No I’ve always said squelching is the term used for the in game punishment.
And I also covered that while squelching and silencing do the same thing in effect, they are 2 different punishments.
Sort of, except it isn’t slang, it is how Blizzard refers to it, but no if the appeal fails then you would be silenced, now what I could not tell you for 100% is if you get credit for ‘time served’ or not.
oh yah , I can see how confusing it sounds,lol, my bad, yes squelch will ‘silence’ you until review/appeal, then the second part of what I said happens.
I should have said, and I thought I did, the automatic silence is called a squelch, to be silenced however is what the further punishment is called if you lose an appeal, and/or a GM reviews and determines it warrants one.
edit to add–so my bad for not being as clear as I should have been, my apologies!
Poorly worded on my part, I was referring to right click reporting to include the subsequent automatic action preventing posting. But my point stands, this doesn’t appear to be a huge problem in retail right now, so why would it in classic? Other than just the pure no changes means no changes argument, (which may have merit) what makes an updated reporting structure anti-classic?
There are a few general threads that bring auto squelches up, but almost everyone posting saying they got squelched for no reason seem to have been being an a-hole in chat immediately prior to it happening. Nobody seems to be able to point to people really being victimized by it. This seems like worry in search of a problem.
Given that Blizzard doesn’t talk about their ban/silence/squelch systems, and any post complaining about it is met with “I bet you deserved it” then we wouldn’t really know if there was a huge problem with it.
It’s pretty easy to claim “nobody appears to have been victimized by it” when you lead with “Anybody who got squelched was a jerk who deserved it anyway”.
but it’s a lot harder to actually prove the second half of that =P
They’ll argue that, because there’s no LFG/etc. that not being able to talk in chat channels will mean you can’t do anything, even though you can pvp, farm, craft items, post on the AH, and more.
Except those people who have claimed it recently have actually proved it themselves.
I mean, the forum threads ive found have had people saying things like “if you can’t handle getting called a [insert epithet here] maybe you shouldn’t play.” as their evidence for why their right click report-squelch wasn’t reasonable. I’m going to take that as pretty clear evidence that guy deserved a timeout for whatever he said. I’m not going to be able to prove it never gets abused, I’m asking for reliable evidence that it does. Where are the innocent gamers who incidentally made someone mad enough to convince all their friends to report him at the same time and get him silenced. Other than just straight trolling, what is there to gain from forcing a squelch on someone?
plenty. people could use it to squelch someone who saw them do some shady stuff . people can use it in a number of ways to really screw over people cause without being able to chat , you can do nothing but solo in classic and with it being a social group focused game its a bad thing.
Which just goes back to the “I bet you deserved it anyway” claim.
Just because some people who complained got caught on it being a legitimate report doesn’t mean that it will be uncommon.
There’s never going to be proof of it being common or not because Blizzard refuses to talk about the stats surrounding the system(and I don’t blame them on this).