{"id":6631,"date":"2016-09-24T13:28:10","date_gmt":"2016-09-24T17:28:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benies-blogs.com\/games\/?p=6631"},"modified":"2016-10-24T02:59:18","modified_gmt":"2016-10-24T06:59:18","slug":"blizzards-silent-treatment-and-my-two-months-late-thoughts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/benies-blogs.com\/games\/2016\/09\/24\/blizzards-silent-treatment-and-my-two-months-late-thoughts\/","title":{"rendered":"Blizzard’s ‘silent treatment’, and my (two months late) thoughts"},"content":{"rendered":"

No, this isn’t about Blizzard giving<\/em> the silent treatment, as it’s been announced by Bellular that they’ve been having weekly Q&A sessions before Legion’s release (and hope to do so in the future).
\nThat is a good thing. However, what they rolled out<\/a> on July 12th (before the release of Legion) is a questionable one. Of course, when has Blizzard ever done anything that wasn’t<\/em> questionable in one way or another?
\nAnyway, this is a system that many claim will be abused by SJW’s (or “Social Justice Warriors”).
\nThat system is called the “Silence Punishment”. How it works is similar to how temp bans work — get reported enough times and Blizzard takes action on the offender’s account, as they should. The twist is the offender doesn’t get banned, but their chat gets muted for a day. And this affects their entire account, so they can’t be circumvented (they cannot get on an alt to continue spewing their racist remarks).
\nAnd if they’re reported again, the time to become unmuted increases another day per infraction (and could lead to the offender possibly never talking ever again).<\/p>\n

Since it’s been two months of when the system was put in, I can’t really comment too much about it(as I was doing other things at the time). And at that time until now, I didn’t even know that this was a thing until I watched this video<\/a> which explained it, and him saying it has the potential to be highly abused. I didn’t know exactly how until I saw this video<\/a> who claims he was ‘silenced’ for simply saying “I love WoW”.<\/p>\n

Watched the video. He had 30 people in his Garrison and did this “as a test” to see what happened. He says, in \/say.. “MY NAME IS ASMONGOLD AND I LOVE WORLD OF WARCRAFT!!”, and I just wanted to \/ignore him for using all caps. He’s the kind of player I would immediately do that without hesitation(which is really the smart thing to do when a player annoys you). All 30 start to report him all at once.
\nLess than a minute later, he gets booted off the server as if he’s been banned. When he comes back, he discovers he’s been silenced (aka his chat features have been muted).
\nWhat he was ‘testing’ is to see if what Blizzard is claiming to be doing in that article, of doing an investigation before<\/em> issuing the silence. Clearly it wasn’t, yet people in the comments section began to get wise and felt he deliberately did this, just to get views on the video.<\/p>\n

He also showed, that this presents a problem that the system was<\/em> being abused back then. But what if this was isolated and it’s never happened since? I did my best to look for any relevant videos of the system, yet nothing else of others reporting of having the same thing was happening to them. The only other things I found was one that was nothing but a “I TOLD you so!!” response(that was also made two months ago) of what happened to Asmongold. There was also one other two month ago thing explaining the system in more detail(including his thoughts of why it became a thing).
\nWith no recent video proof the system was still being abused, I did some local research of asking a few people who play WoW, that I knew that would give me honest opinion. And what I concluded are two things: one of them didn’t even know about this system was until I showed him the link, and the other claims it’s not even being used on the ones it’s made to punish.
\nSo I don’t get it. Why even have the system, if it’s not even being used(or know it’s even a thing)? It feels like a waste of resources and manpower that could had gone to more important projects (instead of trying to be our parents). I actually expected both parties to not know what it is, which would had told me that they got rid of the silly thing (at least from their POV).<\/p>\n

So it’s hard to say if this is a real threat to legit players, or if it’s just business as usual. And since I couldn’t get any responses to help me, I’m just not going to care anymore. Not until it actually happens to me. If it does, then I have the proof I need.
\nBut even with said proof…what good will it do? There’s been reports of people complaining to Blizzard two months ago, that this is a bad thing. And then their thread gets downvoted to the point it disappears. And going from the news history, there doesn’t seem to be any plans of hotfixing the system to punish the abusers.
\nThere are also the people claiming that their freedom of speech is being ‘violated’ by this. Ahahaha.. right. Next time, fully read the TOU as you should be doing, and you might discover that they have the right to revoke your right to play. WoW is not a Democracy. You have no ‘freedoms’. You are not a special snowflake.<\/p>\n

That’s all I have to say about this matter. I need to now switch gears and get ready for the meetup to get to the next WP of the GNE in Elite Dangerous.<\/p>\n

.
\nUPDATE: Less than a month since I came back to WoW, and I have seen absolutely no abusing of said system. So it obviously was<\/em> an isolated case. That and I typically keep General and Trade switched off.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No, this isn’t about Blizzard giving the silent treatment, as it’s been announced by Bellular that they’ve been having weekly Q&A sessions before Legion’s release (and hope to do so in the future). That is a good thing. However, what … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60,58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other","category-pc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/benies-blogs.com\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/benies-blogs.com\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/benies-blogs.com\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/benies-blogs.com\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/benies-blogs.com\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6631"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"http:\/\/benies-blogs.com\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6631\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6819,"href":"http:\/\/benies-blogs.com\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6631\/revisions\/6819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/benies-blogs.com\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/benies-blogs.com\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/benies-blogs.com\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}