Harassment, especially on-going harassment definitely includes a stiffer penalty if we’ve gotten that far.
To answer the original question, as Moonchylde mentioned, penalties do escalate. We try to provide warnings and ample opportunity to correct the offending behavior so often the first penalty for chat violations would normally be a short silence. The second tends to increase the duration of that silence, and so on.
It is important to understand that we want to do what we can to ensure that our games are a fun, fair, and enjoyable place to spend your time in. With that in mind, we have been taking a look at how our reporting and penalties have worked over the years and have been taking steps to make improvements. A number of them went in with 9.1.5.
IMPROVED CHAT REPORTING FEEDBACK
- Added confirmations for players who report misbehavior in chat, as well as for those who are likely to be reported.
- When you report a player for verbal harassment or other disruptive chat in-game, we will notify you when action is taken against the player.
- When we notice that your behavior has moderately changed for the worse, we will send you a warning message so that you can modify your behavior before receiving a penalty.
- In cases where acutely inappropriate behavior is observed, the system may skip warning the player and take action immediately.
- /ignore now blocks all characters on the ignored player’s WoW account.
This is an ongoing process to help address the toxicity that is far too prevalent today so there are likely to be additional changes that are tried to improve the overall gaming environment for everyone.