#1 - March 17, 2012, 5:35 a.m.
I feel compelled to raise this issue in the forums, and it's been touched upon time and again but obviously it is something that needs to be brought up yet again.
2 or 3 nights ago a couple of individuals were indulging themselves in their anti-Semitism in Alliance Barthilas Trade chat. As I always do when confronted with such incidents I promptly launched a ticket, to which I received the generic, form-letter response I usually do. As of today the persons responsible are still logging in, so that tells me that they have yet to be punished.
Just out of curiosity, I decided to run a few terms through the search function on this website. Lo and behold, I discovered the following:
[removed - offensive and inappropriate for the forums]
See where I'm going with this?
Now maybe this sort of conduct is okay under your Terms of Agreement. Maybe you feel that this sort of conduct is not harmful and perfectly acceptable under your First Amendment rights. Maybe you think it's the player's responsiblity to police ourselves and this is something that is not really your concern. But I am also left to wonder that a company of your size, with your resources can't devote a very small part of this to hiring online and website moderators to curb this sort of behavior. It adds nothing to your game; quite the contrary whenever I am confronted with this it makes me want to take an extended leave of absence from it once again as I have in the past.
If WoW were a baseball diamond and the players were members of the opposing teams, what do you think the result would be if one of the players starting mouthing off with racist remarks against members of the other team? If WoW were a bar and one of the patrons started in on an anti-Semitic rant and there happened to be a bunch of Israeli tourists present, what do you think the result would be?
This isn't a new phenomenon in your game, nor is it obviously an isolated one. It is rare that a day doesn't go by when I am treated to yet another racist/homophobic/sexist exchange in in-game chat. I think it's high time you at Blizzard took a serious look at how you plan to police your player base. Because it's apparent for all to see that the mechanism you have in place is not working now.
This begs the question: do you really think all of the lost subscriptions you have had over the past year or two are a result of your product, or rivals' products, or simple fatigue with your game? Let me spell it out for you: a very real reason may be that decent, sensible individuals who just want to enjoy an online gaming experience want nothing more to do with the toxic, hate-filled environment that WoW has become.
