And no this didn’t happen, I just thought of it and was curious to hear all the wrong takes about it.
Alterac valley.
1 human and orc on the bridge.
Every other alliance player is down south, out of hearing range.
The human uses white local speak and says the gamer word to the orc.
The text gets scrambled into “uhlen tulen blablablaa” jibberish.
The orc however still can right click report the human jibberish.
And a GM can probably see what the human said.
So should this report count or not?
Spoilers, there’s only one correct answer and that is “no”.
The human was the only player there able to read it in non scrambled form.
Literally, LITERALLY, nobody else was able to read it.
But here they come, the trolls, the flamers, the 500k redditors going
“but gamer word is bad! BAD WORD BAD! must report! must punishies… yeshhhhh!!!”
This is why I hate people on the internet.
Absolute brainrot, zero sense for what’s right or wrong.
Thank god none of them are lawyers irl.
Technically, whether the report should count is not up for debate, it is defined in the terms of service the players agreed to.
If the TOS says you may not type X in chat, then by typing it you broke the TOS. Report counts.
If the TOS says you may not harass other players by typing X in chat, and no players actually read what you typed, then TOS was not broken, and the report should not count.
However consider this: The GM who reviews the report has no way to know whether any other players actually read what you typed, so the report will count regardless.
I assume the chat log has time stamps that GM can see.
Now, you are alone in your own wod garrison.
0 players around. You spam the gamer word in /s local 20 times.
Then you join a BG and say “what a day”.
40 people report you, a GM has to check your chat logs if you actually did say something bad TO THOSE PLAYERS:
Does the GM have the common sense, and technical detail showing in the log, that he can make the logical call, ruling it not offensive?
The notion of “you typed it and hit enter, thus it’s a valid offense” is absolutely insane.
Same way you can rename your battle or hunter pets gAAmerWOOrds with extra letters to avoid the filters, and then rename them back to something normal.
NOBODY SAW IT. Nobody read it.
It’s like being on a remote island 9000 km from any continent or human being, and taking your hat on and off, which is illegal. So should you go to jail for it? Makes absolutely no sense and this kinda bs needs to stop.
Now I don’t know what the “gamer word” is, but I believe I’m fairly resilient when it comes to mockery by random players. Whenever I see a person saying stuff I hard disagree on in chat, I know that whatever I would say to that person, I wouldn’t change his mind.
Instead of reporting the person like a true Karen however, I use this nifty feature called “ignore”. And voila! I no longer have a troll in my chat.
Words are just collection of letters, sentences are just a collection of words.
I promise you letters won’t hurt you.
The GM can check what you typed. He can not check who read what you typed tho, because your chat log does not contain that information.
And while he could check the individual logs of all 40 people who reported you, even if he saw they did not see your words, he still cannot rule out there was someone else who did.
Actually that’s common sense. There is no easy way for a GM to check whether someone saw what you typed. So he falls back to the TOS. And if the TOS (that you agreed to) says typing something is an offence - it’s an offence, regardless of any other circumstances.