Guild Wars 2

From time to time I come across people in Guild Wars 2 who for one reason or another are, to put it politely, irritating in some manner. In my case I find people who act in a childish manner or openly abuse others to be ‘irritating’ (like name-calling, swearing or unsolicited abuse at somebody, or referring to somebody as a ‘noob’ for no good reason) and is just seeking to offend for the sake of it. Of course, provision has been made in Guild Wars 2 to take care of this issue, at least in the most basic sense.

When somebody offends me I just select him or her or their dialogue and block them but sadly I can still SEE them and certain agitators take advantage of this state of affairs to continue to abuse or taunt because they know they can be seen. In a couple of instances, despite my muting them, certain miscreants have thought it hilarious to fire off effects at me, like explosions (which on some laptop computers causes massive slow-down in frame rendering and they know and exploit it) or to jump up and down in front of me, inside my avatar or around me like some demented jack-in-the-box.

Now, yes, I’ll agree that’s harmless enough but it is also a form of psychological abuse and I do not care for it at all. So, ArenaNET how about you adding to the BLOCK function so that the person who has blocked another does not see any dialogue from them, any noises they may be producing or their avatar so that if some … miscreant is acting out, we can be blissfully unaware of it. When I am forced to block somebody, that’s it – I want him or her gone with not a trace to be seen.

I haven’t had any problems myself but I agree the block system in this game needs work.

For one thing, someone you have blocked but who has you friended can still see that you are on and what map you are in. You can still see emotes that person is doing and since people can speak to each other with emotes, they can talk to you this way. They can enable game messages and will be informed whenever you log on or off even if you have set yourself as invisible. They can join any party you make and spam invites to you to harass you.

It’s a very poorly thought out system. I’ve read posts where real world stalkers, such as angry exes, use the flaws in the system to know when someone is playing, which means they know either where they are in game and use that to find them or that they are home and in one case that they are probably alone since that person lived by themself.