Should WoW have a Social Score System?

World Of Warcraft has always been quite a fun and entertaining game with its player combination groups in mythic plus and battlegrounds. In recent years, it has become apparent that socially awkward players have appeared, this has caused a bit of a rift between the player base. Should World Of Warcraft have a social score system? Ideally yes I will explain that further below.

What is a social score system? (Explained)

A social score system is an implementation where other players can vote your account or character and give it a score or rating, whether or not you have played well or not. 

With a social score system, you can see a player who has done very well. They’ve been a good leader or you could see a player that just causes negativity and arguments, for example.

This system removes you from matchmaking or queuing with players not in your value. So negative players could only play with themselves.

What does WoW have already?

World of Warcraft doesn’t have a social score system yet, but it does have a player punisher of sorts.

If you leave a Heroic Dungeon from Group Finder or Battleground early you will be debuffed with “Deserter”.

This debuff will banish your character from queuing and joining another battleground for 15 minutes.

World of Warcraft does have a Social Contract. This contract does explain that you should be friendly to your fellow player and not fall into rude behaviour or cause others to not enjoy their experience in Azeroth. This contract pops up for new players in-game, and all existing players had to agree to the terms at the beginning of patch 9.2.5.

WoW What needs to change?

World of Warcraft has and always will be a mixture of Hardcore players and Average players. Without adding something soon, you would start to experience more player subscriber loss.

Because Mythic + is already under pressure from bringing in players to your group solely on their Raider IO and Item Level. You have no idea if this player was boosted or has the skills to perform.

The same issue arises with Battlegrounds. With players joining and leaving when it gets real or they can’t survive. Rated Battlegrounds require all 10 players to get along and fight as a team. However the non premade groups rely on your Versatility and PvP item Level and Rating. 

Boosting groups have made the game volatile enough that trying to complete the weekly vault alone is a challenge more than ever. 

Course correcting to add a social score system would be a solution most active players would find reasonable and many unsubscribed players could return. 

Suggestions for a Social Score in WoW

What with World Of Warcraft the higher player base. A social score system could work in different ways. 

Potentially a system where you gain points for completing each dungeon or separately player versus player content and at the end of the dungeon once per day, your account could be voted by everybody that you’ve played with.

In order for it to remain accurate. A massive difference in short space of time could flag an account for an investigation. Suggestively you can only be voted once per day per account preventing stats padding the score to look better.

If you’re pre-making a group you could set a minimum size of school requirement allowing you to choose whether or not to take the players that may cause grief will have caused grief in the past. Or vice versa you could take the players that have caused issues before to bring their scores up if you’re feeling kind.

Regardless, any actions taken should still be at the discretion of Blizzard Entertainment, they would have to assess whether or not certain allegations are true, so in order to make the social system Work, there would need to be a limited amount of options to vote for. 

Again with the inappropriate behaviour may be advised that blizzard at a if you get flagged for this multiple times then you’ll either receive a 24-hour matchmaking ban that comes down to a blizzard and their ideas.

WoW Social score for PVP (explained)

In order to make a social score system work in PVP, especially with World of Warcraft dragonflight expansion, releasing solo rated battlegrounds. It would become essentially important to add a social support system.

Rated battleground has always been quite a challenge to get a fairly decent group to work together. It requires 10 players and full PVP gear in order to even push properly. Adding a solo queue makes it available to the entire player base at once. However, this could cause a negative impact on the player base that really enjoys rated battlegrounds because it gets them into a position where you’re not playing against the casual player anymore.

a rated battleground social score system could be essentially a thumbs up thumbs down. If your account has started to receive too many thumbs down because you’re a generally unpleasant player, then you won’t be able to match with certain better group potential.

Potential issues

The social score system could be manipulated by other players to push certain people down so they cannot be matched made into certain bracket groups anymore. Unfortunately, this would have to be monitored heavily if this was added to World Of Warcraft. 

World Of Warcraft has always been very good for its support system. The WoW GM Does have access to the chat logs from your character with the chats are saved. So this could be implemented into the rated battleground system where it monitors chat logs. 

But another issue is that other players may deem the casual player as not very good at playing in certain battlegrounds or actual battlegrounds at all and they may vote you down just by being there. 

Unfortunately, adding something to keep an eye on. This would take a while to make, but it’s not impossible for blizzard to moderate the games. It would be impractical to assume they should record them all.

If no flags are made during the game. The record is deleted if something has been flagged up by three or more players. For example, action could be taken as appropriate similar to Steam and the VAC system.

Players should have a chance to clear false accusations themselves. From a interactive match list in the UI. But this should be time gated to 24 hours or less.

Is WoW social score system worth it?

For a game such as World of Warcraft a social score system is something the player base does require. If all of the bugs and it runs smoothly enough to not cause headaches for players and blizzard alike. 

It could improve MMR as well as general player happiness in Rated Battlegrounds and Mythic Plus. As well as giving the game players that want to move up from Average to Hardcore a chance to do so.

Final Thoughts:

Whilst researching the implementations of a social score system within world of warcraft, a lot of players don’t understand what it would do. Some forum comments made me laugh at getting “Flight Path banned for not having decent transmog”. This isn’t a Social Score issue but more just not cool. 

A lot of other Blizzard games have social score implementations or punishments for not playing correctly, such as Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone. It wouldn’t be hard for Blizzard to implement something.

Whilst the current World of Warcraft game is fun and adventurous it would be amazing to see a Social Score System implementation within the game. Of course you would have to behave if something doesn’t go your way but that’s all part of playing properly.

Perhaps during or even after World of Warcraft: Dragonflight, a system might be implemented. Nudge blizzard with Suggestions to get their attention onto the topic.

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F.A.Q

Q: What do I do if a player is being rude to me?

A: You can report them to blizzard by right clicking their nameplate. Give details of what happened. You can add them to the Ignore list by right clicking their nameplate.

Q: I have Ignored someone by accident, how do i remove them?

A: Go to your Friends List “O” and click on the tab for Ignored. You can remove anyone you have ignored from there.