Look at Trade as a wonderful example: it is a global communications medium, but it isn’t multithreaded or separated by topic. Instead, it is designed to be a single communications path.. and the only power that you, as a player, have is to opt out. There’s no middle ground, no “I want to see items that link level appropriate content for me’ – you simply have to choose to either participate fully in some manner, or to leave entirely. Loot thievery? It’s similar:

In the real you’d have dozens of options. You could beat the snot out of that schmuck right there, having lasting consequences for them. You could choose to harrass them at work/school. You could call the cops. You could take them to court. You could find their home and steal something of equivalent value. Suffice it to say that your options in the real are both varied (limited only by your choices) and consequent (the things you do, and have done to you, have long-lasting import). In the VR setting, there are strict controls placed around what you do or don’t do by the programmers – I can’t just attack you, and even if I can (on a PvP server, for instance), your consequences aren’t much more than a few minutes of lost time.

Roll back to EQ – if I stole loot from you in EQ, I had recourse to the GMs, sure. But I could also do nasty things like get you killed… and if I did that, you lost experience, and possibly levels. THere were asshats, certainly (especially on PvP servers) – but the consequences were a bit more dire, and the asshattery was honestly far less common. Eve? I can’t get into eve as some can – but, honestly? The general asshattery there, on its frontiers, is really a function of who can enforce what government where, and it has a different dynamic. Some might say that that’s the point of the game.

On WoW, though, the power to deal with your own situtations is proscribed by the programming. You are only granted so much power, and if Blizzard keeps the rest, there’s not much you can do about it.

Also, Moonking?

I think too many people forget that WoW is just a game. We’re not a society.

This isn’t true. A society happens whenever several people gather together for a shared experience, and could arguably be defined by the ‘unwritten rules’ that spring into place to make that society up. Need before Greed, sharing cash, the buffs you’re expected to provide or the portals you’re expected to throw. You’re expected to use polite language, to help out where you can, to play to the best of your ability – and if that’s not a society, what is?

I played Clan Lords before the mechanics caused serious wife aggro :). In that game they had something called Karma. It was a point total that you built up over time. Each day you could give and receive a set number of Karma points. I think it was 5 points given and fewer received. You could give or receive good OR bad Karma. The limits made it difficult to Karma bomb someone and in the end a character’s Karma total was a really good reflection of whether they were fun to play with.

In a sense it was like the DIGG rating systems or the like/dislike rating systems you see for posts on forums. The community rates your behaviour. That is the one thing I find frustrating about wow sometimes is that when you get ninja’d and make a comment to someone else about it they say “oh everyone knows he’s an asshat”. It just highlights that there is no mechanism in this virtual world to identify the asshats.

I don’t want the asshats removed I just want some way of identifying so I can make an informed choice about joining a PUG raid. I don’t know if the Karma system would work in WoW but some way of gathering the reputation as a great tank/healer/dps or just as someone fun to play with would be nice.

Wow would be good if we could self police a bit more. However, I don’t care about the spam in trade chat. I mean, the game (in Australia) has a M for mature, so I mean, kids shouldn’t be playing it anyway. There IS a language filter already and it isn’t hard to ignore people. WoW is like real life, really. . . there are always stupid people and you just learn to nagivate around them.

Put out community tools, and these clowns are going start using them against us. You just gave them power. Now they can band together and game and terrorize the system. Imagine a group of idiots that just decided to single you out for bullying – next thing you know you can’t chat with anyone and no longer can get enchants, PuGs, what have you. We had a BIG problem our server with a guild “Geese Howard The Guild.” It was and is a collection of 400 of the biggest jerkoffs you can find. Our server would be trashed if you handed them any community tools to police the morons because they would instantly swamp the system. It took a month of people pleading with blizzard to just get them to stop ginvite spamming everyone. Seriously I got spammed 20 times in an hour. And if you told them to stop eventually elevating to a f-ck off (ignoring did nothing, they’d just spam from another character) they’d find you and harass the ever-living shit out of you by ninja’ing everything or killing the stuff you were trying to kill and spamming you even more. After all the reports the guild still exists.

The havoc those idiots would’ve done to our server with any of the tools you are talking about gives me the willies. I’ll take the jerk behavior over that.

I’m just more concerned with power concentrated in any small party’s hands, whether devs or players. The power has to go somewhere, and I’d rather spread it around a bit. That has a tendency to balance things out if done right… sort of a “Second Amendment” for game power, as it were. If they want us to police ourselves as a community, we need the tools to do that. Ditto for the forums, and why I never bought the “RealID is the solution to trolling” line.

It’s funny… Blizzard (or any MMO admins, really) have the power to be the strongest Big Brother we’ve ever seen, but they seem at least slightly content to sit back on the social front and let the dirtbags go wild. I’m happy that they aren’t flexing their totalitarian muscle, but at the same time, it’s not like players have a lot of options. /ignore only accomplishes so much, and doesn’t really address the problem players. When the devs won’t or can’t enforce their own rules on behavior or chat, what else can be done?

Maybe we need a Spock neck pinch like Star Trek IV. Mute that punk rocker for a while and see if the bus is a happier place.

Tesh, and those of you advocating more tools for players to police ourselves…. I like that idea.

What I am reminded of, though, are examples we’ve all heard of, of players that had the power in guilds, guild leader, guild banker, whatever… and seem perfectly nice and emotionally stable. Then, one day, they just snap, go on a long drunken rambling crazy session on vent, and at the end of it gkick everyone and disband the guild, leaving everyone going, “wtf just happened there?”

Not a “don’t do it”, just an acknowledgement that power in anyone’s hands can be wielded poorly, no matter what their previous track record may be.

It seems to me that these virtual worlds don’t need more Big Brother, they need more John Wayne. Give us the tools to stop jerks on the local level, like Puzzle Pirates’ “Black Spots” (effectively a short-term mute of that character; *nobody* sees their chat for a while… and yes, there are bans available for those who abuse that power, only vested in high-ranking pirates). As citizens, we are almost completely powerless in the social sphere. Give us some teeth already.