So after almost 6 years, thousands of hours, thousands of Dollars (in game purchases, flying to 4 separate Blizzcon’s to watch HGC championship live, watching Heroes of the Dorm championship live) my account has been banned.
This post is a collection of my thoughts around the reporting system and how players in high diamond-master get silenced/banned, and have for quite some time. Give this post a chance to read instead of just jumping to I’m being toxic.
First off, the reporting system.
This is a terrible system. There is 0 accountability on reports. Players can report you for whatever they want whenever they want, regardless of the reports actual merit or proof. No penalty to players who falsely report because they are mad about losing or one bad play or whatever.
How could that cause a problem?
As someone who has went through the silence phases all the way to a permanent account ban after almost 6 years, i can tell you the silence/ban system feels like an arbitrary number based system. Meaning once you hit enough reports, you get an action taken by a bot. Very little human involvement around the said action, and being on the receiving end of the appeal responses, it really feels like they couldn’t give less of a crap. I didn’t even get an email saying what or why like i have with silences years ago. The response to my appeal? Nothing. just a copy and pasted message, but there was a great line taken right out of the appeal response “We take these types of issue very seriously, and a full investigation is done before any action taken”. My account was banned this last Friday at almost midnight, where i proceeded to immediately make an appeal ticket and that took them 4 days to respond with their copy past reply. I’m supposed to believe they were completing a full investigation at that hour? no. Account action taken by a bot.
No good will system
In other moba’s, a good will/honor system exists. This is intended for when you have great games with others. You can give them points for being great players, great sports, you liked them, or whatever your fancy is. Just counting negativity points is terrible, it doesn’t matter if you do/act great, action is inevitable. Good will systems offset that so your not just waiting for the ticking time bomb to go off.
Then there’s the issue of actual MM. Diamonds/Masters/GM’s being matched with low MMR players.
What kind of environment will that ever foster? Not an enjoyable one. You have the best players in the game who likely spend hours upon hours playing, and your throwing them into games with people who don’t understand basic concepts of the game. That isn’t fun for the new players, or the long lasting ones.
When the game was in its first few years, you had diamonds/masters/GM’s frequently silenced. You can go back through streams and see it even. Not something blizzard liked, but it did point to the horribly broken matchmaking system that’s been around forever. If they had any desire to solve this problem, then they could stop putting players on both sides in these kinds of large skill gap situations in the first place.
Game catered to extreme sensitivity
The casual side of the community over the last few years has turned into this conglomerate of people that cant handle any sort of stressful situation. It doesn’t matter how you address it, with hostile language or not, people are so quick to say toxic and mute. There needs to be a fine line between toxic and not. I don’t think its toxic to expect players your matched with to be of similar skill. Not every loss is toxic, not every win is fun. You can have great games that are loses when its 2 very similarly skilled teams playing, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Losing a game in <10 minutes is not that however.
No reset on escalation of punishment
Here’s a topic that’s really near and dear to me. My account wasn’t banned in a year, not 2, not 3, but almost 6 years. It has been awhile since i last had action taken against my account. I will gladly admit in my early phases of playing this game i went over the top, but I learned. I’m by no means a perfect person in the game, but I’m competitive. There is literally no forgiveness in the system. If i was getting out of hand, but its been 2 years since i last had action taken, then there should be some sort of soft reset on punishment, not just this inevitable escalation. Just another system that is destined to end in a ban.
Final thoughts
The worst part about this is, the more you play, the more you have the opportunity to fall to this. If this is/was one of your main pass times (and you play >20 hours a week on it), then you’ve probably been silenced. The more time you put in, the more emotional you get about ridiculous situations, seeing another person refuse to play as a team whether its in the draft or in the game, seeing a player respond to constructive criticism with “your toxic” or “im gonna afk”, the more you are at risk.
You alienate your longest, most dedicated and active players with systems like this. Plenty of times in the past good suggestions have been made to improve upon the system, and they have been ignored. Look through the forums and see. Now this game is getting little to no support so it well never be fixed.
Thanks for the fun few years.
when asked how effective I feel the reporting system is though. A goodwill system would probably change that response, it would make player feedback feel less pointless.
post topic that went over the line.
