The report appeal/dispute system is broken and needs to be changed.
The way it stands currently is this: someone reports you (wrongfully or not), you get muted or suspended from the game, you panic and rush to the customer support page about your report and you’re told you can “appeal” the report. You feel a sense of relief as you press the appeal button and begin to try to type your response… but then you find out that all the “appeal” does is have a different Blizzard employee look at the punishment and then tell you that “We agree with the punishment given and the punishment stands”
And you never actually get to use words to explain why you think you were unfairly reported.
It used to be, years ago, that you would appeal and actually DEFEND your appeal, like one would expect. Now that option is no longer given and the person being punished can have zero say on why they think they were unfairly punished.
It’s completely unreasonable to just let Blizzard’s employees impersonally decide whether someone did something wrong without having any dialogue with the person who was reported. It’s unreasonable and unjust.
This makes the report system far more easily abused, puts far more power into the hands of reporters and people who merely want to grief other players they disagree with. It needs to be changed to allow people who were reported unfairly to actually COMMUNICATE to the people who are responsible for taking actions against their account.
Inb4
“Just don’t do anything that’s reportable bro! You must be a pretty toxic person if you ever get reported. I’ve never been reported even once in the 50 years I’ve been playing WoW!”
Edit: It’s come to my attention that there appears to be a way (one that is not readily apparent or easily accessible), to actually find a channel to verbally appeal action that’s been taken against your account. However, this option isn’t made readily available from the email you get informing you of the action or any of the most obvious systems you are directed to by blizzard.com. And GM’s have in the past, communicated that the appeal system is NOT designed to allow you to plead your case… which makes one wonder what the purpose of the text box is for then.
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I agree. The report system is completely broken.
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They don’t need you to tell them why it was wrong, they can see the logs.
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That’s not what I said… I said the person who is reported needs to be able to explain why they think they shouldn’t have been reported or that their actions didn’t break any rules. Did you even read my post?
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it bascially been like this since the game launched. 90+% of appeals are NEVER overturned. unless its a obvious mistake. ESPECIALLY FORUM, APPEALS.
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That’s exactly what I answered. They do not need you to tell them why you think you shouldn’t have been reported. They can see the logs. If you shouldn’t have been reported then it will be overturned.
It’s not a time to argue your case. It is a time for a different gm(s) to look over the log.
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Do you understand that I am not saying that Blizzard needs to give people an explanation why they punished you? Literally none of my post is suggesting that…
That’s quite the optimistic viewpoint. What’s next? If you shouldn’t have been reported then no one ever will report you?
That’s LITERALLY what I am suggesting needs to be changed
Thats a lot of wow playing 
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Yes but the appeal system used to actually let you plead your case. And I’m pretty sure I recall actually getting some of my mutes or whatever overturned in the past.
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well, we wanted customer support to be payed a living wage so… there’s very few customer support left now.
we automated to combat the living wage costs.
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And the human ones seem to be minimum wage employees, some of which don’t seem to even speak completely fluent English. They probably churn through thousands of reports and appeals every day.
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i never got mine overturned. even when they were clearly bs bans. apparently typing “we don’t need that kind of thread here.” in a thread that was violating the coc by being posted is worthy of a 1 week ban. (this was back in cata. i got nicely told to go pound sand when i appealed.)Im just listing this for an example. i have several other examples. but only one will suffice.
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Well, yeah I would imagine most appeals don’t get overturned. Though I recall GM’s being a lot more fair and even-handed back before Cata. But I’ve never actually tried to appeal anything through the forums, and I think according to official policy, you’re not supposed to be able to appeal your mutes/bans through the forums. Because ofc allowing those who are reported to speak would be an egregious lack of oversight.
this is why every single time i see people see say “i want the old mod team back.” i tell them"no you really really really don’t." the mods back then would ban you for just POSTING in a rule breaking thread. even if you didn’t violate any rules yourself. it was a VERY common occurance. alot of them were infamous for handing out bans like candy. Or they might ban you because they didn’t like you for the littlest of slip ups.
To be fair I had one of those in game warnings about toxic speech and harassment etc pop up the other day which is laughable because i do not speak to others in the game even in groups. I did however screw up some pulls and we wiped so i figured the idiots mass reported me to get back.
The system does allow you to put in text and explain or ask for why you got the warning etc. However it currently says the queue is 180 days so not sure what use that is.
i’d imagine they’re not minimum wage but they are outsourced, to places where sub-minimum wage is a good wage. globalization is awesome.
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Those can get interesting when they say something along the lines of “we agree you did not violate the TOS, but you must serve out the suspension because the community reported you” 
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Sounds about right. My druid had to PvP for at least 3 years a week to get High Warlord back in Vanilla.
I feel like what happened to you wasn’t that common of an occurrence back then… and that sounds completely ridiculous. I would greatly prefer the old mod team to the new ones that seem to hate their jobs and just want to get their minimum wage paycheck with the least amount of effort possible.
it was a very common occurance. there was a off topic mod who was notorious for randomly banning people for whenever they felt like it. IT WAS THAT BAD. . dude i was on those forums. I KNOW WHAT IT WAS LIKE back in tbc,wotlk,cata,first half of mop.second half of mop was when they ditched the old system and went to automated. this is all i’m going to say on this matter you can believe me or not i don’t care.