#37 - July 5, 2010, 8:47 p.m.
Q u o t e:
after 17 GM tickets, and 5 from my GF reporting the same person harassing us both every day, for 4 months. the GM staff issued warnings. nothing more. it wasn't until i brought the police into the matter that the GM staff actually even bothered to take action. this guy did what you would expect from how people exploit realid, he used our friends to find our names, looked up our face books, pretended to be someone we probably knew, friended, got our info, posted it in game(phone numbers, location, name, siblings, etc) . this went on for four months. threatened to <removed> my gf, come to my house and kill me. want to know what the GM told me "people make these kinds of threats normally do not act on them, just keep them on ignore".
I can't say I have much faith in the GM staff any longer.
That's unfortunate, because this situation was investigated and dealt with appropriately according to our policies. I'm glad that you took the appropriate step to involve your local authorities regarding a potential real life threat.
I should also note that while actions taken may not have been immediately visible to you, some players are not dissuaded by suspensions. The up side is that with dedicated reports, those who choose to engage in such focused harassment find themselves rapidly ascending the penalty volcano.
Q u o t e:
I've tried reporting a few of the more blatant harassers (i.e. the guy who started randomly spamming me with the "c-word" or the guy who spent more than 30 minutes following me around tagging quest mobs), but it's hardly a solution since the GM's are experiencing a "high volume of petitions" every single time I've opened a ticket. Besides, even with chat logs, I doubt Blizzard takes these sort of complaints seriously.
If WoW is anything like real life, I'm glad I'm a guy ;) I learned my lesson and will probably pay to have a character sex change.
To be fair, it seems that this most recent interaction had little or nothing to do with the gender of your character, and much more to do with the general attitudes of the player in question. We definitely take harassment seriously, particularly of the inappropriate verbal sort you mentioned. Our goal, after all, is to provide the best possible experience for our players, and part of achieving that goal is enforcement our harassment policies: (
http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?locale=en_US&articleId=20455).
Our staff may not be in a position to intervene in another player 'tapping' a creature before you can slay it, though.
Regardless, I think your thread title was a little inflammatory, and probably inaccurate. There are a great many female characters running around World of Warcraft, and to suggest that all of them experience a higher than normal level of harassment seems a bit unrealistic.
