New ToS For RP realms

Moon Guard
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So with the new ToS being introduced with the brand new patch; we are introduced to a few new guidelines! Now these are no problem, I myself would never outwardly harass someone else or berate them with hateful comments or telling them to go “F themselves.”

But in a Roleplay Realm, Moonguard Specifically; RP can get heated, your character can be rude. Hatred flows during story and all that, and often or not characters insult one another.

How is the new ToS going to sift through and make sure that players aren’t banned for roleplay under the tense of harassing another player verbally? What are your thoughts on the matter?

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Yea honestly the way it’s worded has me concerned. I don’t want to get banned for letting a random f bomb fly.

Cause GM’s don’t care about context. If someone cries harassment you’re screwed.

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Fun fact: It’s not new TOS.

It’s just out of the fine print and into the fore now.

All you can do is pick people to RP with that you’re sure understand the basic of IC =/= OOC.

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The first part of the Social Contract discusses guidelines for being helpful and polite to people OOC.

The second part of the Social Contract reiterates the Code of Conduct and the Terms of Service which remain unchanged.

There’s no changes. It’s OOC suggestions and the existing TOS, reworded.

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“That’s the neet part! they wont!”

From being in quite alot of guilds lemmi tell ya, the excuses to silence people you don’t like by mass reports are very large.

witch makes me wonder ‘Just why wasen’t this included in the ToS in nice bold text’ or ‘in a page two’ and instead of a completely separate but not really tos thats just like the first tos but with the fake pretense of 'be nice guys and ignore our boo boos :frowning: '?

Oh before I forget, i’ve herd the push for there automated system to be more wide scale is also quite the concern leading to said false reports being overlooked. sure streamers would get there complaints actually looked at and reversed but the common shlub? good luck buck, not going to happen.

One last thing, I found it odd so many people are defending it this bloody hard unironically when quite a good chunk of people like myself had thought of this and read it had these concerns only to be just be dubbed ‘your overthinking it, you just want to say slurs and be toxic, absolutely nothing you stated is going to happen’ despite the fact this is from the same company who thought using a ‘point-buy system’ to make there chariters. You know the one. :weary:

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Hate speech, harassment, threats and slurs have no place anywhere period, and I do hope this helps that. But I do worry, that it will make trolls have more power to falsely and constantly report people under the guise of ‘Offensive or disruptive conduct’. I feel like this will hit alot of innocent people the crossfire. I think for this plan to work, it has to have GMs and CS on standby and handling it well and promptly, but with how automated it is, its rigged against you by default. Thats what people are really worried about. It shouldn’t be ‘Guilty until proven innocent.’

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That’s good to hear! My guildy who made this thread and a few others of us were nervous this was an attempt to make all forms of mature RP, essentially PG’d.

That any mentions of remote curse words or IC “threats” can be considered “harrassment”, etc. It makes me glad that there’s some form of cohesion here, as any form of serious structured roleplay environment can’t exist if something as simple as a veiled threat can get your account banned.

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I mean, OOCly absolutely. ICly, if someone comes up to me and lightly insults my character.

Is that technically “targeted harassment”? Technically Sure.

But IC and OOC are two entirely different beasts. Most good roleplayers aren’t going to shy away from having a character insulted. And if they are that sensitive OOC, they can easily ask the person to stop.

I dare say most people have been involved in some form of RP that they have been at one point or another. If people can suddenly start reporting for something so very minor, that can destroy any form of realistic, mature roleplay with any form of nuance behind it that isn’t all just one big hand holding session, that’ll kill all roleplay on the server.

Imagine trying to roleplay an antagonist where you couldn’t even be remotely mean? It’d get Saturday Morning Cartoon Levels of poor writing. =/ I think that’s the major fear with this.

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Honestly, OOC wise, insulting someone, usually shouldn’t earn a ban or suspension. If someone walks up to me, says I suck, that I should quit, that anyone who has a brain would avoid you like plague, thats hurtful, its mean and uncalled for. And I ignore them. And often, thats the end of it. If it was a slur, or hate speech, or a threat, okay, report that, thats WAY way out of line. But you shouldn’t ban people for being jerks. You should ban for things that were just mentioned, and, of course, those that persist. Making trial accounts to harass, using people to get around ignores, ban them, hit them good. But if someone is a jerk, just use what we have had for decades. Ignore them.

And no, I don’t think people should be mean. if someones mean, they get a rep, people avoid them, etc just like real life. And they reap what they sow.

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I’m honestly not concerned, outside of getting hit with a mass-report. There’s literally zero chance they’re going to take action on random one-off reports. Gotta remember, modern Blizzard is turbo-lazy.

Essentially nothing has really changed.

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The Social Contract might not be anything new out of the ToS but its recent highlight personifies the fact that Blizzard now will-be/Is-in-fact paying special attention and cracking down on these specific generalizations of chat.

Consent between Roleplayers is completely moot if the player is seen violating the Social Contract. In the last few weeks on this Forum (using this example at face-value) there were Roleplayers who were wrongfully punished because a random passerby took offense to a public scene between consenting Roleplayers.
Player presence on the Forums is a minority, so there could be more instances of a similar event happening to other players.

To my point, it installs a sense of concern in me that players won’t be able to have any Contention with RP encounters. Any storied tension between characters will be relegated strictly to Party/Raid/Guild chat - anything that’s not public chat.

Storied Drama will share the same ruled taboo that ERP does and Public RP will be relegated strictly to Slice-of-Life content.

We’re officially now walking on eggshells.

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The problem is Blizzard wants a game where teens and adults interact on a regular basis.

I have never ever seen a RP guild that accepted people under 18. Adults want to act like adults and i’m not talking about ERP.

But we have to cater to the lowest common denominator because “kids play this game”

Also i think it’s very hypocritical of Blizzard whom is fresh off of abuse and harassment allegations telling us how to behave.

But the dangerous part of this, is it once again gives power to those by simply being offended, and the system can easily be abused.

As the workload of GM’s increase the less likely they will be to hear people out, Instead they are more likely to just ban and move on to the next problem

This will contribute to RP going more insular, people only RPing with people they trust because they are afraid of running into that one report happy person that can completely screw their account over.

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There is no reasonable way to police the difference between IC and OOC interactions, that’s the crux of the problem.

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Back in the day, if something offended you, you asked someone to politely stop. If they didn’t, or chose to continue doing something in a public forum, that was grounds for a report. In the past, Blizzard had stated that before reporting, if you hadn’t asked someone to stop the bad behavior, there likely wasn’t going to be any action taken. After all, how was someone supposed to know that the other person was bothered by something you were doing?

There are, of course, ways around these sorts of things like, for instance, writing expletive instead of typing out the actual expletive. Or using an emote to convey an idea rather than spoken words.

What I see here is nothing short of simply asking people to keep drama-heavy RP to private chats and keep the public channels open for less difficult kinds of interactions. It’s not ideal, but this is something that’s always been an issue when it comes to RP. And knowing when to take your RP to private channels has always existed (like since Vanilla, even).

It’s never fun to have to admit that something bothers or seems offensive to me; nine times out of ten it creates a lot more drama than just staying silent. But if we aren’t willing to speak up, if we don’t let others know when we’re upset or offended by something–if we don’t ask them to stop, it’s really not fair to expect them to know when we’re bothered. If we’ve done that much and they’re still willing to continue, it’s safe to say they’re exhibiting bad behavior worthy of a report.

If you’re thinking of reporting someone for something, please ask them to stop the behavior first; let them know you find it troubling or offensive. If they’re unwilling to take their conversations elsewhere (i.e. somewhere less public) or continue to do something you asked them not to do, report them. Blizzard will take those reports more seriously than those who just indiscriminately report people for “reasons.”

And if you don’t want to ask someone to stop what they’re doing, there’s an ignore feature. It’s pretty handy and often makes the game a lot more relaxing when used. I do wish that Blizzard would consider taking a look at certain characters or accounts if they find a lot of people have put that person on ignore, though. They’d likely find all the buying and selling of boosts toons that I really don’t want to take the time to report. Or that one guy that keeps asking me if I’m a girl and do I do things like ERP.
:stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

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Curiosity got the best of me. I’ve submitted a ticket regarding this very thing, on blizzard’s policy (if any) regarding the context of RP realms and IC behaviours breaking ToS.

The behavioural contract isn’t anything new, but it might be helpful to know if they have a plan for combating report-button abuse and if they’re expecting everyone to be sunshine and rainbows IC as well as OOC.

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An Eye on Roleplayers Behavior - Support / Customer Support - World of Warcraft Forums (blizzard.com)

see here. blizz has no plans to support the rp community considerations in light of the new contract. it’s a travesty. Your characters will not even be able to heatedly disagree in public without risking you getting banned. RIP RP

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The “new” community contract didn’t change anything that wasn’t already in place. Ten years ago, if someone wanted to report you for swearing in /say or /emote it could still be done.

RP has always existed in kind of a semi-supported bubble of “let’s all be cool, okay, we’re all just nerds doing a weird mix of writing and acting for our hobby and we’re ALL just kind of going to agree to be…cool about it. OKAY?” Blizzard has traditionally gone to some lengths to support our ability to use their game for what’s technically an unsupported purpose, like removing phasing from legacy content, taking reports of harassment through toys or other OOC disruptions a little more seriously especially during big regular events like the Tournament of Ages.

But, at any point in the past, if people wanted to go around reporting every single IC swear word that someone said, they could’ve and that person probably would’ve gotten an account action for it, as this pre-Social Contract thread shows.

What prevents that is what has always prevented it before, and that’s the community and not the game moderators. The tenuous social contract that we have with each other that we’re all just here to have silly, geeky fun and that everyone is going to understand that harassing each other with behavior like that is a) not cool and b) almost certainly going to backfire when it’s eventually sussed out. And it probably will be, because we have a lot of tools at our disposal and the persistent community to figure these things out. And also with the understanding that some things, even when said “IC”, are still not cool since they represent terms and prejudices that don’t demonstrably exist in the lore of the game world.

So it really nothing has changed. Like it always has in our strange hobby, it comes down to understanding that:

  • Some things, even when said IC, still cross a line like slurs against conditions, sexualities and IRL races

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The difference between before and after the social contract is Blizzard is taking a much more active stance I believe.

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I’m with you on this. I really don’t see this as, “bad guys in RP or characters having a fight will get banned.” I’ve been reading other threads like this, and strongly encourage people to appeal if something like that happens.

That said, nothing about the rules have changed, but people appear to be all sorts of frustrated that they need to agree more proactively to be kind and reasonable, and if you’re kind and reasonable while playing a villain or a character who’s in a fight with another, you and your RP partner probably both have the sensibility to keep truly obscene things out of the public eye.

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Antagonist characters can yes have their fights, the issue is that villains are now de-clawed, in-public forced to be watered down so as to comply with Blizzard’s new choice of actually enforcing an old rule.

The easiest example of this would be in-universe racial slurs or racial competition:
Crusaders must now be careful in how they voice opposition to the Undead.

Crime characters must be careful now in their voicing of intimidation tactics & shakedowns.

The classic Gnome vs Goblin Engineering must also now use safe language so as to not offend the opposing party.

Me, personally as a Dragonslayer: I now have to be careful in how I voice opposition to Dragon characters. “Scalies” can be both an affectionate term and a derogatory one.

Antagonists must now follow the same formality that ERP does and take all their encounters private. Public RP is at risk to devolve into exclusively slice-of-life content. Even in doing this: RP is not a valid excuse in the eyes of a GM, Rules are Rules.

And to be clear: The above examples are just one viewpoint on the new enforcement of old rules. Protagonists and everyone else in between are just as at risk as Antagonists.

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