If you go to your forum ptofile and look at “summary”, the site says you visited the new forums 11 days so far and have read 1.9K posts across 149 topics.
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I’m still at Lvl 0 and have read well past the requirements, I think anyone who speed reads is punished. The levels are clearly arbitrary and not thought out.
Your JSON file says you’re now TL 1… 
- “id”:11,
- “automatic”:true,
- “name”:“trust_level_1”,
- “display_name”:“trust_level_1”
There’s also a trust level checker here : https://bit.ly/trustlevel
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The problem lies in appropriate judgement. I know for a fact that moderator judgement is skewed. I can’t go into detail about it as that might be a infraction, but trust that the flag and penalty system is not without real flaws and once you are tagged with an infraction it isn’t going away without an uphill battle with a system that does not provide confirmations.
My statement about skewed moderator judgement is not directed at any one individual or sub-group. Unfortunately, it is a generalization because there isn’t a way to single out an individual or sub-group. Even if there was a means to do so, I would not be comfortable singling out individuals or sub-group personnel @Acti-Blizz.
Maybe a softening of the penalty system is needed. I can’t say for sure.
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Okay so knowing this don’t you think the OP is right about the requirements (especially to maintain) are a little much? Can we advocate some power forum creep here 
I also had 10k posts and can attest that no where in the timeframe of those 10k posts would I have been at TL3…maaaybe a 100 day period max since launch. A tad bit absurd, think the 20k posts read needs a nerf!
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Pretty much everyone thinks moderation is skewed when they get moderated.
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When moderation happens after making a statement of scientific fact, but which goes against a progressive ideological viewpoint, you tend to think it’s skewed, yeah.
When it has nothing to do with the game and raises social or political issues, it gets removed. That is exactly what the game forum moderators are supposed to do. If someone wants to discuss politics there are lots of other venues for that. It does not belong here. Nobody wants political or social arguments in the game forum where we come to escape that drama.
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The point is, that the progressive statements remain unmoderated but the statements refuting them are moderated, i.e. it’s skewed.
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We are not going to get into this Meteor. It won’t end well. Speaking up against people being jerks is not “progressive” it is being a decent human being. This is not the place to debate whether statements are racist, nationalist, sexist, or hateful - nor why mods might remove them.
My favorite comment on the subject is still XKCD
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“The first amendment doesn’t protect you from criticism or consequences”. Indeed. Compare and contrast that to when a platform hosting a discussion favours one ideology over another and silences / suspends / bans one viewpoint.
Sorry, but it’s not possible for facts to be hateful, racist, sexist or nationalistic. If someone makes a scientifically false claim and someone else refutes their claim, it’s clearly skewed if only the person refuting the claim is moderated.
I’m fine for politics and such like to be kept out of the forums… as long as that goes for both sides rather than just one of them.
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Ok let me try to keep this too the point without creating an infraction.
Scenario is in-game chat some number months to years after RoS is released. There is an ongoing roaring debate in play. Pejoratives and derogatory terms are being flung about.
Person-A: Makes a statement about a sub-group (Gumbo) that he/she is not a part of, that is in negative terms but doesn’t fully make a point. He/she is attempting to imply something much more negative or insidious than what has already been stated.
Me: Ok, I can’t understand your reason for saying “________”, but why does that even matter. Its not a crime and if it were people from sub-group (Ja-Haha) what would be your argument then?.. you wouldn’t have an argument.
Person-A: Realizes that a logic bomb has been launched in their direction and the last 4-7 minutes of debate is about to be nullified.
A few hours later moderation happens. Someone attempts to troll and twist what is between the quotes into an inappropriate statement that violates some part of CoC or ToS, when in fact I was restating the argument of Person-A. No amount of objecting to the moderation is going to change the outcome. Keep in mind Person-A was still yapping in chat after moderation was imposed. He/she was still in chat yapping away the next day as well, trying to make troll statements and stir up yet another heated debate.
Skewed? Yeah I think so.
The only way that happens, if both said the same words, is if the first person was not reported. Further, two wrongs don’t make a right. Just ignore inflammatory bait trolls and, if they are breaking the rules, report them. No need to get involved directly. Same thing happens in school or a workplace. If you get into a fight, even to defend someone, everyone who was fighting ends up punished, if caught.
The simple answer is to keep social debates, politics, religion, etc. out of the game and forums. Same rules used to be present in etiquette books for how to have a successful dinner party - or family Thanksgiving!
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I would entirely agree with this. It appears these days having what my parents would deem ‘commonplace manners’ (I can not translate the Norwegian word for it properly I am afraid.) is a hard thing to accomplish.
The faceless world of online bickering makes for a lovely stomping ground for vicious thoughts and opinions. A 0 tolerance policy for allowing such is always good.
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This isn’t an instance of 2 wrongs don’t make a right. Ignoring the inflammatory debate wasn’t an option either because the troll debate was consuming the entire chat. There was no way to engage in a conversation when the roaring debate was drowning out any other discourse. So effectively the trolls were going to be able to deny anyone else from talking. Reporting them doesn’t immediately bring the troll session to an end. I attempted to disrupt the debate and nullify the point of arguing for or against the either side. Even my attempt to segue to another topic was ignored by moderation. The topic I attempted to bring to the chat was about grouping for an in-game activity.
Keep in mind the above was in D-3. In WoW I’ve watched a 12 minute non-stop rant scroll across the chat window. It was launched from a faction capital city. It was loaded with political, racist, xenophobic, sexist, derogatory, inflammatory, and hateful speech. It would make a Trump rally look like a rated G pre-K kids pizza party. There was only 1 person dumping that trash into the chat. There was no moderation. He/she was still in chat 4 hours later, spamming LFG stuff. Did I report him/her? No. If there is no live chat moderation or automated trigger/alert system, then we part-take in a system where its only a CoC/ToS violation if you get reported.
Skewed? Of course when only a sound-bite’s worth of text is considered and taken out of context. Moderation happens. Life goes on.
Correct. There is no real time moderation that I know of. They rely on reports which capture the reported text and player details. That is what the mods review. It is also why it can seem one sided or that mods are not doing their job fairly - people have to actually report things if they want something done about it.
We get plenty of folks who show up on the Customer Support forum to whine they got silenced in game though for that kind of thing - so the mods DO action it if people take the time to do something. WoW is also good in that if you report someone, it automatically mutes that person for you for the rest of the play session. You don’t have to see their nonsense anymore. Sadly, I don’t think reporting in D3 does the mute thing so chat is still cluttered.
As for how fast mods react - it depends on how many reports. The system is set up so that a ton of reports has an auto squelch feature until mods can get to it. Beyond that, number of reports impacts the priority of the report in the queue. The mods cover all the Blizzard games, not just D3. Their queue is pretty long given how nasty people can be in online arenas.
As always hugs and cheers for you MissC. You’ve confirmed what I understood, therefore I rest my case. Now if we could just take the civility here in this debate and put it in cans. I think we would have a billion dollar product.
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I would have absolutely no problem with that if it was applied equally.
The issue is that the rules are neutral but enforced unilaterally.
Let’s put this back on track, shall we? For those that have to grind TL3, it’s unrealistic with the current setup, especially given that TL3, unlike TL2, uses a rolling window and is not permanent.
Most of the requirements aren’t really all that far off. The receiving 20 likes though, seems good on paper, but ends up being just a “like farm”, especially if one doesn’t normally post a lot to begin with but is still a contributing member of the posting community. This tends to affect tech folks more than GD posters since tech support posts are rarely “liked”, especially when a lot of them are steps during a long process and the person seeking help is frustrated on their end already. Likes needs to be cut down to about 15. We saw how this went on the WoW fora and it doesn’t really incentivize giving a “thumbs up” to a post you really do like, it incentivizes like farming via the “win trade” system where you give a like and you get one back.
Forum posts read, being at a whopping 20,000 is just nuts though. That’s literally forum paragon grinding right there, and nobody worth their salt is going to legitimately read 20k posts even over 100 days when they have other things they’d like to do, such as, I dunno, play the game. This needs to be knocked down to 5,000 tops.
Remember, TL3 for those that aren’t greens or weren’t given it to aid in contributions (based on prior forum activity and contributions) have to continually maintain this because it’s a rolling window. And the kicker here is that because your stats are hidden, it’s impossible to easily keep track of. And to add insult to injury, let’s say you farmed up those 20k posts in one week (only possible on a couple of the fora right now and definitely not this one, but this is for the sake of argument). If you did not keep up reading, then roughly 51 days later, you would lose your TL3.
“Huh?” you say, “I thought it was 100 days”. Yes and no. There is a 100 days component, but the entirety of the requirement is “read 20,000 new posts total from posts created in the last 100 days”. Now combine that with the “you must visit at least 50% of the last 100 days” part. That means that even if you’re a good contributor and even if you’ve been on exemplary behaviour, if you take a long vacation for any reason, poof goes your TL3 and every last bit of progress you made in getting there. You’ll essentially have to start over from scratch. You’ll be at TL2 yes, but for the purposes of re-obtaining TL3, it’s as if you’re starting directly from or close to zero because you had real life happen.
That’s really what bugs me about the system. It doesn’t really say “trust”, it says “farm”. It’s one thing to earn it the first time. If you’ve done it “legitimately” (and I use that term loosely because the 20k posts requirement even for a one-time affair is never going to be done wholeheartedly legitimately) from there on out it should be a matter of trust being whether or not you’ve been infracted. TL3 is ideally meant to show you’ve essentially got a pristine record with Blizzard, at least on this forum. If you misbehave, you lose TL3. That is what trust is supposed to be.
Also, do take into account that a fair number of players post in multiple fora, not just for one game. Because each forum has its own separate set of data and are not connected anymore, you multiply that by a lot. Far, far too much in fact for any human to maintain without either automating the process (e.g. as someone I know made a script that does the hard stuff for them) or sharing their account with someone else to help with the task. That is the exact antithesis of what trust is about.
Now for a bit of a disclaimer: Trust isn’t a “Blizzard” thing. It’s actually built into Discourse, the forum software that Blizzard is using. If you go over to Discourse’s own site, you’ll find that they too have the trust system in place. They designed it, not Blizzard. Blizzard is merely using a customized implementation of Discourse suited to their needs. Blizzard does have the ability to alter the requirements though, so they should really be keeping a thumb on the communities’ respective pulses to tailor the requirements to be more in line with what humans actually are capable of while still having time to play the game(s). One size does not fit all, and 20k doesn’t fit any size in a legitimate trust environment.
Most of the requirements work well enough, it’s just a couple of them that are out of whack and turn the system from “trust” into “farm”. It’s supposed to be a community, not a treadmill. 
Edit: Grammar.
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Wondering if anyone can answer my question who knows tech stuff and I know there’s plenty here. It feels like my question being ignored since everything else being answer upon. I will appreciate the help.