Instead of Start Game, I get Disabled While Joining Parties or Party Locked.
Why do I keep getting these when I try to make a SOLO game?
This bug has been in the game for a while now.
When it happens I close the game and restart it.
That’s exactly what I do, but I get the same thing all over again.
Is this intermittent or every time you try to start / join a game? If it’s every time, have you had a chat silence penalty applied to your account (from any Blizzard game, not just D3) recently?
Yeah, as Meteor said this could be the cause. I completely forgot that’s a thing. There’s this “bug” to speak of, where you get a silence penalty in any Blizzard game you can’t even play anything online; solo or not. Is it at random, or keeps happening?
Time for the copy/paste from my D3FAQS.TXT about this possibility…
Error 315000 - Chat Silence - Only available to party leader
There are two scenarios for this.
First…
It’s a temporary bug which can usually be resolved by switching to another hero and then back to the one you wanted to play on, changing which pet the hero has selected, and so on. Alternatively, closing and re-starting the client should resolve it.
Second…
If you’ve received an in-game chat silence penalty from any Blizzard game.
There is a long outstanding bug (since October 2019) whereby if you receive a chat silence from any Blizzard game, you will be unable to start or join a Diablo III game session. This will last until the silence period is over.
If you have received a chat silence, you will have been sent an email to your registered address with an explanation of why the silence was issued, and how long the penalty period will last. For a first offence, it’s 24 hours. For subsequent offences, the penalty period doubles each time, i.e.
Offence
- 1 day
- 2 days
- 4 days
- 8 days
- 16 days
- 32 days (1 month 2 days)
- 64 days (2 months 4 days)
- 128 days (4 months 8 days)
- 256 days (8 months 16 days)
- 512 days (1 year 5 months 2 days)
…and so on.
If you believe you were incorrectly silenced…
If the penalty was correctly applied…
While it is theoretically possible for us to unmute players which might work around this, we’re not in the practice of reversing these kinds of account actions for this sort of reason. Regardless of this unexpected behavior, the accounts which have been muted were muted for a reason. If you have an extended duration suspension, a user of your account must have broken our terms of use several times. As such, the account actions will stand until they expire.
If I had a chat silence, I would get an e-mail from blizzard. Also, I would have some form of a notification in game that would tell me that I was unable to chat with others. I didn’t get any kind of an error message with a numeric code either. D3 is the only Blizzard game I play.
The red ‘start game’ button was darkened and unclickable. However, if I hover the cursor over it, then I would get the Disabled While Joining Parties or Party Locked message. Sometimes it lasts only a few seconds, nut many times it would last minutes. I’d get the same thing after logging out and back in. I even restarted my computer a few times for an extra measure.
If it was a latency issue then I would get a ‘timed out’ or ‘connection terminated’ or some other message along with a numeric code to look up or ask about. Those I understand. Lots of people get those, especially those asking for an off-line play mode.
Edit: 1 day later (11/20) and now the Start Game button is shaded and I see a new message when I hover the cursor over it. Only available to party leader. Wait, what? I am making a SOLO game. What is this?
See the first scenario in my previous post.
Not so.
Why would a tech company provide an announcement to account holders that their account has been shadowbanned?
Blizzard does not shadowban people. If you get a Suspension on the forums you get notified and it does not impact your in-game abilities.
If you get Silenced in (actually in-game) ANY Blizzard game, you will get an email about it.
That said, a Silence in any game will result in the bug that means you can’t play D3.
However, there is also a bug that is intermittent and not related. Meteorblade’s post is correct.
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May I cut this out and keep it for future re-use in completely unrelated topics? 
aeligos: Shadow Banning? Sounds like Yahoo before they fully disabled their comments. I would see so many comments about that without actually using that term.
MissCheetah: I heard about that bug when I played WoW. A guildy that I haven’t seen online for a while would say that they couldn’t play because they were chat banned. I guess that ‘bug’ affects D3 as well. To me that sounds kind of ‘fishy’ and along the lines of said Shadow Banning. The ‘bug’ being the ‘shadow’ that is.
Meteorblade: The eternal “get out of jail free” card. Use it wisely?
There is no bug in WoW that prevents you from playing WoW if Silenced. You can still enter game, you just have very limited grouping and social abilities.
There IS a bug in D3 since October 2019 that prevents a person Silenced in ANY Blizzard game from making a D3 game. So if you get silenced in WoW then you can’t create a D3 game - that is the bug.
It has been openly discussed and is pinned at the top of the D3 Bug Report forums in the Known Issues section.
There is no thing shadowy about it. You get notified by Blizz you are Silenced in X game. You come to D3 and see the pinned thread of acknowledged issues saying you can’t make a D3 game.
No secrets here.
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