New Silence Penalty Coming to World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft offers many opportunities to engage with other players in a variety of ways and to help support positive experiences in these engagements we wanted to inform you of a new silence penalty we will be implementing with the pre-expansion patch for Legion. Depending on the type of report, players who are found to be abusive in chat or engage in inappropriate chat behaviors may be silenced from engaging in certain ways within the game.

The Silence Penalty

Following the Legion pre-expansion, any player who is reported multiple times under the Spam or Abusive Chat categories will, after investigation, receive an account-wide silence penalty. While this penalty is active, the silenced player will find that their ability to chat with others is greatly limited.

Silenced Players Are Unable to:

Silenced Players Are Able to:

  • Talk in Instance Chat (Raid, Party, and Battlegrounds)
  • Talk in global channels that are auto joined (such as General or Trade)
  • Create Calendar Invites/Events
  • Send in-game mail
  • Send Party Invitations
  • Send War Game Invitations
  • Send Invitations to Duel
  • Update a Premade Group Listing
  • Create a New List for a Premade Group
  • Whisper to friends (both WoW friends and Battle.net Friends)
  • Reply to Whispers from Non-friends
  • Party/Raid Chat (with Invited Players)
  • Create Parties and Raids
  • Talk in Global Channels that have a moderator
  • Share Quests
  • Sign up for a pre-made group

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.

Silenced players will be receiving a notification when attempting to send a message to a channel in which they have been restricted.

By using the in-game report tool to identify players who may be engaging in inappropriate interactions within the various channels, you’ll be helping create the type of community we all want to take part in.