Among the mistakes the HotS development team made that jeopardized the future of the game and contributed to its current state, others being touched upon here,
was their handling of the Abusive Chat category. In essence what happened was they gave in to their weakest instincts. People were deemed too fragile and delicate to handle even normal conversations so chatting was to be sanitized. Unless you had something nice to write you probably shouldn’t be writing anything at the risk of punishment. I have no doubt the spineless fools who believe this is the way things should be still exist but the cost of this folly has borne out.
There are two ways in which the Abusive Chat report category has been clearly misused to the detriment of the broader playerbase.
- As knowledge spread that the system is automated and there is no punishment for false reporting knowledge also spread that anyone could punish anyone else for any reason by filing an Abusive Chat report, even a blank one.
- Anything that annoys you or frustrates you that someone writes is arbitrarily deemed to be sufficient reason for punishing the player by filing an Abusive Chat report.
After Abusive Chat reports accumulated and a penalty was automatically applied the only recourse was appealing to a Game Master. A Game Master would then look even for a single instance of conceivable transgression to uphold the suspension, ignoring all the instances in which false reporting may have occurred.
Things got so bad at one point I recall reading that the driving principle for punishment was community policing whereby the community’s will by virtue of accumulated reports was the law. This is on a defund the police, trust the community level of stupid. Naturally it ended up hurting the community.
At this point we all know that years of mismanagement have brought this game to a point where we have no idea who is left working on or supervising it after this Blizzard Team 1 has been disbanded, although some of the few of you remaining are still stupid enough to think things were great and to blame Activision or anything and everything that has nothing to do with anything for what happened. The significance of this decay is that perhaps only the most basic measure can be taken to mitigate the deleterious effect of Abusive Chat.
At minimum, in the absence of anything else, the Abusive Chat penalty needs to be reverted to silencing players as opposed to excluding them from any game modes. It may have been Dustin Browder, the lead man, who many years back made the argument that because HotS is a team game and communication is important silenced players unable to write (there was no speaking at the time) should not be able to participate in ranked play. However, the game’s simplicity ensured there was virtually no communication, and certainly no essential communication. Browder was either pretentious, as he was in general, or was looking for an excuse to introduce a more effective penalty against abusive chat players.
I would also place a silence maximum duration of say three months.
Now, ideally I’ve been thinking of reforming the system altogether. There are two key elements to my idea that separate it from the previous concept.
- Clear standards for what constitutes Abusive or Inappropriate Chat.
- Punishing players who falsely report other players.
The way this system would work changes at the enforcement level. Players would still be filing reports as before, although now it would behoove them to include an actual reason too, and a penalty would still kick in automatically. Under this system the penalty could still include a suspension from certain game modes. The difference is that upon filing an appeal the suspended player would immediately and automatically have the penalty be temporarily lifted pending review.
The Game Master would then use the defined standards to check the logs of every game in which a report was filed. Three games with legitimate reports and the penalty is not only upheld but doubled - the appealing player has decided to waste time and resources for a review he or she should have known better than to invoke. Simultaneously the game master is assigning a strike to every reporter in a game in which no transgression occurred. The false reporting strikes will exist in the background. Upon three false reporting strikes the false reporting player is issued a warning. After two warnings suspensions for false reporting commence.
The idea is to eventually unburden the system by punishing everyone who decides to disrespect the system by not taking it seriously/understanding it. Players who commit chatting penalties would think twice about appealing and players who get other players in trouble just because they want to will start thinking twice about filing reports. Hopefully this would lead to a shared understanding of what is and isn’t allowed in Heroes of the Storm and to greater compliance without the current haphazard purging of players.
The greatest challenge I would say is in defining the clear standards, which while perhaps not ideal will likely suffice in my opinion.
