Previous Policy Spotlight – “Ninja Looting” can be found here;
27/05 Policy Spotlight – “Ninja Looting” – Please feel free to continue providing us with your feedback.

So, we thought we would continue our Policy Spotlight posts by discussing Harassment, a topic that crops up regularly on these forums and one of the most common ingame ticket categories. Throughout your adventures in Azeroth and beyond, you will be constantly communicating with other players in an effort to conquer a dungeon boss, win a battleground offensive or purchase that enchant you have been saving for. This communication can be very rewarding, but it can also be very damaging.

Whilst tolerance is definitely a virtue, we all play this game to have fun and Blizzard fully appreciates that the bad behaviour of an individual player can disrupt that fun experience. This is why we constantly look for new ways to prevent this disruption and why Ingame Support agents take a very firm stance on all kinds of verbal harassment.

First of all, please have a read of our Ingame Harassment Policies here;

http://www.wow-europe.com/en/policy/harassmentp1.html

What should I do if I am being harassed?

Any violation of the policies linked above should be reported to our Ingame Support team as soon after the incident as possible by means of the ingame ticketing system. Here is a handy guide on how to make such a ticket;

[Guide] How to make a ticket

An example of such a report would be along the lines of;

“<Player_Name> <Player_Realm> harassed me in the Battleground channel on <Date> at <Time> game time.”

You should also consider adding a brief description of the incident, but the most important things are the player’s name (and realm name if it is a cross-realm incident) and the date/time.

Can’t I just report it here on the forums?

No, this is not an appropriate place for such reports at all. This is primarily because of our strict ‘Naming and Shaming’ policy which is detailed here;

Forums Code of Conduct

If you do make a harassment report on the forums, it will be edited/deleted, the incident WILL NOT be investigated and NO action will be taken. Unfortunately it may also result in a temporary loss of forum privileges. Stick to the tickets folks!

What will happen to the player once I have reported them?

The Blizzard representative in charge of your case will thoroughly investigate the chat-logs and judge whether further action is required and what action that should be based upon our policies and internal procedures. As can be seen from the policies webpage, this action can range from a simple verbal warning all the way up to complete account closure depending on the severity of the case and the player’s previous account history.

Will I be informed of the action taken?

No. Due to the privacy associated with these investigations, we will be unable to release details regarding an investigation's findings, actions taken, or its final outcome. Additionally, you should be aware that, depending on the circumstances, any action taken on a player’s account may not happen right away; it would be unwise to assume that nothing is being done.

Is there anything I can use to help prevent this from happening?

Whilst prevention does not excuse the behaviour, we have provided players with an array of tools that they can use to reduce the amount they are affected by harassment related issues.

Profanity Filter – This can be activated within your Interface Options. Once enabled, all inappropriate words in our profanity database will be filtered and masked to appear as jumbled characters, such as ‘&*##@&$’.

Ignore List – Recently expanded, you can add up to 50 character names to this list. Simply right-click on the player’s name in your chat-box and click ‘Ignore’. You can also use the command; /ignore <Player Name>.

Squelch Function – Particularly designed for characters which are spamming public channels, it also ignores the entire account of the reported player for the duration of your current session. Simply right-click on the players name and click ‘Report Spam’.

Cross-Realm Ignore – With the introduction of cross-realm instancing, we implemented a method to ignore players from other realms, preventing you from being grouped with them again in the future. To do this, use the following command: /ignore <Player_Name> <Player_Realm>.

Vote Kick – If a player in your random dungeon group is behaving badly, then you can initiate a vote to kick the player from the instance and get a new player in to help you complete your run.

There are many other ways you can limit your exposure to such dishonourable behaviour such as Guilds, pre-made parties/raids and private chat channels, as well as the ability to leave or hide channels through the chat-box options.

I have tried all of that but I continue to be harassed by a specific player/guild. :(

Repeatedly targeting a specific player will usually lead to more severe action, making it imperative that each incident is reported to us using the above methods. The idea behind this is to prevent any one player from consistently being made uncomfortable in the lands of Azeroth and Outland. Remember that you should try to avoid contacting and/or replying to the offending players; simply keep reporting the harassment and allow us to investigate the matter for you.

The tools are there to prevent, the Ingame Support team is here to protect, but we are always looking for ways to improve these features and methods so please feel free to post any feedback you have on this particular topic in this thread.

Reserved

Just a quick word here on RP. It's not something we have forgotten about. We considered carefully whether to include it in this post but we didn't want to steer away from the main points too much. It may be that we have a dedicated RP spotlight sometime in the future, but we definitely haven't dismissed it, and consider it an issue definitely worthy of debate.

We will take into account the entire context of any incident before making a judgement Shifthead.

You are right Jakino, but every voice matters and if Fluffybear believes we have an issue with transparency then that is valuable information that should be listened to. However, such comments may be best placed in the previous Spotlight post as our harassment policies have not changed really, we just wanted to highlight them, clarify a few points and get some feedback on them.

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Q u o t e:

The only idea I could potentially think of to improve the situation is to update the knowledge base from the in-game ticketing system with a link to the policy pages that are relevant to the server, that way people will be able to check the policies and then enact on said information.

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Good comment. This is something that we are already looking at and working on in an effort to educate the community even more than we already do.