Hello,
I’m writing this with the hopes of leadership and/or stakeholders of support will read and act upon this.
I’m playing WoW since early 2008, been playing on and off since, depending on the content. I have always loved the WoW community and actually longed in my childhood to work for Blizzard, and it saddens me to see that the current reporting system is obsolete, automatic mutes or even bans are flying out without even checking what was indeed the cause of reporting, if a certain number of reports was generated.
And I would like to bring out 2 personal or really close experiences of mine:
Last days / One part of the problem: my friend was doing Maraudon XP servicing. It is well known that a large chunk of the goldseller community uses this to gain gold, and these people are not happy when “normal” players farm it so they can have some gold in-game. They have designed a system where their whole goldselling/boosting community reports you, unsure of the number of people, but I assume it’s a rather large number of reports which these people can amass. Most of these players are from the Middle East, and I too have received already threatening messages from them, so as my friend, but my friend recently got a 1 week mute for “stealing their clients”. (fyi, I’m talking about a guy here who barely says 2 words when he’s in game, so can say with 100% certitude that advertising this got him muted)
AV farming period / another part of the problem: Hundreds of people got muted and banned for writing in BG chat, without anyone revising the chatlog apparently. I know multiple people who got muted for saying stuff like “help with LTs please”, “need help at X” etc., in my case, I “just got muted” for 2 weeks for doing the same more or less.
Besides this, a few guildmembers also mentioned they got muted in AV for same reasons, we all agreed to “disable chat”, by using a window which doesn’t even show chat, and to never talk in AV again to avoid getting banned or muted again.
My point is: these are just two huge topics which can be abused with the current system, which makes people live in fear and to not even say a word in AV’s cause they are afraid of the bans (this was in the past, when r14 was released, unsure what’s the current status now). Some people are making good IRL money with botting and selling mara boosts for instance (this sadly was ongoing and is still ongoing pretty hard), while they threaten you instantly once you try to do the same. I don’t find it normal that I have to be silent about this, or that I’m forced by some in-game mafia to do as they please, otherwise they mass-report me and my account is gone, for a few weeks at least. And then, who knows what happens the next cycles? Might end up with a perma-ban for upsetting the so-called gold-selling mafia.
Thanks for reading and sorry for the long post.
Regards,
Shadpwness