Devs: Lower ban thresholds might kill the game

General Discussion
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Am I wrong to observe that people are getting penalized more easily for abusive text chat?

I just want to get one thing straight : the state of the community is already dire, people in general have the report trigger very loose and send reports left and right … if you openly say you’ll report someone or encourage your team to report a player for game ruining missbehaviour (afk, intentionally feeding), guaranteed they’ll report you back.

Me and my friends have accounts LVL 1000+, years thrown into them, and are suddenly on the route to inevitably get them permabanned. WE ARE NOT COMING BACK to the game after that you understand?

What the game offers us is extended queue times with rainbow lobbies (which will inevitably bring friction), or during the busier hours, tons of smurfs that don’t care about getting permabanned, that will throw games on purpose, and if you do react at all, you’ll get dragged down and likely eventually permabanned too.

Permabanning people based on chat abuse ain’t it, lowering the threshhold is ESPECIALLY not it, BECAUSE smurfing is so easy. It only encourages people to smurf even more, ruin the ranked ecosystem, and be reckless/erratic as much as they want in games, because they can just smurf again anyway.

SOLUTION: Let silenced players play ranked, maybe have them do a couple of punishment ARAM games, and never permaban them. It’s not a perfect solution, but the result will certainly not encourage smufing – the result of a hardcore HotS player getting silenced is them getting on an other account and being just as toxic if not more, so having them silenced AND playing ranked is beneficial (you still need those players, else queues will be too long and the game will die for good).

Thank you for your time, and thank you for updating this amazing game.

Cheers

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Yes, that is generally the point.
But then again, you also say “smurfing is so easy” :wink:

Yes, you are wrong to observe easier penalties. But if you were not, lower toxicity in games would actually bring it up from the cesspool it has become.

And yes, if you do react at all, colloquially known as “feeding the troll”, you may just be dragged down too.
Luckily, you don’t have to be part of the problem.
Feel the need to talk? I get it, I feel it too. But you can be constructive in your feedback to them.
Will it not help?
Well then threatening them with a report will not help either. And even worse trying to persuade the rest of the team to jump the wagon.
Just focus the keyboard time on winning the actual game instead, HotS is THE game where it just may happen, out of the blue, with 3 feeders and a troll and -5 levels, cause somehow the other team decided to out-troll yours in the moment they have clear path to core.

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Yes I could just smurf but if Blizzard tells me “You’ve been playing this game for 8 years here let me ban your level 1500 account with all the heroes, thanks for your service” … like this doesn’t resolve any community issues at all, and just shows they have the wrong approach.

That’s just infuriating, knowing they won’t hear me out or put ahead any staff to actually manually handle the situation beyond just banning a bunch of people.

If they won’t have an actual exchange, communication with the community and they’ll just throw bans at it … it’s cooked, I’m out lol

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Partly agreed. I am considering the possibility banning people for chat abuse (even repeated chat abuse) might not be the best idea; especially on a game that frankly boosts toxicity due to being overly team-oriented, and doesn’t quite suffer from an abundance of players (partly because no measures were taken at right time against gameplay trolling, which was let rampant for some years while mutes were awarded left and right).

With that being said, in my experience, silenced players are awful teammates. They’re far more likely to tilt and throw from the mildest inconvenience: an ally died, they died, an enemy escaped low hp, no one instantly reacted to their ping, someone says something to/about them, or pings them and so on. In the rare case they don’t play PvE all game/ feed, they’re maybe above average (being generous here by only picking the games they don’t intentionally troll from the first teamfight), but it’s far from enough to justify letting them play ranked…unless we invent a new tier of rainbow games, where there’s an equal amount of silenced on each team. Out of the games I played, muted players have been more likely to pull the plug mid-game too; and more likely to disconnect- reconnect - disconnect too, especially in ARAM.

Maybe some of them would grief less if they weren’t perma muted, or maybe the game is better because some of them get pushed to quit by perma mutes and bans. Personally, I’d try (if it wasn’t tried before) to remove permanent mutes/ bans for chat, instead having progressive punishments that cap at a certain period (could be 3 month mutes, 6 months, a year, but not more). Handing out permanent chat punishments like they’re candy might work in a popular game, given the odds of backlash and the positive media coverage for “fighting toxicity”. Best HOTS can do with this tactic is raising the concentration of ‘people’ that play the game to rage-bait others into mutes and bans.

I think a pretty long silence is a decent punishment, and could also give people the opportunity for redemption. After all, starting a new account is free, and LoL / DOTA have faster, better report systems. If people want a moba to grief and troll, ol’ reliable is still here, waiting for their nth account.

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Bans for repeat abusive chat are ok, the problem is and always has been that the system is automated. Systems that hand out permanent account bans should only be reviewed by humans and that clearly isn’t going to happen (because human supervision costs money).

More and more people will turn off chat out of fear of false reports if troll accounts and smurfs keep reporting people just for fun or out of spite.

The other option to avoid false reports is obviously not typing at all which will make the false reports disappear into the void.

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People like you are the problem.

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I don’t understand the point of permabanning for chat when surely a perma silence would fix the problem.

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If you got banned then you already proved you cant socialize with other players the proper way.

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Too late for that. They have banned a lot of good players away from the game since 2017. Lots of those now are playing LoL and Dota. I had a few friends back in the day banned and silenced who never came back

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These incompetent mediocrities, the devs of Hots, managed to encourage smurfing at some point.

Personally, in 2018 I was told by the then still working support that “you can just create a new account” when I asked them what I should do if I was banned or dissatisfied with something.

I wouldn’t even be surprised if they did all this so they wouldn’t all get fired due to 80% online drop in 2 years since the game was released and to fool investors with fake online (number of new accounts).

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^^ this

I don’t mind that, though I think they would actually have to be harsher on their auto reports but actually check the ban appeals for more than just a swear word. IE actual toxicity and not justifiable etc.

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I remember that in early hots smurfing wasn’t an issue at all. Only people who would complain about their ranking being unfair would create sometimes a new account only to fall to the same bracket as their original account. There were 50 ranks of Hero League at the beginning. And I think there were 20 placement games if I remember correctly. It wasn’t very appealing for a smurf to go through all that. Now with 3 placements it’s so easy to create a new account and smurf away.

Smurfing became a problem when Blizzard started silencing and banning people left and right. This started happening en masse circa late 2016 and early 2017. I had a BIG friend list and it was mind blowing watching half of them silenced at any point in time. Some of them created smurfs. Some quit altogether.

The game itself encourages smurfing helped with the most pathetic and inept reporting system I’ve ever seen

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I agree in general, when they ramped up the penalties for chat reports around 2 years after launch, that’s when loads of people made backup accounts so they can play without risking their main account. Giving birth to legions of smurfs in Ranked.

Blizzard always had the key to preventing this though:

— Penalize people who report for fun or whose reports don’t lead to account actions repeatedly
— Stop handing out all penalties automatically. Only silence or ban a player when a Gamemaster personally confirms the chat was abusive.
— If they fear the Gamemasters and mods get overwhelmed with reports, give everyone a max of 2 reports a day. Bonus influence from Steam’s report system: Give more future weight to that players reports if it lead to a penalty.
— Take reporting away from people who submit false reports, or even penalize malicious false reporters

That’s all it would have taken. 1 or 2 employees. Too expensive for Blizzard :thinking:

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Yeah if I remember correctly early smurf ls were more about being high rank than being low.

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trying playing more games then. Just about every game has someone claim that that game has the ‘worst system’ they’ve ever seen. If people only ever play a few things, then it’s not much of a metric to claim something is the ‘worst’.

People still claim dota/lol have the worst, pokemon unite has automated bans that cannot be overturned, Dead By Daylight require(d) 3rd party video evidence plus in-game flags to report a player (so worst for actually getting action taken,) a number of other games – that went defunct – blame their reporting system for killing the game, a number of FPS games have live “shadow banning” where players weaponized the reporting system to forced kick/bans during a game due to report automation and allowing them to bot/script reporting.

Games that don’t have a report system get called ‘the worst’ for not punishing anyone, games that do punish players get called ‘the worst’ because “nobody” wants to babysit a bunch of “adults” complaining about any and everything that they can, so some part of the system either gets automated, or, for some games, it system doesn’t ‘do’ anything, or activity punishes the player that actually filed the report against someone else.

Obviously we have to see if watchmojo – or botslop ripoffs – made their list of the ‘true’ worst reporting systems thus far :thinking:

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I don’t think anyone else needs convincing that tickets are reviewed either by someone who doesn’t understand english, doesn’t care about the outcome or is simply underqualified to be the deciding voice on more serious matters like permabans.

I’ve literally made a full circle in exhausting their prewritten reply forms and not yet have I been asked or threatened to stop opening more tickets on the matter despite each one stating that the decision is final (somehow I am to believe they go through an additional manual review every time).

Yet each time I get a reply that they’ve confirmed their findings after a thorough review. It’s been six months today and it will be another half a year at least before their logs for my account start expiring and begin to vanish. Hoping for more luck and understanding by the time everyone abandons the game and by then no one should remember anymore why and what for was I banned in the first place.

Now after the website update everytime I open the support page there’s a red sticky at the top saying I am an under an active penalty and this stuff won’t ever go away. I miss the game and my stress threshold has benefited from it ever since I stopped, probably for the lack of daily exposure to this poison. I don’t even remember the last time I went to sleep mad over something.

Their entire penalty system feels backwards. If someone is toxic in chat wouldn’t you want to protect players in other games on the same platform from them as well?
:man_shrugging:

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Honestly, based on some of the absurd Gamemaster ban judgments on reddit, it’s pretty obvious many of the ban reviewers don’t play HotS and are from a third world country possibly using Google translate.

The process is outsourced to random people who don’t know the nyances and subtleties of the game (my Reddit favorite was a GM deeming “stop doing camp” due to an incoming enemy gank as toxic chat and coercion).

It is all a bit sad, when you consider the system is automated and not everyone who gets reported deserves any kind of action (point in case, people from Gen chat mass reporting Grubby just to get him banned maliciously on live stream).

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Blizzard is famous for having automated report systems in place in most of thier games. WoW and Hots is just some of them where its shines through the brightest.

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This all would not be an issue if Ban didn’t exist for abusive chat, and ONLY for intentional throwers and afkers. If someone abuses chat but fights hard for the win GROW A THICK SKIN AND MUTE THEM.
The only people I want to see banned are trolls and intentional throwers. And it’s so easy to identify them. And you don’t need too much human resources. Hire a bunch of young people from India, Philippines, or China to review games where people are reported

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2017-2018 wasn’t even the worst period.

I got a three day ban from wow during the first TBC. What I did was write x and y are gay lovers in public zone chat, followed by half of the server joining the chaos during mass world pvp and somehow it was only me who got in trouble.

The explanation was for revealing private and intimate information on two players LOL.

I have literally died on the spot. It’s called humor buddy.

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