Heroes of the Storm Forums

Hello,

First of all, I'm not talking only about my penalty on Heroes of the Storm, I'm talking about how is Customer Support treating their customers without respect and how is Blizzard punishing players in such a unacceptable way. I just want this to stop - there are a lot of players that are such in situation and they are treated in the same way.

I would like to tell you about my personal experience with Blizzard Customer Support and their Report system. Before saying "you were rightly punished" just read all what I wrote and check all the evidences that shows that I'm totally right. I have nothing personal with Blizzard or with the Customer Support, I really love their games and I appreciate their work, I'm one of their customers since 2003.

I've sent many tickets where I explained my problem and the answer was always the same.
Even when I'm trying to appeal the penalty their system shows that I was reported for nothing, I didn't wrote anything.
TL;DR:

I turned the chat off since I saw lately a lot of players that were complaining the report system. With the team chat disabled you can't write to your teammates and also you can't see what are they writting. That being said, I couldn't chat at all. I also never chatted in a lobby chat and a public chat channel (such as General Chat, Storm League Chat, etc.) - the only chat where I chatted was the party chat where I chatted only with my own brother. Customer Support refuse to prove that I really was disrespectful to my teammates.
1) It is often hard to actually get evidence of abusive chat from Customer Support.

There have been plenty of times where they've shut down Silence/Suspend/Ban appeals with automated cut-and-paste replies about how the action was taken in accordance with the code of conduct and won't be overturned, then refused to give any evidence. They have argued that due to their policies they never reveal details of account investigations beyond what is in the initial email, when this in itself is in breach of EU data protection law and EU GDPR, which gives a person the right to access information held on them.

Want sources?

• This response a pro player got to his silences, although to be fair he was legitimately acting like an ***hat in his correspondence towards Blizzard - https://imgur.com/0yBZWWj


2) Blizzard's Customer Support currently rejects account action appeals for trivial reasons.

A popular Russian streamer had his Silence appeal rejected for the 'sarcastic remakes about a player's skills'. As shown in the actual chat logs, he was not being sarcastic, insulting or offensive at all. Even then, banning somebody for 'sarcasm' for just one day is unacceptable, let alone the weeks and months that some players have been getting.

Another player's appeal was rejected despite Blizzard finding no evidence of abusive chat. Instead they justified the chat ban by arguing that the community perceived his gameplay as being toxic. If he didn't commit a chat offence at all then why was he silenced?

Here is a screenshot from a recent forum thread where a guy complained that Blizzard upheld his four month silence. The 'abusive chat' wasn't even worthy of a 1 day, let alone 4 MONTH silence.


3) The system is apparently automated.

When Blizzard first announced the Silence penalty, they stated that silences will only be applied 'after investigation', yet there is plenty of evidence that the system seems to be entirely automated and arbitrarily slaps players with silence penalties after they've been reported an arbitrary number of times.

Want evidence of this? There are plenty of professional and amateur players who have been punished very swiftly and unfairly due to abuse of the system. Some have been due to accumulating troll reports, while others are due to one player throwing around loads of reports on multiple accounts to get a player swiftly banned within minutes.

• Grubby (one of the most mannered and sportsmanlike professional gamers in existence) got silenced live on stream - https://clips.twitch.tv/InventiveAmazingJellyfishCoolStoryBro (it seems that the video is no longer available, but I spoke with Grubby and he said that he has the video saved on his PC and he is pleased to provide it to me)

• WoW streamer Asmongold (a staunch critic of the system) gets silenced live on stream for typing "I love WoW" after bogus reports are thrown at him - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skWzi3o4oGI

• Kendric gets silenced - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HalgaRxFAEk

• Chu8 gets silenced - https://clips.twitch.tv/SpinelessSmoggyKathyRaccAttack

• A r/WoW poster gets slapped with a silence and forced name change after a multiboxer spams bogus reports at him with all 20 of his characters - https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/7p71hu/tifu_by_ganking_a_20man_multiboxer/

• Korean pros including Bongsoon, Jiwooojima, Bluebeetle, and King get slapped with bogus silence penalties due to report system abuses - https://www.reddit.com/r/heroesofthestorm/comments/6vb85a/korea_issue_streamers_in_korea_are_silenced_for/

• Player who was unfairly silenced 20+ times and appealed all of said penalties - https://www.reddit.com/r/heroesofthestorm/comments/6hwrtr/unfairly_silenced_20_times/

• Player successfully appeals 4 out of 6 penalties on his account - https://www.reddit.com/r/heroesofthestorm/comments/5ck24j/the_autosilence_problem_my_customer_support/

Even if Blizzard didn't automatically ban players who got reported often but rather flagged them for investigation, the system would still be a joke. It means that you can get away with being a toxic sack of **** as long as you don't receive a lot of reports.

There is plenty more evidence that was posted in this public Google Docs file. This was once posted in the EU Official Silence System Megathread which Blizzard actually nuked from orbit because the thread was being 'derailed.


4) Accounts become unusable due to the escalating nature of the their penalties.

By punishing players for this long for what is frankly not bad chat, it encourages players to either intentionally feed and throw games out of resentment towards Blizzard, make smurf accounts to essentially evade account penalties and reset the progress/MMR of their account, or just outright quit the game.

When the game's player base and Twitch viewer base is already declining from how bad the current meta is, the last thing you want to do is victimise players for trying to take the game seriously.

I saw lately a lot of threads about smurfs, where people were complaining about the smurfs, and I agree with them.


5) Blizzard have been ignoring feedback and criticism about the report system.

This penalty has been in place since 2015 and since its introduction has been criticised quite heavily by streamers and professional gamers alike, with Asmongold being one of its biggest critics. Yet Blizzard haven't addressed any of this feedback. If anything, they've claimed that the system was a success. They have even been locking threads on the official forums that have raised complaints about the system.

Even in a AMA post on Reddit, the Blizzard developers did not answer a single question on the report system, even though that was one of the core topics of the AMA and recent developer blog that Alan Dabiri posted.

Thank you.