Reporting Ongoing Harassment

Wyrmrest Accord
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Took me a minute to reply to this thread because I wanted time to give you a decent answer.

If you’ve got someone harassing you and Blizz is doing nothing about it, your best bets are to do the most you can for yourself.

  1. Take the harasser off ignore and put them on your friend list. That way, you can see when they’re online and what zone they’re in, and you can actively avoid them. Look up their alts where you can and put them on the list, too. Their friends, too, because if their friend is somewhere, they might be in that place as well but on an alt you don’t know about.

  2. Set a note in the entries on your friend list so you can tell when they swap character names because a name swap doesn’t take them off your list, but you don’t want them to hide under a new name that you won’t recognize.

  3. Turn off your TRP for awhile. Put it up during events, but otherwise leave TRP turned off so that you’re not visible with a TRP profile map search. Make yourself harder to find and track.

  4. Spend more time on alts. Swap mains. Put a character in a different guild and play that on occasions when you need a break.

  5. When you’re in an area they’re likely to harass you in, be with a friend or two. Trolls like it better when they can target a lone person.

  6. If they harass you, don’t respond at all. Make sure you and all your friends in the area report them immediately. All of you. The more, the better. But don’t talk, emote, whisper, or anything else.

  7. Logging off or swapping toons is also a good idea. Stay offline for at least 15 minutes so they get bored and go do something else. Set yourself to AFK when you’re staying in one place for awhile.

  8. Don’t speak out in public as much. Less talk on the forums or in trade or general if you do that.

  9. For extreme harassment, you can faction swap your character and then faction swap again, or remake your character. Both of those actions will take you off their friend list. It’s a pain, but it does work as a temporary measure. If they’re determined, they’ll find you again.

  10. Don’t let it show if it bothers you. If they think their harassment is making you upset, they’ll keep doing it.

Good luck. I’ve been actively avoiding a few people for a couple of years now, and I know how obnoxious it can get.

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22

As someone who has experienced targeted harassment, I second Kirsy’s tips! They are all excellent.

This has happened to me as well. I was sending in Zone Area Disruption tickets pretty much every week for almost a year when people were dumping massive piles of bodies in Stormwind/Orgrimmar and some GMs told me the same thing. It was bizarre because the dead, unreleased characters could not be clicked on and thus I could not make any right-click reports. The Gameplay Sabotage in-game option did not exist then anyway.

It seemed to me that the GMs who understood that the characters could not be Targeted were more experienced/played the game. Perhaps some GMs speed-read or misunderstood or forgot to take the right-click advice out of their canned responses.

In any case, I just continued to send in actual tickets. :slight_smile:

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23

It’s also possible to turn off TRP’s map-scan feature without disabling TRP entirely. Open TRP and go to Settings > Register Settings, scroll down to Location Settings, and uncheck “Enable character location.”

There are also separate options for making yourself unscannable if you’re in Warmode or if you’ve set your status to OOC.

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I second this. Very helpful tips for anyone experiencing problematic people.

It is an extremely sad situation that someone has to choose to play other characters just to avoid harassment. I would hope that when it gets to that point Blizz would do something.

This is extremely helpful! I knew this was a thing but never knew how to do it.

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First and foremost, I am so sorry you and others are having to deal with this. I’ll never understand why people derive such pleasure in making other people’s lives miserable

You’ve got a lot of good advice going on in this thread. Going to chime in with a few things from what I’ve seen and learned over the years from being a CS nerd.

  • The big thing with placing a person on ignore, it’s account-wide now. If you put me on ignore (in-game, of course), it would automatically ignore all of my characters on my entire account. Granted, you would have to do this on each and every one of your characters, but then if they create or use a secondary account to circumvent that ignore? That is one of the big things Blizzard will slap someone down for fast and hard in an ongoing harassment case as it is a deliberate mark of escalation. Yes, it prevents you from seeing what they’re saying, but at the same token, that’s kind of a good thing because it’s not going to add stress to your plate. Let them combust all by their lonesome. You having them on ignore shows you’re trying to do your due diligence in minimizing what the troublemaker can do to get to you. That and not reacting and not responding to a harasser are the biggest earmarks Blizzard will work from with harassment cases.

  • Be careful with the part about encouraging friends or others to report en masse. That can be viewed as weaponizing the reporting system, and that blade cuts both ways. People have been sanctioned for this. It’s obviously one thing if you’re there in a group trying to RP and you’ve got this tool making a nuisance of themselves and you all report them, but be wary of trying to pull in unassociated people for the sake of bombing them with reports. I’m all for a jerk finally getting their comeuppance, but not at the expense of those who they’ve been tormenting.

  • The ticket times have been absolutely bonkers for the past several months, unfortunately. While they’re still not back down to normal levels, they are still leaps and bounds better than where they were. At current, I’m seeing most account issues are being resolved in a day or two, in-game issues at about a week-ish.

  • Also re: add-on reporting. Use the report buttons that are built into the TRP interface. According to the SFAs, they are able to get a snapshot of the add-on when they’re reported. People absolutely do get suspended for these. Have seen quite a few unhappy folks going on about being unjustly suspended for it to come out that their TRP had inappropriate content. There has been discussion recently about using the built-in report button and the GM responses to them over in CS too, so please disregard the “in the future, right-click and report” schtick. The button exists for a reason and it works as it is intended to work.

  • I don’t know how far-flung this harassment is, and if it has spread to stalking alts, be it in-game or your forum presence, but please know that this too can be minimized. You can adjust your account setting to not share your details with third-party sites. Be warned that this can take up to 30 days to take effect if you’ve got it enabled currently.

I know that various sites and all can be useful in finding folks’ alts (a moment of silence for Cogshanks), but I do know one of the more prolific ones right now is one for checking PVP stats. This may be helpful for you to be mindful of your harasser’s alts if they’re not locked down, but it can also be useful for you to create an account on there because you can manually set each of your characters to hidden as well. Most sites that offer sharing alts usually have a similar privacy setting too.

But yes. Keep reporting the heck out of this person(s). Cross-reference all of your tickets. Make sure to emphasize it is ongoing harassment. The biggest (and often the hardest) thing is the “do not respond, do not interact” component. Even just asking them to stop makes it a consensual interaction that will detract from your case.

I do wish you so very much luck in dealing with this.

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26

This is very helpful and certainly helps me.

Something I have been wondering was what happens when they delete those characters? If I have multiple of their characters on ignore on my one character and they delete them all, will my ignore still be in place?

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You know what, that’s actually a good question. I’ll do some digging and poking to see if I can find you a definitive answer on that. I would hope the ignore remains since it is on the account level, but I cannot say for certain. Will definitely see if I can find an answer for you on that!

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Really appreciate that! Thank you!

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I’m not privy to the backend of how Blizzard’s reporting system functions in real-time. Immediate in-game reporting seems linked particularly to active cheating, sabotage (often one-time harassing behavior), and inappropriate handles (names) because of the immediacy of such actions, and the timestamp function behind the in-game ticketing system.

However, ongoing harassment is a little different because it encompasses a series of events spread over a breadth of time. For Game Masters or Customer Service to more appropriately evaluate the information, the global tickets on the website are definitely safer to use, because you can add attachments to those tickets, including screenshots and chat logs as evidence. If anyone is experiencing harassment of any kind, whether it is one-time or recurring, I strongly advocate capturing the evidence of the harassing behavior or ongoing harassment via screenshots. Likewise, there are guidelines baked into the World of Warcraft Code of Conduct that encourages players to fully utilize the “/ignore” function against anyone responsible for making you (the individual player) uncomfortable.

When reporting harassment, it’s important to bear in mind that we have some tools available to us in order to prohibit ongoing harassment, and that we also need to document such harassment in order to report it effectively and properly, so that the behavior can be addressed by the appropriate parties.

One of the other things you can attempt to do is to reach out to a member of the Customer Service staff via the Web Ticket Chat option, so you can personally express the concerns you have to a member of the Blizzard team.

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So an ongoing situation came up tonight. Question for everyone; does anyone know if not interacting includes on the forums if the offender makes a post?

Not doing so right now but curious.

Edit: If a lot of us report someone and one person interacts with them, will all our reports be thrown out by Blizz? People have interacted to counter the griefing despite me telling everyone to ignore and report.

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That’s a great question, honestly. People responding with “KYS” might hinder your cause, however.

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I can now confirm that forum ignores are not account wide. Each character has to be placed on ignore.

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Tell someone to kill themselves, then block them, then cry harassment. Amazing.

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You know what, blizz could really do with updating their reporting features for the forums, too.

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100% agree.

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On the offchance this isn’t an adult that should know better doing this:

Get help. Suicide isn’t something to lightly or jokingly contemplate, and it’s most certainly not something to wield as a weapon against others.

Here’s a suicide and crisis lifeline:
https://988lifeline.org/

On the chance this is a fake cry, it’s sickening that people would stoop this low over a game. I struggle with ideations every day of my life and took years to find the proper help and prevention to manage it. This kind of farce is part of why people struggle to be taken seriously, especially in an area of mental health rife with abuse. Get help, seriously, and get a new hobby.

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Are you talking about the dance-dance-revolution guy who was standing in the middle of story circle? Because he’s posting in this thread and another one, on an alt. I’m pretty sure it’ll become apparent to anyone who’s looking at this thread.

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Then maybe, just maybe, don’t tell people to commit suicide over a game.

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After hearing of this repeated harassment, myself and a few of my guildmates decided to show up and act as witnesses.

For context, the RP event consists of folx sitting in a circle and each storyteller walks to the center and tells their story IC’ly.

We stood off to the side and kept watch, and sure enough, an individual showed up about 30min into the event and began being disruptive to the gathering and did everything at their disposal to “troll” the event, including a /dance in the center of the gathering disrupting the storyteller. They also used the goren toy and rolled over everyone, again, in an effort to be disruptive.

We took screenshots and reported the person for disrupting gameplay. I also whispered the individual and asked them politely to stop disrupting the event or leave. I took extensive screenshots of the exchange.

This person would disappear for roughly 15min at a time - likely their battleground queue - then return again to continue their harassment of the players.

I suspect that person is also harassing this thread as they’ve posted screenshots of the evening and they’re in the same guild as the offender.

This is harassment. According to Blizzard, this is harassment. This person is purposefully harassing this event and using multiple tactics, both in-game and out, to cause frustration and ruin the experience of multiple people. This person should be disciplined as they’re breaking the social contract on multiple counts.

However, I must also say the person who suggested suicide to this offender should also receive some disciplinary measures. Suicide is no joking matter, regardless of how frustrated you are by this repeat harassment. If anyone is dealing with depression, please seek help. The support line posted earlier in this thread is a great resource.

I hope Blizzard responds to this harassment and does something to prevent this long-standing RP event from further interference by this individual. I’m frankly disappointed to hear that this is a repeated occurrence and it’s taking this long to get a disciplinary response.

Raton, please feel free to contact me in-game or on the forums if you hear back from the Blizzard support about this. I spoke with Baoshii during the event and offered to act as a third-party witness again should this person continue this harassing behaviour.

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We were and are so appreciative that you and your guild came out to help. Even before the troll showed up.

This. I don’t think I have the capacity at the moment so I will echo this. I cannot condone this sort of behavior, especially at our events or in my guild. During the event I asked everyone to ignore and report. In the future we are going to have some macros about giving trolls and harassers attention really only keeps them around. We are confident that the “anti-Griefers” are ensuring that the trolls continue to come to the event with the intention of being disruptive.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate all that you are doing.

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