Appealing a Ban/Mute

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How do you properly dispute punitive action from Blizzard that you find was unfair? And this happens all the time. People are constantly abusing the report feature. There are even guilds that accept gold to mass report people and get them suspended from the game.

So my question is how do we actually dispute these abusive reports?

I got banned a few months ago for using some… unsavory language. The point of this post is not to dispute that. Again… for the blue posters. I AM NOT DISPUTING MY PREVIOUS OFFENSES Please don’t treat me like I’m a troll or toxic just because I got reported in the past. We all make mistakes and have bad days. I am only human.

What happened was this: I got banned for 10 days because I called someone a mean word in a battleground. They were being toxic and told me to say something reportable so they can report me and I was being irrational so I called them a mean word and the whole BG just reported me because they were mad we were losing the BG. Once again, I am not disputing the decision made with my previous ban. Technically I was in the wrong. Do I think the punishment was just for someone who at the time had not had any infractions for close to a year if not more? No. But that’s not what I’m posting this for.

The problem happened when I tried to appeal/dispute my ban. Not only is it annoyingly convoluted to try and find out how to actually dispute these things. Once I DID find out how to do so I immediately got an error saying to try to appeal it again later… so I did. Several times. So in my mind my appeal never went through. So I open a ticket. The only way it seems like you can actually create tickets easily these days is through the “Problems with my payments” feature. Go figure.

So, I write a ticket asking why I am getting this error and a “GM” responds a few hours later saying that “We’ve reviewed your appeal and decided that the Ban sticks” or something to that effect. Except… that isn’t what I wrote the ticket for. But oops! Looks like you can’t respond anymore because the GM marked my ticket as “resolved” and moved on. So… I open up another ticket. Same way. I try to explain that my ticket was not for me to appeal. But it was for me to figure out why I was getting errors for my appeal.

Long story short I go through about 5 or 6 different GMs aka Blizzard employees who clearly didn’t care what I was saying, and about 3 or 4 different tickets that I had to open up each time because the GMs kept marking it as resolved. Finally I put in my ticket that they better not mark my ticket as resolved again or I’m going to call customer service and report their GM names. So another GM responds, says that my ban will absolutely not be appealed because it was “reviewed” and then closes my ticket and marked as “solved” or something to that effect again. Making it that I, once again, could not respond with the same ticket. Finally I gave up and just accepted that it wasn’t worth it and that the GM’s didn’t care about anything except the fact that I said a mean word.

So my question is this: how do I avoid this in the future? Other than just not talking to anyone ever so I won’t get reported obviously. In the case that I get unfairly muted or banned how do I appeal it? I never once got the option, through the appeal feature to actually type words to explain why I think my ban should be appealed. Is this working as intended? Are we not allowed to explain why we think we were unfairly banned? Just an automated feature that makes the customer feel like their issues are being addressed but the GMs will just “review” the offense and then tell you you’re banned anyways?

I was told that the appeal system is not meant for you to actually “plead your case” even though I know it used to be. If that’s the case then the appeal system clearly needs to be fixed.

Also since when are GMs able to just close the ticket and mark it as “Resolved” should that not be only an option for the customer making the ticket?

P.S. - I don’t know why this thread was deleted when I posted it on the General forum. I can only guess it was for being “off topic” so I am posting it here. Maybe if we were actually told why our posts in the forums were removed instead of simply being told to refer to the code of conduct.

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I’m not sure what may have happened originally to cause the error, Throm, but from what I can see of the submissions you submit 4 tickets within 10 minutes, which likely would have caused our system to temporarily block you for spamming it. Some time later usually means a good 15-30 minutes or even an hour. I’m sorry if that was not clearer.

The Game Master’s that replied to you would only really be able to look into the appeal, they can’t help determine why you may have been getting an error, they wouldn’t have any idea. If there is an issue with the system in putting in an appeal, that it would need to be looked into by our QA team. It wouldn’t be a discussion point that any staff would be able to have with you.

Talking in-game isn’t the issue. You shouldn’t be silenced or suspended for simply talking. You avoid this in the future by not violating our policies. By not using inappropriate language, by not using inappropriate subject matter or otherwise being toxic.

That isn’t to say that mistakes don’t happen and that players may be squelched or otherwise impacted by reported, but for the most part, if you are interacting with civilly, it is rare to encounter such an issue.

Likely, because it was discussion of disciplinary actions, which is against the Code of Conduct. Though the subject still runs contrary to policy in this forum as well, we do try to provide what insight we can, when possible.

You really need to stop assuming everything is automatically done.

I locked the thread so that I could write my response without a lot of other comments being posted including any likely retorts made.

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Sorry. Community moderators have treated me with hostility in the past with no explanation for what was wrong with my post. And I hate censorship so I didn’t see any reason to lock my thread other than to prevent people from responding. I still don’t get it, but if that’s standard practice then my apologies for assuming I was being treated with hostility.

Yes. I did not see anything mentioning a time period. And I figured it might have just been a connection issue on my end so I tried to do some troubleshooting and then resubmitted it.

I understand this. I didn’t say that I was banned for “merely talking” I was banned for using words that aren’t deemed appropriate for WoW. The point is that I am worried about getting unfairly banned again in the future. As my guild mates recently reported me even though I am fairly certain I did not do anything bannable they simply didn’t like me debating with them and disagreeing.

I had thought that it was only wrong to dispute the disciplinary action. Not merely mention that they happened. I’ll be more careful in the future.

But again, I am still not certain… is the appeal feature meant to be a way for you to actually give a reason why you think your punishment was not appropriate? Or is the appeal feature only a way to send a notification that you want someone to look into your infraction again?

And is it standard practice for Blizzard employees to mark a ticket as “resolved” preventing you from responding? Or was I just unlucky? Again, I’m sorry, but being treated like that: having my ticket closed before I could respond, is why I was feeling attacked when you locked my thread.

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The important thing to remember here is this: People can report whomever they want for whatever the reason. The catch though, if you’re not breaking the rules, then nothing will happen. A temporary squelch may happen (SQUELCH - not silence, as they are two different things) until a GM looks things over. But if you are full-on silenced or sanctioned further, you were in the wrong and in breach of the rules.

If you are aware of people weaponizing their reports? Be sure to report that, because the sanctions cut both ways. If folks are found to be doing that sketchy mess, they’ll get slapped with their own punishment.

You were actually told correctly in your GD thread. Appeals are not for you to plead your case, it is only for a fresh pair of eyes to look things over to ensure no errors were made.

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I’m not personally aware of people doing this. At least not in any way that I could prove with any certainty. But from my own research it appears that report abuse is not really punished. At least not punished very frequently. I don’t even think there’s a category for reporting people for abusing the report system. But I could be wrong.

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Repeating things that you’ve seen said then is how falsehoods continue to be perpetuated if you don’t personally know about it. A lot of people have these grand tales about people who gang-up to report folks, and I’m sure there are those people that exist. But you don’t see it punished because it’s not as rampant as people like to believe.

It only takes a single report for someone to be flagged and looked into. If you do come across folks weaponizing it - report them. I did just earlier when someone made a plea in trade to mass report another player. Right-click, inappropriate communication, text chat and I explained why I did it for the person trying to weaponize the reporting system.

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I’m sorry Throm, but may be applying an emotion to what our Moderation Team does. There is no hostility, there is only policy and the posts/threads that are found to have violated it. I know it can sometimes feel like that, but there isn’t anything personal involved.

I can understand the confusion. If your issue was the fact that you were getting an error in submitting an appeal and you were seeking guidance for getting around the error/bug, more than half of your post is entirely unnecessary. I’d recommend, if you wanted to start a discussion in the future, only describe the error your got and make sure to report it as a bug.

No. The appeal process is there to have our staff double-check the original penalty to ensure that the correct action was taken. It isn’t a means to discuss that action or penalty or to provide a defense or otherwise negotiate a reduced penalty. It’s just a request to have our staff look at the evidence we have and make sure a mistake wasn’t made.

That is how our system works, we cannot just keep them open. All tickets, when a Game Master replies, are marked as resolved from our end.

With that said, you should be able to reopen your ticket, which allows your follow up ticket to be associated with the original, but each time a Game Master “answers” the ticket, it is marked as resolved by us as part of the process.

From what I can see of your ticket history, I see multiple tickets associated with the original, so you were reopening them. “Resolved” tends to be interpreted as in “We fixed everything, you don’t have any more concerns”, which it is not.

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Yet, by your own admission, you were not unfairly banned.

Your motivation for using bad language does not enter into the decision to be banned.
The number of people reporting you doesn’t matter.

You either used forbidden language or you didn’t is the only thing that counts.

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I personally have read posts directly from people who are on realms where these guilds exist. It’s not like I’m going off rumors and hearsay. Unless we assume the poster was lying and all the people in the thread corroborating their story were as well then it seems reasonable to me to assume that said guild exists. But I haven’t experienced that guild mass reporting me personally, is what I meant.

Thanks! I will do this. Report abuse is getting out of hand IMO. I’ve seen many people in trade chat on Grobbulus doing exactly what you described. I just didn’t think of a way that I could report them properly.

I see. Thank you for explaining this.

It didn’t used to be this way… but alright. I guess it is what it is.

That isn’t what appeared to happen on my end. On my end I was having to open a completely new ticket each time. And either the system automatically treated that as me re-opening the ticket or the GMs that I was communicating with were just redirecting my tickets back into the original ticket. But the only way for me to communicate was to go through the system to open a completely new ticket. At least, that’s what the system dialogue in the battlenet website appeared to be doing.

Yes, at least technically.

This is interesting to me. I was under the impression that it definitely mattered.

I am not putting this into question. I am saying that, I am aware of people that have used very mild language that should not be bannable but resulted in the player being banned. I already have a mark on my account recently and I just got wrongly reported recently when I know for a fact that I was careful not to insult anyone or use any foul language. That is what motivated me to make this post so that I could be prepared in case I got banned again.

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There haven’t been any recent changes, the system has been in place for many years now. The only differences are mostly internal, being that we can tie reopened tickets to the original case so there is a history that other Game Masters can most easily track when they get the case.

That is strange. Again, sorry for the confusion.

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How many years? I’ve been playing WoW for many years and I distinctly remember that back then the tickets were only marked as resolved when the person making the ticket marked them as resolved. But that was a long time ago and I know that the current ticket system is very different. Either way, thanks for answering my questions. Sorry that I have a lot of them. I don’t mean to waste your time.

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The number of people reporting you only applies to being silenced and not allowed to use chat channels until the report is reviewed by blizzard. Blizzard will then either evoke the silence with no notes added to your account if it was an unfounded report, or apply a penalty that can escalate for each subsequently verified report.

For most infractions, the number of people reporting you may get your case reviewed faster, but in the end, all it takes is one report to initiate a review of the situation.

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Then all I can say to this is that the guild offering these services is, to put it plainly, stupid. A service like they offer, to take gold and “mass report” someone, has the following effect:

  • Guild takes gold from X player.
  • Guild mass reports someone for their end of the bargain.
  • The target player gets squelched, at worst, for a short period of time.
  • Guild then gets actioned for abuse of the report feature.

See, even if some guild is trying to hype up their public image by appearing to be ‘MMO gangsters’ that advertise dirty deeds done dirt cheap, it means nothing. It doesn’t mean they are actually performing services they offer.

Can they get away with it once or twice? Maybe. But as soon as someone reports their silly ‘mass report’ targeting, or questions the one-day-squelch they got put on for no reason, the ‘MMO gangsters’ are going out of business.

This would be like seeing some note stapled to a telephone pole offering to do crime for payment. How long is that gonna last before someone takes the flyer off the pole, takes it to police, and police then track down the person via the phone number listed on the flyer? Yeah, not long.

Believing in ‘mass reporting’ for inappropriate bans that stick to the player and cause them to lose account access is no better than believing that if you travel far enough in a line, you’ll fall off the end of the Earth.

Those are both ridiculous assumptions that only exist in our world because of 'that one guy that I knew that said so," or, “that one thread I saw on Reddit with 2k upvotes.” Literally, that’s it.

Well, that and the widely misunderstood and misinterpreted “I love WoW” auto-ban that wasn’t an auto-ban. That’s what started this all (thanks, Asmon!) Everyone was fooled and confused by that because it required thinking beyond what was seen on the screen, and an understanding of policy to know what actually happened.

I don’t watch Asmongold, but I actually wonder if he feels any guilt for the massive, ridiculous behemoth of an urban legend he created with that stream. /shrug

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At least 6, I think more. Time tends to run together so… LOL

The “mark as resolved” option should normally be there. That is the action that allows you to mark it as resolved for yourself, which also should generate a survey. It is also what a Game Master marks when responding to the ticket when they close it on their side.

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It’s sad to say, but honestly? You’re better off taking everything and anything with a large grain of salt. Especially when it comes to stuff like this involving sanctions and great conspiracy theories. People are rarely truthful, or they’re spouting things the way they think things happen. Go by what you yourself see and know for certain.

While there are automated systems there to make life easier for us as players, the sanctions and their appeals? None of it is automated, save for the squelch system - and it’s only a temporary thing to keep gold sellers, spammers and extreme chat offenders under wraps until a GM can take a peek into what is going on. Everything else comes from a real live person.

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I guess that’s how long ago I remember the old ticket system being. But I guess it’s been this way for a long time. I just haven’t been making tickets that much since then. Thanks again for the info. I appreciate it.

Well now that I know how to properly report people suggesting to abuse the report system, I should be able to find out first hand. Thank you for the info.

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You send in an ticket to try to appeal. This doesn’t mean having a back and forth conversation, in the ticket. It just gets a second pair of eyes, to look it over.

I see this said, a lot. Those who say this tend to out themselves for actually breaking policy. Not saying false reports don’t happen, it’s just not this big epidemic.

I’d report it.

Your chance was by opening a ticket and choosing what to say in it. By the sounds of what you said, here:

You seemed to have mentioned it.

They can only discuss with you on what you did, and why they actioned you. They cannot tell you what they have and/or have not done, to other people. In this case, they cannot tell you what they plan to do, to the following you’ve mentioned:

Whether, these individuals reported you honestly or in bad faith, what happens to them is not something that’s up for discussion.

All you can do is report them, send in a ticket to appeal, not fall for one’s bait, etc. You will never know of any actions made against them, unless they (not Blizz) express/say what happened.

You are. Just because you explain it, doesn’t mean it’ll be uplifted.

In your poor example that you chose, it sounds like everybody involved was being nasty and rude, but we’ll never know if they were actioned or not because that’s not something able to be discussed between Blizz and us. They may have been actioned, they may not have. We’ll never know. The only thing that can be discussed are our own actions. What other people did or did not do is irrelevant, even if you think they “falsely” reported you, your actions (and by your own admission) states otherwise.

That toxic someone may have been toxic and may have reported you, but that doesn’t mean what they reported you for is “false”. Same with guilds that accept payment to mass report and sour BG team members. While, they may have bad blood on their hands does not change your actions, and how you respond to them. You chose to counter their toxicity with toxicity. Two wrongs don’t make a right.

I’ll even quote my favorite TV show: “Wrong thing done for the right reason, still the wrong thing.”

Believe me, I wish I could know those I reported were actioned or not, but I’ll never know. Breaking the rules won’t help answer that, either. All that’s going to do is get me actioned and for what? They’re not worth getting actioned over. Report and move on.
Don’t engage, it’s not worth it.

You (technically) are pleading your case. Unfortunately, regardless of what “wrong” may have occurred does not excuse your part, in the situation, that went down.

Your example is not a good example for what you’re trying to explain.

Discussing account actions is against the rules.

This always makes me giggle. We’ve always been “censored” in what we can and cannot say in both the forums and the game. Not being allowed to curse/swear is one of them.

You say you understand why you were punished but imply that it was “unfair”, and don’t want it happening, again.

Going by your example, you swore/used colorful language. Doesn’t matter how “toxic” you think that someone is, nor how sour you think your BG teammates were. You broke policy and got punished, for it. And, only your actions matter when applying for appeals.

Depends on what was said. I wouldn’t engage in debates. They tend to get heated really fast.

It’s still both. The example you gave is not a good example.

You’ll never know that. That is not something Blizz will ever discuss with us.

This.

Bad behaviors from others is irrelevant to how we involve ourselves, in the game, forums, etc.

Doesn’t matter how “mild” we think our swearing is. ALL of it gets punished.

You don’t need to do either, in order to get punished. There’s such a thing as spamming used on political discourse, in Trade Chat. Where nobody is insulting one another nor using language but are spamming Trade Chat with political discourse. Political discourse is not against Blizz policy, per se. If enough players report it as spam, then its spam.

Sometimes, “needing to be right” is not the best way to build relations. It’s OK if people are wrong. You don’t always have to “correct” them.

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It’s a bug. You type “test” in it and then edit the ticket once it’s created. Billing (who you made a ticket for) does not address bugs creating tickets. They were nice enough to pass your ticket on to the group that addresses appeals because they believed that’s what your ticket was about.

You can’t. Blizzard hasn’t had a call-in number for years. Fill in the survey when your ticket is marked “resolved”.

It wasn’t unfairly. You rose to their bait. Stop responding to trolls like this. When someone is trying to get you to post so they can report you, report them instead. Choose Inappropriate Communication, then Text-chat or Spam. Give a brief description of why you are reporting it, such as “baiting to get someone silenced/suspended”.

Using a form letter is not a sign of automation. It means that every player is given the same information. It means that more tickets can be addressed because the ones handling the tickets don’t have to take the time to write out the same information over and over again. Most big businesses use form letters for this reason.

The reviews just look at the logs and verify the correct action was taken. The reasons for you breaking the Code of Conduct would not be part of the appeal. It is either a “yes” or “no”, not a “yes but reasons”.

Since these weren’t previously linked:

Blizzard is a private entity, not a Government body. They have the right to dictate and enforce rules about what can and cannot be talked about using their platforms. Blizzard has no control over what people say on other platforms. This is why you can find so many stories on other sites. Those that post on those sites tend to want to get people to agree they were wronged. They tend to either leave out really important details or they associate their silence/suspension/ban with a benign activity instead of the one it was actually for.

The streamer that typed “I love WoW” into game chat and had their followers report it was squelched initially, not an automatic silence that so many people want to say it was. They were then actioned for abusing the report feature because they had encouraged their followers on a live stream to do the report. It was never for what they had said. I believe even the streamer said that on their channel. Players who want to believe the process is automated incorrectly use this as an example.

The “squelch” was put in when right-click report first was enacted. It was a way to limit the damage a gold-seller could do before someone could investigate the report. Thanks to the streamer everyone knows about it and that reporting works. Since they know reporting works, more players are using it.

Don’t let yourself be goaded into breaking the Code of Conduct.

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