SWTOR full of RACISM and HARRASSMENT. Bioware does nothing

[Airea]

I dont often complain about a game I enjoy, nor have i sent many complaints.,.. but those I have all I ever get is the standard auto reply of "thank you for your comments, we will pass this on.. please post to our forums.. but we dont check every posts' Helpful.

I pay for this service? Have paid for 2 years now... but am considering stopping and becoming a free to play like so many others.

What truly concerns and offends me is that when i sent a real concern about the amount of racism and harassments players face on their servers because THEY combined their servers due to cut backs and did not bother to change the "English server" descriptions on them.. players that were forced to move to them are being harassed and faced with racist comments. It is not their fault they do not have a server for their country and have to play on English ones.. it is Biowares neglect. and what do they do when it is brought to their attention? they send an auto response saying thank you, put this on our forums and MAYBE a dev will see it.. and hopes you go away. Lets just see if this works... or will I get another (third now?) auto response.

[JPryde]

What exactly do you expect to happen other than an acknowledgment of your message and the promise to pass it onwards to the team responsible to it?

Do you want the bad guys publicly hanged so you feel better?

 

Also I fail to see, what server merges got to do with this... Servers were never seperated by race (that would be racism by the way) so merging them wouldn't cause any racism or what did I miss here?

 

Are you maybe talking about harassment because of language barrier and call it racism?

 

(Oh and this is the suggestion forum. Your post to me sounds like it belongs either in general or even better in customer support)

Edited August 4, 2013 by JPryde

[MajikMyst]

Agreed, this thread needs to be moved..

 

On a side note, your complaint is for the most part meaningless unless you include some actual screenshots of harassment or racism taking place.. Nobody is going to see any punishment based on your word..

 

They will investigate this issue much like any other crime.. They will need evidence to make a judgment and hand out any punishment..

 

So please keep that in mind.. I am not saying not to complain.. Exactly the opposite.. But if you want action to be taken, then catch them in the act and take a screen shot of it.. You can send it to Bioware.. That will give them much more to go on and act on..

 

I am not to happy with the title either.. That should also be changed as it isn't true..

 

Edited August 4, 2013 by MajikMyst

[jedimasterjac]

I have a few points.

 

1. Harassment, racism, etc., are all reportable offenses. Report the person, /ignore them, and move on. Nothing else you can do.

 

2. There is no way BioWare can prevent racism/harassment from happening. They can't magically tell who is going to say a racist, rude, or otherwise offensive comment beforehand. And they certainly won't censor chat like some of the kiddy MMO's (Wizard101, for example.)

 

3. Server merges have nothing to do with this. Even before the APAC and beyond, the language barrier still existed, and people were still rude to people just for sending out a guild recruit message in Spanish, or any other language. But what would you like BioWare do? Pay to open up dozens of servers for dozens of small languages? Not going to happen.

 

I have more points, but I do want to keep this post short and concise.

 

EDIT: The title makes it appear as if the game is bursting with something that is, in actuality, a very small occurence, and, even then, almost exclusively on the fleet. Any parents seeing this title on the Forums may instantly be turned off from the game, even though this isn't even as big an issue as the title makes it appear.

 

EDIT(2): I am not saying that racism/harassment is not an issue.

Edited August 4, 2013 by jedimasterjac

[Lithinon]

Racism and other such things are everywhere in swtor as far as the players go. But, there isn't much bioware can do. They would have to get rid of 50% of their paying customers just to purge the game of racist and jerks.

[Airea]

@ JPryde

This is the page their auto response told me to post to. And as to merging servers, yes it is the language issue.. they state that it is an English server, so all those moved to it that do not speak english are harassed, and the some of the comments made in general are very racist. My initial messages to Bioware via their tools were more of 'here is the issue' and a suggestion that maybe they change their the server description to no longer says 'English' speaking so these players are not harassed for not being English on an English server. simple.

The only reason I am posting here (and this is my first forum post in the 2 years I have played the game ) is because it is what they have told me to do. It also said their team may read it.. it is the only recourse we seem to have when reporting issues that will hopefully improve the game.

 

And to the others, thanks for responding. I have reported the worst ones, I do ignore them.. but i cant help feel for the people who are merged to English servers and get harassed for it. So it was (maybe foolish) hope that Bioware could made aware of the issue and change the "English" server description so that cant be used as their reason to harass them.

I dont want public hangings JPryde, lighten up, I was only trying to help people who may leave because of the BS they have to deal with

[tyranusdarec]

I will say that general chat on Harbringer server can be very harassing and racist at times. Dang near everyday there is someone mad about something and verbally attacking anyone and everyone. Especially new players just asking questions. Yah I will be the first to admit its a pain answering new player questions. But its part of any MMO. Seems like in TOR people dont realize that.

 

So you will get one guy throwing out racist insults or religious insults or sexual insults to someone. And sometimes its based on language. A few weeks ago a pinoy player (I assume since it was tagalog words) was talking in general chat. Some guy was mad about crashing alot or some such thing and started verbally attacking the asian player. Calling him all sorts of names.

 

But alot of us reported him and after about an hour he disappeared or finally gave up his ranting. But that is all we can do. Report and ignore. That is what I do. I see anyone saying abusive stuff I report them.

 

But this is not just in TOR that this happens. I have played many MMOs.. And you get these rage players that get mad and think that justifies them to insult everyone around them. So its not exclusive to TOR. Just report and ignore. That is all you can do.

 

Bioware isnt going to tell you the outcome of these cases because its really none of your business. I am sorry but it isnt. Thank you for reporting it but somethings need to be kept behind closed doors. Especially cases like this.

[Nempo]

I'm not being insensitive when I say this, I am being the blunt gamer that speaks the truth: play games that are written in the language you speak.

 

English speakers that play asian games put up with language harassment on a scale far worse than I've seen in any other MMO. Ported games also regularly have language issues in translations as well as native speakers of the game's origin being across every server. Merges happen and it is a fact of life in all MMOs (WoW hides those well but has been merging servers even in the highest point of it's lifespan for example). If the default language has changed, it is either due to a mistake on the dev's part...or...your language simply doesn't have enough dedicated players to warrent a server for it.

 

Also...there are MMOs out there specifically made and written for various languages, I have played spanish, german, korean, japanese, italian, and even a russian native MMO. If you find yourself in a game that predominantly speaks a given language, I highly suggest you communicate only in that language publically. I don't speak all those languages, yet I got along just fine in all of those MMO's by using translators and joining guilds where they were friendly and had people I could speak english to without the usual crap that gets thrown around.

 

The world of MMOs has always functioned this way, people don't like seeing languages they cannot understand and thus attack the players in hopes they will leave. The real world has also always been this way, visit any country that doesn't speak your language and they treat you like you are an alien...or an easy mark to fleece all of your money.

[TheNahash]

@ JPryde

This is the page their auto response told me to post to. And as to merging servers, yes it is the language issue.. they state that it is an English server, so all those moved to it that do not speak english are harassed, and the some of the comments made in general are very racist. My initial messages to Bioware via their tools were more of 'here is the issue' and a suggestion that maybe they change their the server description to no longer says 'English' speaking so these players are not harassed for not being English on an English server. simple.

The only reason I am posting here (and this is my first forum post in the 2 years I have played the game ) is because it is what they have told me to do. It also said their team may read it.. it is the only recourse we seem to have when reporting issues that will hopefully improve the game.

 

And to the others, thanks for responding. I have reported the worst ones, I do ignore them.. but i cant help feel for the people who are merged to English servers and get harassed for it. So it was (maybe foolish) hope that Bioware could made aware of the issue and change the "English" server description so that cant be used as their reason to harass them.

I dont want public hangings JPryde, lighten up, I was only trying to help people who may leave because of the BS they have to deal with

 

You keep saying "people who were merged to english servers".

I'm curious, where were those people before?

Because they couldn't have been in Russian, Spanish, Italian etc. servers - they never existed.

They also couldn't have been in French or German servers because they were transferred to the servers that had the same language as the ones they were originally in.

 

Don't get me wrong, I agree about the racism thing, but I really don't get what you mean. There were ALWAYS just English, French and German servers - no other languages were ever supported in terms of server-wide official language. So those people that are now in English servers

a) are not French or German - unless they chose to transfer to an English server

and

b) were never in a server that supported their own language.

 

And, FYI, an "ENGLISH server" means that the predominant language is English and you should expect pretty much everything to be in English. It doesn't mean you can't speak your own language, although I personally find it rude to speak in general chat in my own language for more than a couple of sentences. Not because I have any issues with my language, but when there is a "common language" such as English that everyone (more or less) understands, then writing in a language that the majority will not understand is rude - at least as I see it. I wouldn't speak in my language to a friend in real life, if we also had with us a someone from another country who wouldn't understand what we were saying and I won't do it in a game either.

 

Other than that, I have no issues. And people whose language is not English (non-US/UK/Canada/Australian people) should understand that they won't be playing with people who speak their language and that's always the case with every game, MMO or not.

Edited August 5, 2013 by TheNahash

[JPryde]

@ JPryde

This is the page their auto response told me to post to. And as to merging servers, yes it is the language issue.. they state that it is an English server, so all those moved to it that do not speak english are harassed, [...]

As TheNahash already noted, everyone moved TO an english server was moved there FROM an english server, so once again, I fail to see, how the server merges were in any way related to this problem (which I do not claim to be not existing!).

 

The game is supported in three languages... french, german and english... Which means that anyone who got one of the three languages as native language OR is at least fluent enough to speak it somewhat, is ready to join the respective server.

 

If you want to not speak english on an english server, your best chance would be to create a player chat dedicated to your own language... e.g. /cjoin spanish or /cjoin russian ... If you then use general fleet chat for a message like "All fellow spanish players, please join me on /cjoin spanish" (and repeat the text in spanish... then I am sure, you will not get much harassment.

 

On the german servers there is once in a while some mislead soul, who tries to speak english on the general chat... obviously that is allowed, but it rarely is met in a very friendly way. I in general answer their question in whisper and suggested for them to rerollon the english servers... which surely is the best choice for both parties.

 

For players, who are absolutely unable to speak any of the three supported languages, I got to say... sorry, this game is not for you. I wouldn't try to play a russian or asian game, where language AND charset are completely barren to me... and I surely wouldn't demand to speak german on their open chats and hope for them to accept that.

Edited August 6, 2013 by JPryde