Words have power. I’m all for free speech - including people whom I disagree with - but hateful speech, derogatory speech, that sort of thing should not be tolerated. If you don’t think words have power I can think of a few words off the top of my head that if you wrote them here you’d probably lose your account for good.
Just because you’re anonymous behind a keyboard doesn’t mean you don’t have certain responsibilities. And if you fail to recognise that and fall awry of the TOS you’ll have to eat the consequences of your actions. To me, that’s perfectly fair.
Most people are basically lazy. Busy playing the game, they can’t be bothered to report unless someone says something truly heinous, though using profanity in your abusive speech will make you an easy target. And one report isn’t going to get you squelched. It might get you silenced after a review if you did something so atrocious gm’s decided you needed an extended time out though.
It’s simplistic to say that free speech means all speech. Reasonably, we know, as a society there are limits where that freedom begins to infringe on other people - hate speech for example. Or another example, going a bit outside of the box, but fraud / scams and of course defamation. So to say it’s one or the other, black or white, well that’s juvenile. It’s more nuanced than that - I know you know what I mean.
On RP servers for sure. I got muted on WRA because I told someone they clearly didn’t understand economics in trade chat and they took offense and got an entire guild to report me. I think the funnier part was when I logged onto my alt to post auctions I got a DM from someone in their guild asking for my main to be kicked from my own guild. RP servers are cesspits.
Though in reality, here’s the real issue with that move and that is being muted is an automatic thing. From what I’ve seen the number is either 4 or 5. If that many people report you for something it’s enough to get instantly silenced. Why is that the problem? It isn’t hard to have your account forcibly muted. If you’re undercutting another m+ carry group (my experience), saying anything against the hivemind, or someone with a lot of accounts doesn’t like your name you’ll get muted if they will it.
Was funny though, one day we actually had all 4 of us muted in game because the other carry group kept reporting whoever was advertising against them.
I think the problem isn’t the muting per se, the problem is the fact they have so few “real” people looking at the logs to determine if said muting was merited. I also feel that if there are consequences for speech then there also needs to be consequences for false flagging. I think that would mitigate it. If you’re repeatedly flagging people without good cause, you’re the one that gets an unscheduled break. That is fair.
False flagging was a huge issue late in Legion. Players in the forums were announcing they were going to be falsely reporting someone they disagreed with who dared to post in their thread, and they encouraged others to do the same. A lot of players ended up getting suspended because of those abuses. It stopped when they announced that there would be penalties for false reports that were more severe than the silences that they were trying to smite the reported player with.
I don’t know about that. But there’s a difference between being offensive and hate speech. The social media ecosphere is controlled by private companies so there is no real free speech anyway. As is this forum, as is WoW.
Well that makes sense to me, and how it should be. I suspect we don’t hear about it anymore because they don’t have the Human Resources, actual staff, to properly effect that policy.
This sounds like something someone with either a big group of friends or multiple accounts can use now to prevent people from joining groups. At least for a short while after the auto mute happens and then they put in a ticket to be un-muted
Yeah, which is the issue for me. They shouldn’t be trying to expand on punishing silenced players while it’s still so easily exploited of a system. Like I said earlier, you can get silenced for the dumbest things so it actively hindering those around you for something that given this game’s community very likely isn’t something offensive is just a bad move.
If silences worked as intended and weren’t so exploitable it would be a good change.
Agreed, if you’re going to false flag people and actually clog up resources you should just have your ability to report players taken away. If someone says “Oh well now I can’t report the dude spamming the N-word in my random dungeon finder.” Well, tough. Should have thought about that before you reported the guy selling m+ carries for gold which is allowed in trade chat.
The amusing irony to me is we actually in this world may encounter a time when we actually can’t report people on some things because people weaponizing it maliciously got it taken away. It’s why the forums no longer have downvote buttons, people kept just mass downvoting anything they disagreed with to hide the post and it was a bad system.
They still function the same. I’m not really here to nitpick about whether the dude shoving his fist down my throat is 6’1 or 6’2 because end of the day there’s still a fist being shoved down my throat which is the actual problem, not the technicalities of the situation.