Everything is much simpler. The entire reporting system is automatic, and it has no limits. And a man, by virtue of his ignorance and narrow-mindedness, can throw a report on anyone and for any reason. That’s all. Say thank to ignorant and incompetent developers which even doesn’t understand the reasons why the game on its last legs/does breath at incense
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This, but also what Montana said. If enough people get mad at you for any number of reasons, they will press “abusive chat” and “non-participation” reports on you.
The latter will lead to the kind of warning you received. There is no human supervision (unless you appeal a ban or warning, in which case they may review things like your chat history).
You can be active in every single match you play and get a warning for “non-participation” simply by enough people getting pissed off at you and using that report category falsely.
But it’s not a small amount of unique reports. It’s dozens. One person or even one premade of 4 people can’t cause it.
Which is a mistake, if your team is doing something else.
Farming XP may be a “Correct choice” if your team is on board with it. But if they want to contest an objective and you’re leaving them 4v5 - you aren’t helping anything.
The XP that you farm will NOT make up for them dying there 4v5.
You call may be a correct one on paper and in a vacuum, but you should not discard your teammates. They are just as important of a game variable as your level disadvantage. If they INSIST on fighting - then going to soak a lane is a MISTAKE. You’re bringing your team behind, not ahead.
So yes, nonparticipation is FULLY justified.
Everything is automatic.
I don’t believe that Blizzard have a single living GM that addressed HOTS problems currently.
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You don’t know that.
Also it doesn’t make any sense to do that. Because stats are a flawed metric.
I can nonparticipate-troll for 15 minutes as Nazeebo, just farm my stacks. Then I will go in and make a decent hero damage in the last half of the game. I won’t be super-high, but I will be decently high up there for the system not to know any better.
Besides, you could play OK for the entire game, and then stop participating at a critical juncture which is still reportable.
You give too much credit to the system. The only thing it does is it accumulates the reports and when the counter is high enough - it takes action.
They get silenced. Not banned.
Have you ever seen an “I was banned unjustly” thread on these forums?
Exactly. That never happens. Because banning people is against Blizzard’s ideology apparrently.
Have you ever seen an “I was banned unjustly” thread on these forums?
There are suspensions, plenty of people on the forum have been temporarily suspended. That blocks logins completely (both on forum and in-game).
Bans require multiple suspensions, I can’t imagine anyone but a fully deserving player to get to that point though.
Do they suspend them on Reddit and every other platform as well?
Because then I have to take my hat off to Blizzard’s influence.
That’s the problem. They will allow you to troll and ruin the game for your teammates for MONTHS and YEARS before you get anything of substance.
Hell, it will take weeks just to get a WARNING.
Lol, no. I believe that would be completely impossible. The staff has no way to know your reddit account.
Only Twitch.tv is even remotely linked to the in-game client, but only for purposes of obtaining event portraits. When you watch certain events with your linked twitch account, it transfers a portrait to your game account.
So why aren’t there “I was banned/suspended injustly” threads on reddit?
Hint: because they happen SOOOOOOOOOOO rarely that you will have to dig deep to find them.
Meanwhile, I meet an AFK on MY team 2 games out of 3.
There were in the past. Also in 2016-2017, there were a ton of threads of people getting silenced left and right. Including threads of streamers testing the system just to see how it works (turns out, like you said, it’s fully automated).
With the smaller current player base it’s somewhat of a dead issue.
I haven’t seen silence/ban threads on reddit for like a year now.
Hint: because they happen SOOOOOOOOOOO rarely that you will have to dig deep to find them.
Meanwhile, I meet an AFK on MY team 2 games out of 3. Who should be banned. But who will keep playing and ruining games.
Could be they upped the threshold of required reports by a ton since the system was first released (you could see multiple silenced people each day in games, on chat channels, etc).
Now, I think the last time I even saw a silenced player was in… January? February?
And with less players playing the game, abusers get away without punishment even easier (less players + more reports required = abuser paradise).
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Exactly.
And that just shows that to Blizzard, normal players are worth less than an abuser who plays a lot.
no it’s not, I have played with people who know very well how to play hots, and sometimes u have to give objetives, and go soak xp in lanes and avoid meaningless fights if u are in level downsides, is never a wrong choice, it can only be taken as beeing afk por pepegas ignorants who doesnt know how to play and report for not following on their pepegas teamfights that always end up in more dying and feeding xp for enemy team… and i’ve never go afk sit in base in a game on purpose to make my team lose, thats lame
No. It’s just automated message they send after x amount of reports in y amount of time.
Only the warning is automated. It’s why you don’t get banned for AFK anymore. In the past they had a ban wave at start roughly once a month, then once every couple months till they stopped entirely and they notified about the wave on blizz forums. It also requires the reports to be from unique accounts which is why some trolls never got banned on AUS. People making topics on them here and reddit for years to prove they trolled every game but nothing was done to them because low pop meant they never got enough unique reports on them and blizz never addressed that problem. The ban waves weren’t effective in the first place because they were so seldom that trolls got to keep trolling for long periods. Secondly banned only the top of the top of reported people so when you consider 3 regions getting combined 30-50 people banned it’s drop in the ocean. And same people would just make new accounts to troll so it didn’t fix or prevent anything realistically. For same reason people started to switch to reporting mostly for abusive language, it was automated punishment in shorter period which made it significantly more effective weapon against trolls.
You dont get a warning just because 4 people reported you from one game lol. It takes many afk reports to get that warning so you actually had many games were you were reported for afk and now you got a warning for it.
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I know someone with a banned smurf account with ~100 total games, 70% win and 40% MVP. Between the perma ban and the last ban before that he played 2 games, got 2 MVP and won both. He stopped appearing at objective because our teammates died alone one by one past level 20 and depushed lanes instead of participating in pointless 3v5 fights. He did this ONCE. He contested every single ban but the support dudes could not tell when and what he did, only that they thoroughly investigated his games (which is a lie because they “found” more games where he “afked” than the number of games he played) and the ban is justfied.
btw once I was banned from the forum because I talked about this particular case (they may ban me again). If the system was good they would not do this.
Before the new AI changes I got a warning for afk even I tryhard every game. My only sin was to use a hero name as a battle tag, and my teammates reported me for being a bot 
Sometimes they also told that this was the best bot they have ever seen, but report anyway. It’s too hard to press tab and check the player’s name
I wouldn’t be surprised if this was true; Some players are not very bright. They will really think you are a bot even if you typed during the match, just because your name is Valla and you played Valla…
If I were an employee, I’d create a chart just for fun to see how likely hero name players are to get afk/non-participation flags and reports. Betting it would be a good 10-20% higher than those of normally named accounts.
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The report system in this game is broken, It does not matter the reasoning behind the reports, if the number of reports is high enough, they automatically take action against you without any form of investigation.
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Here’s something some people fail to realize. This is a team game, and if the team is making a play as a team, and you are not backing the play (even if you think it’s a bad idea), you are not participating. Yes, you can ping to get out, but it the team continues, and you’re not helping, you are basically ensuring that your team will lose whatever it is that they are trying to do.
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