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

Re:They are just words.

[nomadic]

"Just words"? Language is the core of human culture. Language affects emotion, if it didn't literature, poetry, song--these things would be pretty much pointless. If language can create positive emotions, why is it so hard to believe it can create negative ones?

Plus I love the English language. If you have to put profanity in every sentence, you're doing a lousy job of speaking it, and that annoys me. It's like watching someone drive a ferrari without knowing how to shift; it makes me wince.

The U.S. Army solution

[Animats]

America's Army still has the best solution. Their in-game implementation of the United States Army Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth. They just put griefers in a barred cell from which there is no escape, and keep them there for a while. There's nothing to do in the cell, except peer out the little barred window and watch the sun go down.

Re:Just leave general chat

[Omestes]

So your argument is "Your a better man for being called a fag by hormonal 13 years who pee into their Mountain Dew bottles"? I disagree. I think that Blizzard, and other MMO makers, lose some degree of profit from harboring hostile player atmospheres. I know I finally quit playing, in part, because I started getting sick the growing amount of idiots out there, and my server wasn't too bad, even (Cenarian Circle [RP]), but the various PvP and RP/PvP servers I played on were just a place for anonymous idiots to inflict themselves on others for fun. Several of my friends refuse to play WoW because of the shear amount of uncouth children running about. Being called a "fag" 60 times an hour is not fun, I don't really care if it makes me a "tougher" person, I'm too old to really care about that anymore. I want to have fun, not build character.

Not saying that there isn't good people on WoW, over the year or so that I played I managed to get a nice friends list, and join a guild filled with very adult people. I did manage to have some very nice conversations while sitting around in Stranglethorn being bored at 3am. But the more populous places were almost unplayable, like the Crossroads.

I'd say this would fall into the "tragedy of the commons" ideology. Just because you can be a moron, doesn't mean you HAVE TO be a moron. Arguments of character building aside, why should I accept being called a "fag", ever? How is this acceptable in a polite society?