Taking a note from Jagex’s book, Blizzard should add Player mods. Since they are clearly way too busy to look over the game themselves. It would calm the bot problem down a little.
5 Likes
Player moderators would functionally act the same as the mass-report banning feature that works so very well and has zero false positives.
What’s stopping them from levying their moderator positions against legitimate players that they have grudges towards?
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Would players want to be moderators? They want to play the game, not do Blizzard’s job for free
11 Likes
If a player moderator putting in mod time while playing were “paid” their sub fees, then sure. It is frustrating as hell to be tripping over blatant botting in virtually every leveling zone, while being powerless to remove them. Give select players the power to do so, while picking up the tab for their sub? TONS of people would do it.
2 Likes
Yes, you can look at CS:GO or LoL for examples of this.
Some people want to “make the game a better place” while others may want “the power and prestige” of being able to ban people.
That would be unneeded, honestly. People will happily do that kind of thing for free, please see my statement above to the previous poster.
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Logs, peer or second reviews, making sure multiple player moderators review a case before a decision is made.
Player moderators could mark players as potential botters, then they would be added to a list which other player moderators review (and remove any name or identifiable information). At that point if 100% of that review pool agrees on the outcome, you’d be rather safe to action it.
Since you can have a large pool of player moderators (all over the world and in different time zones) you could get pretty quick in terms of reviewing these.
All of this requires a massive shift on Blizzard’s end though to design, build, and maintain such a service.
2 Likes
or maybe selective. priority reporters. bot hunter squad
I see no way in which this foolproof plan could possibly fail.
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Luckily the current state of affairs, when it comes to bots, is a bit of a dumpster fire. So we don’t need foolproof, but we need something.
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That is a legitimate concern. Finding players on a server who are active enough to be useful, and giving them the authority to police the system without being toxic is hard because not everyone is going to be on enough to provide coverage, so it would be a flawed system at best.
Players just wanting the power and prestige of being able to ban people…what can go wrong?
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Couldn’t you say the same for any moderator, ever?
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That’s why Blizzard doesn’t do it. They favor automated systems with player reports and thresholds. I can totally understand the “if they aren’t willing to do it I will”-mindset but it’s not always the correct option when trying to moderate a large group of people.
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All it takes is one liberal player moderator to visit barrens chat on any server and these forums will be filled with people who got silenced for saying basic normie things that aren’t even that edgy. I can see it now. Keep that crap in retail, don’t twitter our game.
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This section of civil dialogue right here needs to happen more often in WoW and outside of WoW.
I would accept minimum wage to hunt down and punish bots for 8 hours per day, 5 days per week.
I agree with this 100%.
I can’t recall if it was on Youtube or something that I was talking about with a friend, maybe on a TV show.
It was about a social experiment I believe. Where there was two groups. One of the groups was the police and the other group was the criminals. What ended up happening was even though everyone was friends in the experiment. The people that were the police became overly aggressive towards the criminals and the situation got bad.
I think that is what would happen in this situation. While the idea seems great in theory. I can see it turning really bad, and causing more issue than solving them.
I’d sooner trust a goat to hand out bans than the toxic players in this community. You give them that power and they’ll be booting people on a whim.
2 Likes
Yet you don’t trust Blizzard either, what a conundrum we have here.
Not really- Blizz have proven over and over to be deceptive and lazy. This community is overly toxic. As it is now Blizz is doing nothing because they are too lazy to police their game even for overly obvious things like bot trains everywhere- meaning they’d be too lazy to make sure player mods aren’t abusing their power.
Without oversight, player mods would do whatever they want, banning people on whims or out of grudges. The players that spend the most time in the game are likely going to be the most dedicated mods- but they’re also the players that are most likely to exploit, be hardcore pvpers or raiders and use that power to ban tanks from raid guilds that have better parses, or just throw out bans whenever a premade beats them.
Heck, even with the tools we have players abuse the squelch function constantly, during the devilsaur mafia days if you weren’t in it and tried to sell anything, or were in a guild that fought back against the mafia you’d get chain squelched if you tried to trade.
Part of the reason the community is so toxic is because Blizz lets them be, which in turn makes them the last group you’d want actually modding.