I don’t want to reveal too much about the people involved, but recently, a group of people have been threating my mains guild because they didn’t like the name of the guild. Admittedly the guilds name could be construed as a right leaning slogan, but its neither against ToS nor is it profane in any way.
At first I blew off the criticism, if you don’t like the guild name, don’t join the guild, and that’s that. But then things took a dark turn. Our guild master and several officers like me, started getting legit threats and doxxing attempts telling us if we didn’t change the guild name we would experience “Real world consequences”.
Now the legitimacy of these threats is dubious, but none the less, if they were to actually attempt this, I reckon they would no longer simply be risking a in game ban, but the FBI could potentially get involved as well, as this would essentially be political blackmail, a federal offense, and threats of violence, which is in many cases a felony.
Now, my real message here is that people need to chill and be tolerant. If you don’t like a guild name, or a name in real life, or whatever, ignore it and move on with your life. Threatening to doxx people and burn their house down over a guild name is a good way to get lifetime bans and the FBI knocking on your door.
If you REALLY don’t like a guild name, report it and let blizz decide. But if you’ve already gone through that step and they decided to leave the name as is, you need to back off and move on with your life.
Life is hard…I can only imagine how much harder it gets if you let a funny guild name be the main antagonist of your life.
Not sure exactly how they would ever find out who you are since blizzard doesn’t reveal that information and nothing in the game does. The only way they’d get that information is if you have some shady friends on discord or similar applications.
I doubt the players threatening you frequent this forum and if they do, they won’t care. This needs to be taken seriously and reported to Blizzard with as much evidence as possible.
Never ignore the lengths that someone with 0 integrity, maximum desperation and far too much unused time on their hands can achieve.
Sure to the standard person it doesn’t seem reasonable.
But to the person willing to hunt through linkedin, google, phonebooks and twitter and facebook for 14 hours? That’s a very different story.
There is a real threat behind this sort of nonsense. Whether you want to accept it or not.
For the record obviously I COMPLETELY disavow with doing such things. But let’s not pretend in 2021we don’t all have a digital footprint. Even people with no fb, twitter, etc have their “brilliant” companies now publish their names online on a website.
^ This
You guys ever hear of the Kiwi Farms? They’ve made doxing a damn art form. Typically in regards to terrible people, such as the jackasses at Funimation that are deeply involved with the Vic Mignogna cancel culture nonsense, but they’ve also done it to people that they’ve deemed to be stirring up drama, and those that in some cases are absolute fools one can laugh at on a daily basis.
Generally, those targeted lose their minds and act like they’ve been hacked, but here’s the thing: they don’t do anything illegal regarding it. It’s all data available to the public. Hell, there was one person they got dox info on merely from a selfie that revealed a partly visible street sign outside their home, their work location, the fact that they mentioned they ride a train to said job, and the amount of time their train ride takes as that narrowed down the specific range/lines they would have to take to get to their job.
They managed another dox merely off a dog collar with a visible phone number and a reverse lookup.
Mind you, I am NOT condoning doxing. Just trying to point out how insanely easy it can actually be if you aren’t careful with what you’re posting online, or if someone with way too much time on their hands and a massive hate b*ner decides you’re worth their attention.
Fair enough and quite understandable given the circumstance you guys are dealing with.
At the very least: retail or classic? Been meaning to start on classic for awhile now for the occasional change of pace, so if it happens to be classic, then you guys and your guild might actually be the thing to finally get me to pull the trigger.
I play a lot of classic as well, but I’ve never experienced any threats, or even malice of any form on classic like I have on retail. Not to say everyone in retail is bad, but it seems like on classic people have much more incentive to be nicer to each other and work together.
The guild name may not be against the ToS, but real-life threats are.
Open a ticket, be specific with times/dates down to the minute. When they close the ticket because Blizzard doesn’t care, open another one. When they close it again because Blizzard doesn’t care – call the corporate office and complain directly that you’re being threatened IRL and have sought help twice in-game to only have your tickets closed.
Emphasize how unsafe you feel IRL, and how you believe the threats are credible.
Well I’m not scared, I think the threats are poppycock, However we definitely have been in touch with blizz, they say for now all they can do is monitor the situation, and for us to let them know if things escalate. I’m not sure how much further things can escalate beyond people threatening to burn down your house, but I digress. Supposedly at least one person has been banned so far.
Now if shady things start happening outside the game then we’ve all agreed to call the FBI, assuming they take calls from civilians, and if not, we’ll start getting in touch with local law enforcement.
Of course, that works both ways. I did spend a little time in the classic beta. Key thing that kept me for pulling the trigger at launch: sheer elitism.
The reason: I had the audacity to suggest that they add in transmog to classic as I’m not a fan of clown suits, nor everyone that does higher end content looking exactly the same at max level.
The way they reacted, you’d have thought I livestreamed the murder of a kitten. I knew the “no changes!” crowd were half nuts, but it was a rabid fury I’ve only seen in cancel culture idiots, especially since so many of them told me to never play classic if I wanted transmog in the game.
That is the key reason why I never touched classic after that, despite the fact that part of me wanted to play solely for the idea of classic AVs that potentially last all day, not any of that reinforcement crap that ruined the BG.
^ This 100%
Do not let this stand. If they want to play stupid games, let them win stupid prizes, even if it takes a fair amount of effort on your part to get action against them.
It’s also very concerning of the political extremism that is taking place to a point where it’s now trying to making the opposition the moral enemy these days, and even if you are just neutral or not truly involved, they will drag you down and force you into a side because if you aren’t 100% with them, you’re 100% against them, and their can be no debate, no nuances, and no middlegrounds, but i digress.
Considering the rest of the thread i’m about to read here, i’m going to hazard to guess that this took place on Discord or something. I’m pretty sure something like that would be swepted by Blizzard the next hour or two, because of logs and stuff.
