Should WoW players be responsible for player accountability?
by Anne Stickney 
Feb 8th 2012 at 4:00PM
Blizzard's policy as far as reporting players has been about the same since day one. If you have a problem with a player, you report them. While Blizzard can contact you and thank you for reporting the issue, it will not give any details regarding what it has done about the problem being reported. This has always been understandable to me; in the many years on and off that I worked customer service and call center jobs, rule #1 was that you did not speak to anyone but an account holder regarding the status of their account. To me, the Blizzard policy is just more of the same kind of treatment -- Blizzard cannot tell you about actions taken against another player's account, because hey, their account isn't yours, you know? It's private information.
That said, I have reported my share of players over the years, and I never really knew if action was taken against these players or not. In simple cases of name violations, like using an inappropriate word for guild or character name, I could usually tell if something had been done, because the guild or player in question would have their name changed. But in cases of player harassment ... well, you never know if they've been told anything or not. You just sort of hope this means the person harassing you will go away and that will be the end of it, but there are absolutely no guarantees.
That said, I have reported my share of players over the years, and I never really knew if action was taken against these players or not. In simple cases of name violations, like using an inappropriate word for guild or character name, I could usually tell if something had been done, because the guild or player in question would have their name changed. But in cases of player harassment ... well, you never know if they've been told anything or not. You just sort of hope this means the person harassing you will go away and that will be the end of it, but there are absolutely no guarantees.
WoW has had its share of jerks over the years, whether it was people who ninja looted gear, players who deliberately stirred up drama, players who used GearScore to measure another player's validity, players who used Recount to rub higher DPS numbers in other players' faces -- the list goes on and on. WoW has also had its share of unsavory people who are out there simply to make another person's life miserable, whether it's because of some bizarre sense of entitlement, a personal vendetta, or just the urge to be as obnoxious as possible in a social environment where, presumably, nobody will catch you.
What's odd, though, is that the premise of player accountability isn't one that is foreign to WoW. In vanilla, players were sequestered on different servers, and each server had a fairly tight-knit community of sorts. The one thing you could count on with these servers is that just like any small town neighborhood, people talked. If someone did something reprehensible to the server at large, that person was immediately excluded from raids, guilds, instance runs, and just about anything that could be deemed a social activity. In short, they were shunned -- and back then, you couldn't pay to change your name or transfer servers. If you messed up, you either apologized and tried to make up for what you did, or you started over on another server at level 1.
On the one hand, it makes a strange sort of sense -- pull from a larger playerbase, and you're never going to have a repeat offender or a case of extreme harassment, generally speaking. On the other hand, this system inadvertently lets players get away with bad behavior and gives them free license to continue being jerks whenever and where ever they see fit. Why not? It's not like anyone's going to bother to report them.
This is one of those odd little conundrums that doesn't really have an easy answer. Do we sacrifice the ease and flexibility of things like the Dungeon Finder and the Raid Finder so that we can go back to that state of self-policing? Do we throw up our hands and just let the offensive players continue to be offensive? Or, as Pugnacious Priest pondered, do we adopt a system like the one that LoL is undertaking and let the players judge for themselves who is right and who is wrong?
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 4)
Eladonra Feb 8th 2012 4:07PM
I hate getting GM surveys after reporting something. "Was the situation handled to your satisfaction?" Well....I have no clue how it was handled, so I can't really answer that. I wish harassment or name violation petitions were somehow excluded from the surveys. I don't want to skew the results by making up an answer; I also feel guilty for being a non-responder.
Zapwidget Feb 8th 2012 4:17PM
Just check the NA (not appliccable) box on the right.
Revnah Feb 9th 2012 7:32AM
I completely love Noyou's suggestion on this. That system would be awesome!
Kelly Feb 8th 2012 4:12PM
I LOVE the idea of we, the players, having control over we, the players... "Anonymity" (which was introduced in 3.3) has killed the community of WoW. The LFD/LFR isn't a bad thing, but the anonymity which comes with it, IS!
My idea is this: During a run (lfd/lfr), you can take a moment, if you choose, to rate a player. +1 or -1. Nothing more. It's not mandatory, but if a ninja-looter is in your group, -1! If your tank is going above and beyond in holding aggro, or if you spot a healer picking up some slack, +1.
Now, every time you queue for a dungeon, when you enter, a score is placed by your frame with your score. Too low a score (say, -50), people can kick you without question (or without being charged a VTK). If you have a high enough score (say, +100), you move to the "front of the queue", above all people without 100 points. Guild members cannot vote on other guild members to prevent abuse.
There you go. Still have anonymity, but you lose quite a bit of it, because a player wouldn't have a -10 score or a +25 score unless they were jerks or amazing (respectively)
raingod Feb 8th 2012 4:25PM
This is a good idea in theory, but the problem is it will end up like the reviews on Amazon, iTunes and the Android market, people will give negative reviews just because they can with no repercussions, not because of performance.
explosion987 Feb 8th 2012 4:26PM
I would have to disagree with you on that one. People are far more likely to vote down people that do something bad, than upvote people that do good. It's just human nature to remember and act on bad experiences than the good ones.
umichama Feb 8th 2012 4:27PM
i love that idea, the only problem being that jerks and asshats would -1 every person they grouped with simply because they could :/
Devin Feb 8th 2012 4:41PM
While that sounds like a great idea, it can easily be abused. For example: I join LFR and decide I want to be a jerk so I -1 everyone in the group. Most people probably wouldn't rate anyone the entire run unless something extreme happened on either end (good or bad). So all it takes is a couple of jerks to ruin your rating when you've done nothing wrong to begin with. What I want to do is start a movement where everyone votes to kick a player that starts screaming about booting other people or screaming about heals/dps/tanks in situations where there hasn't even been a wipe. I think that would go a long way to weed out people that want to be a-holes in LFR/LFG. People also don't feel the need to stick up for someone that is being berated in these situations. You will occasionally see someone say "It's LFR chill out man" and that is usually enough to diffuse the situation.
Jorges Feb 8th 2012 4:40PM
I've been thinking on a system like this sometimes, but the problem that I see is: how can you prevent abuse? People with good intentions will use it properly, but the same jerks we want to exclude with the system could use it to rate you badly, just because they can.
Maybe someone could only be allowed rate with a high enough score? But how do you rise your score in the first place? Or someone with a negative score can't rate?
Many questions arise, but I'd like to see something like this implemented.
ladygamertn Feb 8th 2012 4:41PM
That presumes people would be honest in their assessment. Wowhead has a feature that gives ratings and some people just randomly vote down posts making the rating ultimately useless.
Noyou Feb 8th 2012 4:43PM
Yeah. And every new tank or healer will be so far in the hole, the probably won't be able to crawl out of it. No thanks. There should be a box to check if you don't wish to group with them in the future and a box to click if you wish to group with them in the future. Then each time you queue up you are more likely to get people you have clicked on "yes" than an unchecked person, if available. You would probably have to do a few dungeons before you built up enough contacts for it to take effect.
jaymccowan13 Feb 8th 2012 4:43PM
@umichama
Then you could simply make the ability to vote a privilege that you earned at a certain rating level. Make the rating similar to arena ratings, with everyone starting off above average, and then letting the baddies drop down and the good guys maintain/raise their rating.
Also, I believe the Playerscore addon has a similar feature, although it is solely the +1/-1 rating system, nothing else, and it only works with people with the addon.
eel5pe Feb 8th 2012 4:48PM
Then you could add a reactive system like LoL does, where if you vote with the majority more often then your vote ends up counting more. But then there's the problem of say new players who might be doing badly (-1) but don't really know any better because they're not internet savvy and don't have friends to guide them (aww you poor thing, here's a +1 try harder). And then should the rating be account wide or toon-wide, or even spec-wide? You could argue that a jerk is a jerk on any character (-1), but at the same time I can say that you'd probably be overjoyed to have my paladin heal for you (+1), pretty meh if he was DPSing (0), and pretty angry if I was on my druid (-18 thousand).
Basically any sort of numerical rating system rapidly becomes very complex very fast, so I'm not sure it would be the best solution.
Gremda Feb 8th 2012 5:06PM
The only way I could see this working is if jerks couldn't directly lower your score. If it were a 0/1/2 option, where 0=jerk, 1=okay, and 2=good, your score would be set by players rating how good you are, not how bad.
Chairman Kaga Feb 8th 2012 7:53PM
You can solve that in a similar way they operate the vote kick system and its dynamic cooldown.
The more you abuse that downvote, the less you're allowed to use it. Maybe you start with 10 votes a day, but if you're doing nothing but downvoting everyone, that gets pared back. Over time the votes of the people using the system properly will outweigh the trolls.
Gaffy Feb 8th 2012 8:35PM
The way to prevent abuse of the system is really pretty easy.
1: You cannot give rating to anyone you are group with originally. that way you can't "trade up votes"
2: base the value of the votes be based on a ratio of good to bad votes, to a max value. Basically [good votes]/[bad votes]=[value of bad vote] up to the max value and vice versa. If someone had voted 1 good and 100 bad votes then his vote values would be: good vote, the max, bad vote 1/100th of max value. That way, if you always vote one way or the other, your vote would be worth almost nothing. But you still can't stack your vote count to make your votes worth more than what a 50/50 vote ratio would be.
This would prevent most of the abuse issues yet still maintain the value of a rating system. That could be used to reward good players with shorter que times, goody bags, a roll bonus, increased loot or whatever would be needed to encourage players to be on they're best behavior.
Yaroukh Feb 8th 2012 10:17PM
I don't think there have to be any sophisticated method to prevent abuse of such voting system. Keep in mind that this thing would be gathering data over long span of time. Then all of us would run into jerks (so we all would get similar amount of undeserved bad rep.), and the shear amount of up/down-votes would diminish the jerks.
Jay Feb 9th 2012 5:18AM
One way this might work is if by giving negative votes you also give yourself one negative vote. This won't be a problem cause you're a good guy and has lots of positive votes (you do don't you?!). This way you won't downvote people just because you can since you'll in the process downvote yourself. While you won't get anything for voting up, you'd do that just because you'd want good people to be rewarded.
Example 1: 5-man dungeon. Asshat comes in downvotes everyone. Each person gets -1, asshat gets -4.
Example 2: Verbally abusive ninja-looter is in your group. Everyone downvotes him. You get -1 in the process. Ninja-looter gets -4.
Plainswander Feb 8th 2012 4:15PM
Something about foxes and henhouses springs to mind. On the other hand, most folks I meet while running dungeons and LFR are generally decent.
As much as I fear a "player based rating system", if it was limited to "does this player behave like a jerk or a decent person", and not based on "how l33t is this players deeps" then I think I could be okay with it.
A pulldown on the report system with things like "gave me a piece of gear I needed", "made food the for the raid", "made us all laugh", "stayed the whole run", "didn't complain", "got out of the fire", "offhealed when needed", "knows where the interrupt is" and such would be kinda awesome. Let us say good things, maybe it would foster a emphasis on positivity.
And of course, these "indices of win", as they oughtta be called, would be inspectable.
The only caveat being, for goodness sake, absolutely do not tie any in-game achievements or rewards to it.
I think that yes, there is possibility for abuse, but it's a lot harder to abuse that downranking folks.
Pam Feb 8th 2012 5:21PM
The only issue I have with any kind of ranking is, for example, for the first time ever, I am leveling a tank.
I have leveled 7 other toons to 85, 4 of them healing, the other 3 dps. I have been through the 5 mans more than I care to count.
I hit 80, and that's when it hit the fan. I totally didn't realize how much I wasn't paying attention to what the tank DID, just it's health. I merrily stood in the back, stayed out of fire, and healed or DPS'd my fingers off.
Those poor people in Throne of Tides, and Blackrock Caverns.....they were so nice, and patient with me. I wiped us 4x for things that in my mind, I knew better than to do, but my fingers just didn't do them. I toss out my Judgement, and then my brain freezes.....
Anyway, if you just gave a "didn't follow strat" rating, it totally doesn't make up for the people we COULD have had in those groups that would be a jerk and give that low rating too.
I just think there is too many people, and too many types of people in WoW to 'let the community be judge, jury, and executioner'.