In-Game Harassment

Well, yes it is an exaggeration. Another player cannot prevent you from playing any aspect of the game. It can definitely be annoying, frustrating, and possibly may even move Blizzard to make subtle changes, but they cannot prevent you. They can stand on a mount in front of you as much as they want, they can pull out toys, etc., but none of that prevents you from doing anything.

If they are standing on an NPC you need to interact with, there are multiple ways to get around it. There’s the /tar command, in conjunction with the “Interact with” function. You can zoom into first person mode.

I don’t want to discourage you from opening a ticket, if you feel something in out of line. You absolutely should. But like we have said before, while their behavior may be annoying and confusing, they are allowed to be anywhere in the game they want, including right next to you if they choose. They are allowed to use their mounts, toys, pets, etc.

2 Likes

Here is a great tutorial about how to set up the Interact key so that it has a wide range and is easy to use. It lets you bind “interact” to a key on your keyboard instead of having to click directly on whatever it is you want to interact with.

Great for fiddly things that are partly hidden like treasures/dirt/packs, fishing, or vendors that have a mount over them.

I set it up for fishing myself, but then find it SUPER useful for a ton of other stuff.

Another option is zooming in to first person should let you get to the vendor/NPC as well. Most of the critical things have a dismount radius around them so that helps some too.

Sadly, they can add you to their friends list without your permission and you removing them does not take you off THEIR list. There is nothing Blizzard will do for being annoying and in the same area, as long as they don’t talk to you.

Frustrating, but hopefully you can set up the interact feature to make the person inconsequential as a gnat!

8 Likes

I had a similar issue but it was only on a single character. I ended up having to server transfer that character. They server transferred too. So I stopped playing the character altogether. I still don’t know how they kept finding me.

3 Likes

This is not constructive to the conversation and is unnecessary. Pointing out something that has been the case with Blizzard enough that most players know how they operate? It sucks that it’s that way, but offering insight and whatnot doesn’t mean that a personal attack is necessary.

1 Like

When you’re on the same server, just adding you to their friends list will do it. Once you server transfer, there are third-party websites who track players through name changes and any character transfers. This is usually very accurate, using shared achievements/collections/etc.

We don’t play that game here. This forum is a place for players to ask questions about current Blizzard policies. Communicating that policy is nothing more than communicating that policy.

Feedback about that (or any) current policy needs to go in the discussion forum most appropriate to the topic, with General being a catch-all. Those discussion forums are where the devs and CM’s collect feedback for consideration.

1 Like

I appreciate the suggestion for the interact key. I’ve now configured it and that will help with NPC interactions, but I’m not sure how to configure it for fishing and other interactable items (quest, etc). This is for classic, which I suspect has a much narrower feature set.

Assuming this player has me on their friends list, if I were to change my character name, would that remove me from their list or update their list to my new name? What if I were to delete and undelete my character? I’d rather not change my character’s name, but if there’s some sequence of actions I can take to change names, change appearance, and end up off their list I’m not opposed to the ideas.

1 Like

Yes, you are right, that does not have the same features as Retail, but hopefully it does help with NPCs at least.

I THINK so. I think name change alone does not work to hide you and they see your new name.

Delete current char, make new level 1 with same name that you log into once then never visit again, restore deleted char with new name? Might need paid name change to do that?

That MIGHT work? I am not sure of that though.

4 Likes

Prooooobably not. Name changes are pretty frequent on RP servers as people repurpose old characters, and I have to set notes for everyone on my friendlist in case they change their name, because they stay on my friendlist, only with a new name, and it’s like…WHOMST?

I THINK, but I don’t know for sure, that if you undelete a character it restores them on people’s friendlists also, so a rename after undeletion wouldn’t do much but again, I’m not positive.

2 Likes

I don’t believe it does. But it doesn’t stop that player from adding them back in.

Since they already have your information this might be to little to late. But here goes anyway. Go to each toon and in the options is a place to to check “show information for this toon only”. Click that on all your toons and any you make. I had a person harass me back when we could actually respond to it and this was a help. Good luck

1 Like

I’ve never heard of this. So I loaded up the game, went into options and searched for such a thing. Did you mean the option “Display Only Character Achievements to Others”?

All that does is show the individual achievement points for that character (versus account-wide achievement totals) when someone inspects you or when you look at your profile on the armory. It doesn’t “block” information that is normally accessible when you inspect someone or look at their armory profile.

If I am missing something, I’d be curious to know what it is.

Edit: Nevermind, I do see that it provides some thin veil of “anonymity” when it comes to viewing achievements on the armory. Fair. Thanks for the info.

You may need to consider the possibility, then, that what the person doing isn’t harassment. If what you say is true, then “countless” employees have looked at the records of the behavior and determined that no action is necessary.

Or the person keeps re-creating new characters over and over, in which case your only recourse is to keep putting in reports.

That person meant the actor, not the victim. The actor is indeed akin to that kid in school who didn’t touch you (break the rules) but stood there with their finger an eighth of an inch from your face saying, “I’m not breaking rules! Hahaha!”

Kamulus obviously wasn’t commenting on the victim. But we jumped on that. And fast.

5 Likes

Get the addon Global Ignore List, works through the account, I highly recommend it, there is this person who has been harassing areas non-stop, to the point of making characters and spamming our chat, Blizzard doesn’t care, let’s keep it real, even with their new “social contract” which doesn’t seem to be doing anything, case in point, this player has been harassing quite a few people for about a month now and has been reported several times.

Plenty of players coming through this forum complaining of being suspended/banned for variety of reasons and protesting their innocence though.

Which merely highlights rules that have been in place from the beginning.

Now, an important thing about reporting ongoing harassment is to NEVER engage with the player doing it. Hopefully everything has been reporting as ongoing harassment too, especially if they’re bypassing ignores, using alts etc.

Blizzard certainly will take care of it.

7 Likes

might be wise to google checkpvp fr i believe the site is, make an account then any of your characters that are shown, click the options to hide each one.

log into the game check your settings and enable the check box for the option referring to show character only achievements, as doing this will only show what character youre currently logged into has completed rather than your entire bnet accounts army of characters as a whole in terms of whats been earned/completed as far as achievements go.

server xfers can be detected by checkpvp as well, as for name changes even without friend list addons in wow if you change your toons name it will change in the default friends list if the person already has you friended at the character level.

and sadly despite the annoyance and creep factors of being followed and griefed everywhere blizzard doesnt have anything to my knowledge as far as policies and rulings go that says a player can not friend/interact with another player despite whatever nature said player might be doing or into.