For those unhappy with the current rules (of lack there of for safespotting), firstly I would like to say it's not that the staff are ignoring you or that the staff don't understand the points being made. Safespotting used to be against the rules on Kronos, however this was changed a long time back. Allow me to go into more detail
As staff, we have X amount of resources, which consists of both a) Number of GMs in game, and b) X number of hours GMs put in per week. The administration has to work with what we are given. Understand that X is a variable, never a constant. The amount of GMs that log in in a given week fluctuates, and the amount of time they are able to volunteer does as well. We do not have set hours nor do we have mandated schedules. So given this information, our resources greatly fluctuate from one week to another. Compare that to a company like Blizzard who has a) stable income via subscriptions, b) paid staff c) an actual business. This should not be a shocker that there is a lot more resources than we have at our disposal. They had(have) at their disposal the ability to ensure 24 hour coverage, a minimum amount of GMs active at any time, compensation in order to ensure they have adequate staff.
So having said the above, our team is constantly fighting an uphill battle to ensure we have enough support to meet demand; which unfortunately is not always possible (heck, at the time of this writing we're once again recruiting GMs). So given that we have an inconsistent amount of resources available to us, we have to make decisions on where these resources are best allocated. Our staff have a ton of responsibilities which includes but not limited to: answering tickets/fixing things, investigations (bots, hackers, cheaters etc..), monitoring dungeons for hackers/exploiters etc... Given the above, we have to ensure that resources are covering a) the most important things, b) the most urgent things, c) the highest priority things
We put our resources where we feel the server mosts needs them, and given the available resources at our disposal our staff are stretched as far as the can be. Often times when required, we have to pull resources to something that we deem a higher priority or urgent (large ticket numbers, investigations, etc...). When this happens, we have to pull resources from another area to cover it, which then significantly impacts our ability in that area we deem important.
Currently safespotting is not part of our ruleset, as such we obviously aren't specifically taking action against these players. If we were to add this then additional resources from an already stretched thin team would need to be deployed, which means that other areas will be impacted. You might be saying to yourself "well safespotting is easily confirmed and takes like "30 seconds" to confirm, what's the issue?". In theory that's true, but not in practice. Here's the "best" case scenario: a) report comes in via ticket, b) GM is online, see's it, investigates and see's it happening right away. Simple, quick and easy. The problem is that this scenario would only happen 5-10% of the time (if that). Here's an average scenario: Player A is safespotting and killing numerous players, half of those players create tickets for this issue (which increases an already constant ticket flow). No GMs are on, and this goes on for 1-2 hours. A team member finally logs in, and there are 10-15 tickets for this issue alone. We now have to take time to answer each ticket after confirming that this is no longer happening. This takes time, and takes time away from players experiencing game breaking issues or high priority problems. Also even if it's only 1-2 people making the complaint what's the proof that it actually happened and that these players aren't lying? (people lie to us all the time, shouldn't be a newsflash). Even if we are on and we teleport to investigate, we'd need to confirm that the behavior is happening. What happens if by the time we get there and nothing is going on? how long do we have to sit and watch the player before we "blow off" the ticket? Just because a player is in a area does that mean they are exploiting? while likely, the answer is no. Most of the time the crime would have been committed and done with before we can get there to confirm.
Back to resources and importance of issues, this also applies to our devs. Adding range weapons sounds great but that takes time. What happens if they aren't far enough to catch the exploiters? and the tickets of complaints that the weapons don't reach them? what about programming items like AQ, Naxx, other high importance quests/events? or the frequently requested items like faction/race/sex change? Our devs have to decide what is of high importance for the server.
Where does one rank safespotting for importance among other things like hacking/exploiting investigations which both hurts the server economy and even worse can make a bad name for kronos if we don't actively police? what about investigations for exploiting raids or gold sellers/buyers? catching bots? ban appeals? BiS quest fixes like Fording? heck, having to sit and watch world chat because of racist/hate speech takes time away from doing our normal responsibilities. Also keep in mind we are also taking on more work with the now enforced account sharing (which requires time to investigate). "You can spend less time in world and more time doing this". Ok, do we switch from monitoring world which affects 100% of the players on the server to something that affects 5-10% of the population (maybe)? what is more likely to sour people from playing/staying on Kronos, safespotting in tanaris/ch? or poisonous/cancerous world chat? that's easy to answer. What about other issues we don't already handle? (restoring gear for hacked accounts? retrieving lost items/switching quest items after a period of time? fixing misloot issues in dungeons?). I fully understand how safespotting is frustrating, but as said we have to do whats best for the server and allocate those resources to those tasks/responsibilities.
We try our best to cover what we can with what we have available. I apologize if that is not enough for some players (in life, you can't please everyone). But we do what we can with what we have available to us, and as staff we do apologize for the frustration that players experience for this behavior.
p.s side note: this message took me about 45mins to write up, time spent away from doing other responsibilities
