The WoW Dragonflight patch 10.0.7 PTR gives us a glimpse at some of the upcoming features planned to arrive in Azeroth soon, and they include a welcome way to clean up chat. While the Blizzard game is unquestionably one of the best MMORPGs on PC despite many ups and downs over the years, there’s one area where World of Warcraft has always traditionally fallen behind rivals such as Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XIV.
If you’ve ever spent any time even in the vicinity of World of Warcraft, you’ve probably heard of ‘Barrens chat’ – the colloquial term for the unfiltered nightmare of players spouting their collective thoughts, arguments, and general trolling into the general chat window. It’s named after the Barrens, a large, low-level area that was once a hub for such hubbub. While trolls nowadays have mostly moved over to Trade chat to instigate their arguments, there’s no question that WoW is still packed with problematic players picking fights.
Perhaps more of a direct frustration is chat in dungeons and raids, which is equally notorious for its largely unforgiving and often confrontational nature. The trend of many WoW players finally checking out FFXIV over the last few years has been marked by, perhaps more than anything else, an astonishment at how generally friendly and encouraging the community is compared to WoW’s player base. The Blizzard MMO is notorious for players lambasting you with insults at the first sight of a mistake or bad build, before they unceremoniously boot you from the instance.
While I’d love to make some grand hypothesis about the overarching themes of Final Fantasy XIV encouraging friendliness and support, the most important factor in cultivating that friendly community has been the consistent enforcement and moderation of rules that clamp down on players being rude to one another in chat. World of Warcraft, by comparison, has long felt fairly lax in that regard – but now Blizzard is giving players a new tool to help minimise grief.
As Wowhead reports, the WoW 10.0.7 PTR build includes a new social setting alongside the already-existing, all-or-nothing ‘mature language filter.’ This new option is called ‘censor messages’ and includes a toggle allowing you to apply it to everyone, all players but your friends, all but your friends and guildmates, or no-one.
While there are currently no further customisation tools, as seen in the above picture (via Wowhead), it appears that messages marked as inappropriate will be hidden, allowing you to choose if you wish to see them or not. You’ll be notified who the message is from and that it’s ‘potentially inappropriate’ along with a toggle to display it, should you wish to do so.
It’s somewhat of a band-aid solution, but I’ll take what I can get. Being able to minimise the spam of potentially problematic messages is a welcome change in the right direction. Hopefully we’ll see additional steps taken by Blizzard to try and clean up its community and chat further as it strives to win back fans following the release of Dragonflight.
WoW Dragonflight 10.0.7 is also set to bring a WoW Paladin rework helping the class to re-find its identity in one of the best multiplayer games on PC. Meanwhile, the latest WoW Dragonflight patch notes for February 7 tweak the patch 10.0.5 classes dramatically with buffs to a range of builds. Take a look at our WoW Dragonflight tier list to see what’s strong right now, and make sure you’ve got the best WoW addons for Dragonflight in 2023.