Blizzard has had a Squelch system in game for MANY years to deal with gold spammers and such. Lots of reports would initiate a squelch until a GM could get to it. This was not widely known about outside of the CS forums and such.
In 2016 Blizzard rolled out the Silence system which replaced the full game suspensions for language infractions. A Silence is applied by a GM, stacks, and has more consequences.
Lots of reports puts something at the top of the GM review queue.
Asmon asked people to mass report a line of chat. He triggered the Squelch system.
THEN he got SUSPENDED totally from the game for abusing the report system.
He never actually got a Silence applied.
It is frustrating how people still misunderstand that even now.
Players can’t get you removed from the game or forums with reports alone. A Blizz staff member has to push that button. Not saying GMs don’t ever make mistakes in applying a Silence, but that part is not automated.
Yes there is. Certain report categories receive different automated punishments.
There is no LONG term ban issued automatically, but you absolutely can receive a short term suspension meant to allow a GM time to review your case before issuing a long one.
You are not really wrong in that the Squelch type system has been around forever. It is completely intended to stop widely reported behavior like gold spamming until a GM gets to it.
I have not heard it applied to reports for cheating, such as many people reporting a bot. Otherwise I would think a guild could just go clean up all the botters and get them put into limbo pending GM review. If that has changed, it is new to me.
Agree totally though that the actual penalty has to be applied by the GM, or forum mod. Not saying they are always right, but that is what appeals are for.
And if an employee were caught doing that, there would undoubtedly be consequences. It’s not in Blizzard’s best interest to ban accounts without investigating.
It’s also why there is an appeals system for times where a player believes that they’ve been actioned inappropriately.
But no, there is no system in place that automatically suspends or bans an account for any period of time.
It’s pretty common with the Classic community specifically to willfully misinterpret things, especially if it fuels their “Blizzard is the bad guy” narrative.
Blizzard is definitely open to criticism-- only when it is valid though, and not based off of misinformation and conspiracy theories.
Since then, most of those folks got re-hired, or replaced, because they released more games that need support. The team supports ALL the Blizz games, not just WoW.
The layoffs last year were Community Managers, Publishing, Marketing, and esports. Dev staff was increased 15% and CS was not impacted.
There are certainly some tools and systems that are now streamlined or made self-help tools, but most of that is for the best. I mean, do you want to ask a GM to restore an item for you or use the GM tool yourself? Do you want to un-delete your own char or have to ask? The same restrictions and rules apply to the tool whether you do it or the GM does it so why make you wait?
They did, among other departments. Perhaps “purge” is a bit hyperbolic of a word to use. But they laid off a big chunk of people nonetheless in order to save money. Because, y’know, the execs their at Blizzard don’t make enough.
This is the official legal document for the reduction in force that Blizzard experienced in February of 2019. There are two columns, the left column is number of positions selected for termination and the right column for positions not selected for termination; page 7 is the CS department. The only two positions cut from the CS department were a Bliz. IT Analyst and a Blizzard BI Programmer, zero actual CS.
“The following is a listing of the ages and job titles of employees who were and were not selected for termination of employment”
It was not CS that was laid off though. I am not sure where that article got the idea they were. The list of people laid off was submitted by law to Orange County CA and did not contain much in the way of support folks.
I don’t see making GM tools available to the player as bad. Faster support is a positive.
If you check my post history today in the other threads you will see that when it comes to staff support, compensation, benefits, etc - I support the staff.
It is possible to support systems that put power in the hands of the players AND support the staff having a better workplace.
Those are not mutually exclusive.
Edit for example.
Staff members are processing hundreds of item restore requests per day.
This slows response times for players and is tedious for staff.
Solution - give the item resto tool to the players so they can do it themselves!
Lowers the work load and repetitive tasking for staff.
Gets a much faster solution to the player.
Staff can now concentrate on things that take brain power like digging through logs for account restorations after a hack, etc.
Auto bans do exist. The majority of the abuse of this system occured in AV when premades would ban casuals for venturing away from the pack or capturing wrong objectives.
