How Blizzard supports roleplayers

One of the great joys of playing on an RP server is the wide range of player-organised events, such as the superb Strongest of the Horde tournament on Argent Dawn (EU). It's hard to describe how huge and well-organised this event is, but there were hundreds of spectators from both Horde & Alliance (viewing distance limits mean that the picture above doesn't do it justice) and there were player performers, gladiators and drink vendors. The spectacle went on for hours and left some my fellow SANers who weren't from RP realms stunned.

The problem is, that at any event like this, some people see it as an opportunity for attention seeking. In this case, our "hero" was a human paladin who tried to interfere with the duels by running into the arena and deliberately attacking one of the contestants. The organisers had tried to anticipate this by posting guards around the arena, but there's a limit to what you can do when the person involved doesn't care about dying in the process - they can live long enough to significantly interfere with the event.


Needless to say, many people reported this individual to GMs, but that's where the problems started. First of all, they did nothing to prevent him disrupting the event, which meant that the fights had to be re-located to the stands and done as duels, rather than full fights, which spoilt the atmosphere tremendously. When they did eventually respond to the tickets (the following day), the result was pretty much the standard brush-off canned response (see below). At this point many of the people who reported it gave up in disgust.

Now this is an RP server, so there are additional rules that specifically ban harassing roleplayers, so I didn't take this response as an answer.  I clicked on "need more help" and followed it up.

Thankfully, this time I got a response from a GM who actually cared about RP servers:

Thanks for your excellent response Nymhelren. Now if you could please arrange a little training course to educate your anonymous colleagues on the night shift about what the rules on an RP server actually are, I'd be a happy customer.

So what's the message here? If at first you don't get a good response from the GMs, don't drop it. Follow things up and hopefully you'll get a good GM who actually cares about the game.