The squelch and silence are the same penalty… One is imposed by players… the other is imposed by GMs… It’s not akin to being pulled over and investigated… It’s akin to me thinking you are speeding and throwing you in jail for hours/days until a judge decides whether or not you should have been in jail… An event that doesn’t take place for hours/days later, in the majority of cases it’s not something that even happens before the silence should have worn off… It’s blizzard outsourcing their own policing to players because they’re too cheap and lazy to pay people to actually do the damn job they should be doing, and It’s astonishing that you are too blind to either see or understand this.
There are already real consequences for poor behavior in a vanilla environment… the difference is it requires an entire community to do, and not something that a single guild/group/multiboxxer could easily exploit.
Now think about that from an enforcement standpoint… False reports will happen, but not all of them are made with malice, and trying to guess as to each and every report players intent and then make a decision based upon that is incredibly unrealistic, and would be a massive and unreasonable increase in the amount of work GMs would have to do.
It’s simply not feasible to try and dig through and completely validate every single report every time, particularly when the system doesn’t really guarantee a good way to actually clarify why the report was being made.
Now let’s look at a vanilla example… A friend of mine, and a server legend on Stonemaul in vanilla, who ended up passing IRL in Cata: The Shadowpriest Booms.
Booms’s method of making himself (in)famous in vanilla was by becoming the Pirate king of Menethil. He was a Horde Shadowpriest in one of the most accomplished guilds, spent most of his free time sitting on the menethil boat, next to his secondary account’s alliance character named Boomsbot.
Boomsbot’s job was simple… Everyone who wanted to take the boat, had to pay his alliance character a toll, or walk the plank (he spoke in pirate speak the entire time)… He was successful enough at this, for it to allegedly become his primary form of in game gold farming. If you didn’t pay, you got MCd off the boat into fatigue waters until you did. He was ruthless at this…
and he was a LEGEND on the server because of it… He had friends in numerous top horde guilds who would come join in on the fun/get his back if alliance tried to group to take him down, but for the most part he simply became a fixture of every day life for the Alliance there…
I want to be very clear about this… Booms did nothing wrong, and was never once banned for these actions, in fact, Booms was CELEBRATED by both the Stonemaul community in general, and even by Blizzard itself, when he was immortalized as an NPC after his IRL death. https://www.wowhead.com/npc=68985/booms
Now put this same exact situation in the modern right click report/squelch system… Every person Boomsbot talked to probably right clicks his name and reports… It doesn’t matter one damn bit that this is a player that Blizzard themselves celebrate in memorial in game… He’s getting squelched.
He’s now being punished for doing nothing wrong with constant squelches. Moreover, to your assertion that the people reporting him would get banned for causing an inappropriate squelch… ask yourself if they really would? Most of the people reporting him might have even thought that they where doing the right thing in reporting his behavior. Are they punished for trying to use the system honestly? Now what if some people just see him there and spam report him because they don’t like him… How can you possibly differentiate between the reports made in good faith and the reports made in bad faith. Just how much GM time are you now requiring for each and every report to determine intent?
The reality is the system works like this: Reports of a great enough quantity can should and do cause a GM to take a closer look at the player being reported… There simply isn’t enough time or manpower to investigate every single report, and it’s how so many problems slip through the cracks when people are able to conspire with groups, guilds, friends, or even just multiple accounts. A multiboxer can quite literally auto squelch people solo, and it won’t necessarily be easily identifiable as a multiboxxer for a GM investigating.
The crux of this issue is that players shouldn’t have the power to unilaterally issue real in game punishments by themselves. This is especially true given the context of Vanilla gameplay vs modern game play and the larger importance that social interaction has towards actually being able to play the game… Not a single person here is advocating to remove GMs from being able to silence players. Hell, double the penalties for vanilla servers as a compromise if you feel not having player squelch is being too lenient towards toxic behavior… The point is absolutely no squelch/silence type punishments should ever be handed out by anyone but a GM. It’s too great a power for players to wield properly or responsibly.