____Pondbrain___________________
                 018 . New rules guys... Enforce nothing!

So I've played most of the time since mid-vanilla.  I thought early vanilla but no, AQ was about to open when I got maxed out level wise and jumped into MC with Giant Communist Robots.  I remember getting warnings for silly little spats back and forth.  These days, you virtually never get that. Back then people would actually get banned pretty quickly for racism in public channels.  These days, you see the same people pouring the same varying degrees of blatant racism into not only public channels but looking for group, trade, etc.  You can report them every day and they never get banned.

This has been noticed increasingly since mid-BC.  On one hand I understand the desire to make money.  I can see the argument for putting people on ignore rather than them getting any kind of punishment for widespread violation of ToS/EULA.  But lets be real.  Our ignore lists are 150 people.  That sounds like a ton.  It does.  But factoring in an ever growing portion of the player base who troll endlessly and constantly fall into the 'fun' of war with other guilds, totally bad-mouthing with the full range of profanity any chance they get in any channel they can get people to respond.  Also factor in people in randoms who do nothing but scream and cry and assault fellow party members the whole run. 

150 fills up very, very fast.

Now, there is the argument that people should just grow up and be tolerant. That's one thing.  My problem, and many other's problem is simply we know what enabling this type of behavior does.  It incubates and multiplies it.  And that's what we're all seeing in WoW over the years as this be ha vi our is not only allowed but seemingly bolstered by GMs who don't look at back chat logs anymore but just ban the most recent violation of some rule (going around ignore with another toon, for example) - giving trolls more and more power to push buttons with no recourse 'till someone dicks around and gets banned for a tiny fraction of the wrong done vs. the troll's vast majority.

Then we have the intelligent addition of being able to trade items for a few hours after it drops from a boss.  It's evidenced that GMs are ever less interested in helping with any item related thing as time goes on since that change was put in.  Not just in raids, but outside raids too.  I understand their hands are tied because of silly rules upon silly rules of what they have to follow.  And that's fine.  It just sucks for the user base.

Don't get me wrong, often trolling is amusing when it's done as trolling should be done.  Tossing something out there that's clearly bait and allowing the feeders of that bait to go crazy against each other talking about the bait as the troll basically says very little.  Steering the conversation a little to keep it in the directions the good troll wants it to go.  But lately much of it is just hate breeding more hate and disdain where you can't tell where the trolls end and where the true psychotics begin.  It used to be easier because when things went out of control people would literally be banned for a few days. 

I'm kind of a dick but I try to be courteous. Being kind of a dick I've met my share of total ass faces.  Many of them quit by early BC because they got sick of being banned "for no reason" (for being a total diarrhea fiend) - then came back in wrath when they heard 'they quit banning people for trolling' (his words, not mine.) 

some servers aren't very bad.  but most servers, as many people reading this will have been nodding the whole time knowing exactly what i'm talking about, are rotting cess pools the majority of the day - unless you have addons that allow you to ignore unlimited people.  I've tried quite a few of them and all of them have had vastly annoying bugs.  If anyone knows of any that are functional and worth while, please let me know.

My point here is, the lack of punishment where deserved will continue to make things worse.  I used to be very soft spoken and quite quiet in this game.  But that ended years ago.  :D  I fall far, far below the line of total racism and hate I see on a daily basis.  But, I do fire back at dick fucks when they're spattering their anal shit blood all over people who want them to fuck off.  I'm fine with slapping their nose with a brick and kiting them around in whispers so people can fucking continue with what they were doing in peace.  I give two fucks, throw your shit at me - and usually I get them so riled up *I* get ignored.  It's nice.  I mean, for me. 

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