Did something happened (again) or is it something that is set to re-appear at random times?
Anyway @ Blizzard
While wanting a more civil community is a good thing, I do not think that a wall of text that we all have to accept to play the game will actually do much.
People are generally unpleasant at their fellow players for two reasons:
Because they can and because they consider there will not be consequences
Because they may consider the other players to be in the way of them and their ingame goal.
For point 1, you need to consider how to actively have both a carrot and a stick. If you give people even something minor for being pleasant instead of either silent or on the negative side, you might win some over to the Light side.
As about those who cannot help but being really unpleasant or worse, you need to actively work to actually enforcing the code of conduct instead of making us sign disclaimers. The certainty of punishment is often one of the best deterrents.
For point 2, I would say you should look where WoW started in terms of complexity compared to where it is now. Also look at how far the players have gone to optimize their characters for the content. Perhaps you need to think up ways to make the game feel more accommodating outside of really extreme content (Mythic raid, 21+ keys etc)
Also seriously look up the design of some of those encounters… The way the seeds work in the Fyrakk raid is almost as if it was made to give a group reasons to fight with each other instead of with the boss.
The social contract was the most hilarious thing, since they basically did all they could to remove the need for social contact in the game first. Ie. Lone wolf mmo gaming, LFG tool, solo que, etc… Nobody takes that thing serious, nobody even reads it, they just press the first button they come across, so they can start playing. Same with TOS stuff. Nobody reads, nobody cares, nobody applies. Most don’t aspire going to court over a game anyway. And even when in court, a good lawyer always finds a work-around loophole around those “contracts” anyway.
It re-appears sometimes. Even if you or others did not read to play this game you have to agree to both the ToS and other “must click accept” to continue.
Things like the monthly Trading Tendies for good behaviour is an incentive for example, and it costs you nothing to be nice in the game.
It hasn’t re-appeared here lately. I think maybe I saw it pop up back in november, but I’m not sure. Has another account been logged in on the computer you’re using? I seem to recall that might trigger it, when the currently saved logins change. But I think the only times it’s supposed to pop up is the first time you play (which “new” logins might make the game think you are) and if they change anything. If they’d recently changed it, we would all be getting the popup again.
I don’t feel that encounters should be designed around pugging.
I think the expectation that everything should be easily pug-able with no or very little requirement to communicate or coordinate has led to some of the social issues that you criticize.
There is much less accountability and social responsibility in PUGs than in even loosely organized groups (Discord communities for example), not to mention proper guilds or raid groups.
2-3 weeks ago the seeds had royally messed up a lot of our attempts at a guild kill on heroid Fyrakk. Even I who had done the seed duty fine several times with no mistakes I got caught up on murphy’s law and wiped the raid 2-3 times.
We are a chill crowd so there was no nastiness between us, but then I imagined how it would be like in a less friends + family groups.
After some verbal exchange some people would leave and get replaced. A new pull would happen and depending on how elitist the leader was when selecting them, a kill might take place.
Just do what I do and shout out loud a vulgar insult at your monitor. Avoids you getting banned, and the idiot you were being abusive to is none the wiser. Win/win
Sometimes, the person in question needs a reality check, and if I need to navigate around the report system more so than the Buzz Wire Game to give them that check then so be it.
nothing wrong with it .you go to bank and sign the document .if you dont read it without signing on it then the company can say you agreed to it and have still violated the rules .same is with this document .
The general content of the social contract had been part of the terms of service for years.
Just flashing it in front of us does nothing.
Rules and laws are nothing without the will and effort to enforce them with a consistency that can be felt.
So each time I see the social contract, I cannot help but feel that all that is them misdirecting attention from the nasty allegations they had some time ago and towards the players who had nothing to do with it
The things that it asks are reasonable and have been in the game ToS for a long time.
It is the context of how the Social contract pop up came to be that make me frown:
Blizzard got some allegations of abuse in their company and suddenly they decided to make the social contract pop up as a PR stunt to show that they care about the modern day safety-ism. As if the gamers are responsible for the work environment at Blizzard HQ
Meanwhile the game experience itself has been pretty much the same as before the social contract since they do not seem to have done much to make WoW more friendly and less sweaty.
So each time that I see the Social Contract, I think “who are you kidding with this?”