We’ve player harassment in the game. s6k9
Xam Xam has a piece about player harassment that makes some very good points:
“The early MMO’s learned from harassment and evolved the culture of the industry to tackle the problem leading to the tools and initiatives which are stock standard in all modern day MMO’s. But harassment continues to be an ongoing problem and source of frustration for all involved.
Unfortunately, as long as there are assholes hidden by the webs of anonymity who get a thrill out of inflicting harm on others (with perceived minimal consequences) we will continue to see harassment in our games.””
Xam Xam goes on to explain what we know very well, which is that names that mocked the deceased player. He was reported but nothing was done for over a month.
Xam Xam also points out some flaws in the action taken against a harasser.
As Xam Xam points out, Bioware has some room to grow in how it handles player harassment:
“deal with player harassment leading to the game having a reputation in it’s community (to some degree) of doing nothing about player harassment (let alone exploiters).
They do however seem to take harassment seriously only when one of their own developers is the victim of it. The kind of abuse the developer experienced happens to players in-game fairly frequently (as demonstrated above) yet they don’t deal with it that fast when it’s just a player.”
The piece is worth a read in SWTOR has come a long way but it has further still to go to be a proper, safe environment for everyone.
