Spoke 'bout this in another thread, but, yeah, there was a lot of interest to start with. Southshore was a budding hub, couple of Scarlet guilds, Hydraxian-style AA in the works.
But RP never really came outside of a few organized groups. People kept going, “oh, it’s only been two months!”, “only been 4 months!”, “only been 6 months!”, etc., until all the big guilds had already gone back to retail. It was denial to the last second, no one wanting to admit HW had failed as an RP experiment. Seeing an empty, barren Cathedral District in HW was harrowing.
Yes, and people have invested in their retail characters. The biggest gripe for me was the need to spend a lot of time farming RP sets and the lack of customization. Mogging and the barbershop are quite essential for RP I’ve found.
Let’s say Blizz have a 1 policing GM to 2000 players ratio (I plucked this from thin air). By police I don’t necessarily mean “be around” I mean someone whose job it is to either “be around” or to be handling tickets for the server.
Let’s just say there is a server with 4000 players for argument’s sake, 2 GMs to be around to police the server in the manner outlined above.
Let’s say AD has 4000 players, let’s say 200 of them are roleplayers. These roleplayers want a police force specifically for the RP violations re: ERP problem or griefing. Whilst it is feasible that the GMs whom woyuld be employed (2) for the server could already deal with this, it’s pretty clear that we want people who focus on this kind of thing and give it special mind, so we’re either asking these GMs to do more than their contemporaries on PVE servers, or we need 1 more additional GM explicitily for the purpose of handling RP tickets (who doesn’t deal with any other ticket types).
Either way, there’s an element of “more”, because any policing on blizzard’s part presumbley is “all of the issues other servers experience” plus “issues unique to an RP server” which means that objectively the server does require more than others due to the ruleset (if it’s enforced).
I get that it may not cost truckloads in total or whatever, the point is it’s something extra needed for a group that is quite small compared to others.
This is probably why it’s not enforced and left to the players.
Thanks for keeping this thread (for the most part) constructive and within the Code of Conduct.
Paxmillian has given a nice answer on the complications of actively “policing” an RP realm. (This is without even considering each zone has its’ own local chat channels for both factions and the ever present ticket queues )
It’s extremely important to use the report feature to report non RP names, and inappropriate chat/behaviour in the public channels (including character profiles within addons). Customer Support logs can use these reports and they are actionable.
Crazy idea: create a MVP group in the game for roleplaying servers. Let people apply for it that are regulars on the servers and then give them the ability to kick/ban temporarily people from the game. I would do that for free. 24 hours a day.
Another suggestion is to implement a CSGO Overwatch feature. A certain amount of experienced roleplayers can apply and they get the Overwatch status. Which is of course anonymous, same for the reports going in.
For example:
You are chosen for the Overwatch status. Only you know that.
You get a report, it’s the following:
"Player X (names aren’t written so you can’t figure who they are to avoid harassment) writes: Roleplayers are such something really toxic.
You can now vote to:
mute
ban temporarily
kick
You can vote with your fellow ALSO anonymous Overwatch people and whatever option gets the most votes will be taken.
These reports would of course come in in real time, so people that are doing these duties would have to react accordlingly. Everything would be overseen by a senior GM or something in case someone steps out of the line.
ah yes the in game report feature, the thing we’ve used to report ERPers and griefers and general rule breakers for a long time, which blizzard has consistently ignored.
The thing is Ferumlac, while I am glad to hear your response when it comes to reporting and being assured that it works, the thing is that in reality I don’t think we need -constant- active policing of every zone in world of warcraft.
As it stands now, when it comes to certain issues, Elwynn Forest ( Goldshire) is currently the zone with the most problems. We as players are simply not able to take care of that by ourselves. We need Blizzard’s help with that.
You do not even need to constantly monitor the zone. Just have one GM swing through the place like, once a week, or maybe once per two weeks at irregular times so that those who are running around with the inapropriate stuff do not know when you are coming.
Give them a warning, suspend what you feel needs suspending, aswell as making it clear that the place -is- being watched and I guarantee that the zone will see alot less problematic profiles and behaviour, perhaps even vanishing completely. This would not even cost that much extra manpower on Blizzard’s part, nor do I think it would be an very large amount of extra workload on the Gamemaster’s part.
Leaving players to self-police is all well and good, but a Blizzard GM telling someone to stop will be far more effective than a player telling another player to stop.
Yeah, that’s kinda the problem that we don’t ask for.
We ask for active moderation. Since disrupting roleplay usually happens in a moment and is often not chat related. But instead some people park a mount on top of you or rile up.
And what about that Asmongold situation? Was he ever punished for it?
Was the guy who was constantly hanging around Duskwood in the well publically using slurs punished as I reported him every day for a week? He wasn’t.
The person that I reported several times erp’ing in public? Still going. To this day. Reporting every day… Hm.
It’s wack. Really wack to tell us “use the report feature”.
I think the entire server could be fixed on one, maybe two weekends by a single GM
For ONCE show a presence in Goldshire and begin banning, surely it is possible to get TRP3 on a GM account, and if someone uses a throwaway-account just IP ban them, go to the SMC Bazaar next and to the same
Once you have done that, make an example out of a handful of known griefers (that have possibly been reported well over a hundred times) and I guarantee the prevention-effect would be huge
Okay sure, but like I’ve posted earlier I have reported names before and then seen them days or weeks later. How long does it take to get actioned, on average? Is there a necessary report # threshold that needs to be hit first?
People do report - and they see it not working - so this comes across very weak.
Ferumlac gets their house broken into, reports the issue to the police, police tells them “We’re aware of the issue! Just keep on telling us when people break into your house, and it’ll sort itself out. ”
This post in itself is welcomed in the sense that it’s likely a somewhat comforting reminder to see that people over at Blizzard do in fact pay attention to the community’s issues, and for that I imagine most are appreciative, however:
As per Kreuzfeur’s post, a lot of people have the continued concern that whilst officials claim that repercussions are delivered for the offending parties, it often doesn’t feel like it, and roleplayers continue to see repeat offenders running around in the game as if the grief they had caused was met with no real action at all, despite the claim to the contrary.
Myself - and everybody else - are well aware that GM’s cannot discuss the nature of said repercussions, however it does leave the lingering curiosity as to what does and doesn’t warrant an actual punishment on a roleplaying server. Perhaps a helpful and valuable alternative would be to instate a fresh, updated lists of the do’s and do not’s that is as clear-cut as possible as to leave little ambiguity surrounding said rules?
I think I can speak for a good few people in saying that this is something that would be immensely appreciated by the roleplaying community and would ultimately restore a little faith in Blizzard’s willingness to help and support their roleplaying communities in-game, something that many feel has been missing or at least very lacklustre in recent times. Furthermore, it would help to make what is reportable and what is not far more obvious to those suffering issues, i.e. griefing, and on the other side of the coin, help people know what is not reportable too.
Don’t know if you’ll come back to read this stuff whatsoever (I’m unfortunately a little more jaded and not very hopeful like a lot of others here on Argent Dawn) but it’d be epic if you did
Also, and this is forum based rather than game based, but it’s still “server culture”, but what’s up with the cap on number of reports you can make? I reported a few posts before and then hit a cap after…I think 5 posts? Got told to wait 24 hours to report more.
So what, I can 50 posts / day but can only report 5? What if I see more than five rulebreaking posts at once?
The report feature does not work as advertised because it is very obviously automated and requires a mass of reports within a given timeframe
That is of absolutely no help if a mid-sized group of roleplayers is being griefed
We understand that it’s an annoying addition to what must be a big workload but like - it is what it is. Everyone invested in this issue is paying a subscription presumably to RP and that is the content they’re interested in. They have a right to access that content without interruption and a right to good customer support if there’s a problem
I understand that the PVE/PVP-focused communities are a much bigger draw but I honestly think that throwing the one active RP realm some additional support isn’t a huge effort / cost compared to the systems the aforementioned groups need
We’re paying pretty good money and want have a good time unimpeded - that is not a big or unreasonable request
Thanks for the reply / taking a look though, it’s appreciated … people are just rowdy because they don’t like seeing their hobby get dabbed on without any recourse, you know
In other news I’ve followed through with this post here:
and made the profile in question. I’m going to need you guys to send me pictures of your cool RP + ideally add a little IC blurb I can add (or I will make one up and misrepresent you instantly)
https://twitter.com/ArgentAlbum
IDK to what extent this will be useful but I guess this is like a 1% effort thing to do and if even one cool roleplayer sees this and comes by / one “ugh RPers love Goldshire pepega” man peeps it and thinks “hmm maybe they’re cool instead” then it was worth it
I’ll add it to OP - if anyone is doing something similar I can add it to the OP also … if we can get a few cool community efforts going I’m thinking we can get at least one (1) additional blue reply and maybe more
A survey that could last, lets say, two weeks.
During this time, whenever someone logs onto AD will be greeted by an in-game window with a few questions about what they are looking for in World of Warcraft as a game, if they participate in the realms main activity (hint: RP) and how often. After answering the question, a description of the realm, its purpose and rules regarding role play would follow together with a plea to perhaps reconsider if this is the correct server for what that particular player is looking for.
I will once again be a naive man and think that this will help some players to realize they have accidentally stumbled onto a wrong realm and some sort of a solution could be offered to them, either to spark their interest in RP or to help them find a realm more suitable for them.
Results of such survey could also help us see the balance of RPers and OOCers on the server, if the results are made public.
Blizzard could choose to employ more customer support staff if they wanted to. It wouldn’t force them to increase the costs of the expansions or to cut costs elsewhere, it would just require some of their executives to take less of our subscription fee as profit and use more of it to provide a satisfactory service.
Instead, we have a shift to nascent and undertested automated report systems that totally suck - but are also cheaper than paying actual people.
I hate to play the devil’s advocate, but I can’t help but think that even if Goldshire/Bazaar was wiped, the problematic people would just go somewhere else entirely and take it over instead. There’ll always be a constant slew, so it’ll always need to be constant moderation. A few weekends of simply removing the problematic players and calling it a night just won’t do.
On the other hand, if ‘not wanting to lose subscribers’ is a reason why these problematic individuals are not taken care of, isn’t that a complete double standard to “RPers are not a big enough group for this to be taken seriously”? If we don’t make up a big group, removing the people causing these issues won’t do much to change the sub count, surely?
Unfortunately, without support from the people who moderate the game themselves and the dev team, our RP community will turn into what GW2’s became after they had a mass server merge. A slow descent into nothingness, most likely. There’s only so much we, as players, can do to keep RP going on our own without the support of the GM’s and game devs themselves. It may be incomparable to what it could be, but if nothing else, at least we’re getting some support for RP.
Odd stance indeed, given there are three RP servers on EU and US, all classed “high” or “full”. There also are some German, French (etc.) RP realms - I’ve no clue how populated those are.
I am a little annoyed with this “small indie company” attitude.
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50 posts / day but can only report 5? What if I see more than five rulebreaking posts at once?