Cancelled My Son's Account

This topic is not a new one, and we know it's a concern for our players and our player-parents. We hear perennial complaints about spots in our game where this activity is said to take place, and Moon Guard Goldshire appears in that list with some regularity.

Often the public assumption is that unless a GM appears with a crack of lightning and a mighty hammer, Blizzard is turning a blind eye.... this is very much not the case, so I'm hoping to shed a little more light on this topic from Blizzard's perspective.

For reference, the In-Game Harassment Policy:
http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?locale=en_US&articleId=20226

Our Intent
It's our goal (and in our interests, obviously), to present a safe and accessible environment for play. While defining "offensive" behavior can be subjective, the policy linked above reflects our working definition, and our intent to keep certain types of offensive behavior from affecting the play experience.

Enforcement
With millions of players in hundreds of servers and thousands of channels, it is impossible to manually monitor everywhere. To this end, World of Warcraft provides features to help players protect themselves and help us moderate accordingly:

- Profanity/obscenity filter to automatically intercept the most obvious offensive language
- The ability to report any player violating the rules
- Ignore functionality to remove individuals from appearing in chat

No single one of these, by itself, is always sufficient. It's critical to understand the rules we're enforcing, and where they apply. Relevant to this case, whisper chat between two consenting individuals, guildmates, etc is not an area we are out to pro-actively police. Any offensive in-game behavior needs to be reported in order to receive the right followup.

"Punish in Private"
Some posters on this thread have suggested that Blizzard ignores those reports. From several years as a manager for our call centers, I can promise you that we take action routinely.... because they call us. Or they email us. Sometimes there's blame placed on a roommate or sibling, sometimes an account thief committed the offense, etc. The point is that players appeal because players receive actions. You won't see it happen.... well, unless it happens to you. Otherwise you can only decide whether you will take our word on it.

Okay, what now?
Members of our CS team will 'patrol' Goldshire on Moon Guard on a regular basis, and take appropriate action for individuals violating the Harassment Policy. Note that this pertains primarily to public messages (/say, /yell, General) and unsolicited whispers. We won't be showing up with that mythical crack of lightning-- we'll just be watching silently for any rule-breaking language and following up privately with the player[s] in question.

Q u o t e:

Thank you. That's the answer that inspires confidence and demonstrates your concern more than any amount of blue words.

Thank you again.

The support and trust in us is appreciated as always. We know that you guys care as deeply about a safe game environment as we do.

In bringing this up, it's important that we establish realistic expectations about how much this is likely to change about areas where we 'patrol.' A lot of what's "visible" about certain areas (for example, hypothetically, characters standing around without any armor) isn't going to change, even if we patrol all the time. It's simply not against the rules.

With that in mind, I chose to highlight the harassment policy because the public/visible chat is the primary focus-- that's what we'll be watching for. The best outcome one could expect, then, is that potentially offensive public chat is deterred and kept to a minimum.

Q u o t e:
delete what you want its the truth. you need to check yourself if u think rping on a game is BAD?

I don't believe anyone on this thread is making that point, Mashlol. There is a healthy RP population on a variety of servers, including Moon Guard. RP is something players want, and Blizzard aims to facilitate.

Q u o t e:
Arry, the team that will be patrolling, will they be from the regular ingame GM depart? Or will y'all be pulling the mods off the CSF for this?

We have a relatively new Customer Care team, which is an extension of Customer Service. Customer Care works hand-in-hand with the CS Forum group (as my presence here attests), but we probably won't pull CSF coverage offline for this investigation. Instead we will be using some of our other agent resources (who also carry years of extensive frontline experience).

Q u o t e:
Here's another question, though- Are you planning on extending the GoldshireWatch beyond Moon Guard? There are a couple other RP servers where people are always complaining about the same sort of thing, not to mention the Horde-side equivalent in Eversong/Silvermoon.

We'll continue to keep an ear out as reports surface. Our team has actually been doing some low-key exploratory 'patrols' in-game over the last several weeks, to find out how we can best impact disruptive chat and behavior. With this case and others in the future, we might rely less on live monitoring and more on day-after chat log analysis, to identify abusers and problem spots.

The Customer Care group is relatively small, so we simply cannot react to every report/request on the forums. Instead we need players to file tickets when they see abuse, so we can follow the data and see where players need us most.

Hello everyone--

I have been following the discussion on this thread. I'm going to lock it at this point so that we can focus on our in-game work and follow through today. It will also probably be for the best if we can avoid driving any new traffic to this area with the visiblity that threads like these tend to generate.

We appreciate your support and ask that you please use the in-game reporting functionality to help us continue to do this sort of followup.

Thanks,

--Arrestide