This is true, but suspensions for AFK or other kinds of trolling no doubt account for a much smaller proportion compared to punishments handed out for abusive chat.
I’ve watched a few serial trolls who have been playing since Alpha, one buys retired masters accounts and in the period of around six days takes these accounts from Master to Bronze 5. All of these accounts are still active (I’ve monitored up to 10 on one individual), this particular person would even type that they were throwing, would be reported by the whole team, but continue without reprimand.
The fact that many people can take multiple accounts from Master with 65% win-rate down to Bronze 5 with a 15% WR over the span of a few days and not be detected by any algorithm Blizz employs is enough to show the flaws with the reporting system. The fact that many people now choose to play self silenced shows the flaws in an automated reporting system for abusive chat.
The reporting system “works” in that yes, you get people chat silenced, a minority of people will be banned for AFK/Trolling, but how truly effective it is, is the question you should be asking.
Criticism is never well received by most human being. Criticizing someone’s play is never going to give good results. They’ll just lash out at you, then they’re typing instead of playing.
I mean, that reply you just made was in response to criticism by Thanos…
We don’t know that. Blizzard is never going to give any numbers or information about their report system. But there isn’t much they can do about smurfs.
Yeah I agree with this 100%. Bottom line is, the system is flawed, and unless something is done about it, then all these trolls are essentially going to have free reign.
Yeah, it just tends to feel like the people who throw must be doing it often. Because it literally happens all the time. I get it though, there are some games where people start off upset saying that they have been getting trolls every match, so they say they decided to troll because they are fed up. So it’s not easy to just ban someone cause they had a bad day and snapped and ended up throwing one game. Thats why I wish there was an immediate suspension for something like that, that way there are consequences for someones actions that is having a bad day, but a little more forgiving.
You can troll and throw games with impunity, but if you call them out on it, you get banned. Also asking your team to report someone for sitting AFK at the fountain is considered abusive chat, so not only can you troll and throw, but if people get mad and ask that you be reported, you report them instead and THEY get banned! What an awesome system!
I have made an account for the sole purpose of doing this. I go to games, play horribly, die, troll, and then just spam reports on anyone who gets mad at me. It’s real easy to disguise trolling as just being bad at the game so there’s no punishment for it. The way the system is set up, you can absolutely ruin and destroy any game you’re a part of and so long as you never say anything, you can do it forever. In fact the way to win at the game now is to see how many people you can report and measure your victories accordingly.
I’m pretty sure this info is outdated anyway. The system USED to seem to heavily weigh deaths in the decision but I was playing as Leo the other day got the most deaths and still received MVP. This also happened with a DVA. Maybe it’s been changed to how much respawn timer you get, but I’ve still seen other cases where people with more deaths than I had got MVP.
How? It’s completely anonymous and there are no penalties for abusing it. You can be a toxic douche and it doesn’t matter because nobody will ever know! This system is GREAT!
I don’t agree with what he’s doing, but this is often the end result with a report system which does not hold accountable those people who make false reports. I’ve seen countless people in games who claim they are going AFK or losing on purpose and generally trolling because they state they were falsely silenced and are now abusing the system.
When you set up a system that is so easy to abuse, has no repercussions for doing so and have ill-defined rules regarding what constitutes “toxic” speech, it’s only expected to see this kind of behavior.
I just hate it when even abusive chat doesn’t really do much either. Someone has to be reported several times before they even get temporarily silenced. I have had games where people say stuff like do the world a favor and kill your self. Every racial comment you can think of. Every mental illness comment you can think of. And nothing is done about it because they get like 20 reports to do so before they are silenced even temporarily.
How is reporting other players something that is anonymous when literally everyone who reports a player has to announce when they’re reporting someone as if it is a rule and something that must be done when reporting someone? And thus by doing so making everyone think you’re toxic.
Oh no, you should never announce that you’re reporting someone. Announcing that you’re reporting someone can be reported as abusive chat. I am not even joking about this, when asking Blizzard for examples of abusive chat, “reported for abusive chat” was ACTUALLY LISTED AS ABUSIVE CHAT.
^All very true, a friend of mine got his only silence and what you stated was one of the examples Blizzard gave him. He was in a game where someone was dancing in base, then would walk to towers and die repeatedly. This troll player also spewed every kind of abusive chat you can think of.
My friend asked the team to report this player. When Blizzard cited this in his chat logs they said it was “abusive” because it’s considered a “threat” to type “report x player”. It is considered a threat on the same level Blizzard considers a player threatening to kill you IRL. These are the amazing rules people defend.
All you have to do is search these forums for “unfair” bans and you’ll see that the reporting system is working. It doesn’t work immediately though. It takes multiple reports over multiple games for someone to be banned. So no one can be banned for AFK’ing just one game, but if this guy is a troll, then once he does this a couple of times he’ll be banned. The system is actually VERY LENIENT in that a person has to be toxic for several games and toxic enough for several players in each of those games to report. That’s a pretty big threshold, so if a person gets banned, there is a very very good probability that it was deserved.
If someone has questions or concerns about disciplinary action then the appropriate method is to submit a support ticket instead of making posts about it on the forums which is not allowed.
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