My World of Warcraft account was silenced (for a ridiculous reason I might add that had to do with a guild spam reporting me for revenge…but I won’t get into that). So I cancelled my subscription and uninstalled World of Warcraft…and I was thinking about uninstalling the Blizzard Battle.net launcher…but remembered that I had also bought Diablo 3.
I started up Diablo 3 and got to the screen where there is a red button that says “Start Game/Resume Game”…but the red button is grayed out. When you scroll over the button with your mouse it reads “Only available to party leader”, but I wasn’t in a party. I then created a new character, but couldn’t get into the game with him either. I even tried to make seasonal characters and hardcore characters but neither allowed me to get into the game. I searched through multiple forum posts on Google and discovered that this is a bug that has happened to several players. Blizzard please don’t punish people in other games for what happens in World of Warcraft, especially something so mild.
If a player receives a chat silence it means the player was the problem, not which game they were causing problems in. Whilst the current bug prevents you from starting / joining D3 games until the silence penalty expires, the underlying issue is the chat behaviour that Blizzard want you to stop.
I think you missed the point of the post. The point was not if I did something naughty or not and should or shouldn’t be punished for it…the whole point of the post is that something you are punished for in World of Warcraft should not carry over into other Blizzard games. For instance I can still play Overwatch and Starcraft without any problems and even talk in those chat rooms. So If I can play Overwatch and Starcraft then why can’t I play Diablo 3? If you are punished in World of Warcraft does your punishment only carry over to Diablo 3? lol. That sounds ridiculous.
The point is this is a “bug”.
As you may guess that the “bug” is at other team, so it is out of control of D3 dev. It requires other team to fix the problem. When it will be fixed depends on other team’s schedule.
I know exactly what the point was. It comes up so frequently that I came up with a boilerplate response for it that I usually just copy/paste into threads on the subject…
I understand it’s frustrating but there tends to be a lack of sympathy for the people reporting / being affected by the bug, because the only way that people will be affected by it is if they said something naughty in the in-game chat, get reported for it, the GMs decide what you said breaks the Code of Conduct, and apply a penalty to your account.
The penalty for a first offence is 24 hours. Subsequent punishments double the duration each time. This means most people that are even affected by this can play the following day. Heck, some people might never even know they were affected by it. If your silence period is/was longer than this, it means there have been multiple chat infractions.
Yes, let’s overlook REAL BUGS entirely on the BUG FORUMS because people who said something in World of Warcraft need to be punished across the board. People should not be punished in other games for what they did in World of Warcraft. Even though “you” might think they’re a bad person…it doesn’t mean they should be banned in other games when the penalty applied to World of Warcraft…no matter how evil “you” think that person is.
I went out of my way to not talk about what I did wrong to avoid people like you turning the conversation into a debate about how my account should be punished. It’s about a BUG on the BUG FORUMS not how an account is punished. If anything your account should be punished for attacking me for reporting a BUG on the BUG forums!
Want to know what I did that was so “evil”, “naughty”, and “bad”? A guild that I left was talking about current political events in LFG. I chimed in and asked “what’s wrong with ______ ______ (a well known political ideology)?” There were no curse words, I didn’t threaten anyone, I didn’t spam anything…all I did was ask a question about what they were talking about. The guild then told me in a neutral discord that they said in guild chat to spam report me for that question and they hoped that my account would be punished because it happened on a RP server. And the account was punished, but I shouldn’t have been punished in multiple games. If what I did was really bad…they would have just banned the account, but it wasn’t so they silenced the account for a certain amount of time. But my post wasn’t even complaining about the silence…I was trying to report a bug…and you attacked me for it! That is ridiculous! It is literally a BUG in the game and you are attacking me for reporting a BUG in the game on the BUG FORUMS!!!
Done with Blizzard. Done with this TOXIC community. Can’t even report BUGS on the BUG forums without people attacking you. What a HORRIBLE community. And if this is a well known and ancient BUG then Blizzard obviously doesn’t care about fixing it. Why play a game where Blizzard doesn’t care about fixing all of the bugs? lol
Oh please forgive me for not reading every single post on the Diablo 3 forums and not knowing that Blizzard refuses to fix certain bugs. Had I known that Blizzard doesn’t waste time fixing bugs in their game…I wouldn’t have wasted my time making this post. I for sure won’t waste my time by resubscribing.
I only made this post because I was under the impression that Blizzard fixes bugs in their game and that this was a bug that Blizzard didn’t know about and was only discussed on random sites. However, now that I know there are ancient BUGS in this game that Blizzard knows about and is too lazy to fix all I can do is unsubscribe and laugh about it.
They do, when they can. They are fixed in order of priority as well as a cost/labor factors. Something that impacts very few people tends to have a lower priority than something that impacts everyone.
It has been discussed EXTENSIVELY on these forums, not just “random sites”. Blizzard knows about it. It is covered in the pinned thread at the top of this forum on Known Issues.
Blizzard disagrees with you. The Silence is now applied as a flag to your Bnet account, not just your WoW license. That has different results depending on which Blizz game you play. In D3, unfortunately Silenced players can’t make games due to a bug.
The current status of the bug is that it is known and documented. It takes the Battlenet team to fix, not just D3 folks. It has been known since October 2019. There is no update about it beyond that.
What you may consider an urgent issue or a priority does not mean that this issue is considered a high priority for the bnet or diablo teams which apparently need to collaborate to work on this issue. While it is frustrating the lower priority is that the bug is user preventable. Basically don’t do things that will get you silenced…if you feel the urge, quit your game, walk away, shout your explicatives in the privacy of your household. Find other people you like to play with. If you examine what is required to put a silence into effect…it’s quite extensive and one must purposely engage in a behavior to be reported and go through a review.
It is a user caused issue. The priority of fixing this from a support perspective is extremely low priority.
It is not just profanity though -especially on a Role Play realm. Breaking immersion to distress the role players can also be reported and even in non RP realms, politics, religion, divisive issues, are usually a bad idea in public chats.
I intentionally went out of my way in the original post to not explain exactly what happened that caused the silence because I didn’t want the discussion to turn into a “he said something naughty and therefore should be punished across all of the games” beat down. But because someone continued to bring up what they thought I did to get punished…I decided to explain in a reply EXACTLY what happened. And guess what…you are wrong…I didn’t do what you “assume” I did.
I find it hilarious that people can’t stick to the simple fact that this is a bug that needs to be fixed and think that it is justified for my account to be punished across multiple games. What is even more hilarious is that I can log into Overwatch and Starcraft 2 without any problems and even talk in the chat rooms…and people say “WELL IT IS GOOD YOU WERE BANNED FROM DIABLO 3 FOR SAYING NAUGHTY THINGS!!!” People…it DOES NOT matter what I did…it only matters on these forums if it is a bug or not. I didn’t come on here to debate the extent of my crime…which in itself is comically minor. I literally just came on the forums to report a bug. I don’t need to run around my house screaming curse words at the top of my lungs! My punishment didn’t even involve naughty words at all. People in these forums are ridiculous.
Whether its profane speech or other speech that causes distress on others…it is still a self imposed bug. If you do not want to be silenced then do not engage in behavior that gets you silenced…walk away, say your comments, profane or not privately to yourself…And again just because those being affected by a self imposed bug think its a priority, it’s not…Developers have far more important issues that deal with the game a s a whole, that are not self imposed and have truly easy workaround…don’t behave in a way that gets you silenced.
You could also just get a console and play that way as the game is locally served and does not go through bnet.
That’s interesting…considering that I can still play and talk to people in Overwatch and Starcraft 2. That doesn’t even make sense at all. Also, if your World of Warcraft account is flagged for a violation does that ever go away? If I do something naughty 6 months from now will they see that same flag and be like “Ok we need to double the punishment this time” or does the flag ever fall off the account after so many months of no violations?
Correct. If you have a violation in any Blizzard game the duration will double, as far as I understand. The way the system currently works those flags never drop off. So, since the Silence system started in 2016, they are all still there.
Blizz has casually discussed allowing flags to age out eventually, but I don’t know where that discussion ended up. Back burner somewhere most likely.
The best way to deal with a Silence you feel you did not deserve, is to appeal it. Even if the appeal does not get approved until after the silence expires, you still want that flag removed from the account.
It starts at 24 hours and goes up from there. Exceptions of course are made if someone does something super horrible or illegal - that could just be an instant perma ban.
I have no idea why some games have different gameplay reactions to the Silence flag. Some have older chat systems that pre-date the bnet launcher client, but OW is on the newest systems.