Correct. Free Discord means you don’t pay for it. You pay to access WoW and removing paid access from customers should be something thought out, not left to a bot.
Nah I disagree. There are plenty of reasons for autobans. Racial slurs being one. Exploiting the game. Botting. Telling people to “KYS” or “Drink This Chemical That Shares A Name With a Famous Manga”. Some things are worthy of an auto-ban. If it turns out they didn’t do it, toss them game time equal to what they lost. You’re going to have pitfalls in every system, what you need to do is weigh what you lose vs what you gain. What we stand to gain is a couple unhappy people on occasion who are then righted. While losing bombardments of racial slurs and hate speech.
Indeed, online interactions have to follow company policies, which in the case of Blizzard are very family friendly. They apply to all games regardless of game rating.
I think WoW is rated in M in some countries as well. Still does not change the language rules.
Still doesn’t change the fact that there is no official ESRB rating of the online interactions. Haven’t owned a box in a long time, but it used to even be on the box. Rules =/= rating.
You know I don’t work for Blizzard right? It is not my “job” to fix the game.
You are one of the communities liaisons. It is your duty to ensure the games development is steered into the direction it needs to go. That’s literally what the Community Council was built for. If you’re treating your role as a glorified forum user for fancy colored text, then you need to step down. You took on that role for free, because the quality of the game was supposed to mean more to you than money. It’s your job to communicate to Blizzard the communities expectations, grievances, accolades, and worthy ideas.
Blizzard has only had in-game GM chat moderation once. It was an experiment on an RP server in a known hot spot. The results were that it increased bad behavior because people wanted to trigger GMs. Further players stopped reporting thinking a few GMs would catch everything. It ended badly and they did not expand it or repeat it.
In-Game GMs did far more than moderate chat. You’re not actually fully correct on this, having served bans in Vanilla for Trade chat and whisper violations myself. Not proud of it, but yeah 100% I did some stuff in vanilla that a lot of cringy teenagers did back in 04’. Public channels and whispers were frequently moderated in-game, the line was generally drawn at Guild Chat and Player Created Channels such as /world. Physical issues were a more primary function of the in-game GM, such as item redistribution from raids, griefing, or out of bounds glitching.
Now, I do agree there needs to be more enforcement of the reports we DO have and it needs to be consistant. Failure to enforce the rules they have in place is part of the problem with the community in game and on the forums.
The community policing itself is never going to work though. It hasn’t worked for over eighteen years, it’s not going to suddenly start working. For like the thirty millionth time, Blizzard is applying deterrence theory, and it doing so poorly. What you’re suggesting is the community police itself. A community that was so bad at policing itself we removed master looter and implemented personal loot. We’ve been policing it ourselves and look where we are. The main reason it cannot work is WoW is not EVE Online. There is nothing the community can do short of right click report to deal with a toxic player. EVE can police itself to an extent because the player base actually controls who can and cannot partake in aspects of the game. At most now, a player gets their chat disabled and they go on with their day. They trash talk in m+ keys and then the key is dead. People act like most keys are people just sucking at the game, while that happens from time to time. No. Ego is what kills keys. Two players get in a spat over some stupid spec / item disagreement and they kill the key. Nine times out of ten the key holder isn’t even the one in the spat. That kind of behaviour will never go away unless there is rigorous, consistent, and relevant consequences for the player’s actions. Right click report? Right click report key killer. Should be right there in the list.
We live in the age of AI. For a company like blizzard, janky AI isn’t a thing if they don’t want it to be. If anyone of any game company has the resources to properly moderate player interactions, and automate out racial slurs. It’s blizzard. If you’re still that hard opposed to AI banning, you can at least AI delete the comment in the chat window just like Discord does.
While Blizzard CAN penalize for what is said in optional private spaces on their servers, they usually don’t unless it is really bad. Your guild, or private groups, are at-will and currently subject to less rules.