I wanted to talk about the way blizzard silences accounts since I got silenced for 12 days for the first time since I started playing in 2018. This was a misunderstanding because no I wasn’t telling the tank player he’s trash, but that Mauga as a hero was trash. Anyway…
So 12 days is a very long periods and it feels horrible. You can’t talk, you can’t chat, you can’t communicate, that’s the whole point. For some reason when the new season got released, my mute was gone, but after a day it came back (probably a sync bug?), which makes things even more frustrating.
So what did I learn from being silenced and how did it affect my games:
CONS:
You’re being backcapped? Well sorry you can’t tell your teammates and pinging won’t help!
Your supports are being flanked? Well sorry you can’t tell your teammates and pinging won’t help!
You want to thank a teammate, or just say ‘gg’? Well sorry you can’t tell your teammates!
PROS:
When you’re being flamed for one reason or another you can’t answer, so it’s pretty much like ignoring it, and you won’t be saying something stupid
So basically, when you’re getting silenced, it will mostly affect your teammates since you cannot communicate at all, other than with voicelines or by pinging.
I’m curious to see what others have to say on the topic.
I generally only communicate through pings and voicelines during a match.
Because several people have the chat turned off anyway.
Sometimes there’s a match where i mention if a specific enemy seems to be the one causing issues for my team. “Could we focus (so and so)?” “That (heroname) needs to die”
Voicechat in the game hasn’t really been a thing since OW2. Matches back in OW were very much teambased with synergy. Clearly something is wrong with this game as no one appears to use VC anymore. Play Siege, play CS, play Hell Let Loose, and voice comms are a thing.
So true. I sometimes gets a funny guy in QP, or random coms after 7min of match in comp but that’s about it. It’s like it doesn’t matter anymore for some reason.
I would suggest a theory that the active voice chat users are still there in the game, but there’s also a few hundred million new users who don’t use voice on top of them.
Sometimes i have one or two people on voice but they’re not speaking english and when i ask “english please” they all just stop talking altogether.
The way i see it is, if i’m bothering to communicate in a language that isn’t one of the two local official languages (ergo a third language), so should they if they want to be understood.
I find that, if you give basic shot calls and it is helping them “win”, people are a lot more active. Which sounds really obvious.
But so often, people make to many calls that are counter productive. That is before any other “noise” you might get on voice comms.
I think being silenced, will actually make you a better player in the long run. You have to learn how to pay attention to what is going on around you and react to it. You learn not to do anything stupid too, as you can’t ask for backup… If you can work on that, when you do get into an environment where calls are helpful, you will already be pre-empting a lot of the information, thus reducing the reaction times.
Ultimately, in lower elos the best calls you can work on are tracking what ults have been used, and who’s likely to have one for the next engagement. If you can track that, even if you don’t communicate it, you will improve a massive amount.
So, if you are playing to improve as a player, I’d say being silenced (or manually turning all the comms off), is actually better.
I really doubt there is anything here to benefit him in being a better player. He got silenced for saying that Mauga as a hero was trash, he was saying it socially rather than making a call.
OP has hit the nail on the head with the cons, and summary.
Either way, OW2 has no real comms/team synergy these days unlike back in the OW days. You can see why if you get silenced for socially stating that a certain tank is trash.
Stating that a hero is trash is not really helpful as far as team communication goes either.
Such topics are better suited for hero selection phase and used to be conversed at the end during the vote cards. But during gameplay it’s not very helpful.
We don’t know when he said that. It could of been at the start of a match, at the end, during a regroup phase.
It’s specific because I was being specific. I am comparing two games, OW, and the newer game OW2 based on my previous experiences.
I don’t see this as being ‘Same applies’ - CS1.6, CS Source, CS:GO, CS2, all these I have experienced my matches to have healthy comms throughout the games life cycles.
Whereas OW > OW2, the comms have completely dropped off - again, from my experience.
Only comparable if the previous ones are also free to play. As not all free players have the means to get proper headsets or microphones and thus don’t join voice chats even to listen.
CS:GO and CS2 are free to play. The previous versions were paid for, but very cheap when compared to other competitive at the time. All editions appear to have healthy comms.
Different kind of playerbase as well.
I prefer ow over other shooters because of the colourful and fantastical characters and world.
It’s visually very different from counterstrikes and battlefields.
And i don’t remember a game where at least 1 or 2 people weren’t on voice chat. No one just wants to be the first person to speak and thus the channel stays silent XD
I don’t say anything. The game has become 100% anti-social. Even when someone flames me. I just report mass quantities of people. Every time I login I get a thank you message.
It really hasn’t. “100% anti social” is a complete over exaggeration.
I played 11 games last night. There were comms in all but 1 game, and even when I was getting utterly dunked on in one of my early games, there was good banter between the teams.
You get out what you are willing to put in. If you enter a game and say nothing, you’ll probably get a quiet game. If you go in and say Hi and chat, people will engage.
Well done, you can see what he is trying to get over on this thread.
I do exactly that, I say hi, and I’d say 95% onwards, do not respond. Other games however, you do get comms. I guess it helps where there is just one channel, not multiple choice.
I had a game 2 days ago, a duo of supports wouldnt heal me as tank, I make the tracer move and hop from heal pack to heal pack.
10sec on the clock, we are holding first point as defense, nice team fight, me as dva and zen left alive, 2 enemy dps rush in, i kill one, no help from the zen. He’s on his own movie chasing the one dude, all you have to do is throw that orb at me!! Its overtime, zen is chasing the last enemy dps, i get demeched, rest of enemy team arrives and takes point.
I said “all you had to do is gimme the heal orb and the game was ours”, both of the supports lose their s*** after that, flame me to kingdom come the whole match. One of them picks wife beater and keeps pulling me out of fights just to troll me. I finally get annoyed and reply “you should play singleplayer games, since teamplay is a foreign concept to you”. I still get potg with all highest stats, but we closely lose the game. F. i even peeled hard to saved their lives a few times.
Thennnn, they both spam “report tank” in open chat in the closing moments. Im hopeful no one did that and knew what was going on. But this happens too often.
I got a 12 day silence as well, it was supposed to end some time today an hour or two ago, and while i can now use text chat, voice chat is still muted and it tells me so any time i enter a match, but there isnt a red box covering up the chat that tells me how much time i have left. I tried searching for some threads with other people having problems with account silences, but i can only find google links and searching for silenced on the forum page gives me nothing (srry for the essay)