On one of my servers, There’s been one specific person incessantly spewing antisemitic and racist comments and trade chat, and then it spirals into everyone vs them and the people they bring out of the woodworks. I don’t mind some stimulating political talk, in fact I love hearing other peoples perspectives and discussing views. This person, however, is using dehumanizing language, blaming one specific group for everything, saying the world would be better without them, and making some awful comments about violence against them. It’s SUPER unpleasant. All of the chat in trade about the game gets lost in the arguments, and he will personally attack anyone who disagrees with him. Today, he brought another person out of the woodwork who was almost saying WORSE violent things than he was, and its very concerning. I, and multiple other people have reported them, but nothing has happened yet. I’m shocked that the chat rules aren’t stricter.
And don’t engage with them in trade chat or otherwise. They are trying to bait you into saying something that violates the rules so they can report you.
The rules are actually quite restrictive when it comes to this kind of context.
People come in here clamoring all the time about being silenced and shouting they did nothing wrong until they’re blue in the face. Eventually it’s revealed that they were banned for using the f-bomb in public channels-- something a lot of people take for being rather innocuous in today’s lexicon, but it’s also something that isn’t permitted on Blizzard’s platform, regardless of the mature language filter.
Three possibilities spring to mind, to put your mind at ease. First and least likely, with only hearing your side of the narrative so far, it’s possible that Blizzard doesn’t agree with your opinion. Just reiterating, least likeliest outcome.
Secondly, they’re character hopping. I see you’re on Anvilmar, which is connected to seven other realms. They could have characters with the same name on each of those realms, swapping them out on rotation.
The third outcome, and most likely, is that the reports simply haven’t yet landed at the front of the queue. If report queues are mirrored or shared with ticket queues, they’re several days backlogged. It also is important to note that you cannot lodge more than one unique report against someone per Battle.Net account: reporting them on two or more characters will simply consolidate with the initial report, but otherwise leave the report unaffected. That can also echo a previous sentiment that not enough unique accounts are reporting them for any sort of urgency.
But to circle back to the beginning of this post, we see all the time that reporting does work. It just often requires us to have a little patience while it works through Blizzard’s system.
On Moon Guard we’ve had similar situations over the years, and sometimes far too recently.
The good news, all these bad actors get actioned.
The bad news, it can take too long. Their point is to rile people up and it works, sometimes for weeks or months it seems. Sometimes they come back and go again and again.
The sad part is that to report them you must expose yourself to that darkness.
Do what ya can, when ya can, but also keep your sanity.
While it can take longer than you might like sometimes, if people are breaking the rules they will be actioned. The best option as others has mentioned is to simply right click their name associated with the objectionable text, and Report, this will also ignore them for the session you are on.
If this isn’t enough, you can also ignore them permanently, though you do have a limit on how many you can put on your ignore list. Additionally never ever respond to them in anyway, not only will it encourage additional harassment, if they can get you to violate the TOS, say by swearing, they can then report you, so just report them, then simply move on.
This is very helpful! Definitely puts my mind at ease. I have faith that something WILL happen through reporting at some point, and the more he spews then surely the more unique accounts will report him. The general consensus when he starts is always “Don’t even acknowledge him, he just wants attention. Report and move on” which is imo the right response. Hopefully eventually his antics will tire out, nobody will care or be shocked anymore when he starts, and people will do exactly that. Just so saddening to see that kind of negativity when trying to play a game that’s always been a positive for me and many others.
I wish we got a “thank you for reporting, action was taken” in-game mail when someone is actioned for social infractions like we do for reporting bots. Would at least let us know action was taken.
The notice for actions for chat reports used to be a thing, but I have not seen it recently.
For me it was always kinda weird, bugged, except at the start.
Sometimes I’d log into a classic version and have 100 thank you’s (these are different than the bot report ones), which had to be individually clicked! Not too fun, but not terrible as it let me know actions were taken.
As I said, I have not seen the notices recently. But I stopped logging into what is now MoP, or any version of classic at all.
I think there are back end issues with it. But /shrug, that’s a just a guess.
If it was just a single mail that would be fine. Even if it was only sent weekly.
Just something, because otherwise it seems like nothing happens to them. I know they do get penalties, but most players do not come to this forum so they don’t see that’s the case.
It was a little pop up next to the map, different from the in game mail ty for cheating/bot reports.
The reason I said it was weird is because all of mine were from Retail, but I’d only see them when I logged into classic, the version that is now MoP. Then Pop!, the system would give me a ton and I’d click through them. I’d log into classic very very rarely at the time with just 1 low lvl toon there. Now I don’t even do that anymore, so…well, it was weird. I think bugged on back end somehow and maybe not too high on the ‘to fix’ list.
Anyway, Blizz does take action. It can take time.
I will note one relatively recent time. On MG someone being very very inappropriate in chat with an extremely inappropriate name. The worst stuff.
A Blue whispered me in game to grab the name and I am certain that account is closed or locked for being hacked.
So Blizz does do things, even whisper you in game sometimes when locating needs to happen.
I haven’t received any notifications about actions taken against people I reported for a long time. About a year ago, I used to get these notifications shortly after reporting someone for chat violations, but suddenly they stopped, and I went several months without any notifications.
Some time later, when I created a character in MoP Classic just to get the Shaohao’s Sage Serpent mount, I had around 30 notifications piled up (this was a few months ago).
Recently, when I logged into Classic, there were no notifications at all. I think the system might be bugged, since I report people for chat violations almost every day, especially in the MoonGuard trade chat.
Right click report for language. They will get them! Plenty of people come here complaining about getting suspended or banned for chat violations. It does work!