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World of Warcraft: Enforcing the Harassment Policy
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
World of Warcraft GMs will be working known hot spots in the game on a more regular basis to ensure that the Harassment Policy instituted by Blizzard is being accurately enforced. The stepped up 'GM patrols' come as a result of a father's complaint about Moon Guard's Goldshire Inn and the somewhat racy commentary and activities that take place within. Subsequently, he cancelled his WoW account
According to this parent's complaint, he found his son and friends inside the Goldshire Inn laughing at the activities within. The parent scrolled up the chat log and found:
Line after line, having absolutely NOTHING to do with RP: sexual emotes, gay bashing, racial comments....I sat there speechless.
And please don't tell me about the ignore button, I am well aware of that feature. The fact that this behavior goes on CONSTANTLY on this server is disgusting, and I will not allow my son to "discover" any more servers such as this.
Six pages into the (for the most part) bashing of this concerned parent, a Blizzard representative, Arrestide, weighed in on the discussion. Arrestide acknowledged that Moon Guard's Goldshire Inn was a frequent recipient of player complaints due to the rather over the top activity within. As a result, Arrestide said that "(m)embers of our CS team will 'patrol' Goldshire on Moon Guard on a regular basis, and take appropriate action for individuals violating the Harassment Policy. Note that this pertains primarily to public messages (/say, /yell, General) and unsolicited whispers. We won't be showing up with that mythical crack of lightning-- we'll just be watching silently for any rule-breaking language and following up privately with the player[s] in question."
Want to know more about the Harassment Policy that Blizzard has in place? Head here.
What are your thoughts? Let us know on our forums.
Via The Escapist.
Comments
Man man man lol. This is going on in WoW since launch! Especially on the regular PVE and PVP servers. PVP servers being the worst of all.
They are just almost 6 years late. And I think this is just damage control. Nothing but talk and no action, like there have been no GM action since launch.
Good for Blizz. NOw if you could get your arses in gear and get the damn goldsellers in check that'd be a start would it not? Oh I forgot, you don't give a gnats nuts about that do you?
There are so many things that they could spend time on that would make the game better. This is not one of them.
Bet that boy is well happy with his dad right now:) But seriously, it was only a matter of time until something like this hapened. Never played on that server myself, but we have all seen behavior like this. I am not a parent myself, but If I was so I would have a long hard think about letting my children experaince that kind of community. But as I said, I am not a parent so that's easy for me to be able say.
Oh wow, maybe we'll finally be able to lead a normal RP for a change... after 6 years.
Blizzard should have started nailing this down from the start instead of turning a blind eye and, in some cases, even encouraging the conduct by making light of some of the less offensive behaviors. Instead, resources were spent on things like the Armory constant website revisions, and attempts at creating a social networking environment. What money Vivendi let them keep was wasted on widgets instead of improving game design and customer service.
It is something that i agree should have been done six years ago. It is a shame it took so long. I hope that the QA department maintains the punishment records and such.
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this has been going on in mmo's since day 1.
this is why mmo's are not for kids. they are adult games with adults playing talking about adult things. even teenagers talk about racier stuff between classes at school though.
that being said, i've seen better GMing on this sort of thing in lineage 2 than wow. it's fairly typical behaviour for low level "RP" alts to stalk people on forums or engage in this sort of thing more often than doing anything else in teh game in wow.
you know the conception that RP servers are "more mature" roflz. more like trolls who carefully read the rules so they 1) never actually break them while trolling and 2) report anyone who comes close to breaking them at every opportunity while advertising their own supposed maturity levels and calling anyone they disagree with 12 year olds who live in their mom's basements.
also on the RP server i played with one of the larget RP guilds was dedicated to every form of deviant sexual behaviour. and no i'm not talking about just RPing the opposite sex, i mean RPing man boy love affairs, mother daughter love affairs, mother son love affairs etc etc so on and so forth.
anyways, the father is the real one at fault for letting his son play an mmo, and making the GMs responsible for his parenting. how old is this kid anyway? you have to be at least 13 to play wow, but i've frequently seen parents bragging about letting their 6 year olds have their own accounts and talking about how proud they are of them for playing the game.
i've also seen cool people turn into total douchebags because they wanted to play games like wow or cs with their kids. things like banning ppl for swearing in vent. although in the particular case the husband got caught cybering with some woman via webcam that played on the same server as him and his wife.
KERPLAH!
Anyhow, talking about sexual BS. Here's some built into the game.
Polishing the Helm.
Blowing the Horn
Going Bear Back
Opening the Backdoor
Raising Holdir's Spear
Wicked thoughts race through your mind as you focus on the writhing tongue.
Is this not a pile of sexual references in the game. ALL in the same quest lines. POT, KETTLE, BLACK. Me thinks.
either way - I agree with the father. Seeing how I am a parent, you can bet sure as hell that I will never let my children play this game. Although I have played this , they will not for sure after my experiences - this is possibly the absolute worse community for MMO's out there.
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Keep in mind that a game that has millions of players is going to be hard to police in the first place. It's not like Blizzard or any company is going to have millions of GMs watching everything all the time. Any MMO that has a high percentage of kids and teens playing is going to have a lot of poor behavior going on. Hell, any game with adults would have bad enough behavior, but when it has tons of teens the behavior is even worse. Just hop on any well populated server in WoW and watch the general chat for a while. It is absolutely awful. All a GM has to do to clean the place up is sit in a city for a while and watch who the worst offenders are in the trade chat. The people who just sit in cities all day swearing and harassing other people need to be removed and after a while the whole place would be better.
On the other hand the GMs DO seem very good about taking action when something is reported. There was a kid who was spamming filth in the trade chat all day every day that I finally had enough of. He wasn't so much arguing or trying to make a point, but rather just spewing random filth in the trade chat ALL DAY. I would be off questing and come back and there he was. I would log on the next day and there he was. Finally, I reported it to a GM and told him to look at that guy's chat logs for all the proof he needed. After that, I never heard from the guy again. Thank you GM, you performed a service to the whole server.
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Maybe on PvP servers this was the case. On the RP-PvP server i play on since 2005 (The Venture Co. EU) things where ok till mid TBC. Sadly ever since the situation is deteriorating to unbelievable levels. Latest "game" the idiots are participating in is spamming the trade channel with "Annal + <ability from the spellbook or talent tree>" for hours. I must have reported some dozen retards but i don't see any action taken against them.
Why sit your kid down and have a mature and meaningful talk about the birds and the bees, the wrongs of discrimination and social etiquette when you can just slap the blindfold on him?
Just another example of some parent who expects society to raise their child, and I use the term child loosely, this kid is 15 after all.
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The infantile banter that takes place is pretty ignorant, but i have to ask why parents are letting their kids play WoW. This game was not designed for children, it is an adult's game and has adult themes, languagee, and content. There are MMO's out there that are more geared for children, play those instead. Better yet, keep your kids off the computer unless for study/homework.
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I enjoyed the blue locking the thread, where he tells the guy to use the in-game reporting feature.
lol....I say get over it...kids have to learn stuff sooner or later
You got to give them credit for at least trying to enforce the rules. But the fact is, it will probably remain pretty much the same. We have ignore and report options, i've been using them all the time and i dont see any reduction in unwanted behaviors. Yes they may patrol goldshire on moonguard for a while, but they wont do it 24/7, they wont be banning everyone on the server.
I guess he should head over to the kids school now and have them shut down recess. Oh and every other childhood group or unions of 3 or more kids. Time to exit the cave!!!!
Lol, if you guys don't believe the father go to MG Pornshire, there wil literally be 50-80 people in there at any given time sending each other tells soliciting erp, and blatantly sexual emotes, as well as undisguised filth in the general chat I'm not talking about anal [skill], I mean discussions about the relative merits of a futa in erp.
have no qualms about it, myself but I'm 21. I don't really care what people do in /w assuming it's not unwanted, either, I don't care if two people erp consensually, but I agree emotes and /s need to be patrolled. I'd consider uploading a screeny of pornshire inn, if my account was still active. That place is a cesspool. And MG should probably be made into an adults only server if they want to avoid children seeing what goes on there, and to a much lesser extent SMC inn.
I personally never cared one bit about smack-talking in chat and all the derogatory comments that follow with it, nor did my parents, even if I was 13 when I first logged into an mmo.
I would never let my child play an online game like this if I didn't feel they had been educated enough about the reality of such things.
But the father is right in a certain way, talking about porn of various kinds, racist comments and whatnot have no place in general chat or in a lowbie area and certainly not on a RP server...
Blizzard should enforce their own rules.
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Maybe they could open a server or 2 that would be heavily moderated. Even restrict accounts marked as a child's account to only create characters on the heavily moderated servers. It wouldn't be a kids only server because that's impossible to enforce, but it could help seperate players a bit.
Hah, this is how an average evening on Moon Guard looks like:
That the GMs can do? GMs aren't programmers/designers.
Until you cancel your subscription, you are only helping to continue the cycle of mediocrity.
To hell with privately...do it publicly and harsh. Teach the on lookers a lesson...
I've seen this stuff happen on Drenden in Silvermoon, I was in the bank nearest the entrance, when I saw some ERP in the say channel and as emotes. Needless to say I went into the inn next door and upstairs to see what was going on. Took a few screenies
What gets me is that they do it in a public channel, "/say", and they have to know the emotes are seen by everyone, yet they still do it. The emotes being public is a problem, no way around that, but can't they use party chat to "emote" in instead of using an "/emote" ?
/p touches her
will show in party chat as:
Player1> touches her
Why the need to be so obvious about it? Is it the danger that makes it more erotic, like doing it in a campground with a "screamer" so the whole campground can hear you and is awakened? ( Tents don't block sound as well as they do light. )
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