Notes

Should WoW Players be Held Accountable for their own Accountability?

Blizzard's policy as far as reporting players has been the same since day one. If you have a problem with a player must report them. While Blizzard will contact you to thank you for bringing up the problem, it won't provide any details about what it has done about the issue being reported. This has always been understandable for me. blogging is good for your In the years that I worked customer service and call center jobs, rule #1 was to not talk to anyone other than an account holder about the status of their account. For me, the Blizzard policy is a continuation of the same kind of treatment -- Blizzard can't tell you about actions that were taken against another player's account, because hey, the account isn't theirs it's not yours, right? It's personal information.



However, I have had to report a lot of players over the years and never knew if any action was taken against them. In simple cases of name violations, like using an inappropriate term for a the guild or character name I usually could discern if something had been done because the guild or player involved would have their name changed. But in cases of harassment by a player ... well you don't know whether they've been told anything or not. It is only a matter of hope that the harasser ceases harassing you and that it will stop, but there are no assurances.



Pugnacious Priest posted an interesting post on player reporting and complaints specifically within the League of Legends universe. League of Legends seems to be doing something totally bizarre in the gaming industry. It is taking these complaints and let players decide if there's something that requires investigation. Pugnacious Priest takes this one step further, and is wondering if this is the kind of system that could be implemented in WoW in the future.



WoW has had its moments of jerks throughout the years, whether it was players who used ninjas to steal equipment, players who intentionally created tension, players who made use of GearScore to gauge another player's validity, players who used Recount to put higher DPS numbers into other players' faces- the list goes on and on. WoW also has its share of unsavory people who just want to make another person's life miserable, whether because of some bizarre sense entitlement, a personal vendetta, or just the desire to be as rude as you can in an setting where no one will ever catch you.



What's strange, however, is that the premise of accountability of players isn't one that is unique to WoW. Vanilla had players on different servers and each server was a tightly knit community. The servers had one thing in common they all spoke the same way like they would in a small town. Anyone who did something that was considered to be infuriating to the server in general was immediately removed from guilds, raids and instances. They were expelled. Back then it was impossible to pay to change your name, or transfer servers. If you made a mistake you had to apologize and tried to make amends for your mistakes, or you started over on another server at level 1.



But, this odd community watch system that is part of the WoW community has essentially disappeared these days. The potential player base that Raid Finder and Dungeon Finder systems can pull from is astounding. The probability of encountering an offensive player more than once is so small that there's almost no point in reporting the player's behavior in the first place. Why should you? It's not like you're ever going to visit them again.



On the other hand, it makes an odd sense to draw from a larger playerbase and you're not likely to experience a repeat offender or an instance of extreme harassment, generally speaking. This system, on contrary, allows players to be jerks whenever and wherever they want. Why is that? It's not like anyone's going to bother to report them.



This is one of those strange small questions that have no simple solution. Do we sacrifice the ease and flexibility of devices like the Dungeon Finder and the Raid Finder to go back to that state of self-policing? Do we just allow the offensive players to continue being offensive? Or as Pugnacious Priest considered, do we adopt a system similar to the one LoL is implementing and let the players decide on their own and who isn't?


Here's my website: https://ua-7.com/