No. in social games it is community that eventually decides. If you’d spam less, you’d get silenced less. Stop acting as victim, when you are part of the problem other players do not like.
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The amount of people i see purchasing boosts make me really doubt that 99% number. Im more siding with you that 99% are against spam in trade chat (or the lfg tool. Which is infact forbidden. I advise anyone to use an auto report addon for such groups) rather than being against boosts themself.
Incredible how snowflakey the wow community is when its about boost selling lol.
Quite a few people believe you did something wrong if getting muted is a regular occurence for you.
You post your message every 2 minutes and 30 seconds. So do a dozen other boosters. Which means it isn’t 2 minutes and 30 seconds between these sort of adverts but 10 seconds at best.
That is annoying indeed and makes trade chat unusable.
I can see why people report it and they are just as much in the right as you are. You are of course allowed to spam your boosting service but they also have every right to vote against it.
One thing I’d change is that I’d lock people out of only the general, trade, say, yell, and whisper channels if they are muted. Let them use battlenet, party, and raid chat.
Spamming 0-24 trade chat with 50+ people hardly called “trading”
Thank you, it’s been a pleasure to have a conversation with you.
That would be the case if we were talking about a private chat, such as Guild chat, however, for Public chats, it is Blizzard who makes the rules, not the community.
Lets take a look then at another very social game, where trading is flourishing: Warframe. In that game, there is a seperate chat room for trading (just like in WoW in Capital cities), where you are only allowed to sell items and services. They also happen to have a 120 second slow-mode on, because in one region, hundreds, even thousands use the trade chat at once. If someone is caught posting the wrong thing, or floods the trade chat on purpose with extra lines to push others out of competition (which is also essentially spam), or any of the other wrong stuff they listed in their ToS, then they are given a strict mute from using any Public chats.
In WoW, trade chat also has it’s rules, and within that, boosting has it’s rules too, very similar to those of Warframe, without of course, the slow mode on. Blizzard decided what goes into the trade chat or not, it is a public chat, the community has no control over what is moderateable on ANY Public chats. Selling boosting on trade chat while adhering to the rules is not a bannable offense. However, since the reporting System is broken, the players CAN actually decide that they want to ban you. And remember, players can falsely report and soft-ban others whenever they want, without any reason.
Now I’m fully aware that a lot of players want to get rid of boosting, and they raised their voice about it, and while it is absolutely stupid to think that boosting is bad, it is up to Blizzard if they want to ban boosting or not.
I’d also like to add that people who are actively making anal jokes, spamming thunderfury, discussing furry fantasies and whatnot on trade chat are more breaking the ToS than any trade advertiser does.
That’d be lovely, as I do think the current muting system is a bit too harsh.
And I’d like to nail down why exactly that is. The most common argument I saw is that we are giving our customers an unfair advantage (imagine saying that to a guy who’s selling mythic IE runs) by boosting them through +10-15’s, or heroic raids. That is inherently not true, as boosters themselves need to be very well geared, and very skilled, and with a decent raiding and rio background in order to provide a good service. Boosters are usually people who are on top of the gearing curve. In the big picture, it’s just a community driven catch-up mechanic.
The second most common argument I saw is that they’re taking up tradechat, which I already explained in this thread (and in this very comment) why that is wrong.
Some quotes from Blue Posts on the old forums (had to peel these from Reddit as the old links don’t work anymore sadly!) on what constitutes spam:
It isn’t necessarily by the minute/second, Kiwi, though that is the more common determination… how many times something is said in a channel per/minute, etc… If the chat channel is moving slowly, it could be seen as spam if your message is the most prevalent.
“(4) Sending repeated unsolicited or unwelcome messages to a single user or repeatedly posting similar messages in a Chat area, including but not limited to continuous advertisements to sell goods or services;”
So frequency doesn’t necessarily matter, it’s mainly to do with the prevalence of your message and the boosting messages as a whole and the impact that they have on chat (which as I’m sure you’re aware, and which several other posters have pointed out, is mighty high due to the fact there is a small legion of boost sellers operating at any given time!).
One last blue post to bear in mind:
Don’t be spammy.
Don’t be a pain in the backside of your realm.
Follow those two simple guidelines, you’ll likely never cross that line. This really isn’t that difficult.
I know that offering a boost is technically offering a trade and so is warranted in trade chat under the current rules, but you’ve also got to bear in mind that there is a large section of the community that doesn’t like it and who will actively report you and your competitors when your messages take over trade as this is definitely a pain in the backside!
Still, players can get punished themselves for abusing the report feature so appeal it if you think you were reported for spamming for no reason, but I have a feeling that it would probably be upheld 
Well, the chat on Argent Dawn moves very quickly. My rule of minimum 150 seconds is seen as slow in a lot of cases. Other boosting advertisers (not naming names, as I don’t know if communities can be named here on the forums) advertise their stuff three times in that duration.
Which I don’t do a lot, as I spend most of my time outside Capitals, I only really use it 3-5 times until I find a customer.
But then how am I supposed to actually sell boosts? It’s an activity that a lot of people enjoy doing, and a lot of people buy. I’m essentially being locked out of one of my favorite activity, because 10+ people think that I am a pain in the back for selling mythic island runs.
You know what is a pain in the back? Being muted for doing nothing wrong. People spamming anal jokes and thunderfury whenever I’m trying to sell whatever it is I’m selling at that point. A lot of trading advertisers agree with me on this. It’s a sort of tug of war between people who despise boosting with passion, and those that are boosting within the ToS, and Blizzard does nothing about it.
And my appeal ticket is soon to be 6 days old now. I’m still waiting, Blizzard.
And by the way, I was reported for harassment. To quote the ToS (and the Code of Conduct:
Harassment, “griefing,” abusive behavior or chat, conduct intended to unreasonably undermine or disrupt the Game experiences of others, deliberate inactivity or disconnecting, and/or any other activity which violates Blizzard’s Code of Conduct or In-Game Policies.
When participating in communication of any kind (chat, voice communication, group finder), you are responsible for how you express yourself. You may not use language that could be offensive or vulgar to others.
Hate speech and discriminatory language is inappropriate, as is any obscene or disruptive language. Threatening or harassing another player is always unacceptable, regardless of language used. Violating any of these expectations will result in account restrictions. More serious and repeated violations will result in greater restrictions.
This is the advertisement I’m running:
/2 Selling Mythic IE runs for 5k gold per run! Come get your cap and cosmetics very fast, while you AFK! Can take up to two customers.
While it is sort of subjective what ruins the gameplay experience of others, a simple advertisement of me helping others by farming cosmetics for gold is not harassment. And the Code of Conduct also has this:
While we encourage you to report players that are behaving in a disrespectful manner, falsely reporting another player with the sole intent of restricting their gameplay is also unacceptable, and will result in penalties to your account.
As you said very clearly. But again, with how slow tickets are rolling, it is very hard to get my issue (and the whole reporting issue in general) solved, and since this is a subscription based game, I don’t have forever to wait to continue playing the game. My money is rolling away.
Who cares about other games ? Do people spam there to no end too ?
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I was trying to make a point that trading a public chat has pre-given rules by the company that made the game, not by the players. If you don’t break those rules, you should not be punished.
If you spam and annoy people to death, then why shouldn’t spambots be allowed to walk free ?
You can sell your services without becoming annoying, but half of the boost spam bots are as annoying as the guys spamming Thunderfury meme.
I think you are misinterpreting what spamming means - in a trading chatroom at least that is. A spammer in a trading chat is someone who is delibirately using way too many lines of text to push out others from the chat, and make their best effort to ALWAYS be seen by everyone. Not only is that actually annoying, they are also gaining an unfair advantage on the market by having their advertisement seen every time. If there is someone who actually is spamming, then report them. But don’t falsely report those who adhere to the rules, because Trade Chat isn’t a private chat.
Actually that (and the other NSFW one) is far less annoying than the wts boost adverts…
Eh. Equally bad imo, they’re all stupid pointless annoying messages.
But at least those two stop eventually, the boosters go on and on and on…
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Your sales require other people, so you have to mindful of dealing with other people and spamming public channels. Just because ‘other people are spamming too’ doesn’t really make it OK. If you want to see them get actioned for breaking rules you report them too, I end up spending 5-10 minutes while in main cities to make the chat readable without people advertising on lowbies for boost runs.
If you’re sure your advertisements are why you got in trouble then you either need to change your advertisements or change how you do them and how frequently you do them. It’s really that simple.
If you were to help get rid of the boosters that are on lowbies, advertising on your server instead of the server they actually play on - there’d be a lot less booster spam and people would be more willing to put up with only a couple people doing it.
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I never said that. I said that there are many other people using the trade chat, so the “requirement” for spamming changes with it as well. If I was to advertise on Ragnaros alliance, even using my advertisement macro every 15 minutes would be spam, because there are barely any people playing on Ragnaros alliance.
If they do actually break rules, I do report them.
What do I change on this? And how can I do it less frequently, when I was silenced 20 seconds after first pressing my advert macro?
However, I’m going to give Tahra’s and Drae’s suggestion a try for a temporary solution, which is creating a community, and advertising less often.
As far as I’m aware, it is within the ToS to advertise on a lowbie character (and on another server), however, the reason why some communities seem to flood trade chat is because they have a lot of advertisers and accounts to advertise on, each with their own unique advertisement. Individually, they don’t break the rules. If that wasn’t the case, you’d see a lot less “spam”.
I actually recall seeing a blue post on the forums saying that people cannot advertise on a server they don’t actively play on, so like a lowbie would clearly be one that doesn’t play on the server. level 1, 20, or 110’s being the most common. I’ve been trying to find it again through google searching to no avail, but I know I read it. Just can’t remember if it was from the EU forums or the US version.
As I said however, so many people are advertising boosts nonstop in those channels so people see yet another boost message pop up they’re already pretty done with the advertisements and just report to get rid of it. Which yes, in your case it could be considered unwarranted but anything that’s not a 3 hour squelch that’s auto applied means it was investigated by Blizzard.
I gotta look that up, damn. I’ll edit it in when I find it.
I mean, if I was actually silenced by a Blizzard employee based on me pressing my advertisement macro once (an ad that is within ToS), then I’d like to go down hard on them - that is assuming they will actually reply to my ticket. It’s been 6 days now…
You know they are overwhelmed with tickets right now yeah? They’ve even had to get German server GMs to come and help the English language GMs.
It’s down to covid and current world circumstances, more people playing = more issues = more tickets and I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that tickets about bans/silenced aren’t taking a priority over game play issues and such.
You also aren’t currently silenced are you? Because as I understand it, in game silences also prevent posting on the forums so perhaps you could take the community advice here as a thinking point and close your ticket to help ease the load of the GMs who are working from home right now to help keep our game running and keep us actually playing whilst we are also stuck at home unable to work due to either losing our jobs or being furloughed etc??
Give them a break for still actually doing their job in such difficult circumstances.