Here’s something to consider when talking about how jerkish behavior (such as ninja looting) is handled. In Vanilla if someone did something like this, people would usually port to their home city and start spamming the channel (and sometimes forums) about how you shouldn’t group with so-and-so because of what just happened.
Well that was all fine and well then, but in modern times (particularly here) what if they count that as “player harassment”? Back in Vanilla you could make call-out threads on the message board providing that they weren’t too inflammatory. Now, of course, those threads are against the ToS. But what’s to stop someone from reporting someone in the game for “cyber bullying” (or whatever you want to call it) once someone calls them out for their behavior?
For example:
Player A ninja loots something.
Player B ports to Stormwind or Ironforge and says “Don’t group with Player A, he’s a ninja looter!”
Player A reports Player B and Player B gets a warning or temp ban for harassment.
Who says this wont be the case with the way things are handled today?
I don’t see an argument in there. Would it surprise you if it happened? Trolls on the forum act the victim when acted upon and get a pass. I could EASILY see the same happening in game.
Crying out in trade about a ninja looter did…pretty much nothing anyway. It’s reputation with notable guilds that mattered, because they got to control your potential to be recruited.
Nobody stayed mad enough to stay in trade for hours, and those that did were on the receiving end of reports because they were spamming up the channel.
I think the problem you describe is going to sort itself.
We’d talk in-game, or we’d use our realm Discord server (because I assume every realm will have one of those or something similar, especially if Blizzard doesn’t provide us with realm forums or doesn’t let us use realm forums in reasonable ways).
I think the OP is saying. ‘it didn’t used to be’ such a reportable offense. To say hey, “So and so is a bully. Stay away from them!” was more smiled upon than it is today.
That may have been your experience, but on the server on which I played, reputation mattered very much.
One “mistake” was usually forgiven, but a second “mistake” almost always led to the offender being removed from their guild and unable to find a new guild or even find groups willing to accept them for 5 man dungeons.
Were there people who got away with “less than desirable” behavior and were not removed from their guild? There were a few outliers, but those were very few and far between and almost all were The GM, or were “close” with the GM, of their guild. That did not prevent them from having a much harder time finding groups willing to take them, though.
It also was not unusual for a guild to see its members leave the guild and form a new guild when the GM was guilty of “less than desirable behavior”. Most players on that server did not even want the taint of simply continuing to associate with players that chose to behave in a “less than desirable manner”.
That is possible, although that server, Stormreaver, had one of the highest populations. There was almost always a queue to log into that server. People trying to login even during the day usually saw more than 1000 people already in queue.
Even main tanks of cutting edge progression guilds could easily find themselves without a guild if they were to behave in a “less than desirable manner”. No one was exempt.