Over abused report system

[AeneasBK]

During Cataclysm ( I think ) a friend and I made horde alts on one of the most populated realms at that time (Stormreaver maybe?, it began with an "S").

Trade chat was worse than twitch chat in a popular stream in terms of the speed it was flying past, but as we were levelling up I write in trade (once) "Hi, WTS low level enchanting mats cheap, new player on the server so would be a great help to get some starting gold" or words to that effect. About 2 minutes later I "DC'd" and when I tried to log in I got some message saying I had been suspended for, I think it was only 3 hours, maybe it was 6, for "spam".

I don't need any further proof that for years Blizzards report systems have been 100% automated without any input from a person. I refuse to believe that will have changed for any Blizzard title since then. "Needless expense" I'd imagine is the logic.

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There's a reason most people consider the silence system broken/flawed/toxic, because it is.

You got a source for that claim. From what I see its a very tiny (but vocally pissed off) group of players that think the system is broken or flawed. I'm not trying to suggest like Justpassing that there is a definate correlation between being an asshole and taking issue with the system; but the idea that most people who play HotS think the silence system broken or flawed is laughable, most people don't ever encounter it.

[Nikkaszal]

The blue post was made three days ago which means the change has either just gone live or will be implemented soon, hence me pointing out that your claim based on that blue post that the OP must be lying about something that had happened previously was incorrect.

That part wasn't about a change. That part was a statement of how the system works, now and in the past.

[Deleted]

Generally when people come to the forums to cry about how they were unfairly banned for something, 99% of the time, it's just flat out bullshit and they finally got caught and got punished.

99% of the guys who complain in forums don't even play the game

[Ausr]

99% of the guys who complain in forums don't even play the game

That too. WoW especially.

[Charge me Doctor]

i want you to go into trade chat during a high pop time of day and start explaining to people how the reporting system works and explain in detail what they have to do to report a person then watch yourself get kicked out of the game and end up chat banned

Why would any sane person do that? If i ever go to a trade chat is to sell spare mounts or BoE epics. If you get silenced for filling trade chat with bullshit i call it working as intended

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yeah well if you have never met a innocent people there must be no innocent people anywhere that have ever existed good logic

Unless you put your words into my mouth - yes it is great logic, because everyone who went into this forum with a thread complaining about being kicked from raid, not picked into dungeons, silenced in chat or banned from the game "for nothing" were actually guilty. So assuming that someone who creates such a thread is hiding something to get positive responses makes sense

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i dont drag other people into stuff the "attention seeking" and "unnecessary chatter" was mostly me talking about myself and the game

And that's the problem, don't you realize that? You shouldn't be doing that unless its /s, /g, /o, /w (because this is where other person should be using /ignore function). If you keep talking in fucking trade chat about yourself in an obnoxious way - you'll get appropriate response from community via tools blizzard gave said community

[AlmightyGerkin]

Blizzard does not care about their customers anymore. All we are is dollar signs now.

[AlmightyGerkin]

trade chat can be used for everything there is no policy that only allows it to be used for trade its as if you havent read any of the ToS agreements or anything do you just click ok without reading like a ignorant pleb?

if you don't want to use logic i feel sorry for you

what do you think guild recruitment messages are they are unnecessary chatter and attention seeking basically an advertisement im guessing you think people should be banned for recruiting in public chat channels as well

people like you need to learn how to use the ignore function i know its complicated but maybe there is a tutorial somewhere try searching google

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im sure some of the GM's can hardly understand English now
ill bet WoW will end up like Destiny 2 with all in game chat channels being removed

Possibly sometime later in the future WoW will die out but as long as we keep funneling them money they'll make new lore and than screw it over with the chronicle cause before the chronicle came out what we perceived as lore with the books and games meant nothing when Chronicle changed it.

[Acidbaron]

As it's made in a way where multiple reports without them looking in can and will lead to a silence, i say we make it so that the person becomes silenced for that game and pending an actual human looking at it.

[Charge me Doctor]

trade chat can be used for everything there is no policy that only allows it to be used for trade its as if you havent read any of the ToS agreements or anything do you just click ok without reading like a ignorant pleb?

if you don't want to use logic i feel sorry for you

For shits sake, you are the one who floods trade chat with bullshit, then runs to the forums complaining about people using report system for removing you from chat for flooding it with bullshit, have you tried to use logic here? Like, not chat in trade chat, that, you know, says "trade" and people post message about trading something, and probably have other chats hidden so they won't see random chatting and only see trading info in their active chat window, bit now some asshole thinks he is more important that others in the community and start chatting there? Off course they'll want to remove you from chat, it's not even a question, and blizzard provided community with proper tools to do so.

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trade chat can be used for everything there is no policy that only allows it to be used for trade its as if you havent read any of the ToS agreements or anything do you just click ok without reading like a ignorant pleb?

if you don't want to use logic i feel sorry for you

what do you think guild recruitment messages are they are unnecessary chatter and attention seeking basically an advertisement im guessing you think people should be banned for recruiting in public chat channels as well

people like you need to learn how to use the ignore function i know its complicated but maybe there is a tutorial somewhere try searching google

If they pop in the trade chat - yes, they are misplaced. If they pop in lfg chat - it's fine. I think people should be banned from chat for using chat incorrectly, yes, i think it's fine punishment if you can't figure out that "trade" chat is for trading and "looking for group" chat is chat for looking for group.

Ignore function solve the problem, but report system solves it way better:
If a person acts obnoxiously and spams trade chat with "Daish daish daish", 200 people see that and don't want to see it anymore, the right click this person, report for spam, and he gets silenced, other 1800 people in chat do not have to /ignore this person. If this system wouldn't be in place 2000 people would have to ignore him, because he feels like acting like an asshole to others.


Anyways, just a tip for you - there is a general channel for chatting, use that, you rarely get reported unless you spam thunderfury racial slurs of anal [achievement]. Haven't been and haven't heard of anyone silenced for chatting in /1 , because most people who do not want to see it simply turn it off. But people who want to trade won't turn off trade chat because of assholes use it as an irc channel, same goes with LFG, users will report them and get rid of them, which is completely fine

[caervek]

That part wasn't about a change.

Well it obviously was as it directly contradicts their previous clarifications/defenses on how the system works meaning it is either a recent or future change.

You got a source for that claim.

Depends on what you consider a valid source, if you want a survey where every single HotS player is contacted and their feedback recorded then no. If however you're more reasonable then you can simply go off the fact that the are multiple huge complaint threads on the official US/EU forums and the subreddit, plus the overall opinion of the system across all those mediums is overwhelmingly negative, plus the fact that the system was ported from Overwatch where it had already accrued a very negative reputation.

The crux of the issue is simple, there is a very significant disconnect between how the system is "intended" to work and how it is working in practice, the intention is simple, players get the option to report other players and the automated system will issue silences/suspensions based on the amount of reports accrued, thus allowing the non-toxic player base to punish and weed out the toxic player base, it is in theory a good system.

The reason it has failed so spectacularly is because it's not being implemented in theory it's being implemented in the real world which brings three issues straight to the front. Firstly, most non-toxic players are nice and so will often give genuinely toxic players the benefit of the doubt, only reporting them when the toxicity is obvious and only for the things they did (rather than just reporting for everything) this allows toxic players to remain unpunished a little longer than they should in theory but it's not a major issue, the next one however very much is.

Secondly, the toxic players can use the report system to, and they do. Didn't like that player making a comeback to what you said about his mother getting cancer? Report him for everything! Didn't like those players going to the objective while you were trying to 1v2 the enemy under their tower? Report them for everything! Didn't like losing that ranked game because you got matched with players who weren't as amazeballs as you and refused to follow your elite instruction? Report them for everything!

As you would expect this has resulted in a situation where the amount of reports acquired is directly proportional to the amount of games played and the amount of toxic/angry players encountered. To put this in perspective there are many high level ranked players who cannot reach their true rank in a season anymore on their main account simply because in a new season they get report suspended before reaching it. The one saving grace here is that it hasn't become as bad as it is in Overwatch firstly because you don't get entire teams reporting a player just because they dislike their accounts most played character "report the symmetra main lol" and secondly because HotS is free, so when a players account becomes unusable for a long time they lose nothing but time (plus purchased skins/etc), when it happens to an Overwatch player they have to shell out for another copy of the game.

The third and final issue, is that Blizzard are fixated 100% on defending the flawed system, going as far as telling one grand master who was suspended for a matter of months that his ban was being upheld because he said "GG" after a (winning) game, and that many players consider saying that toxic. If they would work with the playerbase to overturn unjust silences/bans instead of going out of their way to try and uphold them by looking through a players history to try and find anything they can to try to uphold it then that would do wonders to take the sting out of the systems shortcomings. Hell if they gave players a limit of ten reports a day like in some other games then that would work wonders to de-fang the trolls.

As it stands however, like a number of popular forum/reddit threads have said, the reporting system is currently the most toxic thing about HotS, and that needs to be addressed for the good/longevity of the game.

[AeneasBK]

If however you're more reasonable then you can simply go off the fact that the are multiple huge complaint threads on the official US/EU forums and the subreddit,

lol You're smarter than that.

I stand by my comment. Most people who play HOtS don't give a damn or are even aware of a "report system abuse". Its a tiny vocal minority, and while their complaints may be very valid, it isn't an issue that affects MOST people who play HotS.

Edit: Bolding just so it doesn't seem like I'm trying to suggest there isn't a problem.

[Nerraw]

Time to tone it down a notch. It is entirely possible to discuss the topic at hand without resorting to insulting and demeaning others.

[AeneasBK]

Time to tone it down a notch. It is entirely possible to discuss the topic at hand without resorting to insulting and demeaning others.

I think that is the crux of the issue though. Of course it isn't true in "EVERY" case (gotta give people an out, so they can tell themselves it isn't them its everyone else) but basically if you got a problem with Blizzards report system it's because you're more of an asshole than the community wants to tolerate. The solution is to stop being such a dick, not to find the anomalous results where someone got silenced unfairly and say "LOOK ITS TOTALLY BUSTED OMG".

[AeneasBK]

go into trade when your server is at high population

We're not talking about in WoW. And at any rate I've been fully aware of how it's worked in WoW since about Cataclysm you aren't making any great enlightening point here.

Do you realise how retarded the situation is, where one would go into a game of HotS and start explaining about their silence system?

Regarding Heroes of the Storm, my statement is pretty much true. A vocal minority of people who don't think their brand of online asshatery is "that bad" get silenced a lot for being dicks and make out like they belong in the EVEN more tiny minority of actually innocent people who get caught in the cogs of such an automated system.

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telling people i was silenced = reason to be silenced btw if your wondering wtf the GM was referring to when she said i was bringing it on myself

I'd also agree with the GM here, it was obvious what she was referring to.

[Ashkiman]

It's not really surprising if you use the same amount of caps and the same tone in game chat

[oplawlz]

I mean hey it's needed. We've all felt slightly abused by it before.

No. No we all haven't.

OT: Honestly, the op's post is enough to convince me the ban was entirely warranted. I assume Daish is also chat banned by their posts as well, otherwise the ban system might not be strict enough.

[Charge me Doctor]

kid go read the ToS why are you even trying to argue from a position of pure ignorance its like your brain is not wired correctly

ToS explicitly says that spam is forbidden, and if players consider your chatting in trade chat to be spam - then you'll get punished. Screenshots of your chat only proves that system works as intended and should be kept unchanged, because your messages are exactly that - spam, just like "young and lonely women near you" that go right into your spambox, except they don't. You don't want this kind of mail to go into your inbox, right? And people who care don't want your messages to go into trade chat. That's why there is a system like this in place

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I think that is the crux of the issue though. Of course it isn't true in "EVERY" case (gotta give people an out, so they can tell themselves it isn't them its everyone else) but basically if you got a problem with Blizzards report system it's because you're more of an asshole than the community wants to tolerate. The solution is to stop being such a dick, not to find the anomalous results where someone got silenced unfairly and say "LOOK ITS TOTALLY BUSTED OMG".

There are probably cases when people get punished "for nothing", but baiting for a ban and acting like an asshole do not fall into this category. I mean, even if there as an obnoxious guy selling postman achievement (you know, the dalaran one) in trade chat - you can't report it as a spam, he uses it in appropriate way, who cares if he tries to be funny with it if his goal is selling a fucking item, and boasting about how good it is is kinda part of trading.

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go into trade when your server is at high population

If you still don't understand why it happens - because you basically go outside with your pants down, bend over, handle a paddle to strangers and say "spank me, daddy!", then go to police office and complain that people spank you. You can't be serious right now

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Regarding Heroes of the Storm, my statement is pretty much true. A vocal minority of people who don't think their brand of online asshatery is "that bad" get silenced a lot for being dicks and make out like they belong in the EVEN more tiny minority of actually innocent people who get caught in the cogs of such an automated system.

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I'd also agree with the GM here, it was obvious what she was referring to.

It's really interesting that in hots there is not that much time to even chat with people to get silenced. Usually people get reported for going into a rampage and typing furiously while sitting afk and their team getting beating at second dragon shrine. There are also people (who may refer to themselves as "advisory" on these forums) who just can't keep their mouth shut about what they think on what others just did. Like picking a talent (you can't "sell" you talent and "buy" another), like making a decision (you can't rewind and remake a decision), like "not listening to my advice" (you can't "listen to advice" post factum). Those get reported a lot, basically, people get reported for talking instead of playing, which is still fine in my book, but on the edge of being wrong.

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what is obvious that she is trying to tell me "your guild sucks" a single time is somehow classified as harassment or breaking the ToS now?

Yes, harassing someone even once classified as harassment. Is it weird to you? Here is an unethical advice to you - next time harass people in /w , this way you will receive only 1 report, instead of dozen and your case will always be looked at by a GM and not an automated system! For sure it will result in less chat bans.

[AeneasBK]

There are also people (who may refer to themselves as "advisory" on these forums) who just can't keep their mouth shut about what they think on what others just did.

Yeah there's one poster here who I've played a few games with through the MMOC channel in HotS who started flaming everyone on our team ( in quickplay mind) for basically not being a MOBA god. Couldn't believe how much of an asshole he felt entitled to be just because they weren't playing to his standard. Always find it hilarious to see him complain about toxicity; he is the reason people stop playing PvP games, so they don't have to encounter toxic pieces of shit like him.

[Druitz]

When i appealed to silence GM said "Unfortunately we cannot reveal the details of the silence" CTRL+C CTRL+V from my appeal.

"but I can make you aware of some of the behaviours that may had led to this"

"this includes telling people what talents should they pick, none constructive advise"

So basically you can't tell people what ult should they pick, if they should defeat camp, push, def etc because this way you consider them as bad players (you think they don't know what to do = they are bad) and this is 100% abusive and can lead to silence.

Every single world can lead to ban with sam exceptions like "hi" "wp" "gg"

[Charge me Doctor]

"this includes telling people what talents should they pick, none constructive advise"

You seem to overlook a comma and what's written after that, none constructive advise is whats important here, saying "Uther you should pick bubble in this game", because enemy has butcher is fine, but saying "Uther you should've picked bubble instead of stun" is not, because first - you are planning for what's ahead of the game, and second - you are blaming other player for making a decision