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?"

Comments

Play more civilized games

[grapeape]

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.

Lack of Accountability

[JoeD]

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.

Options in WoW

[wuie]

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.

Re:Thunder Bluff?

[notamisfit]

It's the capital city for the Tauren (giant man-cows) in World of Warcraft.

Re:Just leave general chat

[Judg3]

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.