In game chat in HC WoW on Defias Pillager is WAY out of control!

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This was originally posted in 21 but I feel that this NEEDS to be addressed again in 23. The world chat in Defias Pillager HC is unbelievable! This game is becoming trash and I won’t allow my children to play it. WoW needs to have a chat GM.

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 HC - 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 censorship 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 world chat cannot be used for ooc content or any content other than toxic because people are using it to spew their toxic content.

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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Sorry, but Blizzard doesn’t collect player feedback or requests on the CS forums as the devs and the people that can do anything about don’t come here. If you wish to be heard, post on the hardcord forums or general discussion.

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You’re right, it doesn’t. If you’re not reporting people and only ignoring them, then Blizzard isn’t being notified that there is an issue. If you assume other people are doing the reporting and you don’t need to, this is a very incorrect and negligent assumption. Right-click and report each and every instance that is breaking the rules.

If you hang around here long enough, we routinely get people who come here to cry and complain because of any number of reasons why their suspensions and silences weren’t legit and it goes bonkers for a bit until a mod strikes it down. So there are consequences - if bad behavior is being reported.

Blizzard has always been reactionary. They tried before to put a GM in a very prime spot where a lot of bad behavior happens. It was an experiment that blew back into their face. What you’re requesting isn’t particularly feasible, but you are absolutely allowed to submit your suggestion in the proper places. Either in Classic/Hardcore General Discussion or through the in-game suggestion interface. Here, you’re preaching to your fellow players and it’s because of this forum’s particular format that no staff comes here beyond our SFAs, and they don’t collect feedback nor do they relay it along.

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The first way was tried before.

You’d need a workforce bigger than you’d probably realise to successfully do this - at considerable cost which would eventually be passed to the paying customer.

The second way was tried by Sony, in a similar capacity - it ended horrible under a wave of lawsuits if I recall.

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This is why it’s important to report inappropriate chat.

As others have mentioned, MANY times we’ll see players come here to complain they were indeed actioned. Things may not happen at the speed everyone would like, but they do happen.

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Congratulations…the volunteer is you.

Right-click report on toxic/profane/offensive chat lines. Every time you see it, wherever you see it.

Will that potentially be a lot of reports? Yes.

Will something come about from it instantly? Probably not, but it only takes one report to get something reviewed, and penalties are cumulative.

Will the GMs always agree that the chat was inappropriate? Not necessarily, but at least it would have been looked at.

You won’t have the power to mute people, but that will happen anyway if enough people report a person in a short window of time, their ability to chat will be squelched until a GM can look at their case.

I’d personally recommend against warning people, that tends to just escalate their behavior, but if they start getting reported they’ll get a pop-up letting them know that people are reporting their behavior and they should potentially knock off whatever it is that they’re doing.

That has always been a diceroll, and as a parent it has always been your responsibility to monitor and control their online interactions. My kids have been playing since they were below school age, jumping characters around all the way up to today when one of them who basically learned to read from quest text still plays as an adult, raiding on WotLK: Classic. But it was always my responsibility as the parent to turn off chats, turn off whispers, turn off party invitations, turn off guild invitations, educate them on proper and safe behavior, have them play only in my direct line of sight, and supervise their gameplay until that particular kid was ready to be gradually more exposed to the wilds of the internet. If you haven’t been doing that all this time wherever they go online, they’ve already seen a lot.

There was never a point of time in the past where people were more polite and declined to act up than it is now. The reporting features and parental controls are more robust and streamlined than they ever have been before. But there does need to be effort on your side in this and more or less any other online game to cultivate the experience that you want you and your kids to have through your own active mitigation and diligence.

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Blizzard did that once in a certain zone on a certain realm. What happened? Did the chat improve? No, it did not. It got worse. The players on that realm assumed that the monitoring GM would see it without having to have it pointed out so they stopped reporting it. Players from other realms made characters there and did the inappropriate chat to see how far they could go before the GM did something.

Right-click and report the player. It doesn’t fill up your ignore list. It also brings it to Blizzard’s attention so something can be done about it.

There is. Just because you don’t see it personally doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.

There will not be a volunteer system that you are looking for. Volunteers would require training to have them follow Blizzard’s policies. According to labor laws those “volunteers” would then be considered employees.

Use parental controls and block any chat channel you don’t want them to access.

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To add to this, Sony tried this at one point. IIRC it was with Everquest, but feel free to correct me if I got the wrong game (because I’ve never played it). Anyway…there was a massive lawsuit, and they were found to have violated labor laws by letting volunteers moderate chat. They basically had to back-pay everyone involved in the program.

Just because you “volunteer” for something, or sign something that says you aren’t an employee, does not mean the company doesn’t have to obey labor laws. That doesn’t even get into the can of worms of allowing unpaid untrained “non-employees” taking actions on paying customers’ accounts. Blizzard employees have specific policies they have to follow that are in line with the TOS and approved by a legal team. Letting random players “action accounts” would be nearly instant lawsuit.

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The vast majority of the guilds there are absolutely terrible and have very vulgar chat yes. But as trade chat goes, it is not anything worse than anywhere else.

Most guilds there consist mainly of people who never have and never will reach level 60 and so troll and insult anyone and everyone who dies on guild chat using their death log addon. But I found only one good guild that doesn’t do that so far. But still their chat can be pretty bad sometimes.

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Then leave the chat channels. I know I have. You’re never going to avoid this, and complaining about it isn’t going to stop it. The internet is an anonymous hellhole where the vitriol, hate, bigotry, and outright horror of the human condition can be vented without lasting consequences.

Every - single - game - that has an online primary focus has this problem. People who are hellbent on being this way will just make new accounts, and unique to hardcore, new characters when theirs dies for whatever reason.

Blizzard does have policies and consequences for using the obvious no-no words. But if you’re talking about just mildly inappropriate topics, sexual references, or other adult oriented chatter then you should just quit playing - because that’s never going away.

The online experience is not rated by the ESRB for a reason, because it can’t be rated anything but M for Mature or A for Adult due to the unpredictability of the people who play the games. That means that any online game is not a place for children if you do not want them exposed to any of that.

If you think that chat moderators would fix this issue, then you just are simply delusional and I’m not saying that to be mean. Even strict enforcement won’t stop people from doing it. Starter Accounts, people with more money than sense, or those who know how to perfectly skirt the rules will always come back.

But yeah, WoW was never meant for children - even the quests sometimes dabble in adult references, topics, and other things not meant for young children. But your kids are most likely being exposed to this on a daily basis in school as well - you can’t shelter your kids perfectly and attempting to do so is an exercise in futility. The only thing you can exert some modicum of control is to properly educate your kids how to deal with, process, and react to these situations. More often than not, the most effective way of preventing certain behaviors from your children is to simply ask them not to do it - and to teach them not to be the people who make chat a toxic place.

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Please be mindful of the age of the thread you’re replying to. Anything over a week or two is considered a necro. OP hasn’t even logged into the forums with that character since the beginning of October.

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