Slashdot Mirror
Cleaning up Thunder Bluff
An anonymous reader writes "Colleen Hannon at Gamers With Jobs is mad as hell, and she's not going to take it anymore. 'Unless you're playing Neopets, online servers are full of foul-mouthed, racist junk-monkeys. The hate-filled miasma they spatter around them has reached the point where many people who could be on those services won't go, and those who do brave it won't go without a posse and riot gear.' She plays out every side of the argument: why things have gotten as bad as they've become, what publishers have and haven't done about it, and why she thinks things are now at unacceptable levels of incivility. She's calling on us gamers to get together and figure this out, because: 'If we wait for the new sheriff in town to fight this battle for us we might not like the town we're left with.' Is it as bad as she says?"
Try Settlers of Catan or Uno on Live, i guess they are too boring for the teeners every game I have played so far has been civil and even pleasant.
It would be nice to play a game against my nephew (the only person I know with an unhacked 360) without having to worry about colorful metaphors. Yes I know its nothing he hasnt heard before and its probably more distubing to me than him, but for grown-ups live is almost unusable for 90% of the games out there.
While I hate censorship, I do wish Xbox Live had some sort of rating system for games with a reporting structure for violators. I think it would work, they could still allow free-for-all matchups that let the explicatives fly, just allow an easy way to designate gamers that dont want to hear it. Maybe an icon on the gamertag? It just looks like there should be some way to do it that allows freedom for both people who want to hear 12 year olds cuss and those that dont.
If only. I've seen so many atheism vs. Christianity debates over the trade channel. And that goes to all the cities. It's so irritating.
"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Drink deeply or not at all."
The problem is a lack of real-world accountability.
If someone were to act in real life the way some of those idiots act online, they'd get punched in the face pretty quickly. Unfortunately, there's no way to punch someone in the face over the net.
Since we're using "Cleaning up Thunder Bluff" as the subject, I'll assume that most of this is directed at the text seen in World of Warcraft. Here are a couple of things you can do to prevent seeing things that might be offensive:
- Use the profanity filter. This will block out the most offensive words that you may come across in chat.
- Put them on your ignore list. I know that there's a limited number of people you can put on the ignore list, but if one person's irritating you enough, put them there.
- Leave general chat. You can always rejoin it at a later time.
- Finally, you can report someone that's being excessively rude and using slurs. Bans are usually temporary, but they can get the point across. Too many temporary bans will result in a permanent one.
Of course, these are the options that are present in WoW, I can only assume that other MMOs have similar steps. YMMV.
No, I'm saying Vent/TS don't do an especially good job at handling their VOX, so you should use push to talk (which they have and support).
Mod point free since 2001
My boyfriend only voicechats with people he knows in real life, but I have no doubt the same would be true if he chatted with strangers and I came on the mic.
I avoid contact with people in online games. If this means I miss out on quests, fine. I didn't get into gaming to meet people - I got into gaming to get away from them. I've seen the way my fifty-something mother gets hit on by idiotic 17-year-old boys on WoW, and I'm not interested in that. I just want to run around killing things and gathering items.
There seems to be a fundamental difference between players who use the game to escape from their life and those who use the game as their life. The latter are the ones who tend to be obnoxious.
"Do you want to be my enchantress?"
Um, no.
A Sherman can give you a very nice...edge.
It's the capital city for the Tauren (giant man-cows) in World of Warcraft.
Jesus is coming -- look busy!
Actually in 2.1 that's being implemented. If you get a tell, you can right click and 'Report Spam' it - this automagically also ignores that user, not just that particular player, but the entire account.
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
Very relevant sidenote is that Tseric just quit his community moderator position after two years at Blizzard. He apparently got tired of the extremely bad treatment he received on a day-to-day basis.
Things like Xbox live and Warcraft at least have ignore functions. It's not difficult to block out the assholes on those systems. Have you ever played Ultima Online? Now THERE'S a game for assholes. There was no limit. If you felt like it you could go through the wilderness naming all the animals 'so and so is a faggot'. Or if you went to Buccanears Den you were 100% likely to be killed by some roaming asshole. They used to crowd around the portal casting firewall spells so people would be killed as soon as they came through. Or if you were just standing around minding your own business somebody'd pick your pockets, then when you tried to complain some other asshole would come along and throw a fireball at you. I think that was probably the most organised group of assholes there ever was.
These days though nobody plays that game any more so Buccanears Den is quite safe. I imagine it'll take some time for Warcraft to make that sort of change.
I have nothing compelling to say
Don't even bother reporting the spammers with spamsentry. Blizzard has already stated that they are overwhelmed by reports from that mod and their logging (apparently) isn't good enough to track the culprits - who usually fire off a barrage of spam and then delete the account.
/spamsentry options ignorebylevel 2
Better use of spamsentry is this:
That'll ignore tells from all players below level 2. I have yet to see a spambot bother to level up a character. They may start doing that at some point, but by then, Blizzard's patch with the in-house spam controls will be available.
Trial accounts have NEVER been able to trade, and have always been capped at 20.