Suspension appeal

General Discussion
#1

I share the appeal I made for a suspension and its response.
I think the answer is from a bot.

hace 3 días

HOTS’s automated reporting system fails.

I don’t know in which part of the suspension process there is human intervention, (if there is).

Actually I was not going to create a ticket for this suspension, but after this experience I will.

He is playing with an alternate account during the suspension, and in my team there were 3 smurf accounts all less than level 50.
As the game progresses and we gain xp we position ourselves 4 levels up, while an ilidan from our team terrorizes the opposing team.
I don’t know if you know the mechanics of the heroes but ilidan has a very high skill ceiling and with 4 levels above he can go 1 vs 5.
In short, this ilidan was walking around the enemy base, filling the floor with graffiti and killing any hero who dared to leave.
didn’t want to win, I
was humiliating them
the rookie players on the other team were terrified, and didn’t know what to do.
That’s what happens when you ban player accounts.
smurf accounts appear and you ruin the experience for new players.

you might think “the mmr will soon put him in his place”,
but that takes many games, and it is modified with each hero that get.

for veteran players the outlook is no better.
You play with suicidal and afk trolls, who report you for abusive chat at the first claim and you are the one banned.
but the afk are never banned.
If you read the HOTS forums, this topic is the most common claim and the one that most affects its community.

never insult another player I can only have complained to feeders or suicides.

I do not pretend a real solution, I will only receive a message, general and uninformed, citing the code of conduct.

but the reality is that the automated reporting system fails and is abused by everyone.

  • is the reason why matchmaking fails and games cannot be balanced.

  • is the reason why gems are not bought (I no longer open loot boxes)
    and the smurf accounts don’t even change the profile portrait.

  • is the reason why players leave the game.

  • is the reason why the game failed, and the HOTS devs left.

Thank you.

Response:

Pude revisar su caso, y temo que la evidencia presentada fue correcta y que la acción fue apropiada. Nuestra decisión en este asunto permanece y no será revocada.

Esta acción ha sido hecho en acuerdo con nuestras políticas de Heroes of the Storm (Blizzard's In-Game Code of Conduct - Blizzard Support) y el Contrato de licencia de usuario final de Battle.net (http://blizzard.com/company/legal/eula.html), los cuales reconoces y aceptas antes de jugar a nuestros juegos.

Este asunto se considerará cerrado y no aceptaremos más apelaciones.

#2

as someone who has a responsibility to respond to e-mail inquiries, a lot of what I do is done with templates. It’s not worth my time to ‘humanize’ the hours I spend responding to stuff that people are largely not going to read, and will typically respond with ways to try to fault me for the things they do instead because they didn’t actually think things through.

Language barrier aside, I don’t see how you anecdote is supposed to appeal the suspension and account actions aren’t taken after a single game. Rather than make acase for how something did or didn’t violate the code (I’m not sure on the angle here) you go off on tinfoil rants to try to fault a person not paid enough to motivate them for pushing through hundreds, if not thousands, of similarly misguided appeals, such as this.

Since you probably haven’t considered how mindless it can be to deal with effectively illiterate people that don’t read things through, it’s easy to assume a ‘bot’ did something that a person probably did, but it’s not worth it to them to spend more than quota-time on the mundane task of looking for something unlike the myriad of other appeals they see, and stamp it with a templated response because it’s not like they’re be compensate better for putting more time into the review and reply.

5 Likes
#3

Its probably not worth their time to find the evidence either, or show you if they already have it. In both the response from blizzard that the OP posted, as well as blizzard’s response to me when I got banned on my main, both stated “the evidence presented shows the action is correct”. However I asked for evidence and they repeated the same cookie cutter answer. I don’t think a human customer support rep would do that, they’d at least explain something, one would hope… or this one human just didn’t care enough. Not really something you want from a CS rep.

If you’re going to uphold an action taken on someone’s account, and they ask for a reason and evidence and you don’t show them, then either you don’t have evidence to support it or you simply don’t care enough to show them. Now if they were to have any type of evidence and said “this here is why you got banned” and had the evidence on hand, then yeah I’d understand.

I don’t know whether its automated or not because a lot of times its much easier to use templates and because of how some replies look… they do look automated. However, if they are real humans replying… they probably just don’t care enough to actually do anything more than reply templated answers.

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#4

Reading some parts and scanning through the rest, I don’t even see why is this an appeal. More like a complaint about the effects of the system. At best, an attempt at litigation.

It sounds like a rant I conjure after losing three matches on a day where I had to endure really boring meetings and I had the misfortune of playing instead of a walk with music.

Take a course (watch a Youtube video or two) about how to get your point through, how to structure your text. It will help you down the line.

In case of an appeal, there are two main components two include as a brief summary: whatever you think may have triggered the reports, changes you’re willing to make (if any, applicable), ideally connected with a minor apology.

If you suspend me, I might just smurf and troll like the rest won’t invoke sympathy. Which is exactly what you need: convincing the other person that you’re worthy of a second chance.

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#5

I mean that might work if you’re dealing with a human, or at least a human who cares. I don’t have enough evidence to say its completely automated, but what I’m thinking is that the people handling appeals don’t care and just go by the report number.

There’s no punishment for false reporting and people do it so much more often than before. There are a lot more trolls playing and if someone is immature enough to troll, they’re immature enough to falsely report someone. Some might say that if you are banned you deserved it, but if that’s the case why do these CS reps not show you the evidence if you ask for it? I think the answer to that is they don’t care, or don’t have any.

You wouldn’t even be able to do that. Smurfing is not something I’d think blizzard would react nicely to… so once your account is banned, you’re done.

Even then people have argued that your “second chance” is the multiple actions on your account previous to your ban, which is true, I just don’t think anything chat related should result in not being able to play the game at all. Chat should just be permanently disabled and you shouldn’t be able to play in SL. However that won’t be effective until smurfs are prevented… and we know why that isn’t possible.

#6

The report system has many inconsistencies in how its applied on an individual basis. I’ve not had any friends who have received bans, but I have had various friends silenced for “chat abuse and suspended” for “disruptive game play.”

I asked to see some of their tickets and those for chat abuse (this is going back to about 2017-18) were quoted in game (and in draft chat) text chat that was considered abusive. They were also given a rundown of what passes as abusive chat, which was so vague like “sarcasm”, so basically almost anything could be abusive if the GM’s so deem it to be. It’s also worth nothing the GM edited lines of chat to makes some compliments resemble abuse by leaving out chat that proceeded and followed the quoted line. No appeal was successful for these friends.

As for the two friends who received suspensions for “disruptive game play” this happened recently, 2021 and 2022. Both of these are personal friends I introduced to Hots and one received a suspension after dying too often in ARAM games playing heroes they had no clue playing and the other was accused of being AFK in QM games, these reasons were provided on appeal. I encouraged my friends to appeal again after watching their replays as it was clear both were just bad and not intentionally dying or AFK, but simply new and unfamiliar with Hots. The good news is both had their suspensions lifted, so it would seem there still are real human GM/CS for Blizzard games.

I do think you need to “get lucky” by speaking to an fair GM, it also seems to depend on the kind of infraction that has occurred. Abusive Chat seems to be the most difficult one to appeal, I had one friend who did so successfully as they proved they always played with chat disabled, so no chat lines could be recited outside of party chat between friends.

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#7

It is. Just go watch all the people on Youtube who had thier guild report him for abuse chat and then the guy got 1 week ban for yelling I LOVE WARCRAFT. Once upon a time Blizzard had devs checking reports. Now they dont. Its all done by a robot that is programmed to ban people that get reported enough within a certain timeframe just like hots.

If the report system really worked as it should 100000 of false reported players would still had thier account or never saw a suspend e-mail.

2 Likes
#8

Maybe its due to it being back in 2017-2018 but I don’t even get a reply of this sort. I just get a repeated version of what I said before, and no evidence or quotes or anything. Maybe they just stopped giving out abusive chat appeals altogether. They didn’t budge with mine and didn’t give me any evidence to support my ban either.

Wait a minute how did you watch a replay of an aram game?

I know the reports are automated, with no one looking at them before a ban or suspension is sent out. I’m saying that appeals look like they’re automated too based on my own experience and what I’ve seen others say about theirs, but there’s not concrete evidence to back up that claim like there is (I saw an azmongold video about it) with the reports themselves.

I’ve come to the conclusion the CS reps don’t care, or even those replies are automated and abusive chat appeals won’t ever get granted.

Based on what Minky said, someone at least got quotes of messages sent in game from a CS rep, but that doesn’t seem to be possible anymore.

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#9

You can watch replays for all ARAM games with the exception of “The Industrial District” which doesn’t record replays. So after watching the 12 or so replays that were recorded by my friend, I felt confident they should appeal.

As I said, getting a reply didn’t help my friends witch the exception of the friend who has chat always disabled. I so wish I could post “the rules” for abusive chat that the GM gave my friends as they are really quite ridiculous in how intentionally nebulous and broad they are, almost any chat could be interpreted as abusive.

Frankly I’m too lazy to find the relevant patch notes, but I remember in 2017 they stated they were using “machine learning” to automate all areas of the report system, so it’s no secret. It seems they have pretty much gutted the number of CS and GM positions.

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#10

For some reason I was under the impression you couldn’t watch any aram replay. Cool!

Well I was just saying that it was a human response nonetheless vs the template responses I get that just reiterate their first reply.

Couple that with automated reports and you’ve got yourself a state of the art report system!

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#11

The Wow streamers who tested it ingame already confermed its automated no matter what is said. Its all about how many reports you get within a timeframe. The content of what is said does not matter anymore cause no devs checks it. If the report system worked as it should fake reports would be ignored and those who fake report others would get punished themself.

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#12

I think she was referring to when people actually would respond to appeal tickets… that’s what I understood at least and was referring to myself in my posts above.

#13

This is very true. Funny thing is one of my friends said to the GM’s that reports were automated based on volume, but the GM totally denied it.

That’s correct. If it wasn’t against the forum rules I’d post some of those ticket receipts, the GM’s were actually quite rude and the rules they quoted for abusive chat were absurd.

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#14

If this is true, which I believe it is since you’ve given me no reason to believe you’re not trustworthy, then idk how people defend this system or blizzard’s reputation with reports.

#15

Report system is absurd because the devs allow the players to take control and decide for themself what is reportable and what is not. Its happend on this forum aswell.

A troll flagged the guy who made lvl 100 club thread and he got suspended for a week and had his thread deleted. Its just a big mess all of it. Meanwhile trolls that copy paste the same thread over and over that get flagged for spam or trolling get thier threads unflagged again. Sounds like admin/devs are catering more to the trolls then to the actual players.

2 Likes
#16

The WoW forums are funny these days, too, civil discussions get deleted en masse, at best because they don’t agree with someones, clearly preferentially as a baseline but also inconsistently.
(These days, having moved on from the mandatory appreciation and promotion of LGBTQ++ exclusive communities while also shaming, shutting down and deleting others, people now dislike how rushy dungeons are, how you are expected to know everything in advance, not allowed to be new, and getting kicked upon first failure. Nothing political, just asking for some change to curb the pace. Nope. 404. You must like things. Happiness is mandatory. Compliance is expected. Disagreement will be punished accordingly.)

It’s just not a good place to discuss anything. Like it or leave it. If you can’t, a distinct lack of anger management can help with getting banned.

I am overwhelmingly disappointed by automated systems all across the board. And with the companies employing them. Even worse if this work is actually done by humans.

It’s just sad when you need to let go of stories and companies that you’ve enjoyed for the past twenty or so years, due to them changing to something intolerable.

But more importantly, I’m worried about our beautiful new world. Fortunately this is just a silly forums of a silly video game company. But it’s a perspective of our future, and definitely that of our children.

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#17

Trying appeal to any moderation team or employees won’t work. This games moderation rules do not work, and only encourage smurf and troll accounts, which is why if you log in and just read the games general chat, you find copy-pasted racist rants from day old accounts, and its daily, and hourly. The racist trolls never end, you find them in-game, and in general chat. Heck, people make new accounts just to troll with Cho-Gal combo names that end up being racist. And its not like banning them does anything, as those players CLEARLY do not care about said accounts, and just make more.

As Blizzard suspend accounts, people value them less, and just use a spoof email, (or just use a new email) to create endless accounts, and the trolling gets worse, as people value their accounts less.

That is the core of the issue here. They want to be incredibly stringent in enforcing “no toxicity” and in doing so, have made it that much worse.

The game needs to remove most report functions and just replace it with “mute” and “block” and not much else. If you don’t like what someone is saying, mute them.
If someone is AFK / suiciding, or you suspect some kind of bot, “block” them - which should prevent you from joining with them on your team again for a day, that way, if you end up in a match with a suspected troll you’ve blocked, at least they are on the opposing team.
And a simple vote feature like “vote to surrender” would save players the time of being stuck in 20 minute matches with trolls or AFK bots. The surrender option exists in the more successful MOBA’s for a reason.

That alone would fix this game, but again, the moderation team does not play this game, does not care, and in all likelihood, doesn’t have ANY control over the game. Any and all subjects on the matter on these forums is all the same rationalizations from the same few people, rinse and repeat, meanwhile, the games trolling has only got worse and the games “balance” is completely out of whack, since MMR doesn’t come into play with week old accounts.

Blizzard moderation is like a stubborn parent beating their kid, and thinking its making things better. Its not. Abused children become abusers themselves, for evidence, just log in and read the general chat.

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