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.
Edit: The creation of a server-wide World chat channel and moderation + restriction of LFG and Trade chats to their respective purposes could potentially suffice.