It works better than it used to. Any time at all spent in Trade shows it does not stop the behavior totally. Of course not.
What people want is an instant bolt of lightning to smite the jerks. I get that. I kind of do too. It is not realistic though given the need for review of actual logs before acting.
Still, I don’t blame people for recognizing that the anonymous internet can be a pretty nasty place - and that overall companies and PEOPLE need to do better.
There will never, ever, ever EVER!!! Be a volunteer program, thank the ungrateful currs that tried to sue AOL back in the 90’s over their “Guide” program, and then the issues with EQ. Class action suits like those tend to cause shifts in the whole industry, and because of them, there won’t ever be another one by a major company again.
Uhhhhh… Have you seen how fast Illidan’s Horde trade chat speeds along?
No way would a single human be able to keep up with that.
The base pay for a game master is $16 an hour, base on Glassdoor report on that, would be ~$2,560/month. (Not sure where you got that number from to be honest.) At $16 an hour, an 8 hour work shift at 5 days a week, a person would get pay $640 for that week. Not counting overtime or weekend work. But if we do count weekend work, it’s just up to $896 a week without overtime.
Seeing as one shift won’t cover a day, (seeing as players can and will do/say things around the clock), we’d need to cover those other others. So that’d jump up to $1,920 for just a week. That’d, also, be just a five day week without overtime. For a 7 day work week, it’d be ~$2,688, a month of that would be ~$10,752. Mind you, this is before taxes and overtime. This is just for one server.
For roughly 241 server in NA, it’d come out to ~$2,591,232 a month. For a year of this, it’d be ~$31,094,784. This is just for the one chat for a given main city. But let say the can view trade, general and I think the city defends on one screen. But that won’t really stop the issue fir other zones and places commonly play in, so they’d also need folks watching the chat and upping the cost as well.
No, you are not requesting support for an issue that makes the game unplayable. You are asking for a change to how the game and policies work. That is a Development issue, not a Customer Support issue.
It wouldn’t be one person monitoring chat. It would need to be over 100 people per shift, with six overlapping shifts a day so there wouldn’t be a break in coverage during shift change, seven days a week. To cover the added expense of salaries, training, heathcare premiums, hardware and space (when they can work from the office again,) how much more are you willing to pay to play WoW?
Not really.
And how much of the sub goes to the server maintenance? Is there really that much of the subscription available for this? To pay for your idea it would more likely triple the cost of the subscription.
All you looked at was one or two chat channels that are in the cities that are shared by those cities. It doesn’t look at the two chat channels that are in every zone. It doesn’t look at the /general chat channel that each raid also has. If players stop using city chat for this, they will just move to a different zone. It also doesn’t look at the Classic chat channels, or the upcoming Classic TBC chat channels.
The other thing you aren’t considering is about what happened when they did active monitor in retail. It was only one zone. It was only on one server. It was because the issue was a real problem there. It did not help the issue at all. it made the chat problem worse. Do you know why?
Your ideas are not feasible. Active monitoring is the least effective and most disruptive way to deal with chat violations. Players reporting it when it actually happens is much more effective and cost effective.
Players handing out account action is never going to happen. The game companies that did this had those toxic people you want to get rid of work to become those monitors. They could then troll anyone with that power. That is what would happen if Blizzard gave that power to players.
Blizzard has given players the power to have an effect on chat happening in the game. It’s the Right-Click Report system. Blizzard cannot force anyone to play nice. That is a social issue and can not be programmed out of the game. Blizzard can’t for anyone to chat nice without removing chat from the game altogether.
Before you start suggesting chat filters, those don’t work either. With access to the alphabet options available with the ASCII set, and alternate spellings, it wouldn’t take players long to figure out other ways of saying the toxic comments. Blizzard tried using a filter to cut down on gold-seller spam. They put in the filter during maintenance. Literally five (5) minutes after the servers came up the gold-seller spam was back.
I think this topic has run its course, so I’m going to go ahead and close it. Thanks everyone who contributed.
To summarize -
If you see inappropriate chat in-game, please right-click and report it using the in-game systems provided by the World of Warcraft team. These systems allow chat to be flagged for Game Master review and allows for overall tracking of trends/behaviors for the game team.
If you would like to offer feedback for how systems can be improved or offer suggestions for services you’d like to see the Game Master team provide then there are a couple of ways to provide that to the game team.