These two quotes sum up the entirety of my feelings and why I’m both-sides-ing this. Allow me to ramble, rant, and relate my own experiences for a minute.
Back when I first discovered WoW RP and got convinced to download an addon to see profiles, my very first (and second, and third, and fourth) experience could best be described as unsolicited smut. I was an adult (and allegedly still am), but it was very overwhelming. And not even in Goldshire or SMC or the usual places you might see something like that; it was Shattrath, back when people went there. Just straight walls of text boxes of smut, with no warning at all.
Of course, this was in the olden days of addons, and on Moon Guard during its rise to infamy, so that context is important.
From my very niche experience, things have gotten significantly better as addons advance in complexity and the community has become more aware of the possible presence of minors. When I log on my Alliance alts, who still live on MG, I might see a class replaced with some questionable content (and I’m pretty sure that isn’t a class!!!), and Goldshire is certainly an… Experience, I rarely see anything blush-worthy unless I ignore clearly written warning signs and go out of my way to click through a profile.
Now, my experience is not everyone’s experience. Obviously not. But I’d wager that the ERP sub-community has largely taken steps to prevent potentially abusive situations or accidental exposure of adult content, again given my own sample size (which could very well be observer bias).
Now, clearly the issue is still relevant. It might take a few extra steps to get to the naughty bits, and it requires you to already be very aware of what a big pile of acronyms mean (I still have no idea what most of them mean beyond “Alynsa will probably be blushing soon”) to avoid seeing it. There should be a better method of… I’m grasping for the word. Not shielding, not advertising, but something between those for ERP or other NSFW content. And it can’t just be “shove them in a corner” either, because what happens when The Children find themselves in that corner?
But I have seen how Blizzard “moderated” Goldshire in the past, and it was blanket ban waves. I caught a 24 hour one that got shortened or overturned, all for the crime of “being in Goldshire after a bad news story got put out by a games journalist”. IIRC, I was mining copper in the kobold cave nearby.
Blizzard has a long and storied history of moderating to extremes; punish everyone remotely suss or let the children play without parental supervision. Blatantly racist guild names going unpunished in spite of multiple reports for months, openly homophobic general chat going on for longer, so on and so forth. Or banning anyone who spends too much time fishing (I almost got banned for that too!!). Or someone who happens to play for too many consecutive hours.
Blizzard getting more involved in the RP scene in an authorative way will lead to only one of two ends; nothing changes at all, or RP dies. It’s as simple as that.
My personal opinion is that while the problem exists, and it is bad, I do not trust Blizzard to be the solution. If they’re not addressing already-reported RP profiles, then throwing in more resources to the RP community won’t make them start. It’ll just do what has been done before; ban waves for a minute then back to nothing.
If anything, this might be where the addon community is better suited to step in.
If this were still the case, it’d be more reasonable for people to be concerned.
Many people are courteous enough to include 18+ warnings at the start of their profiles, and even before opening them there’s usually indicators of what they’re about.
The vast majority of abuse that occurs is within guilds, where people get coerced into doing things they don’t want to do and are intimidated because of power dynamics. The guilds are where bad activities get hidden, including cases of child grooming, and it takes several steps that tend to be easy to avoid to get put into a situation like that. It’s up to server communities to find these groups, and after getting evidence of explicit activities involving minors, to report them to authorities. Some of this harm is done by people who claim to be against all of this, in order to trick people and have deniability. This type of thing isn’t done by random people in Goldshire, it’s done by organized groups, and going against Goldshire pushes people to hidden places that foster danger where people can’t see it.
I think the solution is education. Parents need to talk to their children about what can be found on the internet, and speak to them often about what it is they engage with. People in the game should explain to new players things that can be found in the game. What should be combated is ignorance. Knowledge can be very helpful.
I want to avoid having innocent people get banned. I don’t trust Blizzard to solve a problem in a way that isn’t heavy handed. They get extreme in their solutions. I suspect that them intervening in this would cause more harm than good. It’d definitely cause another scandal for them.
I do think them getting involved in the RP scene would cause damage to it. I don’t trust Blizzard to implement measures that would actually be helpful. Which might be partly why this is a subject I’m so concerned about.
And they earned that respect. I used to respect these developers but now I don’t. Anyone who forces me to respect someone who has not earned it deserves no respect from me. They will however be treated with manners and politeness.
“Respect” has multiple meanings. People often equivocate them. “Respect” can simply being considerate of somebody’s feelings. It can also mean a sense of admiration, like the respect you may have for someome who achieved something great. They are different.
Thats the thing the definition that being considerate of someone feelings came afterwards. I actually mentioned the word respect has lost its meaning in recent times just like how people say legit doesn’t mean that anymore. EDIT: Doesn’t help they basically are telling me to respect them when they muted me and put me on a vacation LOL
No, I said that those who engage in ERP are not causing harm, they are not the people I’m talking about in my thread on the CC. I said the people who are not playing with responsibility is the problem.
It’s true that instantly banning someone for behaviour like that is draconian, and I don’t want that. Punishment should be relative to the offense. Break the rules a few times, you get a warning. If you keep breaking them, maybe your account is silenced, or you get a suspension. If you keep violating the rules again, and again, and again, you will eventually get banned. More on punishment later!
Not… quite? Even if the ESRB labeled the game that way, if the behaviour is against the terms of the Code of Conduct and you encounter it, you did not consent to encountering it, because it is against the rules.
I didn’t say the majority didn’t know, and saying the majority knows doesn’t contest my point. Who is it that don’t know this? It’s new players, and players who aren’t as clued into the wider community. Goldshire is also one of the places many prospective roleplayers go first, and that in turn makes a pretty bad impression.
Like I said, I used an example that was relevant to roleplayers, and Goldshire fit the bill pretty well. I could have also talked about the people who spam racist or sexist slurs in public channels or in /yells across the cities, or anyone else doing anything else that qualifies as being in violation with the code of conduct. I don’t want to nuke Goldshire. I want the rules to be applied everywhere.
Edit: other examples include griefers, something roleplayers are intimately familiar with. I could’ve used this example as well, it’s been brought up to me in my community several times already.
So far my points have been:
Toxic behaviour should be punished by moderation.
ERP is not toxic behaviour, but players with explicit public profiles, players that publicly engage in erotic content, and players who actively or unknowingly engages in this sort of content with underage people, are not acting responsibly and are thus engaging in toxic behaviour.
Not everyone in Goldshire qualifies under the list of items in the former point, which means they are not putting themselves at risk to punishment.
It is difficult to give consent to these actions and/or protect oneself from this if there are no indications that this type of content and behaviour exists, therefore the offended parties are not responsible.
I don’t see any contradictions, but I might have missed something, or perhaps I worded myself poorly. Please correct me and point it out if I did!
It is true that it has gotten better in more recent years, in no small part due to people taking responsibility themselves. I applaud everyone who does so, because I don’t think the problem with the ERP community is the existence of the community itself, their preferred way of playing, but the bad eggs that don’t do this. Self-regulation is good, but it is currently not good enough.
There are probably better ways of doing it, and I hope we’ll find some effective ways of doing it. I don’t really like the idea of punishment, and I do believe the better of people. Right now, I think punishment is the best way to go about it. It doesn’t solve the problem perfectly, but I don’t see much better options.
This is perhaps the best point against punishment, because Blizzard has historically not been very good at dealing with it. It has typically been very heavy-handed and half-hearted, and that approach has never worked. However, that isn’t to say that moderation through punishment is bad in of itself. Poorly wielded power is bad for everyone involved, and it erodes trust in those that wield it. Blizzard would also need to change their approach to how they go about dealing punishment, what punishments they’re doing, and who to punish - and there needs to not only be an appeal system, but a way for us to hold Blizzard accountible when they are wielding their power erroneously. It needs to go both ways.
I mostly covered this one in the point above, but I wanted to add that I don’t want something targeting Goldshire and the ERP communities only. That’s going to create a whack-a-mole fun time of moving the banhammer around Azeroth. This level of oversight needs to go everywhere.
This is certainly a step in the right direction, and a good way for the community to self-regulate. For example, I believe TRP3 has a mature profiles filter, which isn’t perfect, but definitely a good step in the right direction. I believe it filters based on a list of words, it would be helpful if it instead allowed someone to flag their own profile as mature, and then other players will get a warning when they open the profile. Basically like this:
By being given a warning that a profile contains something, you have given them a chance to consent. And if a child clicks onto it - well, they shouldn’t do that, and it is their parents’ responsibility to teach them not to.
Again, I want to repeat that I think this is a game-wide problem, and that Goldshire is just an example of it. As is illustrated here, there’s a lot of really bad stuff going on in organised guilds, and that is a lot harder to crack down on - but is definitely something that needs to be cracked down on. Especially the grooming and other criminal activity. But the existence of bad stuff going on in the shadows, is not an excuse to allow other bad stuff to go on in the light.
Education is really important, but it’s not only the parents’ responsibility here. Yes, it is certainly true that they need to consider this when they’re letting their kids play WoW. But most parents don’t play WoW, they don’t know about Goldshire, and if they don’t know, how will they be able to make a good judgement about it when they let their children play? We could educate the parents, of course. There could (and should) be better parental controls set in place - right now there is no parental regulations over TRP for instance. Simply adding a warning, as was suggested, goes a long way in the line of education too.
There will still be offenders and problematic people, and education alone isn’t going to solve that. Do we learn to live with a problem, or do we solve it? And I’m not necessarily saying we solve it with an iron fist through punishment, that is what I suggested and what I currently think is the best idea, but we need a solution.
… Also, I think this discussion is kind of against the intended topic of this thread, so I think this will be the last I will respond to it here. Maybe another thread would be a better place to have a discussion on this? The reason I put mine on the CC in the first place is because I think it is a discussion worth having.
To that point, I can’t speak for the intention of the thread… As a forum goer, while I appreciate your time here, as a duly appointed Council member, discussing things with folks, like Blizzard intended…this all does seems more like RP related stuff than Lore and Story.
Sure. By all means. It isn’t like the story is going to suddenly be saved, and render criticism moot. It will be there to discuss.
It is good that you see your RP and Lore points as separate things needing separate consideration.
I was thinking about that saying today, and I was realizing that it’s also just different definitions of respect. And that the more general respect is the same sort of respect as in the phrase “Respecting boundaries” the respect that’s just recognizing the validity of something. So in this context you don’t need to look up to a dev in respect, but respect them as people enough that we as a generic group of people who play games get past the point where too many of us think that threats and abuse are an acceptible form of feedback to them.
Not contradicting, just a thought I had today and piggybacking on your post.
I respect the guys who do the art, and design main zones, quests, and dungeons. I guys in charge of the main story involving the primary Azerothian NPC cast, and who add a half dozen new systems and currencies every patch, I don’t.
This is something that actually needs solving and is topic worthy. This is something that has happened everywhere in the game without proper repercussions. It’s sad when streamers bring an audience that has no respect for the RP community and encourages them to grief roleplayers, and they are allowed to get away with it despite blatantly filming what they’re doing, as what happened in Asmongold’s project 60.
This is also worth having a topic made over, though I do feel it’s something that could cause retaliation from Blizzard themselves so I don’t blame anyone if they’re to afraid to do it. Accountability for Blizzard CMs and GMs is important since they have sometimes done things out of their own personal bias without a way to take them to account.
I think this is the ideal solution.
They don’t need to, they just need to inform their children about content that can be found on the internet and why it’s bad for them.
I kind of used this place as an opportunity to rant and wasn’t entirely expecting for you to respond to it, and I didn’t want to make a topic in general discussion since I figured someplace like that would cause the topic to get drowned out by too many voices who don’t care about the subject. Though even if we disagree, I do have more on your perspective on this now which I respect and am grateful for. Thanks again for responding and taking the time to properly reply, you’re an example of how council members should handle this duty given to them. I hope this didn’t stress you out too much, the story forums probably get talked about in the council discord and I don’t want you to think I’m trying to cancel you or something like that. You’ve been putting in much effort and that should be commended.
Maizou ranted about the Twitter hate squad, and defended that guy as well. They’re accusing me of going through their post history, when I didn’t even have to, since I was in that Exploring Kalimdor thread when it was active.
The way people blame everything on Baal, I’m starting to picture him as a little satyr with a little pitch fork and a lyre, gleefully rallying villagers for mischief.
The dude took screenshots of the conversations, left the name in there and tried to get a mob going. There is evidence for this blame.
What purpose does it serve to single out a user like this than have a mob be rallied against them?
Nothing besides making this person a target for attacks.
