If you think there is addons being used that are breaching any of the rules, you’ll need to report it to hacks@blizzard.com. Keep in mind, what you say, may also not be the case either. But as mentioned, all you can do, is report it via the email address linked and let Blizzard investigate.
You can also use the email to report any explotive activity as well. As mentioned though, this will be up to Blizzard to investigate, and determind whether that is, or that is not the case.
The community council has no involvement with any moderation within the forums. That is all handled by Blizzard. Keep in mind, people are free to report anything if they feel it does violate the Forum Code of Conduct. It will be up to Blizzard to determind if the post does violate the Code of Conduct and if action would be taken, not the community.
Mass reporting would be a single person switching between characters to report the same post over. Since we can’t see who flagged who, this is very highly speculative.
That’s not what mass reporting is, and this kind of mass reporting is common with posts that target Epic BG communities. If anything, this just solidified their guilt.
What’s telling is he declined an invite to one of these communities, and joining (even if just for a bit) would have been a great way to get one of these ‘hidden’ addons he’s so insistent exist.
Because once you have the addon, you also have the source code, and can see if it’s actually doing something sketchy (Lua being an interpreted language and all).
Someone using a ton of alts to mass report is a type of mass reporting, not the limitation thereof. The more common use of the term is to denote targeted reports by a number of coordinated individuals. While we cannot definitively prove this is an example of mass reporting, there’s more than enough anecdotal and circumstantial evidence to lead a reasonable person of sound mind into concluding this to be the case.
In this case, we know for a fact the addons exist, we know for a fact at least one of them has functionality outside the bounds of a normal addon, and we know for a fact at least one of them has been kept private despite this being in clear violation of Blizzard’s TOS. Moreover, we know for a fact the same names keep popping up time and time again in defense or denial of these things (mostly denial when it comes to the addons, of course) whenever EBG premades or the addons assisting therein get brought up - names that, also conveniently, seem to be accompanied by a swath of downvotes.
Blizzard would have all the data when they do the investigations. Yes, you don’t need to know the name of the addon or where to find the addon for Blizzard to break the addon. But keep in mind, as I’ve also mentioned within the quote, this also may not be the case either. But this all comes down to the determination on what is found, and what you say here on the forums may not be the case.
Report it, and let Blizzard investigate whether there is any breaches to any of their policies.
I debated whether to announce this here or not, but I actually know the guy who created these addons (no, I won’t tell you who he is). The truly sad thing was that I knew him from when he first joined one of gov’s original comms in WGE. He was a nice guy. Clearly clever enough to build these addons. But it’s completely broken the entire the game mode at this point. It’s very much moved into breaching the ToU territory and as much as I hate to say it, since I have good history with the addon author, he really should have his account banned at this point. The irony is that ADM (the splinter comm off WGE) didn’t originally operate this way. Clearly somethings gone wrong with the leadership and now it’s spread to multiple comms.
I miss the old days with gov and co. We did things the right way with none of this very obvious cheating that clearly breaches the ToU. How Blizz hasn’t started swinging the ban hammer on these guys is beyond me.
I’m sure the intention was good when creating an addon to help your community. Just like the Multiboxing Addons I was using that made my multiboxing life easy. Until Blizz said to stop.
There use to be 10’s different multiboxer post every day, now we don’t see them anymore.
The original intention was good. The community flare addon was originally designed to make the queue syncing we were doing easier. Although TBH some of us in the comm never bothered to install it (myself included) since I wasn’t brain dead and was happy to queue sync the old fashioned way. But like you said, things changed and now we’ve reached the jumping the shark moment.
I freaking taught this guy all the best strats to win EBG’s as well FFS. And guess who taught me? Gov.
