Just confirmed on a smurf account last night…
I made three smurfs to test this idea that “no players gets banned unfairly”
whelp… It 100% happened to me last night on one of the test accounts.
Account #1 - never talk in draft, never comment in game, leave chat option turned OFF… not banned.
Account #2 - talk in draft, never comment in game, leave chat option turned off in game… not banned.
Account #3 - never talk in draft, never comment in game, but leave chat option turned ON… just got banned…
All three accounts started at the same time, same tag name, started early last year.
It seems that it is true that if you NEVER TURN THE CHAT IN GAME OPTION ON, then you cant have false reports send about you.
But… as the third account confirms… false reporting is in fact a thing.
So, as a byproduct of their own design… you can get away with being AFK, feeding, non-participation, obvious toxic troll behavior just as long as you have the chat DISABLED.
AND, you can get suspended and banned for NEVER EVER TYPING A SINGLE WORD OR RESPONSE IN THE GAME b/c you have chat ENABLED.
Toxic players are preserved, reporters, and long time players get the punishment.
There is apparently a flaw in the report system which will count pings as chat.
A person had such “ping bans” on reddit and had them overturned by appealing to a Game Master.
Though they had not talked at all during games.
They should fix it though so that pings can’t count for Chat reports.
For ping spammers, there should be an “excessive pinging” category.
We got spam report for that if people spam ping but i think the problem is spam pigers gets treated as hard as abuse chat does.
Not sure why having chat enabled or disabled would have any effect on an account getting suspended/banned, chat reports only leads to being silenced.
Edit: chat reports can lead to suspensions/bans but only for repeat offenders, which is still subject to false reporting, however this can be “circumvented” by not participating in chat
@MvMArcher
That hasn’t been true for two years now. They have started handing out much harsher penalties for Abusive Chat now.
In the next few days, we’ll be rolling out improvements to our reporting system for abusive chat. Specifically, we’re changing the ways we penalize repeat offenders by increasing the severity of the actions we take against their accounts.
In the current system, players who are regularly reported for abusive chat incur a silence penalty, which restricts them from chatting in-game and prevents them from playing Hero League for the penalty’s duration.
We’re going to greatly reduce the number of silence penalties we apply to repeat offenders’ accounts. Instead, a player who returns to abusive behavior after their initial silences expire will begin incurring account suspensions. These suspensions will quickly ramp-up in duration and prevent them from playing Heroes of the Storm entirely.
Players who prove they are incapable of—or unwilling to—improve their behavior after being suspended enough times will be permanently banned from the game.
You get three chances. Then you’re out of the game for good. This is much harsher than the old system that started at a 24 hour silence (not even a suspension) and doubled in duration each time.
A person on my friend list got a 7 day, 14 day and 30 day suspension. He can’t log in anymore because he is now banned forever. They had to create an account and earn everything from scratch.
But this was a player who flames most matches so I didn’t have much sympathy. If you feel the reports were not fair you can make appeals to Blizzard and they will check your chat log.
Personally, I was never suspended, but I am careful to only play about 2 matches a day. This limits my possibility of getting a lot of reports piling up against me.
The account in question would still have to incur a silence before getting a suspension though and the OP doesn’t mention this, furthermore according to that article if a player doesn’t interact with chat those reports will be ignored.
Based on this, I think it’s safe to assume the account in question wasn’t suspended for chat, or the OP isn’t telling the entire story.
CONFIRMED!
Source: Trust me.
Forum stories of account actions should be taken with a grain of salt anyway, as there are plenty of people who simply don’t tell the truth.
But after 2018, people can start incurring suspensions even without a prior silence (as the chances of getting a silence today are vastly smaller than getting a suspension for chat-related offenses).
That’s not to say silences have completely disappeared, I have seen 1 or 2 silenced people even this year.
Some people have also posted emails of getting warned, so there are actually three steps the reviewing employee can apply to your account (they can choose to warn you, suspend you or silence you. Extreme case after multiple actions: Ban)
Reports also exist for delibate antigame behaviour, trolling, spamming, AFK-ing.
Linking bans to only chatting is fallacy.
Yea but they send you an email which says what the reason was for your ban.
I actually got an email for AFK:ing which warned me not to do it again. It was not a ban though it was only a warning. I was totally “wtf” from this email, so I did get ahold of a chat support. They removed that from my history after not finding any evidence of AFK:ing.
This is making me suspicious that afk reports also are automated to trigger an action after you get a number of reports. I don’t know how high that number is.
Or if it isn’t automated, some untrained intern chooses what to do when you get reported a few times. That does feel unfair too.
My chat has always been on, and I haven’t been muted so far… idk how you achieved it when you haven’t talked at all.
Which modes you played, that matters as well. Biggest false reporters are in storm league. Play that daily and you will get a lot of ragers reporting you just because they can.
If you play brawl, very low risk, AI almost zero risk. QM low risk of being reported.
Talking a lot in general chat is also risky. Almost 200 people see your message. If you offend only 2% of them you get 4 reports instantly.
Talk there every day and even bigger risk. This is why I avoid general.
that is why this system is so bad it makes people not want to talk in a TEAM FORCUSED GAME for risk of being banned, also not play that much or again, risk of false reports. reports should be decayed over games, not time. that way someone who plays 1 game a day will have the same chances of being banned as someone who plays 10 games a day
That in itself is a pretty big issue, communication is kind of needed for a team game and not everyone uses voice/some people don’t listen to pings.
they should just remove the report system alltogether at this point, it does more harm than good, plus it is a free to play game and if you dont like what people are saying, there is mutes, blocks, and turning off chat that you can do
I think bans should exist but they shouldn’t ever be automated. 1st off, people who were players before that change 2 years ago had their purchases held hostage during ‘negotiation’ of new terms & conditions which last time I checked is considered illegal in the civil sense of the word as it’s a unilateral change they’ve leveraged purchases against.
2nd off, too easily abused.
3rd off, typically courts tend to frown on clauses that basically say “we can do whatever we want, whenever we want, however we want” which is essentially what’s happening when you allow a community to police itself.
It’s just a legal minefield and it’s not entirely fair to the people who get caught in this mess.
What Blizzard needs to do is consult better lawyers who have more interest in doing the job properly rather than padding the hours they’re on retainer with clauses they know can’t be enforced and will be overturned in civil court, if it ever comes to that.
the amount of money it would require to NOT have the system automated would be to high for this game, blizzard is not willing to do that for no real payoff.
Removing the report system and letting people FOR THEIR PERSONNAL SELVES (only they cant see the chat etc with the current IN GAME blocking) is what i meant
Not a community police driven system
yes report system has major flaws i got penalty for afk without ever leaving a game ,i stop playing after 1penalty , game is not worth for me to lose my acc.
Interesting, have you tried to get the account #3 unbanned by contesting the ban?