The studio is cracking down on lewd and erotic chat that spills out to the WoW public, with US Moon Guard server’s Goldshire Inn a ‘hot bed’ for it.
A Blizzard rep felt the need to clarify after a user on the WoW forums said he had cancelled his son’s account because of the smut peddling going on and a lack of policing.
”We hear perennial complaints about spots in our game where this activity is said to take place, and Moon Guard Goldshire appears in that list with some regularity,” said Blizzard’s Arrestide. ”Often the public assumption is that unless a GM appears with a crack of lightning and a mighty hammer, Blizzard is turning a blind eye…. “
”…this is very much not the case, so I’m hoping to shed a little more light on this topic from Blizzard’s perspective.”
”It’s our goal (and in our interests, obviously), to present a safe and accessible environment for play. While defining “offensive” behavior can be subjective, the policy linked above reflects our working definition, and our intent to keep certain types of offensive behavior from affecting the play experience,” they continued.
Whispering sweet naughty nothings to each other in private chats is not something Blizzard is concerned about, unless it turns into harassment of course. ”With millions of players in hundreds of servers and thousands of channels, it is impossible to manually monitor everywhere.” There are over 10m subscribers to World of Warcraft.
”Members of our CS team will ‘patrol’ Goldshire on Moon Guard on a regular basis, and take appropriate action for individuals violating the Harassment Policy. Note that this pertains primarily to public messages (/say, /yell, General) and unsolicited whispers.”
”We won’t be showing up with that mythical crack of lightning– we’ll just be watching silently for any rule-breaking language and following up privately with the player(s) in question.” Blizzard are also now moderating StarCraft II maps for anything ‘inappropriate’.