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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 4 of 4)
Jebril Feb 9th 2012 10:32AM
With all respect, I have to disagree on a couple of points. As a CISSP, I know the privacy issue is phony. If somebody breaks into your house and steals your TV, should the police catch the bandit they can tell you his name and what sentence he got. If you report player A from realm B for whatever reason, Blizz could let you know the results "We investigated your claim and player A from realm B had their account banned for x days." or "We investigated your claim and found player A from realm B has not violated any Terms of Service provisions."
Secondly, you mentioned why bother since the chances are you'll never see the person again. Again if somebody steals your TV, you wouldn't report it because you think the thief would never return? Leopards cannot change their spots.
If somebody in your pug was abusive to you or a member of your group, they will very likely continue to be abusive until stopped. My guess is that Blizz does nothing in most of these cases because they dont want to incur the added costs of conducting investigations. Sending you a form email saying they can't tell you anything because of privacy issues is their cheapest solution.
styopa Feb 9th 2012 11:20AM
Most of the rep-voting systems fail because they lack feedback.
What I'd like to see is that perhaps you get points based on:
- level (the more you play, the more you'd have experienced and understood)
- time in-game (same)
You can spend this FINITE number of points on reputation votes. Up or downvoting someone costs you a point. The fewer points you spend, the more each of your points matters. AND one might even bias it against your trend, sort of a diminishing returns.
You vote everyone as wonderful? Meh, you're not very discriminating.
You vote everyone a jerk? You're a jerk.
The point is that a successful reputation system CAN be constructed, but it has to include a second-order reckoning that includes the behavior of the RATER, not just the score applied to the RATEE.