Guild Wars 2

I saw this suggestion in another thread about general suggestions and want to highlight it:

11. When someone is reported for spamming or something similar, the game should auto silence at the very LEAST if not auto ban them after lets say 50 people report them. Its annoying to report a gold spammer and see them spamming 20 minutes later. I know it will get looked at eventually but they need to muted immediately.
So if everyone in Lions Arch reports someone for gold spam they should be auto muted from Map chat for an hour. Hopefully someone will investigate by then, and if not and they start again they get hit with the automute again.
Requiring a high number of reports would prevent this from being abused to harass people.

While the poster was referring to gold spamming (I just block the spammer after reporting them), I think the idea of muting a player from general chats, like map chats, after a sufficient # of reports in a short span of time is a very good idea, particularly for hate speech or abusive language.
I don’t know if I just have bad luck or what, but I’ve moved servers a number of times now after repeatedly reporting the same few players for saying racist, homophobic, xenophobic, sexist, and transphobic things in map chat, hanging about for a while (30 mins – 1 hour) and seeing those same people continue on with their hate speech. I don’t block these people because it’s important to me to continue to report them for every instance of verbal abuse, and it’s pretty disheartening to see them continue on in their bigotry for quite some time. I would like for players like that, after some sufficient number of reports (that number will probably need to to be tweaked for some time) to be auto-muted from general chats so they cannot continue expressing their bigotry to people at large, and likely to people from the minority group(s) they’re targeting.

I think adding this feature or otherwise stepping up on shutting down players who continue to be abusive, is important if fostering a welcoming and relatively ‘safe’ gaming environment for minority people is something that is important to ANet. It certainly won’t hurt their bottom line to make it clear that minority people are welcome and wanted as customers, which is not currently the impression I personally get while playing, much to my dismay.

I disagree it could be used wrong. People could gang up on people and have them muted when they did nothing wrong. I understand where your coming from cause trust me i get annoyed but its giving a “bully guild” or what ever to much power if enuff of them block.

Wobels.1679:

I disagree it could be used wrong. People could gang up on people and have them muted when they did nothing wrong. I understand where your coming from cause trust me i get annoyed but its giving a “bully guild” or what ever to much power if enuff of them block.

Well sure. ANet could simply do a better job of checking reports for abusive players quickly, and solve the problem that way. But if it’s an issue of insufficient staff, I’m personally ok with temporarily being muted myself in general chats, if it also means bigots are being prevented from using general chats as a forum for their hate speech. Maybe I should stress that I’m not saying this feature ought to be used on a player who makes a single derogatory statement in chat. I’m talking of people I’ve seen, on all the servers I’ve been on, who continue to put bigoted, discriminatory things in chat, over and over, for 15, 20, 30 minutes at a time.

I’m well aware that any such feature would be abused. I don’t mind people being reprimanded for abusing the report function, either. But I also hope that the coding behind a mute feature would perhaps be fairly intelligent. Check how many separate lines of chat are being reported, just 1 = no mute, multiple lines of chat, from more than one person reporting, reaching threshold ‘x’ # of reports = mute. Check if the players reporting are all from the same guild, even and don’t mute if so, etc.

Giving administrative powers to players is always a bad idea. I have not seen a single instance where this would have a positive impact in the end.

Even if Anet decides to go after the people abusing the feature, it would just generate even more work to the already overloaded GMs, giving even worse service to the people that actually need a GM.

This is why we have ignore. You find a person spewing their colorful language in chat, then report them and ignore them.

Kal.2376:

Even if Anet decides to go after the people abusing the feature, it would just generate even more work to the already overloaded GMs, giving even worse service to the people that actually need a GM.

Well that’s a good point I wasn’t considering. Seeing as how ANet clearly has insufficient staff (or insufficient staff that care about hate speech at least), I wouldn’t want to burden them further. It already takes long enough to handle bigots in game. I’ve actually never noticed anyone saying that sort of stuff suddenly stop posting. I always notice they’re still chatting away an hour later, so there’s either a long time between a report and a GM looking at it, or ANet isn’t taking bigotry seriously.

Kal.2376:

This is why we have ignore. You find a person spewing their colorful language in chat, then report them and ignore them.

This is not a good point, imo. And it’s not just ‘colorful language’. I don’t report people for random curses. Asking or expecting people to simply ignore these sorts of people is the tactic children use for the playground bullies. I would like to think that as adults, most people have at some point come to the conclusion that ignoring hatred and discrimination does not solve the problem, does not make the issue go away, and does not actively discourage others from participating in that sort of nastiness. If ANet and it’s player base care about making GW2 a game where people, at minimum, will keep their hatred of minorities to themselves, and where anyone, including minorities, can enjoy the game at all times, without constantly navigating an environment where they’re reminded of the fact that others view them as 2nd class people and subhumans, then the exhortation to just ignore the continued bigotry will be seen by most people as an entirely ineffective and unkind expectation.

Ignoring is just so you do not have to deal with the abusive person any longer. I also posted there that he should be reported. Anet are the ones to deal with the abusive poster, not us. They will do temporary bans, or warnings, or whatever is necessary.

So report and ignore. One to stop seeing stuff, the other so Anet can fix the actual issue. It really is not up to the player to fix the issue. It has to be Anet. We cannot become vigilantes, or try to take law into our own hands. We have to trust Anet to do it.

Howdy potsherds.7916,

You seem to have a problem with chat, a big problem. I saw your flurry of posts on the Guildwars 2 twitter page.

Unfortunately, there are always going to be folks out there that are racist, sexist, etc. They express their opinions freely online and don’t think about repercussions.

That being said, I think you are at the other extreme end of that. You freely express your opinion to the point that it becomes annoying and impossible to address. You’ve expressed your opinion of Guildwars, of the people playing, and have made extreme estimates regarding the quality of the staff and their ability to identify discriminatory behaviour.

While your motive is just, and you’re trying to right a wrong, you’ve essentially transferred from a problem solver to a problem starter. Give the good folks at Anet a chance to act on the reports, and implement new policies. The game is new, and they have taken aggressive steps far exceeding those that I’ve seen within other games.

That being said, I hope you stick with the community, and keep up your diligence in reporting folks that break the EULA. However, for your own credibility I hope you tone down your Anti-Guildwars2-Bigot spam via Twitter, use the ignore function, and enjoy the game.

Cheers!

Jify

Once I’ve reported someone for spamming, I’d at least like them to be on MY block list.

I’ve had to make sure to block people after reporting them, because it was done automatically in WoW. Otherwise, I’ll surely see them in map chat again, or quite possibly get another mail from them.

Jify.9361:

Howdy potsherds.7916,

You seem to have a problem with chat, a big problem. I saw your flurry of posts on the Guildwars 2 twitter page.

Unfortunately, there are always going to be folks out there that are racist, sexist, etc. They express their opinions freely online and don’t think about repercussions.

That being said, I think you are at the other extreme end of that. You freely express your opinion to the point that it becomes annoying and impossible to address. You’ve expressed your opinion of Guildwars, of the people playing, and have made extreme estimates regarding the quality of the staff and their ability to identify discriminatory behaviour.

While your motive is just, and you’re trying to right a wrong, you’ve essentially transferred from a problem solver to a problem starter. Give the good folks at Anet a chance to act on the reports, and implement new policies. The game is new, and they have taken aggressive steps far exceeding those that I’ve seen within other games.

That being said, I hope you stick with the community, and keep up your diligence in reporting folks that break the EULA. However, for your own credibility I hope you tone down your Anti-Guildwars2-Bigot spam via Twitter, use the ignore function, and enjoy the game.

Cheers!

Jify

You nailed what I was thinking.
If hating is such a crime, are you allowed to hate haters?

RebelYell.7132:

Once I’ve reported someone for spamming, I’d at least like them to be on MY block list.

This would be a good solution. However there are two problems:
– Ignore lists usually have a size limit. I don’t know if this is the case in GW2.
– Gold seller spam is often done on hacked accounts. If the account is recovered by its owner, you don’t really want them to stay blocked.

But there is a solution. If you report someone for spamming, then they are added to your ignore list until ANET has processed the report. Then they get unblocked, even if they are silenced by a ban.

Agree !! anet, make something…

Jify.9361:

While your motive is just, and you’re trying to right a wrong, you’ve essentially transferred from a problem solver to a problem starter. Give the good folks at Anet a chance to act on the reports, and implement new policies. The game is new, and they have taken aggressive steps far exceeding those that I’ve seen within other games.

That being said, I hope you stick with the community, and keep up your diligence in reporting folks that break the EULA. However, for your own credibility I hope you tone down your Anti-Guildwars2-Bigot spam via Twitter, use the ignore function, and enjoy the game.

Cheers!

Jify

It’s pretty comforting to have folks police my tone. Reminds me of where I stand. I participate in a number of spaces for discussions of discrimination, etc, so I have definitely become less tolerant of all its forms, including those that are usually acceptable in mainstream culture (which is a whole lot of it, btw). And I’m well aware that there’s a general expectation that minorities and allies are supposed to be nice, polite, kind, never angry, when hesitantly asking with many ‘pleases’ and ‘thank you’s’, if the situation can’t be improved for their lot just a little bit, please, if that’s not too much to ask. I am well past over it, with that sort of thing.

My impatience with AreaNet is based partly on the fact that they’re not entirely new to this whole idea of needing to police their community, partly on the fact that I’ve seen a game company completely new to MMO’s do a better job straight out of the gate (I also spent some time sending e-mails and such to them, about these sorts of issues, and would like to think I helped them, but even being able to give input was tremendously comforting to me), and partly based on not having actually seen anything done, ever, to the players I’ve reported (I’ve lost count of how many, maybe 1.5-2 dozen players?). I’m not fully aware of their disciplinary structure, but I thought the initial disciplinary action for a Code of Conduct violation was a 3 day suspension (pretty hefty, imo). But a person I had reported for using transphobia to troll was playing the game 3 nights later, trolling once again, and when (out of desperate exasperation) I asked if he’d gotten any response from a GM, said that he’d gotten some e-mails. Again, I thought I’d read that that is never how situations like that would be handled. But assuming this guy was being honest (not likely) that’s a major waste of GM time if I’ve ever heard one. Some folks are entirely reasonable, and an e-mail warning will suffice, but there’s a significant portion of people who don’t learn until they’re banned, and those folks, upon receiving and e-mail, are going to go right back to doing whatever they were doing, exposing more players to their unpleasantness, and creating more reports for the GM’s to sort through. I’m not entirely fond of an immediate 3-day ban, because I think plenty of people are just testing that line between what’s acceptable and what’s not, and a swift, immediate 24 hour ban is likely to teach most people to stop messing with that line. But I certainly prefer a 3-day ban to an e-mail.

I’ve read through the ArenaNet CoC for this game, and my impression from reading it, is that most forms of bigotry and discrimination and speech which creates a hostile gaming environment would not actually be caught within the CoC. One must directly verbally harass a player to be in violation of the CoC. That was my concern going into the game, and having reported as many people as I have, and having seen so many of them chatting away 45 mins, an hour, 3 days later, I am assuming that’s exactly what’s happening. That’s not acceptable to me.

I’ve started keeping track of all of this, at this point, and plan to compile a week or two’s worth of data on my reporting, which I’ll be sending to an e-mail address that hopefully exists for these sorts of complaints, and at that point, unless something changes from what I currently perceive is the way these things are being handled, I’m quitting the game, due to ANet’s inability to create a non-hostile environment for minority players.