They have been in-game silenced for a reason Blizzard, they are TOXIC, they are a liability to the team and the game, yet you let them keep playing the game.
Constant pings which I have to mute them
They provide NO TEAMWORK
They do NOTHING for the team
They just do their own thing
I have never experienced any silenced players being helpful. All you did was just made them more annoying in-game.
At first, I tolerated it, but it seems you have gone through a wave of silence and it shows. A lot more silenced players are in-game.
Most of the silenced players I encounter are usually low level accounts and are likely to be smurfs. Silenced or not they will probably behave poorly as they are playing a throwaway account they have no attachment to.
Having said that, I’ve had the terrible kind of silenced player you described and other silenced players who have been very cooperative and skilled. I doubt forcing silenced players to play vs AI will change their behavior at all. They will simply wait out the silence period and then go back to their bad ways.
I’ve had mixed experiences with silenced folk. To say they all can’t play and just sit around doing nothing useful is an overstatement.
Seen the kind who pingspam and refuse to play, but also seen ones that completely dictate the flow of the game with their skill, and may have been silenced for overly eager or hostile shotcalling. Who knows.
All I know is I’ve seen both good and bad silenced players in terms of skill. Just like in sports, some of the best players do sometimes run off their mouth too much, but that doesn’t make it easier to defeat them.
I have a lot of fun with them, i start asking questions and try to guess what they want me to do by their pings. They get mad very easily and its hilarious.
Not all of them got silenced casue they are trolls or toxic. Some of them could be people that tried to shotcall but got false reported by trolls and false reporters that dont want to get told what to do.
But that is maybe only 5 % of the time that is the case. Most silence players I encounter deserved the silence.
They ping spam target players and like to feed a lot. Also notiest that many low lvl accounts are silenced so that most be smurfs cause thier main got banned or players from other mobas that think they can talk like they want and never get punished for it.
For the simple reason you can’t describe all silenced players the way you do and punish all of them the same way. Minky already gave you an example that there are different reasons why someone can be silenced and not everyone is a jerk.
EDIT:
I would even claim that ALL deserves the silence, but it’s still wrong to put all of them vs AI for the reasons were told.
If you think hots system is bad, you haven’t been to the wow forums. People are reporting left and right for whatever reason, little things such as not receiving an invite for a rare spawn or similar nonsense, and this is in a subscription based triple A title mind you.
Customer service is a coin toss where you might get lucky and get someone who can actually read or might even play the game on which they work, or you get an automated reply from a robot.
At the same time, boost groups advertising in group finder, or the trade chat in its entirety is being ignored by everyone involved and you can guess why this is, because of Blizzard’s indifference to a social meaningful MMO experience.
With all the improvements to the bnet platform, they can’t even make it so the suspensions carry over from one game to another, because that is what someone who cared about the whole report system would do.
considering how badly abusive this report system is, anyone i find silenced i dont pay much mind to it and feel a little bad for them due to them being hit by the system, sometimes they do deserve it but also alot of times i have found low level silenced players to ACTUALLY play well due to them being a smurf most likely.