Rise of Shadows Q&A - April 22, 2019

[autosquelch-11655]

Quoted from the Implement Auto Squelch thread. What are the CURRENT reasons for not implementing this now?

@autosquelch-11655

Please implement a simple and lightweight feature to the UI that will allow us to toggle on squelch. Many player really dislike the emotes and find them either distracting, annoying, and in some cases, infuriating. I dislike them so much that when I see one, it really sours my whole play experience. So to avoid seeing an emote from my opponent, I squelch them at the start of every match. This is rather tedious after many many matches. This would be a simple “Quality of Life” improvement to the squelch feature that would be a nice convenience for those of us who are squelching our opponents anyway.

The only “official” Blizzard objections all refer back to a 4+year old tweet from Brode that expressed fear of options bloat and potential reduced emote usgae. Adding one small checkbox above the “Allow Spectators” checkbox is not options bloat. It’s one added feature in an already pretty bleak set of options. Also, I don’t see why emote usage would change appreciably at all. People who would be using
auto squelch would be manually squelching anyway. Further, it doesn’t preclude the opponent from emoting; it only keeps it hidden on our side.

Additionally, there is a chronic problem with the way squelch is designed. When we play on a mobile device and experience either a brief disconnect or simply receive a phone call, the squelch falls off, and we are forced to endure the opponent’s emotes before squelching again. So at times, we need to squelch multiple times per match, adding the the tedium and frustration. Adding a squelch toggle would fix that issue as well.

Blizzard, please implement this change and/or please offer your reasoning behind your refusal to do so (something more that just referring back to a 4 year old tweet).