A worried murmur went through Goldshire in World of Warcraft. Blizzard is getting to grips with the “eRPlers” – or has it always been like this?
“How can he still walk around the realm with such a name?” – That’s probably the question asked by many who stay in the capital cities of World of Warcraft. But it’s not only there that you come across scary names, it sometimes gets really scary in Goldhain on role-playing realms such as “Argent Dawn” or “Die Aldor”. What people write about their characters can get banned because it’s so bad game masters can’t even rewrite it.
What happened? In the US WoW forum, an outraged player named Valui reported who had received a 3-day ban. He was punished for “disruptive gameplay” and, despite all his love, couldn’t explain what was going on.
After a while, the first Game Master remarked, “If something is considered inappropriate to say it out loud, then it is also inappropriate to put it in an addon that can be read by other players.”
Valui still seems to have no idea what it could be about and suspects that it is because he would criticize Blizzard in several of his RP flags. Then it will probably be too colorful for the game master Vrakthris, who becomes a little clearer and explains:
To be perfectly clear, Valui, there have been no changes to our rules. It’s the same rules we’ve had for many years. The only thing that has changed is that you went from not yet reported to reported and verified.
While the quote you mentioned may be ambiguous, that’s not why your account was penalized. The content that was reported was much more visual than anything you just exemplified here. To such an extent that even I, with my expertise in innuendo and vagueness, cannot even paraphrase this content without acting inappropriately myself.
But even after that, Valui still doesn’t seem to know what it’s actually about, even if everyone else in the article had suspected it from the beginning – about activities in Goldhain that you could probably describe as “slippery”. Then the GM goes in again:
It’s weird that it took so long for someone to report you for this content when you’ve really been around for quite a while. I can only imagine that the others who saw this didn’t know that or how to report this.
Nothing you wrote was shocking. It’s just not appropriate for our game, or any place really, except ones where you’re actively looking for such material.
What kind of addon are they talking about? The most used addon by roleplayers is Total RP 3, but there are alternatives, although most of the features are similar. One of the most important functions is that characters can be described in more detail here. Details such as size, type of clothing, general behavior or even a character story can be found here. All this information together is called the “flag” of a character.
While most of these “flags” are harmless, you can also find many a flag with a lot of details that you might not even want to know, especially in the notorious gold grove. Draenei like to have a few body parts too many, and night elves describe every corner of their body and their sexual preferences in a level of detail that would make even the porn industry blush with shame.
Many probably thought that the “flags” were not part of Blizzard’s criminal area – after all, they can only be read by those who also use the addon. A while ago, however, Blizzard created the possibility of reporting content written in addons and imposing sanctions on it.
What does that mean? If you’ve ever wondered how it can be that characters with obnoxious names just roam the World of Warcraft unmolested and Blizzard “does nothing” about it, then that’s simply because these characters have not yet been reported . So if you find an offensive or inappropriate name or, in the case of roleplayers, find some rather rude expressions in the roleplaying flag, report the perpetrators. Because Blizzard only checks something like this if it is reported.
Do you also have people on your realm who go off the rails in public – whether it’s in RP text or as a character name? What were the most absurd names you came across?