What do you do if you have two separate people on high legend, one who is filtered out due to rude language, and one who is not, but they end up never facing each other due to this feature? I know this is quite a niche example, but say these two players ended up being something like rank 2 & rank 3 legend and they need to face each other at some point to compete for rank 1 legend, but they can't due to this feature?
I'm not proposing any change to matchmaking, just to handling of chat requests. If rank 2 prefers not to receive chat messages from people who've been frequently flagged, and rank 3 has been frequently flagged, they can still play. Rank 3 just can't add/chat to Rank 2.
3. ... to accept someone as a "friend" over Battle.net (you do NOT friend someone over Hearthstone, it goes through the battle.net client), that's a concious decision. It is the same thing as walking up to a stranger on the street if that street contained 'roughly 50 million people and telling them "be my friend".
Clearly that's not how Blizzard views it, given that they have "add the last person I played as a friend" as prominent functionality in the client. The metaphor presented by the game and marketing is that of strangers coming to the same tavern and playing a game together. I am proposing a way to bring that metaphor closer to reality. I would not go to a tavern to play a game where I was unable to talk to anyone else in the tavern, or where most people who tried to start a conversation with me yelled insults at me.
You've yet to explain WHY this proposal wouldn't work. You refer to the DotA community. I've never played DotA; care to explain how DotA proves this proposal useless? You complain that Hearthstone chat is provided by Battle.net. That doesn't make it any more difficult to implement.
And again, this has NO EFFECT on anyone who doesn't opt in. It is not a chat ban. It's taking the concept of blocking other users and adding server support for sharing those blocking preferences, so instead of a few hundred thousand people each blocking a small handful of users which does nothing, you have a few hundred thousand people sharing their blocks so any chat they get is from someone who not many others in the group have found a reason to block.
I don't think there is a need for this. [...] You just remove them and let them be
Maybe you don't feel there's a problem, but clearly a lot of people disagree. There are complaints about the toxicity of the Hearthstone community ALL THE TIME. Just look at the "insulting and racist player behavior" thread. And one of the usual responses to those complaints is "well duh, why are you accepting friend requests, of course it's going to be someone abusive and insulting".
A single flag wouldn't tag a user. For malicious flagging to work you'd need a coordinated attack by a bunch of people, all currently tagged polite, to all friend a particular user, have their request accepted, exchange chat messages, and flag them. That seems like an unnatural pattern of behavior that'd be easy to automatically detect and discredit.
As we all know, Blizzard does next to nothing about people being abusive, racist, harassing, etc in chat. This is understandable! It's a really hard, labor-intensive job to sift through a ton of reports. Also, everyone has different notions of what is inappropriate - some people really value being able to talk trash, and while that's not my thing, I guess they have fun with it.
But many of us get tired of getting "fuk u lern to play" in chat 80% of the time someone friends us, and so we stop accepting all friend requests, and that's kinda a shame. Encouraging people to make new friends and have fun and laugh together is clearly one of Blizzard's goals for the game, just look at the Fireside Gatherings. Ubiquitous toxic chat does a lot of damage to that goal.
So why not let people choose their chat preferences, and handle it in an automated way? People who want some semblence of civility can select a "polite chat only" option. If you're polite-only, and someone sends you abusive messages, you flag it. If too high a percentage of your chat messages to polite-only users get flagged, you get tagged as rude, and lose the ability to send chat to polite-only users for a few days. (Or a few weeks if it happens again, or forever if it keeps happening.) Of course, if you get tagged as rude, you can't select polite-only anymore.
Minor development effort, no ongoing manual effort, everyone gets to choose the kind of chat experience they want, problem solved. Make this happen, Blizzard!
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Clearly that's not how Blizzard views it, given that they have "add the last person I played as a friend" as prominent functionality in the client. The metaphor presented by the game and marketing is that of strangers coming to the same tavern and playing a game together. I am proposing a way to bring that metaphor closer to reality. I would not go to a tavern to play a game where I was unable to talk to anyone else in the tavern, or where most people who tried to start a conversation with me yelled insults at me.
You've yet to explain WHY this proposal wouldn't work. You refer to the DotA community. I've never played DotA; care to explain how DotA proves this proposal useless? You complain that Hearthstone chat is provided by Battle.net. That doesn't make it any more difficult to implement.
And again, this has NO EFFECT on anyone who doesn't opt in. It is not a chat ban. It's taking the concept of blocking other users and adding server support for sharing those blocking preferences, so instead of a few hundred thousand people each blocking a small handful of users which does nothing, you have a few hundred thousand people sharing their blocks so any chat they get is from someone who not many others in the group have found a reason to block.
Maybe you don't feel there's a problem, but clearly a lot of people disagree. There are complaints about the toxicity of the Hearthstone community ALL THE TIME. Just look at the "insulting and racist player behavior" thread. And one of the usual responses to those complaints is "well duh, why are you accepting friend requests, of course it's going to be someone abusive and insulting".
A single flag wouldn't tag a user. For malicious flagging to work you'd need a coordinated attack by a bunch of people, all currently tagged polite, to all friend a particular user, have their request accepted, exchange chat messages, and flag them. That seems like an unnatural pattern of behavior that'd be easy to automatically detect and discredit.
As we all know, Blizzard does next to nothing about people being abusive, racist, harassing, etc in chat. This is understandable! It's a really hard, labor-intensive job to sift through a ton of reports. Also, everyone has different notions of what is inappropriate - some people really value being able to talk trash, and while that's not my thing, I guess they have fun with it.
But many of us get tired of getting "fuk u lern to play" in chat 80% of the time someone friends us, and so we stop accepting all friend requests, and that's kinda a shame. Encouraging people to make new friends and have fun and laugh together is clearly one of Blizzard's goals for the game, just look at the Fireside Gatherings. Ubiquitous toxic chat does a lot of damage to that goal.
So why not let people choose their chat preferences, and handle it in an automated way? People who want some semblence of civility can select a "polite chat only" option. If you're polite-only, and someone sends you abusive messages, you flag it. If too high a percentage of your chat messages to polite-only users get flagged, you get tagged as rude, and lose the ability to send chat to polite-only users for a few days. (Or a few weeks if it happens again, or forever if it keeps happening.) Of course, if you get tagged as rude, you can't select polite-only anymore.
Minor development effort, no ongoing manual effort, everyone gets to choose the kind of chat experience they want, problem solved. Make this happen, Blizzard!