I got an email thanking me for reporting the incident, Blizzard takes all of these incidents very seriously, we will investigate, blah blah blah.

A day later I saw him online, same name, still in Winterspring, probably still Bot-farming Yetis.

Your story is all too familiar Cap’n. I can’t recall how many times I’ve reported “botters”, naming violations and chat violations only to get the same form email. Then the next day you see the very same people still at large in Azeroth. It’s no wonder that the community is so bad as the responsible players who report them and nothing is done. It’s like we are banging our heads against the wall.

Customer service is a farce in WoW. They exist simply to brush you off as they prepare to brush of the next subscriber. Perhaps they are on a quota system. Nevertheless, it’s very discouraging to players like ourselves who are doing our part to police our own communities.

I am surprised by the ignorance of the bot farmer. You’re right, that would seem to be a very easy thing to verify. I’m wondering whether it’s incompetence or overwork that led to him being ignored. Either way, some good HR practices would compensate. It’s not like Blizzard is starving.

When I inspected him (easy to do because he tried to Ninja-skin several of my Yetis) he had a simply horrible mixture of green gear, as if he just equipped anything that dropped if it was a higher level than the item it was replacing, regardless of Stats.

His name was a clear violation of Blizzard’s naming policy, and was just a random assortment of letters, like Myxoplzx, as if the player had thumped the keyboard to generate a name.

When I checked an old chrono site I knew that used to tell you when a WoW Toon first appeared, and which basically tracked their level progression from that time on, I saw that this toon was less than 1 week old, and within a matter of days had advanced almost 60 levels.

I reported him for name violation, and in the report stated I also believe he was botting, and why.

I also added him to my Friend’s List.

I got an email thanking me for reporting the incident, Blizzard takes all of these incidents very seriously, we will investigate, blah blah blah.

A day later I saw him online, same name, still in Winterspring, probably still Bot-farming Yetis.

All it would have taken was 5 minutes observation to verify that he was Bot-farming. Don’t contact the player, just fly over there (GMs can do that) and observe.

I was actually banned once for a Naming Violation. Fortunately the GM let my friend finish running my Warrior through RFD but literally seconds after we’d downed the last Boss and looted him, the GM messaged me, told me my name was in violation of the naming policy, that he was about to log me out and that I’d be required to rename my Warrior before I could play him again. Sure enough, almost as soon as he’d said this, I got logged out. I clicked my Warrior and there was a message and a rename field, just like the GM said. Lucky I was on Vent with my friend so I could explain to him what had happened. All because I’d called my Warrior “Knuttjob”.

So all is not lost. There are some in the “new generation” who know the value of civility.

You are right. There *are* lots of good people that still play MMOs and while age can be a good predictor of behavior it’s not entirely accurate. The problem is many kids and teens follow the pack mentality and what’s worse is companies like Blizzard sit back and provide relatively little enforcement of community standards.

Community standards…that’s a phrase you almost never heard in reference to MMOs and virtual worlds but I feel we as members of the community need to speak out when we can either in chat channels, reporting offenders to GMs and lobbying Blizzard to help create a more civilized community.

As a player I used to spend about 10 minutes a day back on my WoW server submitting petitions on naming violations and chat violations — if Blizzard had proactive enforcement then I would not have had to do that. The problem was that despite the same people violating the rules they seemed to always be back the next day doing it all over again. Eventually they tired you out and you leave every public channel and keep to yourself — a sad indictment on what is supposed to be a community experience.

At least there are rays of hope amidst the gloom with your example of that 10 year old.

*cheers*

-Wolfshead