World of Warcraft can be an amazing experience, full of fun times with your friends.
But it can also be incredibly toxic, both in the game and outside of it.
I’ve been trying to come up with some ways that both Blizzard, and sites like Wowhead and content creators on Youtube and Twitch can fight back.
Blizzard:
Here some things Blizzard themselves can do…
Crack down on coded hate speech like “huntard” and “libtard” and hateful political spam
This has been a problem as long as WoW has existed, people think they can use code words to insult other players. Things like “huntard” and “libtard” should be treated the same way as calling someone a retard would.
There will probably always be people spamming trade chat with political crap, but what should be cracked down on are the ones repeating the disgusting right-wing attacks and dog-whistles. Things like “MAGA” and calling Joe Biden “braindead” shouldn’t be tolerated.
Ban players who post extremely high priced auctions to trick players
This is market manipulation.
On some lower pop servers there will be people who post a a very small amount of materials for 100K+ gold.
On higher pop servers this isn’t as much of an issue, since there are more materials posted. But on small servers there will often only be a few materials posted, so this tactic can catch players who aren’t paying attention.
They should add a specific category for reporting those kind of auctions.
And of course users who attempt to abuse that reporting tool to remove competition should be banned themselves.
Ban players who abuse reporting tools to attempt to get innocent players “auto-banned”
It shouldn’t matter if they’re just some random person harassing people…
Or a well-known Twitch streamer.
This shouldn’t happen.
It leads to innocent players having to fight with Blizzard support. Sometimes this means having THEIR ENTIRE BATTLE NET ACCOUNT threatened with a ban for “excessive appeals.”
Blizzard needs a VERY strict policy about abusive tactics like this. They also need to improve the way they handle appeals.
Because there is proof that reports aren’t always thoroughly reviewed, players have been banned for no reason due to false positives or GMs not doing their jobs correctly.
This can be fixed but Blizzard has to care enough to do it.
Wowhead, Twitter Youtubers, etc
Block/ban abusive users
This SHOULD be the standard for all social media and website comments sections:
Block or ban abusive users entirely.
They don’t need a voice.
They don’t need a place to spew their hatred.
SO DON’T GIVE THEM ONE.
It’s not hard.
It’s not censorship.
Wowhead turns off comments on certain articles.
Why?
Because they KNOW the userbase can’t be trusted to act like adults.
So treat Twitter and other places the same way.
As for Youtubers, they often let trash comments stay just so Youtube’s system will show their videos more often.
Even if it’s a small channel just trying to get started, extremely abusive comments should always be removed and those users blocked. It will be more beneficial in the long-term because you will be known as someone who doesn’t allow toxicity to ruin your community.
Make sure there’s no misleading/false information in articles
This is more specific to certain topics, like multiboxing, because back when Blizzard made their ill-advised and kneejerk decision to prohibit input broadcasting while multiboxing a lot of Youtubers and websites falsely reported that MULTIBOXING ITSELF was now banned by Blizzard. This kind of thing is part of what leads to players getting harassed in game, because they see/hear something and don’t care if it’s accurate.
That or they’re just assholes.
Also, and this is very recent, be VERY careful about posting news about developers leaving Blizzard. Wowhead did this and had to turn off the comments knowing what kind of comments it would get. But they don’t do anything about toxic users on Twitter. There is more limitation for Twitter, even if you lock replies they can still quote the tweet, but BLOCKING THE USERS WILL PREVENT THAT.
The “reason” for the disgusting replies that the tweet got was because the developer was involved with in-game systems that got constant hate over the last few years.
That’s basically it.
Personal attacks and all sorts of vile things were directed at this developer because of this.
They weren’t involved with the horrific abusive behavior that was going on at Blizzard, in fact that’s one of the things that made them leave.
It was because they worked on something these people didn’t like.
And as far as I know they weren’t even responsible for the BAD parts of those systems.
The replies to this developer’s OWN tweet were so vile that they had to make their Twitter account private.
This is completely unacceptable and is a result of YEARS of doing nothing to stop this behavior across the internet, as well as personal attacks often directed at Blizzard developers from big Youtubers.
Reddit is a dumpster fire that can’t be fixed, so /r/wow is beyond saving.
Since I know there will be people screaming “SLIPPERLY SLOPE! FREEDOM OF SPEECH! THIS WILL JUST DRIVE OFF WHAT’S LEFT OF WOW’S USERBASE!” here’s all I’ll say about that:
Getting rid of abusive players and users won’t kill World of Warcraft, being known as a game and community that is so toxic towards players and the game’s developers that no one new or old wants to play or be involved with it WILL.
Oh, if you’re mad because you got blocked or banned for using vile slurs or harassing and threatening people, then TOO BAD.
That’s all.
Get off my lawn.
