Yesterday a trinket dropped in a normal run that is BiS for every class in the game. Someone other than me rolled higher on it, but I noticed he was guildless and probably an alt character so I wrote to the guy: “Hey I’m about to have a trial in a guild and could really use that trinket, name your price.”
Now. As a response I got an automatic message from blizzard saying that the chat he replyed with was potentially offensive. Keep in mind that I have chatcensor off for everyone. So what possible slur or horrible sentence could this person have strung together to trigger the chatcensor even tho its turned off.
My curiousity was very high at this point so ofcourse i had to see it.
“I hope you fail” was this persons response. No swear words, no threats. Tiny bit disrespectful but who cares really. But this response made blizzards chatcensor suggest to me to report this person. Something that could get him silenced. Unable to join groups or even potentially banned.
The worst part about this whole thing is how easy it’s become to report players for their speech. When the chatcensor pops up its easier to report them than not to. Which is imo wild. Chatreporting is not supposed to be as suggestive as this feature is. At this point its not even the players reporting other players. Its blizzard reporting vicariously through other players.
Out of fear of saying something that could trigger this chatsystem I am limiting myself to only ever talking to my guild. And trying to play minimaly with other players. Enjoy having no social interactions in your social game…
Thank you but the trinket and trial are besides the point here. The fact that the chatcensor is completly out of line is the main takeaway from this story. It got trigged by something so trivial as “I hope you fail”. This person does not deserve to get reported and blizzard still makes a very strong suggestion that the player deserves a report and all that comes with it.(silenced, banned from pugs, and potentially gamebanned)
LOL I don’t think that was really the point of the post
OP - I’ve heard reports from my own guildees that they’re having a similar issue … I don’t know what settings they have on, but even a quick whisper between guildees caused a chatbot flag.
One was asking the other if they could refresh a mana buff. Absolutely no dodgy words. Then obviously they had the buff refreshed and sent a message saying “thank you so much” (but only the initials … I’m not going to reproduce it here because obviously the chatbot thought that was an issue, so I don’t want it to flag here too!) - and it came up as offensive and should be reported, complete with link.
Completely bonkers.
Apart from anything else … I’d like to think that the massive spike in random reporting for innocuous comments will get reviewed by a real person at Blizzard which means, of course, they’re gonna have a massive influx of reports to work through.
I don’t think completely removing an automated system is needed … but they REALLY need to review what it’s flagging and make sure it’s only the worst of the worst. People always have the option of reporting manually anyway … but there is an element of players in wow who will see a button saying to report and think “well okay then” …
That sounds overzealous and quite weird to be honest. It’s not the nicest message but at the same time it seems quite tame if that is the bar for reporting lol.
I knew the social contract was implemented to make it justifiable to take offense to and report anything (and thus I’ve stopped talking to non-guildies/friends too), but I didn’t realize there were additional systems in place to make reporting so easy. That’s insane. So yeah, can see where you’re coming from.
Considering how suggestive the system is. It’s not far fetched that a lot of players wont even take offensive and still report, I’d say it should be fully removed. If they censor only so the chatmessage is unable to be sent I’d have no problem with it. Within reason ofcourse. Making the gamerwords unable to be sent would suffice when it comes to chat restrictions. Other than that its extremly excessive.
Also with german language, there are a lot of german words, who just have fragments in words that are isolated hatespeech, and this will trigger blizzard’s crappy system, even though the word as a whole is completely normal.
I was gonna list them here, but it won’t let me lol.
