Players of online games, be it Halo, Call of Duty, Destiny, World of Warcraft or even Heroes of the Storm, can tell you stories of the obnoxious players they’ve run into. It always seems that there’s one or two per match, raid or heroic. Some may be having an off day and others, well, others may have turned being rude and obnoxious into an online art form.
Blizzard seems to understand this as the company will be offering new reporting options and penalties for those in Heroes of the Storm who get enough complaints. What is the penalty for abusing the chat system, you ask? Well, not being able to fully use the chat system.
When the new major patch drops, users who have been reported multiple times for spam or abusive chat reasons will receive the silence penalty, as it’s called. This penalty is for an initial 24-hour period and progressively doubles for every silent penalty given after. As Blizzard puts it:
This means that players who receive multiple silence penalties may find themselves unable to chat for a very, very long time.
While this penalty is active, the silenced player will find that their ability to chat with others is greatly limited. Silenced players will still be able to user party chat with invited player; create, request and suggest to join parties; manage friend requests; send whispers and reply to non-friend whispers; and issue in-game pings.
However, while you can reply to whispers from non-friends you can’t initiate whispers to non-friends. You also can’t use allied in-game chat, chat in hero-league draft lobbies and chat in general or custom channels. Blizzard will notify players with a silence penalty of how long they have remaining before they can use all the chat features again.
[clickToTweet tweet=”.@Blizzard to implement new penalties and reporting options for Heroes of the Storm. #HotS #Gaming” quote=”Players who receive the penalty will also be logged out of HotS after receiving the penalty. “]Players who receive the penalty will also be logged out of HotS after receiving the penalty. You will still get your rewards from the game including XP, gold and/or ranked points. Also, players who have received the penalty will see a new orange three-dot chat symbol on their avatar denoting they’ve been penalized. Other players will have the ability to see this as well.
Heroes of the Storm Reporting Options
As if that weren’t enough, the company also revamped its reporting features for the MOBA. They include:
- Abusive Chat
- Insults, cruelty, or ongoing harassment directed at one or more players.
- Hate speech
- Real life threats
- Intentionally Feeding
- Player intentionally and repeatedly gets their hero killed in order to anger allies or feed XP to the enemy team.
- AFK/Non-Participation
- Player is idle or inactive for an extended period of time during a game.
- Player is present, but has given up or refuses to take part in the game.
- Cheating/Botting/Hacking
- Suspicious behavior which indicates the player may be using third-party software or hack programs to gain an advantage during a game.
- Inappropriate Name
- Character names or BattleTags that are offensive, insulting, bypass the mature language filter, or are otherwise considered objectionable.
- Spam
- Excessively communicating the same phrase, similar phrases, or pure nonsense
- Blatant or repeated advertising for third party websites
Those of you who play Abathur or Murky shouldn’t worry though about being reported for non-participation or intentionally feeding by those who don’t know each characters’ gameplay mechanics. GMs will take heroes with unique mechanics into account and take action as such. Blizzard will also take into account those who send in false reports or those who frequently send out trivial complaints and take other necessary action as needed.
So if you’re one of the players who happens to find the wrong crowd to pal around with in Heroes of the Storm, rest assured knowing that Blizzard will help you reign them in a bit. Of course, if you are one of those players out to make others’ lives miserable, then know you’ll get your just desserts.
Would you like to see other companies revamp or add better reporting and harsher penalties to other online games? Let us know in the comments section below or on any of our social media accounts.
[button type=”link” link=”http://us.battle.net/heroes/en/blog/19818500/introducing-new-reporting-options-and-the-silence-penalty-9-7-2015JeI” variation=”btn-danger” target=”blank”]Source: Blizzard[/button]Last Updated on November 27, 2018.
