In MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, there are sometimes unpleasant experiences – stalking is one of them. The community reveals how to deal with it.
Cyber-stalking has become an increasingly bigger problem in recent years. Whether in social media or in video games – once someone has picked a victim, it can be hard to get rid of that person. Many pieces of information are interconnected, making it frighteningly easy for perpetrators to stalk someone – whether in the real or digital realm.
In the WoW subreddit, a player has reported that he is being constantly stalked by another person in the game. This person follows his characters everywhere, watches every step, or contacts the victim’s friends and acquaintances. New characters of the victim are quickly found, and there is no peace in the game anymore – the constant feeling of uncomfortable surveillance is present.
The response from a Game Master that there is nothing they can do was correspondingly disheartening for the person. However, at least in the comments under the post, there is a lot of sympathy, support, personal experiences, and plenty of tips and tricks on what measures can be taken to avoid intrusive fellow players.
Housing will be coming soon – hopefully that will bring some peace:
What can be done against stalking in WoW? Although there is no perfect protection, the community has some tips on how to at least gain a bit of peace. However, this requires some effort or, in some cases, even money. A (nearly) complete list of the things that can be done to protect oneself as much as possible is revealed by the user Ok-Necessary1396:
- Log into the Battle.net website, go to the “Account Settings” menu, and then to “Privacy.” Make sure the following points are disabled or set to “private”:
- Suggest me to friends of friends
- Real ID
- Share my game data with community developers
- Profile visibility to “Only I”
- Activate the option “Show character-specific achievements only to others” for each individual character.
- Lock as many battle pets as possible in cages and remove personal names from all if you have assigned any.
- Remove addons with built-in tracking, such as “Total RP3” (especially on RP realms).
In addition, there are some significantly more painful steps. Leaving the guild and renaming your character are important. It is also crucial to delete your character before renaming and to keep it deleted for a few days, so that it will be removed from the stalker’s friends list. But don’t worry, characters can be fully restored directly from the login screen.
All these steps, while they do not provide complete safety, make it significantly harder for troublemakers to follow and stalk you.
Regardless of all these options, it is important to seek help in cases of stalking events, even in the seemingly insignificant
context of a game, and to discuss it with trusted people – whether in your own friend circle, with family, or with relevant support services.
What else can be done? Further suggestions from the community are other drastic steps, such as switching realms or even the game region – this allows people to play seamlessly on American realms from Europe or vice versa.
Another possibility is to get your guild or community to collectively report the perpetrator. Since a certain number of reports will immediately impose a temporary penalty, you will at least have a few hours of peace. However, one should be aware that “wrongly” reporting people can bring penalties for your own account. But it seems that some have had good experiences and success with this.
What is being demanded from Blizzard? Many in the game’s community believe that Blizzard needs to take a harder stance on such problems. But even if formulating such rules in games like World of Warcraft is difficult, there should at least be better methods to naturally protect against unwanted players. Some demands are:
- Character data should always only be viewable at direct request. External platforms, such as the official “Arsenal,” must be actively consented to for listing.
- Friend lists should only be accepted with mutual consent. You can only add a character if that person agrees. Currently, anyone can simply add any character as a “friend” – and is always notified when that person appears.
However, there are also a handful of comments that report incidents where Blizzard allegedly helped them. If you find yourself affected, it seems advisable to at least try it with a ticket.
While some may wonder about this topic, many suffer from stalking – even in video games – and lose the joy of their hobby because of it. And that is often exactly what stalkers want to achieve: influence on the victim’s life. In any form.
