Have had an open ticket now for a few days go dispute an action against my account. A GM gave a generic scripted response to my appeal, left the ticket open, and has since quit responding to my questions regarding what warranted a week long suspension.
Before my suspension, I received a warning ticket in-game. A warning usually means, hey don’t do that again, slap on the wrist. Then, out of nowhere the next day it resulted in a suspension.
Still not sure what the warning was for.
Is there not a difference between a warning and an action? What was the warning for to begin with, and why did it warrant secondary action?
Have been a long time subscriber to WoW since 2004. There should be some sort of due process to this system.
A warning is just that - a warning. An account action, you’d have gotten an email to state what class of action it is, like abusive chat, naming, etc. The two ain’t the same as there can be other things that happened beforehand that gotten your action.
Nobody can actually tell you that part. Those are just automated messages letting you know that other players are reporting you, so that you can maybe stop whatever it is. Usually it is something like advertising in trade too often, a macro that spams, etc. The GMs can’t see what it is for though.
Once it escalates to an actual report - they can see. Then they would decide if action needs to be taken.
The warning and the account action may be for different things done at different times. Keep that in mind.
I’m a bit curious about this, shouldn’t they be able to see all reports made against an account? A warning suggests that a certain number of chat lines, or behavior was reported.
Does a ticket only ‘generate’ if it gets past a second threshold of reports against an account - that’s further on from the warning?
A warning is something Blizzard put in to try to help folks learn what they’re doing isn’t welcome by the server. There isn’t a report made as it’s meant to help someone get that their guild ad, what they’re saying in general, just the wrong channel is being used, etc., should be stopped.
But folks tend to not listen to them and keep going.
I think I’m starting to understand why there is so much confusion and misinformation for players, just from reading many of these threads.
Of course, there is the general confusion and various conspiracy theories about automated bans and mass reporting, but that’s us not what I’m referencing.
I think the warnings are extremely confusing for players because Blizzard is deliberately vague about all their detection and criteria parameters…with good reason. If a player gets a warning in game, I think there are a few general categories it falls into.
The player that knows they were trolling chat or using profanity or advertising excessively and either tones it back or pushes onward until they get a squelch or possible additional punishments, depending on what they do.
This can easily “appear” to be mass reports followed by some sort of punishment. And even for players that KNOW they messed up they cry about False or Automated actions because it can still LOOK LIKE CAUSE and EFFECT.
The player that knows they didn’t do anything wrong and can trace it back to a simple dispute or misunderstanding and goes about their business with no concern.
The most problematic player is the one that DID NOT do anything wrong or did something they did NOT REALIZE was wrong (like advertising in wrong channel) but doesn’t understand the system.
They may send in a ticket but get no real answer because “Blizzard doesn’t know” why there was a warning, again leading to suspicion of “mass reporting and automation”. If the warning was for a real infraction and they don’t realize what they did wrong and continue to do it, it results in real punishment. This again lead to the “Cause and Effect” appearance of Mass Reporting.
Of course, we are all responsible for our own actions and reading the ToS and CoC and keeping up with changes, but I’d challenge that the average player does not do that. Ignorance is no excuse, but I wouldn’t be as familiar as I am, if I had not started reading these forums.
Perhaps, it’s good to remember that nearly all guilty players will call foul, some people are genuinely ignorant of the specifics and panic when they are actioned and conspiracy theories can seem comforting.
Apologies if this is out of line for this forum, but just something I’ve been noticing for awhile.
In my humble opinion, they should be able to see the chat for anything a GM takes action on. A record should be kept - which it is. The player should also be sent that text in my opinion. They used to get it, then it was text somewhere near the reported offense…and now no text. I suspect it is broken or something. I think they DO intend for players to know what they got actioned for. It helps reduce future occurrences of the same behavior and reduces the “what did I do!!!” tickets. Hopefully that gets fixed and they return to sending some of the reported text in the email with the account action notice.
They do not talk about that at all. We don’t know what types of things might generate just a warning then drop off vs things that get escalated to GMs. We know that some things get an account action with only one or two reports, so it is not just number of reports that does it. For spam I think the number of reports matters - which makes sense - but not for some of the other things.
As for seeing every little thing we get reported for? Heck no. That level of back end tracking and sending of messages to people seems overboard and expensive to run. Do you really want to know every time someone reports you? Do you want to know every single flag you get on the forums? Most of it is just going to drop off if it is not a valid report. Further, if people got a notice every time they were reported some folks would further abuse reporting to make them get notices, and others would delight in trying to get reported.
From the way I read, it’s only if a name was already previously flagged (Meaning it had met the prior second tier of reports previously), or if it’s something extremely heinous/ongoing harassment.
Everything else, as what I was getting at, basically doesn’t get investigated/seen unless it gets to the second tier past the ‘warning’ phase. Which means the ‘every report gets investigated’ thing doesn’t actually work out.
Now on the forums, they’re not doing any better. It’s rare for anything that’s not flagged, or in a flagged reply chain to get looked at. It also doesn’t help that completely fine posts are getting removed depending on who made them and in what thread, despite thousands of posts in threads technically not following the rules.
Warnings happen when one player receives a certain number of chat reports in a short period of time.
I’m not sure why a GM isn’t able to tell what the warning is for. They may not be able to say until the reports are addressed. Those reports are handled in the order they are received. Something that gets a lot of reports in a short period of time has a higher priority than something with only one report.
I’ve seen threads here in CS where chat violations were acted on from one report.
With chat violations, especially language ones, it only requires one report for account action to happen. Spam can be the same way if the posts happen really close together or posted in multiple channels.
The name penalty system runs on a separate track to the chat infractions. So a name penalty in the past, means a longer penalty for future infractions. Such as re-naming the same thing. You are right, once it is changed if it gets reported again they do have it “in the system” to kick back a penalty faster.
The ongoing harassment is totally separate and handled via tickets, not the in-game reporting tools.
So, chat reports are separate from name reports, and ongoing harassment reports.
I would say not every report gets surfaced to the GMs. I don’t know what determines if something just falls in the warning system or if it falls into the GM buckets. They are not going to share that. I used the spam as an example because it is often harmless but annoying - the sort of thing a warning is good for. I would guess there is some sort of flagging on reports that helps decide what goes to GMs vs warnings. AI does not make any final decisions, but flagging incoming reports based on category and content is likely going on. Some key words likely go straight to GMs, spam to the warning bucket first? I don’t actually know. I am guessing based on how I would do it if I was in charge. Heh. Blizz is not going to tell us.
sigh
Reported things get action more often than things that don’t get reported. The people moderating don’t have time to read every thread on every Blizzard forum and action them as needed. They depend on reports.
Yes, sometimes when a whole thread is nuked there are those who escape penalties because it was just deleted instead of reviwed in detail. Depends on who is moderating that day. We had a huge discussion about that on here recently that I think you were around for and reading.
The mods do not just remove posts based on who said it though - that sort of odd fixation on moderation is not helpful. Nor is trying to pick apart which things got reported vs those that did not.
Actually Gms tell you to use right click reports for it, so it gets ‘logged’ prior to a ticket. I’m aware that it wouldn’t be handled as ongoing harassment if you just used the right click report tool.
At this point, I wonder how many because there a lot of things I report, that’s more of my experience from looking at, and reporting gambling multi-boxxers with non-rp names as well as advertising/spamming with addons that never seem to get looked at. Especially non-RP guild names.
Right, they(GMs) just sort of look at the ‘infractions’ in batches and hit a button to decide whether action or not (I think that’s how it was explained by blues).
I do wonder about that, but I wonder how often people get actioned before they ever get a warning, since a warning is based on number of reports.
I mean, I report a lot of things that never get handled.
Yes, like I said only flagged to hidden posts, not 1-4 flagged posts.
They have, because they get flagged depending on who is posting it. I’ve had quite a few, recently. It seems like most posts that are flagged are getting removed, instead of just reinstated if they don’t violate the CoC.
No, they do not look at chat infractions in batches. That is not at all how that goes.
If you are talking about bot ban waves, then yes, that is more likely a batch process of accounts that meet specific detection criteria.
We are free to wonder. Blizz is not telling which things go straight to a GM, and how many fall into a warning bin.
Mods don’t usually remove a post unless it is actually against the rules, is non constructive, or is part of a conversation chain that gets removed. I have had hundreds of posts removed, but not because I did anything wrong. It was just because I replied in threads that got nuked, or parts of threads that got nuked.
Blue said they do for most of it, which is correct?
Yes, which is a flaw in the system that hasn’t been resolved thus far. Like the thread I mentioned, there are technically thousands of posts that would meet the criteria that remain up.
It’s just very obvious when a green brings up a topic in a thread like this, and as soon as they don’t like a specific poster asking questions they say “It’s not the correct thread/place”.