Legion Beta Key Giveaway - Week 5: Warcraft GO

New Silence Penalty Coming to World of Warcraft
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
World of Warcraft offers many opportunities to engage with other players in a variety of ways and to help support positive experiences in these engagements we wanted to inform you of a new silence penalty we will be implementing with the pre-expansion patch for Legion. Depending on the type of report, players who are found to be abusive in chat or engage in inappropriate chat behaviors may be silenced from engaging in certain ways within the game.

The Silence Penalty
Following the Legion pre-expansion, any player who is reported multiple times under the Spam or Abusive Chat categories will, after investigation, receive an account-wide silence penalty. While this penalty is active, the silenced player will find that their ability to chat with others is greatly limited.

Silenced Players Are Unable to:
  • Talk in Instance Chat (Raid, Party, and Battlegrounds)
  • Talk in global channels that are auto joined (such as General or Trade)
  • Create Calendar Invites/Events
  • Send in-game mail
  • Send Party Invitations
  • Send War Game Invitations
  • Send Invitations to Duel
  • Update a Premade Group Listing
  • Create a New List for a Premade Group

Silenced Players Are Able to:
  • Whisper to friends (both WoW friends and Battle.net Friends)
  • Reply to Whispers from Non-friends
  • Party/Raid Chat (with Invited Players)
  • Create Parties and Raids
  • Talk in Global Channels that have a moderator
  • Share Quests
  • Sign up for a pre-made group

The first time a player is silenced, their chat will be restricted for 24 hours. This duration will double for each silence penalty received after the first, and there is no maximum. This means that players who receive multiple silence penalties may find themselves unable to chat for a very, very long time.

Silenced players will be receiving a notification when attempting to send a message to a channel in which they have been restricted.

By using the in-game report tool to identify players who may be engaging in inappropriate interactions within the various channels, you’ll be helping create the type of community we all want to take part in.
This article was originally published in forum thread: New Silence Penalty Coming to World of Warcraft started by chaud View original post
Comments 672 Comments
  1. beanman12345's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Valaut View Post
    From what I hear the lists have been switched accidentally which means that we can finally start silencing these idiots who keep spamming trade chat with boosts all day. Hope everyone does that so that these idiots can fuck off. Well done blizzard!
    This will be so amazing. Finally!!!!
  1. chaud's Avatar
    List was swapped around the wrong way for two minutes, sorry!
  1. emilpor's Avatar
    Silenced after investigation my a**. How are they going to investigate so many requests. That's a thing they say only to close our mouths if we complain about it. Who came up with this idea anyway? Seems pretty stupid honestly. I mean, I enjoy when people fight on chat sometimes. I am 100 % sure it will be abused with nonsense. Give the people power to restrict others, the people will use it. Investigate my a**, there will be too many requests to investigate. It will work like in Dota, you will be unable to do things and you will most likely not know why or when you did something wrong.
  1. Queen of Hamsters's Avatar
    Awesome! Only those at risk have a reason to be angry!
  1. mmoc438b82b371's Avatar
    I love this
  1. Rowin's Avatar
    The Trolls are going to love reporting spammers trying to engage in legitimate business activities.
  1. pyrostorm9001's Avatar
    Silenced Players Are Unable to: Talk in Instance Chat (Raid, Party, and Battlegrounds)
    Silenced Players Are Able to: Create Parties and Raids

    "So this guy creates a party, but wont talk to us?"
  1. Lilija's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by TheBaron87 View Post
    I wonder how many people are going to go rant about the absurd restrictions now without ever double-checking the official source...
    I feel so trolled right now
  1. Collie's Avatar
    I have to wonder if all of the people with the "GG Blizzard can't wait for this to be abused" or "Wow, this is so needlessly harsh" sentiments are simply the folks who know they'll end up being silenced when this feature goes live...

    Being helpful and friendly doesn't take anything out of your day!
  1. mmoc1f5e02b9df's Avatar
    People will just abuse the shit out of it, so the investigation will take to long to really have an effect on the people who do wrong.
    99% will just be reports by assholes how think it's funny.

    Of it's an automated system which will lead to the end of chatting in WOW
  1. TheBaron87's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by LazzySpazzy138 View Post
    They better make damn well sure it is investigated THOROUGHLY and that they speak to BOTH PARTIES so as to make sure they know CONTEXT of the situation as well. Someone could very well have incited inflammatory responses JUST to get fuel to report for this shit. Bad decision imo, it's gonna backlash on Blizz hard.
    That's not really an excuse, just don't get incited. Be the bigger person, report and ignore. People who fly off the handle easily are nearly as bad as the trolls.
  1. deviantcultist's Avatar
    I am really fond of this feature as long as it does not get abused. For example, having people conspire to harrass another player to silence him on purpose etc.
  1. schwarzkopf's Avatar
    The only thing I'd change is to still allow them to mail their own alts etc (account restricted emails). However, I'd remove their ability to post on the AH instead.
  1. Heladys's Avatar
    Good stuff.
  1. schwarzkopf's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by pyrostorm9001 View Post
    "So this guy creates a party, but wont talk to us?"
    Instance chat is different to party/raid chat.
  1. Queen of Hamsters's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Rowin View Post
    The Trolls are going to love reporting spammers trying to engage in legitimate business activities.
    Same as now, being reported doesn't do shit unless there's grounds for it. I can't count how many times I've been reported for "botting in Tol Barad" by retards that don't know basic mechanics (such as not allowing yourself to go afk by moving your char every once in a while within a 5 minute window) and it has brought no form of negative results for me. A GM confirmed to me that being reported isn't enough, they'll check if there's grounds for the report and if there's none, you won't have any red flag or bad standing on your account.
  1. Soulwind's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by schwarzkopf View Post
    "Talk in global channels that are auto joined (such as General or Trade)" -> needs to move to the bottom category.
    The whole thing is swapped.

    I like this. They should create penalties for other minor infractions instead of having temporary bans for everything. Isolating troublemakers from the specific parts of the game they're making trouble in is better than removing them from the game completely.

    Unfortunately assholes aren't always bad players, and it's not fair for a whole raid or RBG group to be punished because a key player got banned for saying something stupid in trade.
  1. JohnnyQuest's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by pyrostorm9001 View Post
    Silenced Players Are Unable to: Talk in Instance Chat (Raid, Party, and Battlegrounds)
    Silenced Players Are Able to: Create Parties and Raids

    "So this guy creates a party, but wont talk to us?"
    Instance chat (/i) is the chat channel that you are put into when doing LFD/LFR. You can't talk in that when silenced.

    Party and raid chat is different. If you manually create your party or specifically join a pre-made you can talk in those channels.
  1. Flurryfang's Avatar
    I really hope, that they will in some way mark silenced players, just so you can know why players are not speaking
  1. mmoc1f5e02b9df's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Collie View Post
    I have to wonder if all of the people with the "GG Blizzard can't wait for this to be abused" or "Wow, this is so needlessly harsh" sentiments are simply the folks who know they'll end up being silenced when this feature goes live...

    Being helpful and friendly doesn't take anything out of your day!
    Well since people who are silenced appear to be able to report people, it will just be report everybody while you are silenced just to fuck with the employees

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