Most of us do report, the problem is the lack of enforcement from Blizzard and if there is any enforcement by the time it has occurred the entire situation has long pass, sometimes by days or weeks.
I spent months during Shadowlands reporting a guild on WRA with a slur in their name and I don’t think anything ever got done about it. I kept seeing them every day in Korthia and I’d report them and the next day I’d see that same guild again.
I will admit there has been improvements this expansion with them actually enforcing bans on people with inappropriate content in their TRPs that break a number of rules. Yet, that is a separate issue from the one we’re talking about PVPers griefing RP. I have low expectations that there would be enforcement from Blizzard because their response has usually been, PVP problems need to be resolved with PVP.
Honestly, I think creating warmode and turning all the PVP servers into PVE servers was a huge mistake.
This is a problem with blizzards in and of itself. Tickets in vanilla were answered very quickly and most of the conversation would take place almost right away in game. It’s not a problem exclusive to RP servers though, and should be an issue taken up with blizzards and the WoW community council and CS forums.
This is my entire point, though. Even after the revamp to the reporting system, it didn’t account for rp realms, because you have to directly the report the person ingame as well as open a ticket to be as effective as possible. There are multiple options blizzard can take to make this better for rp realms, and keep in mind that I’m not blaming CS and GMs when I’m talking about this, but they ultimately don’t do it and don’t enforce enough.
I genuinely think that alone is a very valid reason not to link the servers, because you’re ultimately causing more grief for both with an intended bandaid fix, no less. I mean I don’t think it’s wrong to at least push for better ways to hold people accountable first, if this is going to be an inevitable outcome as norman suggested earlier. I would rather see those kinds of changes first before any talk of server merging or linking.
Yeah, I get why they did it, but I tend to agree with this more and more as time goes on.
That’s just a let the trolls win mentality. I personally don’t believe in that method.
I do understand what you’re saying, but these type of trolls exist everywhere, in every server, in every game. This isn’t only a problem on RP servers or this game in general, but this IS a blizzard problem while it is happening here, and one that then need to own up to.
Post to their twitter, blow up blizzard’s spot, get the wow community council involved, find AMAs with the devs and make it the questions to them, post in CS forums, bring it public to gaming news outlets, don’t let up.
“We’ve heard the community loud and clear. Given that there is no consensus on whether or not to merge Wyrmrest Accord and Moon Guard, we’ve decided to compromise by removing Roleplaying realms from the game.”
Anyway - I don’t really think Blizzard is a very reliable steward of anti-griefing measures. They’ve been shaving down their customer service department for years; I wouldn’t be surprised if within a few years we learn that they silently fired all their staff and just set up ChatGPT to send their customers in a circle.
I’m doubtful I’d have a good experience on a hypothetical Moonrest Guardcord without Blizzard implementing some kind of client-side super-ignore that completely removes another player from the world, toy-spam and all, and that sounds like the kind of feature that game developers hear about and go “that’s basically impossible.”
I wouldn’t complain about a larger pool of roleplayers, though; that seems like a net good. So maybe having to deal with concentrated griefing would be worth it, but I’m not really holding my breath.
I’m not sure how this was the takeaway after everything I said, but ultimately what I’m saying is that the issues present should be fixed as opposed to allowing them to turn into bigger issues first.
I do think the rpers on the wow community council should raise issues and suggestions on how best to tackle the grief, as an rp realm insight is very important to this. That said, the other suggestions you’ve mentioned could work in gaining more visibility, but they’re things that have been tried before. The most we’ve gotten is the social contract and report system update that didn’t include sorely needed features. And those, I vaguely remember raising issues about in tickets I’ve sent, and elsewhere.
I’m certainly not trying or intending to be defeatist about it, and I don’t think anyone else here is. I don’t think a single person that brought up this issue wants to “let the trolls win”.
Well I definitely agree that blizzards needs to do a much better job than they have in dealing with this kind of player harassment.
If it gets passed off to a gaming news outlet, that’s when the most traction would get picked up. Or even asking the devs point blank at blizzcon in front of everyone.
Reporting griefing, names, etc. hasn’t worked for years. Since maybe beginning of Cata. I remember some people losing non-RP names in LK. There was a mage named Icyhot who kept getting reported and lost his name repeatedly, for instance. But there was also a player with a version of Brittney Spears, another who ICly claimed to be Sylvanas in Trade Chat and another who was Neltharion all about that time and no matter how many times they were reported, they kept the names.
The report function has been dumbed down to being a drop-down menu. I don’t see Blizz backing up and deciding to make it suddenly more functional than that. It’s more “theater” than reality - think of it as those buttons that cities installed at intersections for people to push, thinking they’re changing the speed that a traffic light changes. Blizz has the report function there so you can feel like you did something to report someone who was harassing you. They will probably only follow up if someone is repeatedly being reported in a short period of time. That way they can employ less customer service personnel, which is the point for Acti-Blizz - more money for the shareholders by keeping operating costs lower and not having to give out bans for bad actors.
I’d be genuinely surprised if they let anyone from the audience speak at Blizzcon ever again.
Like, they gotta know that giving a random person the mic in a post-harassment allegation, post-“is this an out-of-season April Fools’ prank” world is a terrible idea for them, right? It’s not like they can vet the questions, either; you can just lie about the question you’re going to ask and hit them with a zinger once you’re on the air.
I was already shocked that they brought it back post-COVID, but I can’t see them willing to risk anything more than disengaged presentations now.
YES YES YES YES to all of this, thank you for saying it.
Also, people really need to stop thinking in terms that RP is either SW or ORG. I RP all the time on WrA Alliance and I dont even think to check SW anymore.
Damn it all I have a busy couple of days and I miss the drama thread. Still, it’s nice to see the forums returning to their natural state. Drama is coming back to the WRA forums and it’s beautiful
Silliness aside, I have many thoughts on this topic, so I’m going to throw in my two cents and bring forth exasperated groans from anyone and everyone who wants this thread to just die already.
First of all, I’m going to respond to this with a really bad meme.
(I’m working part time nowadays though so it’s a little easier. I sometimes play at American hours now :O)
This does however inform some of my points. There are oceanic World of Warcraft servers but not one of them is dedicated to RP. Not one. So folks who live in the Oceania part of the world have a hard time finding RP at the best of times. That gives me a bias in favour of the servers merging, especially since so many WRA-A people have already actually moved to MG over the years. I’d be in favour of a merger broadly speaking.
But it is complex. I’ll break it all down this way
The Pros:
Bigger community - thus a bigger pool of characters to build sub communities from. It’ll make it a lot easier to say, bring back race-specific RP guilds or allow RP in forgotten parts of the world. It’ll also help dumb lame Aussies like me to have a better chance at actually making friends and meeting folks IC and OOC.
As proposed above, we’d be able to keep our character names. So that’s pretty sweet. If anything we have twice the chance of actually getting our preferred character name.
A lot of WRA folks have already moved to MG, so in some ways it’d be nice to reunite with old friends.
The small town vibe can still remain. Duskwood can still become a hub for WRA folks, by and large. Stormwind is really where it’s all at for MG.
Elimination of server competition. Sometimes I feel there’s uneccessary competition between WRA and MG. It’d be nice if we were all just RPers, building communities. I’ve seen a lot of resentment or scoffing from people on both sides because “the x community is more active here, therefore why would you be there” and that sort of thing (not necessarily here, but my old ally guild from yesteryear actually had a falling out over these exact sort of points). It’d be nice to put aside the server wars and just embrace the fact that we are RPers. I’d find that quite a relief.
Perfectly balanced, as all things should be. It’ll be nice to have a visibly active walk-up community on both factions again.
The Cons:
MG Goldshire
MG Goldshire a second time because please, no. Spare us.
Servers as sanctuaries. I won’t go into details as its not my story to tell but I have a friend who won’t touch MG due to the presence of an abusive person they had a hard time with some time ago. Reading this thread, I’d suggest they’re not alone. Ripping people unceremoniously out of their sanctuary is a pretty massive con and even with all the pros, it’s enough to make me hesitant.
Potential competition over space. When servers are quieter it’s easy to have a guild HQ or something akin to it that you just happen to use every Wednesday at 8 o’clock and everyone knows this. It’s kind of an oof if there’s a merger and suddenly another guild does the exact same thing.
Server culture. Admittedly my info might be out of date here, but it used to be that MG was famous for its fanon that you sort of had to subscribe to to fit in. It also had a more flexible attitude to RP characters generally speaking. WRA used to be known as the lore-puritans. Obviously there were exceptions but that was the stereotype. I might be showing my age as a MoP boomer or whatever, but if that’s still the case it could be jarring for people as we find ourselves needing to reconcile different RP styles.
Questions:
This is where my tech knowledge is bad and I don’t understand the internal running of the servers or whatever, but if anyone can lend clarity to these and whether or not they’d be a problem, let me know!
Server population. Pretty much constantly, the WRA and MG servers are listed as High to Full population. I’ve never understood why as their numbers have visibly declined, significantly. It wasn’t so long ago that the Mage and Cathedral districts were consistently full on WRA. So it begs the question, is there still a very high volume of players that simply don’t RP? Or as WoW has declined rapidly over the years, did they simply change the numbers needed to constitute a high population server? If it’s the latter, that’s good. It means there’s the tech available to merge the two servers. If not…
Sharding. Given that we shard more than we ought to anyway, if the servers merge, would there be a population influx that leads to sharding? Because that would eviscerate the RP community generally and would entirely change my mind about connecting the servers. Better a small community that can see each other than a large community divided into several different small pockets, so that you don’t know if the person you met yesterday will even be in the same shard as you today.
Anyway, with all that in mind, I lean towards a merger. But it’s a difficult and sensitive issue and needs to be handled gently, as there are definite pros and cons to the situation. So I’d strongly suggest to those few who are being quite abrasive about their viewpoints that we handle this conversation politely and actually hear what people are saying, even if we don’t come to the same conclusions.
A man who abused me is in MG duskwood. I wont go into details. I never want to see him again. There is a reason im against this. I love Duskwood. I would stop playing if the servers merged.
Still, it’s nice to see the forums returning to their natural state. Drama is coming back to the WRA forums and it’s beautiful 
