Hello, trade chat, my old friend; I’m turning you back on again. Because the team on World of Warcraft has addressed your issues at last, so the players who were filling you with spam will not be banned, but will make sounds of silence.
The new silence penalty is being rolled out with the game’s pre-patch for Legion and will hopefully provide a useful midpoint between banning players and simply silencing those who others find continually offensive. When a player is reported for offensive behavior in chat and the report holds up under review, a silence penalty will be implemented, preventing the player from inviting others to groups, talking in general channels, or sending mail to other players.
At first implementation, the silence penalty will last for 24 hours. Each subsequent silence penalty will double, with no upward limit. Your 10th silence penalty would last for about 512 days, or just about a year and a half. So for players who just can’t stop dropping ethnic slurs in chat, there’s a means to get them to hush up. No word on whether Simon & Garfunkel play if someone under the penalty attempts to use a forbidden chat, but we can certainly hope so.
