Violation: Abusive Chat - Question

That 2 years ago chat violation is still on the record and counts towards future penalties.

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Insane system when it’s paired with mob rule of automated bans.

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There are no automated suspensions or bans, a person reviews each report and applies a penalty if it’s required.

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There are no automated bans. It’s sad when people come in here not realizing that your realm mates were the ones who reported you. Then a real person went over those reports to determine if you did violate chat rules. Once verified in the log files, they impose a penalty based on your accounts history. Those penalties usually start with a warning to stop said violations, but if you have had penalties in the past, you already received your warning back then. From there, the penalties escalate up to and can include full account closure.

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If believing that it was opposing sellers that reported you makes you feel better about it, that’s fine. But you really have no idea who reported you nor does the system rely on just a couple of reports.

It would have taken many reports from unique accounts in order to trigger the spam squelch which a GM would have looked at and determined what kind of punishment was appropriate. Simply put, the suspension wasn’t automated.

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There are but anyways.

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And it is extremely sad that people believe the lies spread on reddit about something that the redditors have no actual knowledge of. They post their lies on Reddit because if they post here, they get called out fast for lying and it is hilarious. They don’t like it when they get called out with facts so they post there instead.

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Agree to disagree then I’m not going to convince you and you’re going off topic about what you know happens behind the scenes.

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The one post you linked has many Blue responses that say otherwise, and one direct response that says:

“we have data analysts poring over a variety of metrics that we collect, to look for a lack of participation. There is no single metric that gives a clear picture, so we look at a variety of metrics to make sure we allow a variety of valid play styles. “AFK” reports from other players are just one of these metrics. We certainly look at them, and they can be a good clue for validating our other metrics, but we do NOT issue suspensions based solely on these reports.”

I don’t mean this to sound condescending, but I have actually heard others say this, so I want to be crystal clear: a Data Analyst is a paid position at the company, done by a human being. It is not automation.

There are human beings looking at many data points, and even after those data points, suspensions are not given solely on those data points.

So thank you for confirming that there are no automated bans.

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Not off topic at all. As someone who has worked in the industry in the past and in CS for years, I know much more than you can imagine. Also, the Blizzard posters here have many posts stating the exact same thing I did, and they know for a fact what the internal workings are. It has also been pointed out about people using Reddit to try and garner sympathy for their case and not giving the entire stories about what actually was stated in-game.

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Is the reddit post I linked anything like this…?

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Huh weird I’ve seen multiple videos of people getting flagged for silences/bans that got overturned in the last 5 years. They must be using false clients to make Blizzard look bad I guess

  • There is an automated Squelch in game and has been for a REALLY long time. If enough unique accounts report someone, it can silence it pending GM review. This was put in specifically for Gold spammers/advertisers or serious chat shenanigans. Blizzard has never shared what the number of reports required to trigger it is. Yes, some people have had others report them and have proved that the Squelch system does work. Some folks have also found themselves suspended for abusing the report system by having followers falsely report them.

  • Actual Silences or Suspensions are issued by a GM based on infraction and past history. Of course, mistakes can be made hence appeals are available. The OP in this thread was reported for spamming. That one of the categories that actually DOES have the automated squelch, if there were enough reports. In this case, they got a Suspension so a GM looked it. Now, could a second look cause them to revise? Maybe.

  • Ban waves for cheating/exploits may have a measure of automated data collection to look for specific metrics associated with whatever cheat or exploit they are looking for. A recent ban wave for non participation in BGs did have some flawed data collection and those were identified and overturned.

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Or maybe the appeals process works.

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Overturned is different than automated. Humans can make mistakes, humans can decide to be lenient, humans can consider mitigating factors. That’s exactly why there is an appeals process.

Automated is quite different. The only “penalties” that are automated are: a warning when there are multiple reports in a short period of time, and a squelch, when enough people report you for spamming.

The squelchs are then reviewed by Blizzard to either remove the squelch or apply an actual suspension.

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Players do not have GM banning powers with extra steps. Right-click player reports can’t automatically ban players. If this were possible, we’d have Discord communities dedicated to policing servers and going after bots. We’d have multiboxers with the ability to do it by themselves. There has never been a single video of this happening because it isn’t possible to automatically ban bots or players with right-click reports.

Do you actually believe that Blizzard has given the WoW community the ability to ban each other?

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To be fair, groups can get together and apply squelches. To many players, there’s not much distinction between a squelch and a silence. The confusion is understandable.

The more recent problem is that many players think that claiming “mass reporting” will get Blizzard to overturn suspensions, as if many people reporting them cancels out what they may have done wrong.

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I have heard a lot of drama about people getting mass reported in RBGs throughout all of Legion and BfA, and consequently booted out of the game AND suspended before they “fixed” the system to not allow you to report people in rated battlegrounds…

And this was a real problem, so much so Blizzard had to address it. How is that not an automated ban? It is instantaneous and there ARE videos and evidence of people doing this.

From my understanding and experience the system works as such. Once you reach a threshold for X number of reports in X number of time, actions are automatically taken against your account immediately. You will be disconnected. You can determine this by having things like name changes or chat violations or other historical things (there is plenty of evidence to support this). Also, in classic world pvp raid leaders would get reported and taken offline when they get x number of reports. it was abused in rbgs, and in many other places.

And basically your account is “suspended until further review,” most of the time it takes longer for a support ticket to get answered by a human then it does for your punishment to be met. When it takes 7 days for a ticket, its likely that these cases dont get reviewed, before your punishment is over. In almost every ticket of this sort, i put in a question etc that is basically never answered. Its almost always the same copy/pasta. After about 5 escalations, you will get an actual human response and they will respond to your question along with the ticket.

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