You need to fix the account silencing crap and more

General Discussion
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As a twitch streamer, we get trolls who don’t like us. Get the wrong trolls it creates a gigantic mess for us.

For example, my accounts ( some that quite actually don’t have chat logs at all ) are getting silenced due to mass reporting. This is obviously because you don’t have a customer service department anymore, but as a team game player not being able to communicate with your team mates is kind of a problem. Just to be clear ALL 10 of my accounts are on at least a 1 month mute, my main account is now on a 2 month mute. Obviously this wouldn’t be a problem, but your customer service and ticket scheme is fully automated so case-to-case issues are no longer being reviewed. I just hope this mass reporting doesn’t lead to account bans as that would suck. Not a big deal since the game is free to play and I can just make a new account, but losing hundreds of dollars to due having an automated customer service would really suck.

You have a ton of bots mucking up the team game ladder. On the Korean server there is one account that started laddering back in 2019 and in that time has played 409,000 ladder games. Needless to say it’s literally impossible to achieve that unless you’re playing 24 hours a day 7 days a week. On the NA server I very frequently run into an account called " Computer " that has the various leave time stamps: 30s / 1m / 1m30s. If you get the wrong time stamp, you can’t abuse the eco and essentially you’re playing a dead on arrival game. That account is nearing 350K games. You have ask yourself why in the world doesn’t the game company address such obvious issues?

More on bots - When you get to the highest level of 2v2 there is not a very large player pool to choose from. Because of this, you spend the vast majority of your time queueing into the same players over, and over and over again. That of course is only if the players are of similar MMR. In patch 3.0 you changed the match making to not exceed 6 minutes and 30 seconds. You did this because high ranked players ( regardless of the game type ) were waiting between 20 minutes and 1 hour to actually find a game. The issue now, is that we have bots that are running at the top MMRs and quickly using the globe to " switch servers " effectively cancelling the game. You will receive a message that says " A player you were matched with has left the game or disconnected from the service. " This problem started back in November, and unless I switch game types I literally cannot get a game started at all. The reason for this is because the bots are playing at a similar MMR to my account. Albeit this is targeted trolling specific to me, but this does effect all of the other players who are trying to play the game at the same time that I’m streaming.

I was genuinely hoping that by this time in the Microsoft acquisition that we would have seen some significant improvements to security, privacy, and general UI improvements to gatekeep trolls from just getting away with this sort of stuff non-stop, to my dismay I’m still dealing with this non-stop harassment 200 hours a month.

I wouldn’t even be posting in the general section about this under normal circumstances, but since you literally can’t speak to anyone via tickets anymore, it’s the only place I can think of to get Blizzard to notice or even acknowledge that one of your streamers who sits at the top of the viewer directory in sc2 almost every day of the week can’t even get these issues acknowledged.

Thanks for reading.

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A few streamers once said some not so nice things about me and I ended up being harassed by their viewers for like a decade. They’d mass report any account I used. That was in game and also on the forums and on reddit. All the reports were totally ridiculous. I put 4 random letters together and got banned for “masked language”, and this is insane when their own forums has that word built into an emoji:

:face_with_symbols_over_mouth:

Translation, they’d ban literally anything I did, but other people could spew the most toxic vitriol and were never banned. How visible an account is predicts if it will be reported, and not the actual content of the post. High visibility posts are likely to be reported no matter what, and low visibility posts will never be reported even if they are toxic.

Internet moderation systems are weaponized against famous people, but most especially if a famous person isn’t liked by other famous people, because the famous but unpopular person will be hounded in negative coverage from other famous people, and that creates an extreme amount of visibility. As a comedian who made fun of streamers, pro players and casters, it’s needless to say that a lot of them didn’t like me, and many still don’t to this day. I’ve permanently retired many pseudonyms I used to do this. One was so legendary that to this day people are still scared of his name, lmao. The amount of harassment that comedians get is just unreal. You just can’t crack jokes without some loon absolutely loosing it, and on the internet there are a lot of loons.

So yes, internet moderation systems are EXTREMELY flawed, and you aren’t the only person to run into this issue. There is a reason why most famous people play or chat on smurf accounts. They just don’t want to be harassed 24/7.

Jordan Peterson’s twitter account is probably the best example that exists. Love him or hate him, it shows how bad internet moderation is. He does a tweet that someone doesn’t like and now they are moving to revoke his psychology license. He’s never had a complaint from a patient, and the person making the complaint was never a patient. It’s a bunch of randos on the internet getting together to spam reports on someone they dislike.

Frankly this sort of behavior should be illegal. Coordinated internet harassment should at least be civilly punishable with a hefty fine. If someone truly deserves to be banned, people will run into that person & report them organically. It should be possible to sue people who organize internet brigades where they mass report things artificially. It’s a weaponization of the internet moderation in a way that completely defeats the purpose of the moderation. The purpose of section 230 is to allow internet content to flourish, and what it’s created is a system where a vocal minority has complete veto power over what content is available. Not only can they veto the content, they effectively have ban power to where they can have someone banned. That’s on top of their ability to spread lies and misinformation and gossip in a way that can destroy lives & ruin reputations & tank careers. It’s crazy how much power the internet mobs have, and there need to be laws to counter balance it because it’s totally insane.

The most pernicious aspect of internet mobs is that they aren’t really controlled by a central intelligence. It’s a wild animal running around and attacking random things. It’s a thoughtless machine. People just nudge it in a direction and it goes hog-wild and ruins someone.

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As for your silences, submit an appeal. You can do them on all your accounts. If any were a mistake (or an abuse of the report system as you claim), it/they can be overturned.

If you are denied initially, resubmit the same ticket (for each account) asking for another look. Be nice and concise to expedite the process. Long winded exposition like provided hrre only muddies up the ticket making it take longer.

That’s a choice by all streamers to put themselves up in front of everyone. No different than any other public figure, especially if you’re as big as you claim.

Not likely. MS is not interested in interfering with ATVI at this point plus the game is retired, which you’re fully aware of. You’re going to have to make peace with the fact that you are choosing to continue playing a retired game.

Humans are required to apply account actions, meaning those humans must read the reports, massed or not. And if violations are found in the reports, they act. If no violations are found, you’d never know you were reported.

No, Seal, the one common denominator here is obvious.

The SC2 CMs were let go back during the layoffs of 2019. With SC2’s retirement in 2020, all remaining SC2 staff was eliminated. There’s no dedicated staff watching the GD forums, and there hasn’t for many years.

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I think it’s pretty interesting how the forums haven’t seen any blizz prescence in years, yet apparently humans have been reading the reports given. Seal got 10 mutes in a month on 10 seperate accounts, I thought that would be autonomous, with the game apparently being abandoned. Interesting. Not sure if it’s a good thing or not. Would be nice to hear from the people behind the scenes.

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You’re mistaken, this is mostly automated. The only humans that participate in this, are perhaps the people who submit the reports to an automated system.

SC2 is not the only Blizzard game that uses these systems. Allegedly, the only way to stay immune is to not ever use the chat system. But that’s just something I heard from an ex-employee so not really sure whether it’s true or not.

Yet, the system itself is automated and it’s something hard to deny.

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As someone who’s regularly exposed to the other side of things, I can say that account actions are applied by humans. There are “Squelches” that are automated, but those are very short duration and exist to give the humans time to review the reports. Unlike account actions, Squelches don’t count against the account so getting hit with one doesn’t affect any future account actions. Anything of appreciable length, like a month for example, was applied by a human.

You are correct that some games do experiment with AI automation though.

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At the same time, that’s a source of “employment” and Blizzard through known negligence is enabling at leas 2 crimes I can think of (fraud and harassment).

This is why systems like Blizzard’s autoban are not wise, not when it’s automated to this extent. Back when Blizzard used this crap people in Heroes of the Storm were getting mauled by this decision. It’s so bad even Luke from LTT got hit with the automated banhammer.

I know they wanna save money but this isn’t where you do it. It opens them up to litigation. You pinch pennies by having people WFH or managing your IPs properly instead of abandoning them half way through development.

Personally, my suggestion to fix this is to have everyone set by default to an incogneto mode. Your UN is there, your btag is still there and you can choose to reveal them but unless you do that, you show up as a barcode. Just like everyone else.

Poof now it’s a lot harder to brigade people. It would also help fix the dumb toxic ladder thing where people start looking up other people’s builds to hard counter them.

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Seal,

As for your silences, submit an appeal. You can do them on all your accounts. If any were a mistake (or an abuse of the report system as you claim), it/they can be overturned.

If you are denied initially, resubmit the same ticket (for each account) asking for another look. Be nice and concise to expedite the process.

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I think green text is spot on your expecting a lot for an old dead game. I think its more likely they shut servers down than pay more people to look at tickets. Your situation sounds frustrating but it is what is as they say.

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the problem is ive seen this kind of behavor with a TON of other games before which just got to be known as Toxic AF, Example Dota 2 / LoL, these days you cant even say basic hello or such without running a risk of being silenced in some of these e-sport games
its pretty obvioius these companys kinda just stop caring.

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:rofl:

They once banned a guy for saying something about a sandwich. “If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.” - Cardinal Richelieu.

That’s why in American law, overly vague laws are moot. You can interpret them to mean anything, and that makes them too broad and if they are too broad then they are too powerful. Laws have to be specifically tailored to fix an issue as simply as possible, and it has to be proven that they are effective at solving that problem. It’s called strict scrutiny. Internet moderation would not come even remotely close to meeting strict scrutiny standards.

Internet moderation has a strong bias against the accused & will use the most ridiculous, contorted logic to justify the moderators actions. The language used in the rules is so vague and nebulous that every rule could apply to every post. Masked langauge: your post about a sandwhich is clearly masked language, it conveys a hateful message about gender norms (women being in the kitchen). :roll_eyes:

Masked langauge: when you told the other user to “have a nice day”, this was obviously sardonic and masked langauge for trolling. You knee they were having a bad day and said it ironically to upset them. Etc.

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“Something” about a sandwich? Well, yeah, there’s countless things that could be said about a sandwich that could one actioned.

:wink:

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No, it was the definition of the most rule abiding post conceivable. He said he was taking a break to eat a sandwich and that’s it. The process is far from flawless & the people involved in the moderation are no different than any other group of people. I’ve met moderators who were malicious and hateful. Every type of person on Earth can be found with the pool pf moderators on Earth. Treating moderation systems as some sort of holy, flawless, Devine process to separate good posts from bad posts is simply totally detached from reality. The biggest predictor for what gets banned is simply how visible it is. That’s it. That’s the number one predictor.

I’ve had accounts banned merely because I beat a streamer, like avilo, and viewers from their channel track down your account and mass report it. Internet moderation is highly flawed. Moderation doesn’t stop abuse, moderation becomes the method of abuse. That’s how the real world works. It’s not a hypothetical in a board meeting.

Licensures operate in a similar fashion by the way. There was a lawyer who sent an email expressing a legal opinion, and a court in California disbarred him for the crime of sending an email. Normally you need a complainant and some sort of major ethics violation. They had none. No client had ever complained about the guy. It’s a very similar system to internet moderation. You want to weed out the bad apples. What happens if the bad apples somehow gain control over the moderation process? It’s called regulatory capture.

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No, that wasn’t all of it. There was more to the story than they or you are letting on. That’s just the yarns the perma mad, anti Bliz zealots spin to rabble-rouse the uninformed to their cause.

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Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Your fundamental assumption is that moderators are Gods who can do no wrong, and that’s an absurd proposition. In Plato’s “Republic”, he talks about nation building and how difficult it is to hold powerful people accountable for their mistakes and/or wrong doings. Thus the quote: “Who guards the guards?”. The people in power are supposed to keep communities safe, but what’s to stop them from simply not doing their job, or even actively making a community worse themselves? That’s the fundamental question of western government, and it’s how to hold government accountable to the people they are supposed to represent.

One of the solution is maximum transparency. Everything is visible to the public eye, and that allows the public to scrutinize their leaders, which holds they leaders to a high standard. That sort of accountability simply doesn’t exist for internet moderators. They control the public square and are accountable to no one but themselves.

The question of how to improve internet moderation is such a huge problem that it’s a subject of debate for the world’s greatest legal minds. Section 230 was created to solve that very issue and it’s not working as intended and so they are debating revisions.

The opinion of bnet forumites is “lul doesn’t happen because I said so.” Placing your head into the sand doesn’t make the problems go away, it simply makes it so you can’t see them. The question at hand is a fundamental issue of organizing large groups of people, it’s a question of human civilization itself, and it’s been debated for thousands of years, but people on the internet will tell you it doesn’t exit. :rofl:

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Yeah I vaguely remember that incident.

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In no way did I explicitly or implicitly state that, Adventurer, and I never would because I absoultely believe mods are fallible humans who makes mistakes like everyone else. I’ve seen it.

And with that, I can’t continue this. I can’t trust you to not twist my words to fit your narrative.

Yeah. Unfortunately, it’s fairly common that people will choose a line of chat that isn’t a violation to soapbox with. What they leave out are the all the lines of chat that surrounded the benign line.

“I was silenced for saying LOL!!!”
When actually it was all the F and S bombs that were peppered before and after the “LOL” line. It’s fairly common. We see it all the time in the Customer Support forum.

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All right then, so you retract your statement which essentially called me a liar & accused me of withholding information about the sandwich ban because it is in fact possible that human beings making mistakes can accidentally ban an account over commenting about eating a sandwich. Thanks for your cooperation. Have a nice day!

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None of that was me saying that I believe mods are gods. You spun that for your own purposes. As for retracting anything, I haven’t. That was simply you exemplifying my point.

In reality, I accused you OR the originator of that statement, depending on who was leaving out details. I was never saying the mods don’t make mistakes.

Besides, if it was a mistake, it would have been overturned on appeal, meaning the assertion that Bliz actions people for non violations didn’t actually exist to begin with.

As I added above,

Don’t cut yourself on all that passive-aggressive edge.

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No, just overwhelming deference. Moderators are human beings. They make mistakes, they can be lazy or even malicious. They aren’t some sort of magical unicorn truth tellers who have 100% accuracy in their ability to ban the bad guys. Scrutiny is a good thing because it holds police, etc, accountable for their mistakes, but that kind of mechanism just doesn’t exist with internet police aka moderators. That means we can expect maximum abuse and maximum laziness because we have no reason to believe otherwise because it’s all done behind closed doors. If their work is exemplary, there would be no need to hide it. Hiding it is proof that it isn’t exemplary.

Totally false. They send you an email saying they can ban whatever they want for any reason, and that arguing with them is considered a ban-able offense. You’ve clearly never interacted with internet moderators before.

I truly do want you to have a wonderful day. I mean, why wouldn’t I? What exactly are you implying here.

Hopefully you’ve realized that “have a wonderful day” could be interpreted to be a trolling statement depending on who is doing the interpretation. It’s subjective in other words. How are you supposed to know if they mean it, or if they are being sardonic. Therein lies the problem. Internet moderators have to interpret posts through their own personal biases and this creates errors. I have no doubt that Leviathan, if he could, would ban me for the crime of telling him to have a wonderful day. Thus it is proven: moderators will ban anything for any reason.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjYXNonafzo&t=142s

:call_me_hand: