The seemingly impunity of harassers in World of Warcraft

Community General Discussion
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Hi, my name is Peter, and I’ve been playing World of Warcraft for about 15 of the 16 years it has been out. Why did I miss a year? Grab a coffee, I have a couple stories to share.

Of those 15 years, nearly half of them have been spent playing with the AH, and with very casual gameplay in between. Which is my main driving train in WoW since Legion, last time I raided was in WoD.

I didn’t play WoW through most of Pandaria until the WoD prepatch, why? Harassment from another player. Some people just don’t like having competition in the AH and will go full psychopath trying to win the game. This guy prosecuted every business I managed to touch, and is ethically fine, as it’s flagged as “AH PvP”, but when he couldn’t get me out of the AH, the harassment begun. He would create characters to whisper and harass me every single day, I don’t know how many, but I can tell you that the ignore list has a limit of 50, and all of them where his. I reported his behaviour every single time he continued the harassment, and kept getting the same “We take this issues very seriously, please keep using the report tool, and we’ll take every action possible”. In the end I quit the game because of sheer frustration, and this scum of a person kept playing the game.

Now, after 8 years, I’m in a similar situation. There’s this psycho which, in turn, thinks he’s the boss of the AH (the previous one at least played intelligently). After about a month of AH PvP, were he mindlessly bought me 800k worth of enchants which he though he could flip for a benefit, He tried to communicate with me about 4 times, all of them just to insult me, but after a couple times, I just ignored him. He would keep spamming emotes (even when ignored, the emote animation plays) and run and jump all around me all day. He even pulled out pets with “names” to call me, even pull out pets sequentially to build phrases to call me stuff… I didn’t care. I’ve also been told that he spams full monologues against me via /say, I didn’t even want to know about the content. Now he has gone full psycho, in the last two days, I’ve ignored and reported about 6-7 characters of his, I also had to ignore a third person which he used to send me messages via /say. The messages go from plain insults, to questioning my sanity/virginity, imply that I’m botting, threats about spreading bad word of me through the server, about seeking my other auctioning toons among other servers… all kind of stuff. This is ridiculously tiring, and it is HARD not to answer to him (which I haven’t).

But it doesn’t stop here, I got in contact with and old guildie of yesteryear which also plays the AH, and has been widthstanding this guy since March, and his activity didn’t stop with the insults and threats, this psycho actually recopilated IRL info on him, and whispered every guildie of him asking for more IRL info. He has reported him countless times, and he’s still playing and not banned.

Blizzard PRs have their mouth full of praise about their efforts against toxicity whenever they write a press note on it, but it doesn’t reflect into the actual game.

While I get that my duty is to “report and ignore him”… The actual job of the GMs is to do something about it. How much do we have to widthstand? Do I have to leave the game again? And let think this psycho that he ‘has won’? Why do I have to get to the point when I think of this psycho even when I’m offline and nothing seems to be done about it?

This all takes me to two main points:

  • We need better tools to ignore/block this kind of people: We need an option to block an account as a whole, with improved functionality, such as (for example) not seeing that persons emotes/name/pet names… anything. Heck, that person’s toon should also be replaced with a random, ugly troll.
  • The GMs really, REALLY need to step up their game. No one should feel uncomfortable playing the game, no one should feel frustration whenever the WoW client flashes with a whisper… And ABSOLUTELY NO ONE should feel forced to leave the game because another random player’s behaviour.

If someone managed to get all the way through this, thanks for reading.

27 Likes
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Now there is two thing you can do here. Be passive and just report him again and again. That will most likely have the same result that it had 8 years ago.

The other thing you can do is that if you have a proper guild, grab 30-40 people and mass report him. Even if it doesn’t get him banned it will result in a nice silence.

1 Like
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I would escalate the ticket to speak to someone more senior. It is not acceptable to be treated this way. The report tools are not doing enough. Provide them with all the evidence you can.

There is an addon that will let you extend your ignore list and will automatically ignore that name on your alts too.

https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/global-ignore-list

If you have a garrison with the AH set up I would recommend using that instead or use an AH in one of the other locations to avoid him in the mean time.

6 Likes
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Tbh if someone done that to me, It would make me play the AH even more. I would be more determined to do it. I don’t expect other people to feel comfortable in situations like that though. I also don’t agree with the way Blizzard has handled your issue.

I got spat on a few times for wearing the fairy wings from the store. So you know what I did? I put the whole set on.

Worst thing to do is let people like that win imo. They tend to be pathetic losers that aren’t very tough when pushed back.

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Take him out to the cleaners.

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there is not really an option to report harassment specifically in game. so of course, if you just report it in game under something else, it will do virtually nothing.

tbh your best bet is, if you receive in game harassment, to take screenshots over a period of time, gather as many information/evidence as possible and then write a ticket to blizzard and include everything.

2 Likes
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I totally get where you are coming from and apparently the only reliable solution we are left with is dealing with harassment ourselves. Meaning ignores and reports. Even though the reports will likely not be terribly successful. You need to develop a strong mental state. That’s the only way.

Rest assured that the majority of players would despise the person harassing you as much as you do. They simply don’t get to see their actions.

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Grow a thicker skin or mass report his bum. No other way around it.

As you have the AH mount you could also just go to a random mailbox in do world (or your garrison) and do your business there, as he cannot show up personally there.

1 Like
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We need better tools to ignore/block this kind of people

The OP raises an interesting suggestion here. The ability to block the entire account seems reasonable.
+1 from me as I can not think of a downside here.
Anyone care to point to a significant downside to adding something like this?

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Circumventing ignore is already a bannable offense. I just open a ticket the instant someone circumvents it.

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You should definitely aim for a livechat via the website and or a phone call with blizzard which both are viable and extremely effective routes.

https://eu.battle.net/support/en/help

Unfortunately you’re going to have to scramble abit in this link as blizzard loves to make it hard to get in contact with a real person, but nothing a few minutes of pressing buttons wouldn’t get you to.

Also, you should contact the police immediately in the case of your friend, as these often DONT mess around and will make sure any threat is neutralized.

2 Likes
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That would be an extremely good thing against trade chat spammers as well.

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Tried this addon personally its a very half-baked one, I feel like I had people on that ignore who could still contact me via alts (last time I used it during legion at least) and believe me, I had over 100 people on ignore on my main alone.

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It can not know other people’s alts, it’s for you to be able to block ‘Bob’ on every alt you have.

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Bah figures. They really should just let you universally block people’s battle nets like guild wars does :stuck_out_tongue:

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Yes to first.

As for the second one, don’t blame the GM’s too much. A lot of them got fired for “SAVING MONEY”. They’re a limited number of people, dealing with millions of players and in some cases, their daily requests.

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I’m sorry this happened to you OP. There’s good advice in this thread, like going to a different AH. if he follows you there it will be one more reason to take action against him.

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I know this is wrong, but sometimes naming and shaming does seem a viable option in these fora.

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I do blame the gms, i’m fine admitting that i’m the guildie who has been harrased by that psycho without any help from those gms further than “ignore and report him”

In my first ticket they said they needed more information, i gave them more. Then they asked me to give them the dates of the logs, i did so. From that point every gm answers me the same, we take this very seriously but we need more time for the on going investigation blah blah, it’s been 6 months and he’s still there.

I even gave them the logs where he admits that he’s doing a “CSI”, damn it’s not only that he admits it he’s spreading some of my IRL data to everyone in the ah and to whoever comes to booty bay in case “they need my IRL”.

The situation is pathetic and blizzard is not doing anything, as of usual.

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Thanks to all the answers with suggestions. I already know of those kinds of addons from the last time. As for the moving to someplace else, I don’t care about him being around, I care about the whispers… Which in the other hand, I wouldn’t like to auto ignore them, to keep reporting him.

2 Likes