With Overwatch, Blizzard has come down hard on toxic players which has thankfully resulted in a game that in today’s scene, is oddly enough very friendly and receptive of new players, versus other FPS games where you get called all manner of names for doing the wrong thing. Now it looks like Blizzard wants to apply that formula to World of Warcraft.As you might have heard, the Legion pre-patch is almost here and with the pre-patch, Blizzard plans on introducing tools to discourage toxic players. One of those features is the “Silence Penalty”, where any player who has been reported multiple times under the Spam or Abusive chat categories will be investigated, after which if found guilty of those infractions will be hit with an account-wide silence penalty.
As the name implies, this basically silences the player’s entire account. This will prevent them from chatting in instance chats, global channels, create calendar invites/events, send in-game mail, send party invitations, and so on. Basically it sounds like Blizzard wants to muzzle the player’s mouth as much as possible.
According to Blizzard, “The first time a player is silenced, their chat will be restricted for 24 hours. This duration will double for each silence penalty received after the first, and there is no maximum. This means that players who receive multiple silence penalties may find themselves unable to chat for a very, very long time.”
Will this be an effective tool? We suppose we’ll have to wait and see when it is implemented, but in the meantime on paper it does sound rather promising.
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