Guild Wars 2

This is kind of odd for me, so bear with me as I explain…

My wife often plays with a Northern Shiverpeaks guild on Teamspeak. We’re on Borlis Pass, and she also joins our server’s WvW channel on occasion. At some point in recent weeks, some guy in Teamspeak (I know his in-game name, but I won’t list it here) gave her his phone number (unsolicited). She never called him (just ignored him, as before), and she hoped the ordeal would end there. It didn’t.

While she was guesting on the Northern Shiverpeaks server to do some PvE stuff with the aforementioned guild, he started sending her PMs accusing her of being a “spy,” since she was obviously only there to report back to the NS guys on our WvW doings. We had played against Northern Shiverpeaks in the previous week’s WvW matchup, but we weren’t against them at the time of the incident. It was all pretty ridiculous, but mostly just frustratingly stupid. She blocked him, and we hoped it would end.

But no.

This morning, two people told my wife that this guy had been talking about her. In addition to being a WvW spy—apparently not just for one server, but for any server we happened to be playing against—one of them reported that he claimed she was homosexual (she is not, and was upset by the rumor). Another person told her that he said she was also a stalker. The guy had also commented that she “just follows people around randomly” in WvW (which, I hope, isn’t a crime), and that when she’s with a group, “the zerg just seems to find them somehow, any time she’s there” (again, I hope dying to an enemy zerg isn’t against the rules).

Before someone suggests that he may be right, I’ll attest to her innocence. She loves to play WvW, and with all the drama of this kitten-butt spreading rumors, she’s very upset. I suspect he only did this to make her seem less credible if she tells people about him (she only recently admitted to me, the husband, that the weirdo had given her his phone number, so I assume he’s probably done more ridiculous things that I don’t know about). She’s never done anything to make me suspect she isn’t being truthful here, and I don’t consider that a possibility; she wouldn’t hide her own actions from me, but she would avoid telling me about the deeds of idiots if she thought I’d be upset by them.

My point is this: Is there anything that Support (or anyone else) could do about a situation in which a player is harassing a player through means other than directly messaging them? I mean, I don’t know what I would suggest, but they seem pretty interested in keeping everyone’s game experience positive. If Support can’t do anything, is there anything else to be done?

Well, you need to contact support and ask them as they are the only people with the answers.

Go to the support tab at the top of the page then go to ‘ask a question’.

Good luck.

Astral Projections.7320:

Well, you need to contact support and ask them as they are the only people with the answers.

Go to the support tab at the top of the page then go to ‘ask a question’.

Good luck.

Any advice on how to do that? They don’t have an option for “Player spreading rumors.” Would it fall under “Violation Report”? “Gameplay”? And would I have to get her to make a support account just to find out they can’t help, or would they be able to tell me that much from my own account (no pun intended)?

I don’t mean to sound flippant, I just find the whole thing bewildering.

Is he doing the majority of this over teamspeak? If so, could you not get him banned from the channel?

Unless he’s texting all this through GW’s ingame chat or mail, I don’t think it’s really Arenanet’s place to punish someone for misbehaving over a 3rd party social network.

If it is through ingame mail and chat, just report him for slander/harassment and the GMs will handle it as such.

You’re probably looking at a Violation, and it would probably be best to have the player the violation was against be the one who is submitting the report.

And yes, she will have to create a support account. I found that bewildering as well when I had to contact support about something last year.

Solkard.5136:

Is he doing the majority of this over teamspeak? If so, could you not get him banned from the channel?

Unless he’s texting all this through GW’s ingame chat or mail, I don’t think it’s really Arenanet’s place to punish someone for misbehaving over a 3rd party social network.

If it is through ingame mail and chat, just report him for slander/harassment and the GMs will handle it as such.

Yeah, as far as I know, it’s mostly through the in-game messaging. I don’t know how many lines of dialogue they’d have to go through to find the relevant stuff; since she blocked him fairly early on, most of this is just reports from other players (and I have seen those comments— they were definitely in-game, though they’re not the most important ones). But considering that one of the two people who told her about it was a complete stranger who felt he should inform her, I think the odds are good that he’s been talking about her to a large number of people.

I think SHE would have to open the ticket to get anything done. If she didn’t screenshot the PMs, I’m not sure what she would present to Support as evidence. She certainly needs to capture ANY contact she gets from him in the future.

Sagramor.7395:

You’re probably looking at a Violation, and it would probably be best to have the player the violation was against be the one who is submitting the report.

And yes, she will have to create a support account. I found that bewildering as well when I had to contact support about something last year.

That’s what I thought, but it’s still disappointing. She tends to sign up for these things using an email address that she never checks, because “nobody sends [her] anything important.”

Brother Grimm.5176:

I think SHE would have to open the ticket to get anything done. If she didn’t screenshot the PMs, I’m not sure what she would present to Support as evidence. She certainly needs to capture ANY contact she gets from him in the future.

She doesn’t get any contact from him at all, since she blocked him a couple of weeks ago. She doesn’t take screenshots, either, so I’m thinking the “evidence” would have to come from the game server’s chat logs. I kind of find that comforting, since it means that no matter how good one is with Photoshop, one can’t frame someone in GW2 (no pun intended).

Unfortunately, the reality is that GMs in any game will rarely just passively stalk through the world observing players. If you want action taken, someone will have to file a complaint. If other people are contacting your wife about it, have her request that they file a report on her behalf, since they will be able to most easily submit a screenshot of it with the report.

Solkard.5136:

Unfortunately, the reality is that GMs in any game will rarely just passively stalk through the world observing players. If you want action taken, someone will have to file a complaint. If other people are contacting your wife about it, have her request that they file a report on her behalf, since they will be able to most easily submit a screenshot of it with the report.

Well, I didn’t really expect them to stalk anybody, and I fully expect someone (namely, myself and my wife) to file a complaint. I didn’t think the GMs were so dependent on user-submitted screenshots, though. If that were the case, I expect fewer people would have been caught in various exploits over the past year… Like the snowflake jewelry, or the karma vendor mystic forge thing way back when.

I think what I was trying to ask was, “If we request for the support team to scan through the chat of a particular player and find that he’s spreading rumors about her, is this something they would care about?” I have no doubt they have the technical ability to find out what he said, since I’m always seeing comments from Gaile when someone claims that what they said “wasn’t really offensive” or something. They have the tools to find out exactly what was said. So what I want to know is, will they still care if the comments weren’t made directly to the affected player? Or will it be more like, “Well, how are we to know that she isn’t really a spying homosexual stalker? We can’t get involved.”

This is from a related post.
thread on a player harassing others

Vayne.8563:
“Fill out a support ticket and make sure to include your attachments. You can do this from outside the game support.guildwars2.com
Include as much detail as you can”.

CC Danicia
“Vayne is correct here. Please submit a support ticket and include as much information as possible, including any previous ticket numbers you might have.
ArenaNet treats harassment very seriously and we do not allow players to harass each other in-game and on our forums. We do not allow players to “Stalk” or otherwise harass another player for any reason”.

As to what topic to choose, they’ve never said but if it was me, I would choose ‘Violation Report’.

Thanks. That’s helpful.