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

Just leave general chat

[WinterSolstice]

Seriously - it's the only way to retain any hope for mankind :)

Re:Just leave general chat

[OglinTatas]

I have left general chat. I also left trade channel and defense channel, because there are few on topic postings if any. Trade and defense are mixed in with the garbage on general chat. I've never been to LFG channel. Face to face talking and obviously /p or /g are about all that are not full of trash talking. (Or not.)

That takes care of all the profanity, but now I get in-game spam-mail and spam-tells from 'xssdfjbv' or 'jwedexxsd' about gold prices. And if I /ignore, in 5 minutes I get "xlxsow removed from ignore list--no such player" then another spam-tell from 'wossdddd'

Blizzard needs to do 2 things: 1) a "mark as spam" button which automatically logs a complaint and the evidence, and ignores the user for chat, tell, and mail; 2) as another poster put it, if I /ignore a player, I want the option to ignore the WHOLE account, no matter how many alts the guy uses--chat, tell, mail, duel spam, plain talking, yells, and emotes.

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.

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?

Re:Just leave general chat

[C0rinthian]

Here is a better analogy: If you own a store, and someone is inside verbally abusing your customers, do you:
A) Tell the abuser to leave.
B) Tell your customers to deal with the abuser.

Which do you think is better for your business?

obPA

[Rob T Firefly]

Gabe said it best.

Thunder Bluff?

[wbren]

But Thunder Bluff is full of easy-going Tauren. I mean, I've had people moo at me rudely, but I wouldn't call them "racist junk-monkeys". I'm sick of people stereotyping Tauren! First it's "Tauren are stupid cows" and "Tauren aren't allowed in my house because they'll break the china". Now it's "Tauren are racists". When will it all end...

Re:Thunder Bluff?

[vjmurphy]

I hear that Geico's next commercials will feature a new tag line "So easy, even a Tauren can do it."

Maybe... just maybe...

[__aaclcg7560]

If the video game industry wasn't an extended boys locker room where everything goes because there's no parents or teachers around? I worked for six years in the video game industry where such childish behavior was the norm. The supervisors called each other "douche bags". A woman lead tester was fired for calling a tester an "a**hole" for screwing off on her project, never mind that male testers routinely called each other "hos" and "bitches". Maybe it's time for the video game industry to clean up its act.

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.

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.

Thunder Bluff?

[richdun]

On behalf of the Taurahe people, I for one am highly offended at the implication that our peaceful, majestic city in the clouds needs cleaning up. Our Bluffwatchers are some of the most efficient custodians I have ever seen, and our program to recycle waste products into compost to aid in Arch Druid Runetotem's morrorwgrain research sets an example for capital cities across Azeroth.

Despite our bovine nature, and its accompanying production of large piles of waste product, we boast of the cleanest cities on Azeroth or Outlands, free from the usual blight of urban sprawl, like the putrid sewers of Undercity, the molten magma "waste processing" of Ironforge, or the dumbasses in Stormwind who let a dragon take over the city just because she could shapeshift into a "hawt bb." Meanwhile, we have continued to maintain a healthy tourism industry, and, unlike our druidic friends in Darnassus, people actually go to Thunder Bluff on purpose, not just because their cat hit the mouse and they were trying to go to Winterspring to farm.

In summary, I expect a full apology to be delivered to Cairne by the end of the week. Reparations in the form of well chewed grass, some decent low level balance druid armor, or a free pass to /spit on all rogues, both Alliance and Horde, would be acceptable.

Celticow
(Azjol-Nerub)

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.

taboo words, racism, and trash talk

[Lord Ender]

I don't know whether it is cultural or instinctual, but when boys compete, they "trash-talk" eachother. It is the competitive spirit of the game bleeding into language.

Think about a street basketball game and the "yo momma's so fat" jokes. The same thing happens in online FPS games.

Players tend to build up an immunity to such insults, so there is an arms race of conceiving increasingly offensive verbal jabs. It gets worse and worse.

The solution, of course, is to just ignore offensive words altogether. Think "sticks and stones" and get on with the game! Racism in online games is a joke anyway--nobody knows your race so they can't mean it seriously. There is nothing special or magical about taboo words, either. Hearing "swear" words only hurts your feelings because you let them. You have nobody to blame but yourself.

If you can't handle trash talk in competitive games, whether they are on the court or on the net, you can either stop playing or stop giving taboo words power over you.

Alternatively, start a girls league or have referees which enforce a code of good sportsmanship. Pick-up games of basketball and of counter-strike don't have refs, so you will always have boys' competitive spirits showing in the language.

This the Reality of ANY Pick Up Game

[PM Guy]

Did anyone play pick up basketball games at their local playground growing up? Racist, sexist, homophobic, profane... you name it! It was called smack talk and some people were incredible at it. This is the modern day equivalent. If you are a 30-year gamer with a job (like me) and you go into a game filled with teenagers... guess what? Smack talk. It's no different than heading to your local basketball court and trying to hang with the teenagers there.

Re:There's this thing...

[TNTSoggy]

Actually no freedom of speech does not apply to game servers because they are the equivalent of private property, I'm a member of the gaming clan and we have a ZERO tolerance policy on racial terms and most profanity. if you use it your warned, the next time your kicked, and if you comeback and do it again your banned. we ban a lot of people but we gain even more because we run a clean server.

Re:Just give us the option

[Red Flayer]

You have no clue, do you? You've never raised kids, have you? Until you have, STFU and GBTW.

I have my preferences, you have yours. Big fucking deal. If there are a lot of people like me out there, why shouldn't a game company cater to us? It's not like the people like you and the people like me can't both be satisfied.

Or you could teach the children to ignore it and thicken their skins a little, but hey, since daddy can't and would rather be shielded from all the naughty words and thoughts than just do the same, why should they?

Seriously, get a clue before you spout off your nonsense. If you ever have kids, you'll learn that parenting is not easy, and that making sure your kids are exposed to the right influences is one of the keys to ensuring that they establish behavior patterns that are healthy for them. Teaching them to be able to handle bad situations and assholes is important, but I want to be able to do that on my own terms. Then again, I *care* how my kids turn out, so the above may not apply to you.