So today I had the misfortune of running into a particular griefer in LFR named Mamba. He hails from Blackrock and did the usual pull trash and wipe the group, staying in combat to avoid getting kicked. The key though was that I encountered him in two separate LFRs on the same day. Surprisingly, the time difference between both encounters was not more than around an hour or two at most but the fact that he was able to pull this on several occasions made me decide to publish my thoughts on the Blizzard’s policy of griefing.
I read before hand that Blizzard does not consider ninja pulling bosses and such “griefing” in the terms of service agreement. That disturbed me quite a bit because this type of griefing really falls under mass-player harassment. The second time I attempted to get into the LFR group, it took roughly an hour of waiting. It’s quite possible that the time for the queue was prolonged as this guy prevented people from getting in through pulling mobs, remaining in combat to prevent people from vote kicking him. Some of the results were people leaving, including the tank, which prolonged the wait time by another 10-15 minutes as tanks and other players eventually grew frustrated and felt it was easier simply re-queuing in an attempt to enter into another group.
For people like myself, we had to endure roughly over an hour of waiting on top of the multiple wipes. That cost us valuable time and demotivated some players from sticking around. That type of issues, while not happening that often, still should be considered player harassment as it prevents people from enjoying the game. While Blizzard does a policy on PVP, LFR in itself is really not a spot for PVP style griefing to occur. Yet numerous players seem to get away with murder and it seems that Blizzard does little to take this into account.
My response to the situation was logging him on my LFR Troll list and then reporting him on Blizzard’s website for harassment. I requested that Blizzard permanently ban this player from the game as I had directly encountered this situation twice with this character. Then another player in the group mentioned that he also did this in a Throne of Thunder LFR. So that alone marks three occasions. I decided to examine my list and noticed a similar named character from Mal’ganis who was a rogue that griefed me during the Tortos encounter. So that makes it four separate occasions possibly if you connect the two separate incidents as being driven by the same player.
When I examined both toons, one thing that struck me was that the toon from Mal’ganis also was active. I’m certain that he has continued to grief players. But the fact that no one had reported him and that Blizzard has allowed him to get away with this demonstrates that Blizzard has not taken a serious examination into this person’s awful behavior. Certainly, as long as he continues to go on unmolested by Blizzard, he will continue performing these unethical acts against the community at large. Unsuspecting players will be griefed in having their time wasted. With the LFR queue times reaching ridiculous levels in excess of 30+ minutes, Blizzard seriously needs to look at these players and revise their stance on them.
The end result is that without mitigation into these problems, players will continue to express dissatisfaction with the existing system and most likely will feel both insecure and increasingly mistrustful of Blizzard. Business will go down hill over time as long as these miscreants continue to plague an already problematic system that needs serious attention. The other thing is that people like this are probably very sick in the head and allowing them to continue within the World of Warcraft will just allow them to mentally dissolve. There needs to be some level of social accountability held by Blizzard for their player base.
At any rate, I encouraged other people to report the guy on Blizzard so that they understand the severity of players like this. This situation is simply intolerable and must be remedied soon if they want to continue allowing LFR to be a viable source for players.