Please fix the auto-silence function that is currently implemented when others report players for advertising. There will be players who will proudly report anyone who advertises boosting simply due to disagreeing with said practice. This will auto silence a lot of players who are following the rules entirely. Seeking appeals is time-consuming and bothersome. Given your investments in language AI recognition in Overwatch, I trust you can prevent this from happening in WoW.
We’ve already established that individual or guild boosting is totally allowable so that’s not the debate here at all. (“This policy update does not restrict individuals or guilds from using the provided in-game tools (“trade channel” chat) to buy or sell in-game items or activities for in-game currency.”)
Moderator: Edited title. Use of the word “Blizzard” to call attention to your post is a violation of forum rules.
Squelch - the automatic muting of an account pending GM review was put in game LONG ago mostly to deal with gold spammers. That is what happens when an account gets a lot of reports.
Silence is applied after the GM reviews it. Those stack and double each time a GM applies it.
Also, keep in mind - just because a guild can still do runs for gold, does not mean the server population wants to see the adverts. If enough people feel it is spam and unwanted the GMs tend to agree with the general server population.
This is going to be a bit difficult to navigate for guilds. I would suggest maybe keeping any adverts to a few times an hour at most.
Thanks for the information.
Your statement here is the part that is the most worrying. Hopefully, they (Blizzard) pushes out some guidelines / policies on what frequency is acceptable and what isn’t.
The idea is that there will always be vindictive players who will report indiscriminately.
Same thing happened right after the change to multiboxing rules.
People were falsely reporting players not using any tools and just had second accounts on auto-follow without using any broadcasting tools.
Zero change to policy but the community sort of self corrects after a cooling off period.
They have discussed it on the Customer Support forum in the past. There is no “set time” frequency to avoid getting penalized for spamming.
On a busy server once every 5 mins might be fine - in that others on the realm don’t feel it is spam because so much else is going on. On a quiet server posting every 5 mins will end up being MOST of what is posted and people may very well report it.
Blizz goes with what the server population feels is best most of the time. I know that is not the answer you wanted right now, but that is how they tend to see it. If the server is annoyed by the posting and a lot of people on different accounts are reporting it, Blizz sides with the reports.
Pretty much. People will get used to the new rules and adjust. Guilds will also be sure to adapt their message to indicate they are NOT part of a boosting syndicate, etc.
It has been 3 months since I got yelled at for multiboxing (manually obv) so yeah it just takes people a bit. People do like my RP skits though so that’s fun. It’s a spin on “who’s on first” lol Oh and using toys to make it look like my boomkin laid an egg is fun too. Anyway…
The Houkans and all that I report those but if I see a guild person advertising or a group advertising I leave it alone.
FYI some Houkan boosters are starting to put (no community) at the end of their adverts to try and bypass this new rule even though the toon they are advertising on is clearly in the Houkan boosting community’s guild.
what happens to the people who spam report people for spam because they dont like a person to get them squelched, asmongold proved it can be abused awhile ago?
Well, when you abuse the report function in a coordinated way like that you end up suspended from the game. That is what happened to Asmon. He got suspended for telling his community to falsely report him. He proved the squelch works like it was supposed to work (large number of unique account reports) AND that Blizz will further punish abuse of the system.
Note again - you get one report per Bnet account. Switching chars in game does not change that - the system does not count the other reports from your account. I makes it hard for one person to log in and out/switch chars to load up the report bucket.
They have the details on how the reporting system works in the Silence article.
Multiple abusive chat reports from the same person do not stack—only reports from unique players are counted towards a silence penalty.
Same goes for the automated Squelch portion. Silence is the GM applied penalty. They are not exactly the same.
Those people reporting are all paying customers as well. If a lot of paying customers consider someone a disruptive spammer - Blizzard usually sides with the larger group of customers.
The spam was so overwhelming that people are emboldened by the recent decision. While two wrongs don’t make a right, the pendulum stayed on the spammers side for far too long.
Doesn’t make it right, and I’m not just talking about spammers.
Plenty of times I’ve seen in chat someone talking, asking questions ect and then some guy “hey everyone mass report so-n-so bc I disagree with him about something lul kek…”. Unfortunately people find that kind of thing funny bc it won’t effect them.
All I’m saying, is if a player is inside the rules they should not be punished. Simple as that.
This is not how silences have worked for quite a while.
Silences have begun to trigger automated seven day suspensions to players, because they use the language filter as a report. Essentially meaning a majority playerbase can hinder the gameplay of a minority playerbase on any whim they choose.
This change from silence to suspension… was the real problem.
Blizzard also, does not tend to agree with the server population. Blizzard overturn these silences or suspensions immediately and with consistency. But again, why rely on a system which ends in hundreds or thousands of tickets for silence or suspension removals.
Silences are applied by a GM. A suspension is applied if the GM feels the Silence is not enough of a penalty for the offense, or the account has a long history of offenses. That takes a human reviewing it first. Not saying humans don’t make mistakes, but that is how the system works.
The Suspension for chat has always been on the table, but they recently went back to using it more often because people were not getting the point with just a Silence. It again, points out that Silence still exists, and the system is not automatic.
This post in CS has some info on why they use Suspensions again.
Silence came into existence as a penalty in 2016. Prior to that, the penalty for spamming, profanity, harassment, etc - was a Suspension. Silence was an attempt to be nice and remove social features for people who did not use them appropriately. Suspension is the original penalty … being nice with just a Silence was not having the desired impact on changing behavior.
Anyone with any experience in boost advertising can tell you how clearly misinformed you are. A key example being how boosting communities will not appeal silences on advertising accounts Why? Because the automated suspension is generic. Once they appeal, a manual review makes it clear they are on a advertising account (against TOS) and it is then closed.
Silence came into existence as a penalty in 2016.
Yes, but even in 2020… the silence from trade chat was not a real risk. This was in the last 12 months or moreso since the advertising account bans that it was used aggressively on any account that triggers enough reports.
You get a template email that is “generic” but the action was not automated.
What is standardized, or was, is the penalty system so the GM does not have much choice in what to apply. Previoiusly a Silence simply doubled each time. End of story. Now the GM can opt to apply the suspension instead. It does get more attention.
You may be right about appeals though - doing that can trigger a much deeper dive into the account than the simple chat sample the GM had in that one set of reports. This happens on the CS forums too - the Forum Support Agents take a look at the “false silence/ban” only to see it was part of a pattern of behavior and well deserved.
Again, this just isn’t true. As the poster in the other chat we spoke in… just moments ago spoke about. He got the instant 7 day. As everyone does. There is no more scaling.
I appreciate your back and forth. But you are just wrong.
This happens on new accounts, old accounts, first time offenders, tenth time offenders.
