anyone who doesn’t approve of bad behavior ought to report it. Anyone who doesn’t report bad behavior is complicit by allowing it to continue and doesn’t get to complain about it. If you want to play the game but don’t like the toxicity, then report it. If you don’t report it then the behavior continues and you have no right to complain about it. If you quit, then you escape the toxicity, hit Blizzard in pockets where it hurts, and leave the bad players and the players that do nothing about them to suffer in a garbage community with each other.

Don’t press for proactive policing in games because it doesn’t work. The players are the ones that have to experience the game in whatever state it’s in, so if they let it go to “trash,” they’ll have no choice but to change their behavior, make changes and just suffer the effects of their actions and inactions, or quit. Let reality sort out the trash.

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Neither are you.

Correct. But I haven’t made any assertions about affordability.

As you was told, Blizzard doesn’t collect player feedback on the CS forums.

I am a customer requesting support for an issue that makes the game unplayable.

At $12/hr, it would cost $8760/month to have one person monitoring chat. There is no fundamental reason why they could only monitor one server at a time. A person could reasonably monitor 3-5 servers in real time effectively. Really, this is a function of the population of the servers, moreso active people who are online, so the number of servers that could be monitored at once would increase during times when fewer people are active.

So let’s say one person can effectively manage ~60K server population. That’s estimating an average of 12K server population, 5 servers, based on my experience on a high-pop server. Obviously there’s a lot of handwaving with that number.

People can play on multiple servers, so let’s say that 60K works out to 40K unique people. At that estimate, that’s $600K/month income from subscriptions, meaning that $8760/month cost for a moderator works out to 1.5% of each person’s subscription.

Even if we did go one mod per server, that would work out to at most 7.5% of the cost of a sub.

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not a cs issue, what you are asking for is a developmental issue

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