the dilemma of reporting someone on XBL...

[sans lumiere]

We’ve all been there, modded lobbies, glitchers, laughably intolerant xenophobes (god BLESS ‘MERICA!) and, garden variety general douchery ….. but a few weeks ago I encountered something so sublimely infuriating that I not only red flagged this user via XBL, but also formally addressed emails to both Microsoft and Activision….

Its possible to create almost anything with the black ops gamertag generator right? You’re given like 11 or something layers upon which you can stack a huge variety of geometry and stock clip-art images. The dude in question here managed to pull off something quite spectacular… true to his clan name (pun intended, it was [KKK] ) he had created a menagerie consisting of a pastoral hillside decorated with a burning cross, white stick figure w/ conical hat ,and an implied lynching ( black ‘man w/briefcase’ clipart suspended beneath a tree).

This totally threw me for a loop. Believe me, I hate the very idea of moral relativism with the heat of a thousand suns, but in this case the sheer metric tonnage of WHISKEY.TANGO.FOXTROT. made me

A: feel obliged to say something

And

B: wonder how this had slipped by long enough for me to get infuriated and report it in the first place.

So let’s get candid here…

In your COD tenure (zombies or otherwise), have you ever filed negative feedback against another gamer? If not where would you draw the line, and what would make you?

[Shooter]

I've never reported anyone, but I've thought about it a few times. I saw a picture of group of people hanging another group of people as well, and I was appauled. He was also screaming racist slurs at everyone in the lobby. I proceeded to give this 15 year old a mouthful about his hateful ignorance, and how he would never say any of that shit in public. I told him to go to the south side of Chicago in some of the crummier neighborhoods and to start running your mouth like that. It's easy to act big when they're sitting in the comforts of their own home. I usually don't even say anything to those type of people, but racism is a big peev for me, and he was saying some extremely hateful things I just had to put him in place.

Online gaming is just a medium for people to spread their hate. The sad thing is these people will never realize how ignorant they truly are. This is the only way they can act tough, through a medium like the internet and online gaming.

In the end, you did the right thing. Report the gamer, and ignore him. The only thing those type of people enjoy more than spreading their hate is seeing people react to it. Don't do what I did haha

[sans lumiere]

The sad thing is these people will never realize how ignorant they truly are.

true, and don't get me wrong, i bit my tongue. a necessity when encountering such a demographic. exposing bigots and homophobes to logic may yield dangerous, even fatal results, not unlike those of exposing seagulls to alka-seltzer or juggalos to a 4th grade reading competency test.

[TheHybridTheory]

i reported a guy with a p3nis emblem in a game of black ops. he was later kicked. i laughed too hard.

[Sigint]

This was in MW2 but i reported 2 people for obviously hacking 10th prestige (they had spinning 10th prestige emblems, which is not available unless you hack) directly to sony. they got banned from PSN. haha, i love owning people

[freakbag tofty]

i report alot of people, mainly for 2 different reasons:

1) if they have hacked the game, the amount of times i've gone into a lobby on W@W and seen people with rainbow gamertags or gone into a game to find a person on 61 to 0 since he can't be killed or someone flying is unbeleiveable i just report them the moment i see them.

2) the other is if, on BO especially, they have an offensive clan tag (like KKK or similar) or a "s**ual" emblem, mainly of women in nothing at all....

I do sometimes report glitchers, if they do the glitch to benefit theselves, most of the time though the glitches fail and they get killed (zombies mainly)

I have yet to see a racist emblem though, i'll keep my eye out for them though and report them :D

[latt81]

I once reported a guy after playing a round of TD on villa, as we were getting to the end of the round, he sent me a voice message full of expletives calling me a cheat and other things to that effect. As we entered the lobby after the game ended he carried on his tirade of abuse saying how I cheated and that if he ever saw me how he would kick my ass...

I simply told him that its not my fault he can't play the game properly, and that he should give his dad his xbox back and go play Indiana Jones on his Wii instead. This obviously upset him more. So I blocked him.

A day went by and it had been bugging me why he had called me a cheat, since I'm not that great. So I went into the theatre and watched the match again. Fair enough I did better than I would normally do, but not so well that it looked like I had cheated. I actually only killed him once, and there was no way cheating could have been involved. Then towards the end of the match you saw him hide in a corner and not move for a couple of minutes, clearly when he was sending me the voice message.

I then decided to report him, there was absolutely no need for his comments, and it wasn't just trash talking, he had gone to the effort of actually sending me a message.

Its these kind of experience, especially the rascism that tarnishes online gaming, and I think we all have to do our bit to report it.