So today I received a 14 day suspension for non-participation in AV.
Now I’ll admit… I don’t PvP much (I’m not even close to rank 11), but when I do, I almost always have Netflix up on the second monitor and watch something because AV is almost mindless in classic wow. I still try to cap a few towers and attack enemies when I encounter them, and I usually try to “stick with the heard and push north”.
That being said, this weekend I did a little AV on my druid and I frequently recalled and tried to recap towers with stealth and I was constantly met with “if you’re not north, you’re an idiot” and “reported for afk” if you don’t just rush Van. and I think I got mass reported by premade I kept running into.
Regardless, i have been playing for almost 20 years with ZERO incidents and now this comes across and it’s an INSTANT 14 day suspension? I tried to appeal and ask for a warning for a first-time offense, and I got an automated response just linking me the TOS.
Does Blizzard really not even look at appeals? id understand if i were a repeat offender, but thats not the case.
When this kind of thing comes up, it’d be more for repeated offenders. They don’t act folks for funnies. Even then, this kind of thing is when someone has a history of doing such.
They’re not going to really talk about it with you. No, they’re not got to give you a warning because you asked, they used two template mainly - either they upheld it or its overturn. They’re not going to talk about it.
Along with that, basically the ToS is the warning.
This almost certainly had to be egregious and repeated over a longish period. That is based on afkers I have seen in pvp and that have been reported, what I’ve seen in the pvp forums, and what we have seen come through here. It does not happen very often that we see one for this.
You option is to appeal. You can keep appealing until they say no more. Then that is that. If netflix gets in your way of participating in pvp, or if classic AV is not engaging enough, consider turning off netflix and come and play epic BGs in retail. Retail can have some really tough fights. I’ve been in 3 great games today myself, and I only solo Q.
You must remember many of us have been playing WoW since the first few years and into TBC, starting at a more mature age and a general respect for internet society.
A huge majority of the youngest player base has not only grown up on wifi and smart technology, but in a time when there is no respect to be found online.
They reported you because you were in their group and they had the power in numbers to do so.
I just came back after one of those 6-8 month hiatus from being online and its like peeking into a controlled environment every now and then to see whats changed.
I think it would be fresh to either see GMs more open in public, interacting with players and having /say and /shout interactions with the public. I only came across that kind of situation once pretty early on right after tbc launch, but it was so memorable that from that point on I treated took their interaction as a framepoint and have tried to emulate it since prior to youtubers doing their whole mass follower thing. Bring those guys back to hangout in city areas and walk scripted paths like the npcs in replace of auto run.
Im not suggesting morality police or anything like that, just someone with a little bit of authority to set the tone of the community that way people having solo fun dont get reported for simply playing the game more broadly than they do.
They can’t as this isn’t 2006 or such as the GMs handle more then Blizzard and a far higher amount of tickets. Even then, they have tools now then before where they don’t need to get in world to do their job. That’d be ignoring the fact that folks ain’t going to see it as a good thing and more a targeted harassment towards those workers as they’d be yelling things at them, threats and so on.
As an idea on this, anytime the blues post outside of the CS forum, they’d be dog-pile by folks thinking they can get their issue fixed, think that blue will personally send their requests/suggestions to whoever department there is, or just make threats because they can.
At this point, AI can handle tickets and is well on its way to doing so for companies like Cisco, for example. I’m sure Blizzard is on its way to retiring its ticketing staff in order to automate the system. Because this isn’t 2006, they should have the available manpower and capital to revitalize their large community with an enthusiastic and positive presence.
There was never a presence in game. It was very rare that a Blizzard employee would show up in the world to all players. Those also weren’t GMs, as far as I know, and were usually Devs that had to come in to fix something or check on something and had a little time to “show off”. This was done because it was the only way they had to fix or look into certain things. There was never a presence where the GMs (or anyone from Blizzard) would come in a pre-emptively monitor the game for violations, except for one small experiment that they did a few years back in Goldshire which was a disaster for numerous reasons but mostly because players would just verbally attack and harass the GMs.
This sucks no doubt, but I remember fondly a time a gm approched to me to help me with an issue I had with a quest. Those days are long gone n btw, I think we all understand this template system but it’s undoubtedly soulless and it all it does in most occasions is to aggravate the situation even more.
So you were NOT heading to where the majority of players were heading to or already at, doing your own thing trying to recap something that was taken when everyone is at or going to the boss to finish the match sounds like penalty is justified.
Not following the zerg, would not likely be justifiable for an action. Now obviously if your side is beating on final boss, controls every graveyard, and someone “ports” back so they can defend a non existent attack, maybe, but even then, as long as they arent’ AFK and say running into a tree for the entire BG or being botted, I simply don’t see Blizzard taking action.
Edit: If I had to guess, I would suspect far too much attention on Netflix, and far too little time where you were active, or in an area with some sort of contention, and across multiple BGs.
To be penalized for non-participation, it is not sufficient to have simply been reported or to have had a single game with minimal engagement. While an investigation may be initiated based on reports received by our team, the verification process involves a thorough review of multiple data points.
The severity of the penalty reflects the rigorous evaluation required before any action is taken against an account. It isn’t like a simple social violation where we’re looking if you used inappropriate or toxic language, or not. Penalties for non-participation are issued only after consistent inactivity has been verified across games. This includes, but is not limited to, multiple instances where a player has contributed little to no damage or healing.
We do, but it is usually to verify the original data and to confirm that the account was not compromised at the time of the violation. It is unlikely that we’d be able to supply any additional information to any questions you may ask. If the matter was overturned, they’d let you know, otherwise you’d normally just receive a standard template on the uphold. Sorry.
