Posts with tag vote-kick

Our last Community Blog Topic talked about the bad behavior of guildies to non-guildies and whether it was the result of being in guilds or not. Many people brought up suggestions as to how to police the individuals causing the problems. Unfortunately, some of these suggestions can be exploited to grief non-funsuckers. So the question is, how can we police the bad guys without making things even worse for the good or at least not-so-bad guys?

One suggestion that is constantly brought up is the expansion of the ignore feature. If you could /ignore someone's entire account rather than just the one character, that would prevent the funsucker from getting on another character to harass you. This would be best done anonymously so that only the one character appears on your ignore list, but the remaining characters on the funsucker's account would be silently ignored as well. (If using /ignore account-wide actually listed the ignored characters alts that were also ignored, that could be used by griefers to find people's alts just by temporarily ignoring them, so it would have to work anonymously.) I think that the ignore should work on all of the ignorer's characters as well so that logging on to an alt doesn't expose you to the player you've already ignored on your main.

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

If you're the sort of person that likes mobile games, pick up Dungeon Village. Build and maintain a village to attract adventurers, who will spend their hard-earned gold pieces on your fine wines and steaks!

It's fascinatingly fun in the same way that Recettear turned out to be.

Patrick asked:

So...why did Blizzard not have an April Foolz prank this year? Was it just a matter of focusing on their work? I'm actually totally fine with that, but it made me sad.

I've been running more dungeons lately for the rep bonuses so I can gear up my tank a bit faster, and I've notice something... there are a lot of players that just like to troll or screw around. Especially during the day it seems every 13-year old smart guy likes to play WoW. (My apologies to the 13-year olds out there that do not fit into this category, I know you're cool.)

Now this isn't to say that there are not good players on during the day, and that every bad player should be kicked. Sometimes all that's needed is a friendly hand to help out -- in fact in the vast majority of time that's all that's needed. You'd be amazed at how simple it is to just say to someone "Hey, can you do X instead of Y? It'd help us make this run faster and smoother." People love getting tips like that, and most of the people you meet respond wonderfully.

But for the other group that doesn't... well, it's time for the vote kick. Throughout the last month I've perfected the method of getting a successful vote kick or correcting the problem. Here's my five step process;

Step 1: Politely ask the player to fix the problem
Really, most of the time, this will solve the issue. People don't want to be a bad player -- and even though there's a ton of WoW information and strats around, most don't read them. Just asking them to fix something will usually get their brain working on solving the problem on their own. Be sure to do it politely too -- and not fake politeness either.

Anyone who's read the official forums lately has probably seen a raft of complaints directed at players abusing the dungeon finder and vote to kick features. It's a reminder that people will always figure out a way to twist a system to their own benefit. The most upsetting technique I've read about is two hybrid DPS in cahoots with a third DPS queuing as a tank/healer duo, getting an instant invite to dungeons, and then pressuring the two other members of the party to shoulder the tank or healer job. If they don't or can't fill these roles -- kick 'em after the 15 min grace period and requeue themselves as straight DPS. Voilà -- they are now at the head of the dungeon queue for the next tank or healer! Is it any wonder that players find this enraging?

Heartbourne of Lore Hound offers an analysis of some potential solutions to dungeon finder abuse. As he observes, a proposed rating system for players could be easily abused on its own, so maybe that's not the best way to go. However, I find his suggestion of a social networking angle to be pretty interesting. What if there were a priority system to be grouped with players you met and "liked" before? What if guilds across servers could "friend" each other and form pools of players from which to draw 5-man groups?

NSFW warning: Video may be slightly NSFW (bikinis and shirtless guys).
Drama Mamas Lisa Poisso and Robin Torres are experienced gamers and real-life mamas -- and just as we don't want our precious babies to be the ones kicking and wailing on the floor of checkout lane next to the candy, neither do we want you to become known as That Guy on your realm.

Does Right Said Fred hold the answer to the latest WoW drama? This week, the Drama Mamas help a frustrated player who can't figure out why so many of her groupmates seem to feel they're simply too sexy for their groups.

To my dearest Drama Mamas,

In a random heroic I did earlier, I kept getting prompted to kick members of my party. I saw nothing wrong with the way these players were performing, and I always voted against it. After it happened again, I asked my party why there were so many random kick attempts. I was told by a hunter in my party that the tank, who was in a guild with the hunter, was being an ass and that it was funny, after which the tank sent a smiley face in party chat. I did not say anything further and continued healing, only to be kicked a minute later. Oh, did I mention we were in the middle of Falric?

Was I right to question why there were so many kick attempts? Is there anything I could have done to avoid this situation? It seems like kick abuse is happening more and more frequently. It is not uncommon for me to be in a party where a tank or DPS will start a vote simply because that player won a piece of gear they wanted; I have even been in groups where a member has started a vote to kick a player who is pumping out higher DPS.