Hello do you play SWTOR...? And did you get squelched for unfair reasons.....? Would love to hear players thoughts on this matter. Do you think its fair how you may be a subscriber only to be silenced for 24 hours for unknown reasons or even unfair reasons.... Would love to hear comments

The reason for being squelched is (assuming it works correctly) fairly well-understood. It happens when, for whatever reason, ten(0) people /report you, typically for spamming, but they might for variety claim that you were harrassing someone or being generally rude.

 

It doesn't have to be *true*(1), because the squelching system is totally automated.

 

(0) The correct number might not be ten, but that's what I recall people saying.

 

(1) SWTOR lacks one thing that Final Fantasy 14 has in this context. In FF14, when you say you want to report someone for gold-seller spamming, you get a pop-up that warns you that making false accusations of this type will result in Squenix taking action against your account. SWTOR doesn't have that, so false /reports are consequence-free for the reporter.

The only squelching I've seen is on newbie planets - outside that - that's as much as I know.

And good luck getting the fools at customer service to talk to you in terms of educating you on how that works.

All I wanted to do was educate my guild on what to do and what not to do.

 

Frankly the system isn't working - its players abusing the system and breaking things at that point.

 

If its strictly automated - linking items or guilds on newbie worlds will get you squelched at some point.

As to when/how - your guess is good as mine.

Again....you can thank customer service for their ineptitude on that subject.

Its not as aggressive as it should be (referring to clear trolls who easily sidestep the consequences of this very tool) and it is too easy to abuse under circumstances that are not ideal. Still, I prefer it be a thing if it had a more manual touch to it and the reason were clear.

i've managed to squelch one person my whole swtor career, if you get squelched you have done something very wrong. I literally watched someone troll fleet for 8 hours and not get squelched lol

The reason for being squelched is (assuming it works correctly) fairly well-understood. It happens when, for whatever reason, ten(0) people /report you, typically for spamming, but they might for variety claim that you were harrassing someone or being generally rude.

 

It doesn't have to be *true*(1), because the squelching system is totally automated.

 

(0) The correct number might not be ten, but that's what I recall people saying.

 

(1) SWTOR lacks one thing that Final Fantasy 14 has in this context. In FF14, when you say you want to report someone for gold-seller spamming, you get a pop-up that warns you that making false accusations of this type will result in Squenix taking action against your account. SWTOR doesn't have that, so false /reports are consequence-free for the reporter.

 

This would be the correct action. But unfortunately, SWTOR doesn't do that.

To be fair, squelching is just another Bio-bandaid fix because EA/BioWare don’t want to spend money on proper game moderators. If we had real in game moderators, the auto squelch system wouldn’t be needed.

But if you have nothing, then you have credit spammers and trolls who take over chat and make it basically unusable. And while some people unfairly abuse the squelch system to troll others, it was much worse before they introduced it.

i've managed to squelch one person my whole swtor career, if you get squelched you have done something very wrong. I literally watched someone troll fleet for 8 hours and not get squelched lol

That just says that nobody (er, not enough people) could be bothered to /report that someone.

Hello do you play SWTOR...? And did you get squelched for unfair reasons.....? Would love to hear players thoughts on this matter. Do you think its fair how you may be a subscriber only to be silenced for 24 hours for unknown reasons or even unfair reasons.... Would love to hear comments

 

Yes. 9 year paying customer who will never pay EA for anything ever again, because brigading is the norm for swtor, and there are no customer service solutions. The bullies win here, and that's not acceptable. The report function is absolutely being abused, constantly, and I'm being regularly denied the full product I pay for while the bullies gloat about it.

 

I'd love to add a caveat to "will never pay EA for anything ever again" to the effect of "unless they fix it", but they have no intention of fixing it, it's been going on for a long time.

 

Trolls rule SWTOR, and EA is fine with it.

To be fair, squelching is just another Bio-bandaid fix because EA/BioWare don’t want to spend money on proper game moderators.

 

Unless you want to properly pay those proper game moderators, you'll be paying people dirt and not a living wage, because the number of people necessary to monitor live chat 24/7 across all servers all planets all instances would be huge.

 

Imagine even if an automated system funneled everything to a moderator's console. That crap would fly past their screen so fast they'd be totally overwhelmed, and any system that generated what would have to be tens of thousands of auto-generated tickets on a nearly daily basis every time one player stole another player's sweetroll would require a full-time (24/7/365) army of moderators.

 

Call it a band-aid, but unless EA is running a world-wide charity to pay under-employed people for their time managing such a system, I don't see it happening.

 

Yes, there are other games with in-game moderators. I sometimes bump into them where they're just hanging around in the middle of town in EQ2, usually for just having gotten several sudden reports about vile behavior.

 

And yes, I remember being contacted in-game by Bioware staff replacing a weapon or something for me, telling me log out of SWTOR and it'll be there when I log back in again.

 

But I know if I logged onto EQ2 right this minute and all by my wittle self randomly reported someone for doing something, just making something up to report them, the last thing that would happen is an in-game moderator manifesting as a ginormous (read: unattainably huge) shadowknight sitting on an equally ginormous fire-breathing horse busy popping the reported person out of the game.

 

I've witnessed an in-game moderator in EQ2 zap a player out of existence for foul behavior after many people reported him. Doesn't happen with a single report.

 

Collective reporting -- enough people reporting someone that it rises to the point of intriguing a moderator -- is exactly what squelching does. Handles collective reporting.

 

How you feel about EA not paying a massive army of moderators to replace the squelch system is another matter.

Edited December 26, 2021 by xordevoreaux

Squelching .... What do you think of it....?

In 8 years of solid playing, I've never been squelched.

 

If my experience is any example, the typical player just trundling along, playing the game, not engaging in toxic conversations or slinging slurs in gen chat, not griefing a group of players about to smack a boss, not starting internecine warfare in a guild, not tossing guild or trade spam every 2 seconds, not griefing players in PvP—basically not being obnoxious—has zero to worry about.

 

If the day ever comes that I'm squelched—whether I ever know why—I'll unearth this thread and mention it.

I don't expect to.