sport and news: Blizzard comments on how to deal with harassment

Thursday, 6 December 2012

Blizzard comments on how to deal with harassment

Community Manager Daxxari made several comments earlier today, detailing how players should respond to and report harassment in WoW. The comments were made in response to a thread on the official forums asking what Blizzard is doing to combat bad behavior in the WoW community. The original poster cited some of the visible efforts Riot Games is making to combat bad behavior in their game, League of Legends, and wanted to know if Blizzard had done anything similar.

Daxxari gave the following response, as well as some advice for players being harassed in-game or on the forums.

Daxxari -- Curtailing bad behavior

Quote:

What is Blizzard doing to curtail bad behavior in their playerbase?

Harassment is a serious issue, and we've dedicated significant resources toward dealing with it. In fact, we have a large support team, and we've (comparatively) recently implemented faster tools to deal with harassment.

If you're experiencing harassment in-game, there are a few steps to take.

Don't respond, or get involved in an argument. Stooping to using language that violates our policies simply opens yourself up to suspension, and doesn't accomplish anything. Seriously, don't do it.
Use right-click Report on their name next to any lines of text that contain offensive language--the appropriate category should be Language.
Use /ignore to close the lines of communication.
If your harasser by-passes the /ignore feature and contacts you on an alternate character, immediately place that character on ignore, then open a support ticket to report Ongoing Harassment, and include that phrase, as well as the offending player's name, realm, the exact phrase that they used to harass you and that they by-passed the /ignore feature to do so. Please be detailed, our Support team works hard, but they aren't wizards. Mostly.

On the forums, just mouse-over the offending post, then click the 'downvote' hand, then select the 'Report' option.

You won't receive notification when another player receives any kind of disciplinary action due to our privacy policies, but rest assured that we like to make sure that everyone is on the same page regarding what constitutes acceptable conduct in-game.

source

In a later post, Daxarri also included links to Blizzard's harassment policy, should players need clarification on what Blizzard considers harassment, and a guide for reporting bad language and names in WoW.

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