If there isn’t then Blizzard employees suspend people before investigation. Either way it’s an issue.
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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.
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There is in fact an auto ban system for right click reports but it’s function has alot to do whether you’ve been banned in the past and what for.
Yet there have been many documented cases of overturned suspensions from mass reports 
If you think Blizzard isn’t taking shortcuts after purging their support staff you’re kidding yourself.
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That’s an outright lie I’ve been 24hr insta banned from player reports and so have others.
That wasn’t an “automated” suspension. It was mass reported via tickets and a GM applied that action. There’s also a blue post on it.
And yes, I imagine a GM got into some decent trouble for that one.
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I didn’t say there was. I’m trying to say their support staff has a tendency to shoot first and ask questions later.
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.
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They didn’t purge their support staff.
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They removed 600 Support and Community related folks in 2012. That was long ago. https://www.polygon.com/gaming/2012/2/29/2833313/blizzard-lays-off-600-likely-primarily-in-customer-service
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?
I don’t see that as bad.
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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.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.gamesindustry.biz/amp/2019-02-13-activision-blizzard-staff-cuts-largely-hurt-support-teams-it-qa-and-publishing
You don’t see Blizzard’s business practices as bad? Yikes 
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”
https://www.scribd.com/embeds/401389950/content?start_page=1&view_mode=&access_key=key-Dh96i2zsTyPm8t95vdMf
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.
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This just in. According to the OP’s “source” (more like word of mouth/hearsay which isn’t proof) there’s such thing as auto-bans!!!
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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.
Another solution is hire more people. But that costs more money. So even if it’s a better solution it’s often tossed out.
Wouldn’t want to cut into those executive paychecks.
Why would you hire more people to do a menial task when the solution - giving the restore tool to the players - helps BOTH the player and the staff?
You don’t make sense on this particular topic. Solutions that make it better for both should be encouraged.
Another IRL example. We had a software system testing process that was manual and took about 6 months to test, and retest, the data points. I got TIRED of it. I wanted to focus on the problem areas, not the routine stuff.
So, I wrote the specs to automate the testing and flag the issues for further study.
Some people got worried…
Result? We cut the testing time down from 6 months to 4 weeks. The results were FAR more accurate because it removed the human data entry aspect as well as the fatigue of collecting that data for 12+ hours a day. We went from producing 5 builds a year in the group to 27. Staff tripped as did revenue for them. Oh, and I got to go home sometimes and sleep.
Improving a process with modern tools can be good for the end customer AND the staff.
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I’m speaking generally.
Anyways, this discussion is becoming a waste of time. I’m out.
Some replies here remind me of people in twitter, believing twitter’s statement ,and write endless tweets about how shadowbanning is not real.
When Twitter admit what they were doing, those people continued to defend Twitter, tweeting about how correct is the existence of shadowbanning, as if they weren’t supporting that it didn’t exist