Smolderforge Support Community

It's something quite strange really, I haven't noticed this to the extreme scale as it is on this server. Sure on some other servers there were a few who were very hostile and overall negative. But those people were just like I said, very few.

Let me give you an example of what happened yesterday...


I was playing deep resto druid and decided to play a few arena games with a friend of mine who plays warlock, he's not that experienced with the class and makes quite a lot of mistakes but I was prepared for that, and since warlock is my main class and I'm used to playing the comp I explained a lot of things and gave him advice as the games went along.

Things went smoothly and then we faced a warrior/resto druid team on blade's edge arena, I explained to my teammate that try to keep only exhaustion on the warrior and go on the druid and I'll take care of the rest. The plan is to simply keep the warrior CCed forever and kill/oom the druid, It's a rather foolproof plan especially since I was feral charge spec.

The game took 22 minutes, simply because the druid kept running around all over the place trying to avoid the warlock, and my friend had trouble chasing him efficiently, he got stuck on terrain and made bad decisions on which path to take when going after the druid, as well as overall bad pet management. This resulted in the druid being able to drink a lot of times even though the warrior was pretty much CCed 85-90% of the game. The enemy druid clearly played better than my warlock, the warrior too.

When the enemy druid finally died, the warrior stopped playing and started spamming the chat with all sorts of insults and curses, clearly trying to express his anger and how he thought they were obviously much much better than us. Even after the game ended he kept going with whispers for a good 5 minutes.



I can sort of understand that some people will feel like this when they lose and go completely berserk mode, unable to control their anger. However I've also seen this happen a lot of times when people win games. The winners will then insult the team who lost in a similar fashion. Which to me is a very strange behavior.

I've had to put countless of people on this server on my ignore list and I'm trying to figure out why that is, when I've played on many other servers where I barely had to put anyone on ignore. Arena-Tournament(now Warmane) 3.3.5 is a server that I played a lot on a few years ago and people didn't act like this at all there.



What's the reason for this? Back when I was younger and in school I remember teachers used to explain that people who were bullies very often did it because they were unhappy/depressed, it could be because of many different reasons but usually it was related to family issues, and an overall bad environment at home. I'm thinking it could be something similar with the hostile people on this server. They're probably depressed and/or in a not so good situation irl, so they use this server and the people on it as their scapegoat.


How do we fix this and make the server a better place?

People who badmouth others like this are often not as good as they think they are. Their ego can't take the hit of losing to someone "inferior".

Unfortunately, TBC arenas are FILLED with people like this. Back in the days, it was really fun to watch it from the side. You had nice people who were decent at best, who got carried by someone/happened to play at the right time and managed to hit higher ratings. Now this quiet, decent player suddenly became this massive dickhead to everyone, shit-talking everyone and acting superior in every way. Intriguing how it works. Whereas when you actually play with GOOD players, sure theres some small shit-talk, but nowhere near this level.

I don't think I've ever seen a community as toxic as "tbc private server arena" scene. It's ridiculous. It's like playing at the lowest ELO possible on LoL - you have shitty players everyone complaining about everything and everyone.

Deems wrote: I don't think I've ever seen a community as toxic as "tbc private server arena" scene. It's ridiculous. It's like playing at the lowest ELO possible on LoL - you have shitty players everyone complaining about everything and everyone.

That's the best example, but the same is also happening around d5. It's just about ego.

Well shit, after creating this thread I went to do some arenas with a random warrior that asked me shortly after I got online.

well, after a few matches we faced these guys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLYSpjmNz8I&hd=1
For germans: DL Link
as per usual, they were very hateful after the match.

Toxicity is something I have always wanted to address better on Smolderforge. I look at games like League of Legends that developed to have tribunal systems for players to review cases and deliver appropriate punishment, or entice players to be kinder towards each other, and instead of removing players from the game, deliver mutes. This is also why (starting with Ruuren) I implemented the permanent-mute feature which blocked all public communication besides guilds and groups. These methods somewhat worked... But there were people who would go around the (Kunngen) and resulted in them being permanently removed for circumventing the mute measures.

However, despite our efforts there has been little progress. Players like Ptaq and Kezx are insanely toxic players who are very full of themselves. It has been very well noticed that they are two community members that deserve to be muted. However, I am not sure what this will result in... I feel like there has been little change in behavior for certain players that receive mutes. They view it as public shaming and either will just leave the server, or, like others, try to find a way around it.

We've been very pro-ignore list, but I know that only goes so far. I am not sure of any long-term solutions due to lack of real ability to address this. Suspend people and they leave, mute people and it works temporarily or they leave, etc. I am not sure how to address it better.

Some people can't handle a loss. It has always been this way, sadly.

What happened here simply confirms what Lelol and Deems have said.

Grael wrote:What happened here simply confirms what Lelol and Deems have said.

Indeed. This has only solidified the fact there was a huge problem here that needed to be addressed. Necessary punishment and actions have been taken. I would still like to discuss the problem's big picture despite the hijacking that took place on this thread.

I will delete all unrelated posts to restore the topic back to its original intent.

@Henhouse LoL is using a reputation system to be sure people who usually report for nothing aren't validated. But it's hard for GMs to make a difference between those fake reports and legit ones, therefore besides warning the player, they can't do anything.

That's why /ignore is the very best way to deal with people who insult you but it may happen that they continue to harrass on other channels. More than harrassing one player, it might annoy a big part of the community to see that.
On this case GMs aren't doing a lot, and in my opinion, they shouldn't hesitate to mute people doing that. But without telling that X has been muted to others, it makes no point to brag about having to mute such asshole.





Sprintex is probably angry towards others because he'll never be a true German.

ahahahaha never true german :DDDD