Improving The Social Aspect

Read a post from Glyph of Jai this morning, about how name calling is becoming more prominent in WoW and she’s absolutely right.  I believe this is because if treaded mildly, it doesn’t validate being reported.  Again, if they do it right.  But let’s be honest in this scenario right is still wrong. 

Then again, that’s one of the big drawbacks in World of Warcraft, or any MMO for that matter.  I’ve advocated for some time that you can take the most timid person in the world but the second they’re behind their computer screen and anonymity they become the biggest asshat you know.  I can say this with experience, as a former guildmate fit this model to a “T.”  Or perhaps “A” is more suiting.  My observation is this creates the opportunity for amplified passive/aggressiveness.

So, you have countless douches out there who are just jerks to begin with.  Then you have people who simply follow along and conform to said nonsense.  On top of that, you get the people I mentioned above such as the former guildmate.  That quickly becomes a large percentage of the player population.  When you’re on one server, it could be bad (Khaz’Goroth-US) or it could be limited (pick nearly any other server).  Once Blizzard opened up the LFD and LFR however, the potential for exposure grew.

Individuals, a couple or trio, or god forbid all guildies, can be complete hypocrits and/or downright mean.  Many forget what it was like when they were first playing the game.  Or, given the evolution of the game, maybe they became a product of the environment.  I find it hard sometimes not to do the same.  I was a bit disappointed the other day when a friend of mine was doing 11k dps in a Heroic I was trying to heal.  There was no reason for me to be that way, even if the number was low.  I tried my best to respond in a helpful manner, but I was still ashamed of my immediate reaction from behind the screen.  Others would’ve been far worse about it and that’s not right either.  People would rather go off on a player than try to help them.

So how do we make things better?  Well, no matter what you do the asshats are going to be there.  Also, you can’t ban them for their personality.  Sure, some of us would just as soon put them on their own server, but that’s not going to happen either.  You can’t just ignore them either, because eventually you’re likely to come across them on another toon.  But, if the ignore feature was better then perhaps it would be an option.

I would love, for starters, for the Ignore feature to affect the player account rather than the toon.  If you encounter some clown, then you should be able to ignore their entire account rather than just one character.  This also would reduce the griefing which sometimes occurs.  Raise your hand if you put someone on ignore and suddenly they whispered you on another toon.  My point exactly.  This would no longer happen.  You’ll also reduce the Random Finder people who will roll a level one on your server just to further their point.  I’ve seen that happen, too.

To me, that would be a great start.  But to tie-in to that, I’d love something more advanced.  I say I would love to see it, but I don’t honestly know what kind of difficulty scale there would be in implementing this idea.  When you queue for a random, you would not be paired with people on your Ignore list.  If you ignore someone mid-run or mid-bg, then obviously the settings wouldn’t kick in until the next time you queued.  The first drawback that would come to mind is a longer wait time.  You know what, so what?  I know people who have sat in a queue for close to an hour only to get grouped with the biggest idiots in the game.  Wouldn’t it be worth the wait to increase the odds of a dungeon run you’ll actually enjoy?

Indeed, hard to say if that feature would be attainable.  But certainly account-wide Ignore is well within the realm of possibility.  If I can have a friends list that shows me when someone is online, and who they’re on with, it shouldn’t be that difficult to essentially do the opposite with the same type of feature.  Come on Blizz, make it happen.

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