My criticisms and experience of the "silence" system introduced a year ago
I would like to preface this post with the fact that I believe the silencing system is a useful tool needed for the health of the game. My criticisms lie with the fact that we, as players, are unable to learn from what we allegedly did to earn these mutes.
Today I have had my first run in silencing system introduced a couple days over a year ago to date.
One day over a year ago today, many of us heard about what happened to Azmongold when the system was just released. Azmongold, however, had the luxury of knowing what triggered his silence, and, to be fair, he was deliberately trying to trigger it.
As I am not a particularly abrasive person, waking up to an email claiming I have been silenced for abusive language did come to a surprise to me, so naturally, I decided I needed to not continue laying in bed, and opened up a ticket to try and figure out what was going on.
After verifying that the email was in fact a legitimate one, not a spoofed one in an attempt to phish, I opened a ticket in attempt to figure out what was going on.
This morning I received an email that appears to be legitimate -- from @blizzard.com -- claiming my account has been silenced due to a chat violation.
I would like this "chat violation" that I received a silence for reviewed by a person.
If I did do something to earn this violation I would like know what specifically caused it so I can avoid this apparently deviant behavior. Not remembering what even happening, or even worse, not knowing, makes this system very ineffective. I would like to suggest that information on what caused these violations, such as what was said, while hiding identifying information of others, is supplied, similar to a system Jagex does with Runescape's abuse/mute/ban system.
Thank you for your time on looking at this matter for me.
Despite the average wait time being 24 hours, I was fortunate enough to receive a response within half an hour.
Hey there REDACTED, I see we needed some assistance today! This is Game Master Dytinran, and I'm here to help.
Based on the reports we received from other players within the community, your account has been silenced until 2017-07-22 18:07:12. A review of the chat confirms that the behavior was in violation of our code of conduct, so the account will remain silenced until the end of its duration.
The action is usually a result of excessive spam of chat, or due to linking websites to other players that are intended to steal their account login details. Please be aware that we do not allow this type of behaviour in chat, and as such we advise you to avoid this in the future.
This action has been taken in accordance with our Terms of Use and our In-game Policies (https://battle.net/support/article/42673), which all players acknowledge and agree to prior to playing World of Warcraft. These policies and conditions allow us to maintain a fun and safe game environment for all of our players.
Our Battle.net Terms of Use can be found at http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/legal/eula.html
We now consider this matter closed and would not look to enter into further discussion on the subject.
This individual, Dytinran, says that the correct action was taken, followed by "The action is usually a result of excessive spam of chat, or due to linking websites to other players that are intended to steal their account login details."
I had requested in my initial ticket to know what the cause was. Well, in regards to the spam trigger, the only thing that could have been potentially the case would be my buying silk in bulk I will drop two to four times a day when I take care of auctions while on my bank alt. In regards to linking websites that could steal information? Well, unless wowhead or discord links are now phishing sites, that wasn't the case either.
Unfortunately, that response simply was not good enough for me.
As I had no way to reopen that ticket in particular, I opened another ticket.
In response to ticket REDACTED.
Unfortunately, my entire ticket was not responded and it appears that I had instead received a canned response.
Since it is now being claimed that this silence is in fact legitimate, I would like to know exactly what triggered it -- as I requested in my previous ticket -- so I can avoid this alleged behavior.
How is this system supposed to be effective when I do not even know what triggered it?
To which I received this response.
Greetings REDACTED,
This penalty has already been upheld. Any further requests on this topic will not be reviewed. Our logs are internal information and cannot be shared by Game Masters. If you would like to have access to our logs, please have your legal representative contact our legal department at custodianofrecords@blizzard.com Regards,
Blizzard Entertainment www.blizzard.com/support
In this second ticket, I did not request the offense to be looked into a second time; I simply wanted to know the cause so that I am able to learn from my behavior.
Apparently I did something over the course of the last few days that triggered this, after all, and given my rather standard routine with little variation, I would like to know so I can avoid this behavior and improve myself as a person.
As I suggested in one of my tickets, a system similar to Jagex's for Runescape, (source of this image: https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/46q86y/1_year_mute_wasnt_worth_the_spaghetti/) would work out very well for a system like this, as it gives players effected by it the option to see what they did so they are able to learn from their behavior and improve it.
I am unfortunately aware that this post will not net me the result I would like, but perhaps can raise awareness to the situation so we can improve this system and feature of the game that is very much needed.
Posted Jul 21, 2017, 9:54 PM UTC