In recent years, I have been reported by other players, I assume in trade chat or other channels, for saying things they don’t like. I run an LGBT+ Allied guild on Moon Guard, and as you can imagine, this draws the ire of certain individuals and paints me and our guild as a target of harassment.
Something is wrong with my account to the point that any time I get right-click reported, I get instantly banned from the game for 10 to 15 days, no questions asked, by the automated system.
My account has never received a silence, a mute, or any other disciplinary action regarding behavior, my very first “infraction” got me hit with 10 days. The second one, just two months ago, got me for another 10 days. Now, today, I genuinely don’t know what it is I could have said or done in game, but I woke up to a 15 day suspension for “abusive language.”
I am telling you, with 100% certainty, that I have done and said NOTHING in the game to warrant such a harsh punishment. I currently have an appeal in. The last “10 day” suspension for “abusive language” was lifted, and as it turned out, I was just being reported for “spam” for advertising my guild, and the suspension was overturned.
I am a raid and guild leader, I advertise our guild and advocate for LGBT+ rights in our message. Penalizing me for fifteen days is absolutely insane, is there any GM here that can look into this for me and help me work out what exactly is happening to warrant such harsh penalties on my account? I am now out of raid/mythics with my guild for over 2 weeks because someone got mad at me in game? I just don’t see it.
I have an appeal in, I am making a post here to draw attention to it so that I hopefully avoid the automated GPT-esque response to my ticket that is copy/pasted into most appeals without actually looking into it. That is my hope, anyway.
Is my only option here to just stop talking outside of my guild/party chats? I legitimately feel like I can’t even speak in game anymore in fear of someone reporting me and I lose access to my account for weeks over it. No player should have to walk on eggshells like this.
The CS agents use templated responses to maintain an uniform answer across tickets and to reduce answer times. So that they don’t need to type the same answer across similar tickets all the time.
If they don’t look into it, your previous appeal wouldn’t have been overturned. So they do infact, look into it.
I recommend to keep your appeal open, and maybe a CSFR will pop in later.
Blizzard does not use AI for responses, cut and paste… yes.
You might want to drop the politics from your guild recruitment, especially in this time and age. Just saying you are friendly to those groups should be enough.
It was only looked into and overturned AFTER I made a Forum post about it. Before I made a forum post drawing attention to it, I received the “this decision is final” copy/pasted response and my ticket was marked as resolved. I re-opened the ticket, and then posted to the forums, and THEN I got a non-automated response that overturned my suspension because I actually directed attention to it.
Yeah, that’s the crazy part to me, my first “infraction” was automatically 10 days. Prior to that, I have never received any sort of mute or any other penalty to my account. It was just instantly 10 days, and it was for the same thing as here, “abusive language.” I don’t use “abusive language” in the game, I don’t even indulge trolls when they’re in my DM’s calling me and my guild all sorts of slurs and derogatory remarks for just existing. A 15 day suspension would lead one to believe that a player is a very big problem in game, but I know with full certainty that I am not.
I know there are run-of-the-mill posts here where people pretend they don’t know why they got banned, this is not one of those cases. I genuinely do not believe in any capacity that anything I have said or done in game warrants such a visceral response from the automated ban system, there is just no way that anyone looked at the actual reports and issued this suspension, it was automated.
The blues here have zero to do with appeals. They can tell what’s on the appeal and what the appeal team said to some degree, but they’re not part of that team whatsoever.
Either way, the only thing the blues here can do is provide information. They have zero influence with the appeals process, and zero interaction with that team.
Well, maybe I can get some information then on why this is happening to my account.
Yesterday, I was unlocking the Allied Races (finally) and was in Molten Core for the Dark Iron segment. While doing this scenario, I got the “Behavior Warning” popup and had no idea why I was getting it, I just clicked it off and moved on. That is the one, and only, Behavior Warning I have received in Retail, in about a year.
I brushed it off thinking it was something automated or an error, and didn’t think anything of it. Finished unlocking all of my races, and logged off. I did think to myself, “I hope my account doesn’t get another aggressive suspension over that,” but thought surely it wouldn’t happen over just the one.
But nope, sure enough, I wake up this morning to two e-mails, one stating I was banned for “abusive language” and another stating that my subscription was frozen.
Something is going wrong, somewhere, and this auto-penalty system they have in place is very aggressive. In my chat history, I can guarantee that nothing I’ve said or done warrants removing me from the game for over two weeks. Of that, I am certain.
So that is not always 100% true … they CAN answer tickets in some cases but I don’t know what those cases are and they don’t want to encourage people to come here to get around the ticket system. The OP did have a direct assist from Orlyia on their last appeal and situation.
The account history never resets. If you had ANY chat system infraction on the account then it counts as a strike. Your first may have been a 24 hour silence back when the penalties were shorter. A second then was 48 hour silence. You may not have even noticed. You are getting 10 days because your account has two past infractions on it, even if you don’t remember them.
Abusive Language is the catch all term used for “abuse of the chat system”. That does not just include horrible speech that abuses people, it includes spam, advertising, trolling, and anything else using the chat system that breaks rules. In your case, I think spam was the category you needed to be careful with.
This is an Account wide thing. It does not always pop for the character that you were reported it. It can pop up for another character later - even in a different game mode like Classic vs Retail.
What you were doing at the time of the notice, or suspension, is not always what you got reported for.
Also, if you were doing things with others and have any macros or addons that do RP speech, or pop up something in chat, that can be a culprit for spam.
It has to be the guild message, I think you’re right. I make sure to only post it once per 5-10 minutes, and I never spam it twice. But after this, I think I’m just going to stop posting my guild recruitment entirely, I can’t be playing Russian Roulette with my account just for advertising. I am just going to disable all public channels and be done with it, and use third party resources for recruitment outside of the game (and the guild finder window, but we all know nobody uses that, lol).
I just hope that someone sees this that can fix the error, and I mean it when I say I will never, ever, do another advertisement in this game again after this.
That is an automatic popup that appears when repeatedly reported in game. That is not something caused by blizzard staff.
Advertising can be vastly interpretable regarding spam accusations. You might be posting once every ten minutes, but people sitting in the chat for long periods of time might see nothing in the message box but your advertisements going back as far as the eye can see, and as such they view it as spam and report it. Also, since there isn’t really a concrete criteria for what constitutes spam, staff members investigating the reports can also come to different conclusions depending on what they’re looking at.
And to add onto this, if your advertisements include the content you claim they do, then that adds a new layer of risk, as not everyone accepts that material and will more than likely report it whenever they see it.
Yeah. Thank you guys for the insight on how all of this works, I thought I was doing it the way that I was supposed to to avoid this from happening, but I guess not. To play it safe from now on, like I said, I’m just going to stop recruitment entirely, and disable the public channels and only communicate with my guild/parties.
I appreciate ya’lls time, I hope I am back in game before Tuesday at least. My raid team and guild need me
