Why don't Blizzard permaban anymore unless it's serious?

[HyperJay]

Seriously.

I mean back before this silence stuff if you said horrid shit to people like wishing cancer on them or something then bam suspension. You continued with this behaviour then bam... perma ban.

I just don't think the silence system is a fair punishment for continuous offenders or repeat ones in my opinion.

So why. Why don't they permaban for this anymore? Not saying it happened to me but just something that was on my mind and I wanted to ask.

And let's not lean towards "subs plummeting" as a reason. There are plenty of games with a smaller playerbase that still do perma bans for repeat offenders. So why did Blizzard suddenly let it go?

Perma-ban means two things, Loss of Profit for the company and loss of time and money for Players.
1 Player Perma-ban is $15 a month loss why let that happen when you can have that free money.
On the Player Side - I've likely spent thousands of dollars on this game, if I got perma-banned for any reason I'd probably freak the fuck out lol

[Megas Elekmatos]

Someone already answered. Loss of profit. The only way they will issue permabans if it is something that widely affects the community at large. If the behavior has the potential to turn away people in droves; then they will result to permabans. Otherwise; slaps on the wrist and move on.

[Queen of Hamsters]

They never dished out permabans on a whim. It always had to be serious.
I knew a guy that regularly spammed "gayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy" in trade during WOTLK. He got suspensions, he'd be back, repeat. Then another guy I used to know openly admitted one day that he had paid real money for Invincible. Bam, he was permabanned. He clearly wasn't very clever.

[Tiwack]

They hope people will consider coming back once they've grown up instead of having them have to start all over from the bottom up. Afaik silence works as intended. You can call someones bs without harassing them or using foul language. Don't feed the trolls. Report them when they do the same thing they hope for you to do.

[MoanaLisa]

I imagine the thinking is that permanent bans should be for something really serious.

Personally I think the better approach is the silence thing. A lot of people are really only interested in getting some attention so silencing them robs them of all of that. It's not limited to the game. Insulting others is largely an ego thing in any case. "Here, allow me to demonstrate my human superiority by putting you in your place." You see it all the fucking time.

[Tiwack]

I am very sad with how concerned people on the internet are about getting the people who “insulted them” banned silenced or worse. It really seems like an awesome side game where you can actually hurt others while feeding your ego.

I don’t know why people are so desperate to have rules and a referee I mean at the end of the day someone swears at you swear back or just ignore no big deal is it?. What more can they do to you. Just typing bad words wooohooo. But let’s face it it’s awesome to get people banned isn’t it. I mean it doesn’t do anything the world doesn’t get better no justice is served but that warm feeling that you actually hurt someone who “offended you” is priceless.

Mind you I’m not talking about serious offenses or harassment but even calling someone “incompetent” can be seen as a bannable insult.

Blizzard gets it and satisfies these instincts because hey it’s all money. Hence the “silence”. The “offended” party feels the power of revenge and the “offending” party is “punished” but no harm. What a wonderful world we re building. Full of hypocrisy.

You just take the biggest problem with online play and turn it into another reason for people to play. Yahtzee! Not our problem people eventually lose their minds. Sign of a good product.. Mob-justice makes fools out of everybody

[Merie]

One of my friends once got a perma ban right off the bat when he used a guildie's account to try out the warrior class at the level cap. This was years ago, though he started a new account last month.

[Aeula]

Because permabanning people was a pretty stupid thing to do.

[Flame6]

Blizzard has said that perma-banning leads to trolls making new accounts and just trolling harder since they have nothing to lose.
A temp ban lets them ban you, you stay away for a while, and come back with a hopefully better attitude.

[Doomchicken]

Because permabanning people was a pretty stupid thing to do.

Except it really isn't. There are just some people that shouldn't be interacting with other people period. You see it all the time in game and on forums, even this forum through the various people that get banned constantly to the point that those people have become a meme. Every community would be better off without those people.

[Cosmic Janitor]

Money. They are their customers.

[Doomchicken]

Honestly the subs and the money thing is high on the list of stupid arguments. How many times have you seen where X player talks about Y game and their shitty toxic community? A toxic community would cost them way more money than banning the stupid fucks that ruin the game for everyone else.

[Deleted]

is this a serious question? its easy ££££$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$£$

[Super Kami Dende]

Seriously.

I mean back before this silence stuff if you said horrid shit to people like wishing cancer on them or something then bam suspension. You continued with this behaviour then bam... perma ban.

I just don't think the silence system is a fair punishment for continuous offenders or repeat ones in my opinion.

So why. Why don't they permaban for this anymore? Not saying it happened to me but just something that was on my mind and I wanted to ask.

And let's not lean towards "subs plummeting" as a reason. There are plenty of games with a smaller playerbase that still do perma bans for repeat offenders. So why did Blizzard suddenly let it go?

As one of the biggest Tradechat trolls on my Server throughout Vanilla, TBC and Wrath. I gained the entirety of 2 limited bans. both for 72 hours. It's not a new thing for them to not permaban over Words.

[Eazy]

No it wasn't. They had a system in place. Think it was something like this.

Warning.
3 hours.
24 hours.
48 hours.
72 hours.
Final warning and 72 hours.
Permaban.

I never understood what was wrong with that system personally. Works fine in a lot of other games. I remember Blizzard calling it the "penalty volcano" or something

I was banned twice, once for 48h, another one for 72h.

Once was saying mean thins to GM(couldn't revert our arena wins, we had 9-0 streak and my healer bugged out and got stuck in the wall, opposite team written to GM and he grabbed him out into the arena where 2 DPS were already waiting and I was killed, so yeah...).

Second time was for saying something like "Hail to the victors", but I was in the german group and I used that language... so... yeah... People overreacted.

[Deleted]

you should not get permabanned for chat related stuff unless you are both a serious and serial offender. serial means more then repeat offender. the silence penalty is enough for everyday insults, so you should only get suspensions/bans for extreme insults, and then if you don't learn your lesson after 3+ of those you can start cranking up the ban duration, ending up with a permaban around 6-12 orso.

[Darththeo]

A perma-ban should only be for serious offenses. Honestly, banning someone permenantly because they are offensive just seems stupid.

[Gorgodeus]

Blizzard officially answered your question when they instituted this policy.

[Daedius]

Perma-ban means loss of profit. Welcome to the timeout, go stand in the corner, snowflake society.

Half right.

Blizzard's metric now on measuring the game's success is the logged in times of players.

Silenced players still add to that.

[Azerate]

Well, there's one important thing to understand in this. First of all, no one just joins a group and proceed to insult people, that doesn't happen. There had to be something happening to make this person insult another.
Let's say the guy throwing insult is X and the other person is Z.
Most situation would go something like this: Z moves his character very wrongly, body pulling extra stuff that are supposed to be skipped. It's very obvious when things are meant to be skipped and at this point everyone should understand aggro ranges. Not knowing that results in playing like crap which justifies insulting him. This is just one example, I could sit here all day listing the terrible things bad players do all day, I pug a lot, but it's necessary to understand that when I'm not puging, I'm also not controling other player's character, there's nothing that explains playing like crap in a pug, it shouldn't happen and players who do will also play like crap in a guild run.

But wait, insulting people is bad, it should never happen!
False.
People need to be put in their place, they need to know and feel extremely bad if they're wasting everybody's time with their lack of skills. A normal person would see this as motivation to get better. Weak minded people are the ones crying about cyber bullying and shit, and they stay weak their entire life. We don't need them, let them crumble and quit under the very light weight of typed words in the chat of an online game.

If insulting people is reportable, lack of skills should be, because it's much more toxic to play like crap than to insult people who deserve it. No one deserves to have their time wasted by people who have absolutely no motivation to play decently. Also, let's say you ban someone who insulted another player. Why would he not do it when he comes back from a ban? There will still be bad players around, so the problem will not be fixed. The problem is bad players, not players who insult others. Notice in a group where everyone plays well there's no one insulting others? Yeah, that's right, the problem is bad players and nothing else.

If everybody played decently, we would all have fun together, there would be less toxicity, pugging wouldn't even be considered a bad experience, LFR wouldn't exist and Blizzard could design better mechanics other than "move out of shit" and "soak this puddle" which is basically the limitation of most players in this easy game.

Bad players are hurting the game and Blizzard does nothing about it. No motivation for playing well, no feature to help players get better, no punishment for players who constantly suck, free rewards even after doing everything wrong.

Bad players need help and banning the only ones who call them on their shit is doing the oposite of making the game better.

If you are actually serious then you are the one who needs to be removed to improve the game's health.

Insulting, harassing or attacking in any way is never okay. Certainly not just because someon lacks skills. I could partially agree with you if you said that it's okay to maybe say a few harsh words to people who are doing some annoying shit on purpose, but just for being unskilled...no one deserves to be harassed.

You are the only one who needs to be put in your place, because you believe you are entitled to insult people. You're not.

PS. And there's nothing stopping you from telling someone what they are doing wrong without insulting them. Not sure if this ever occured to you?