So, I made a burner account and tested how long it would take to get silenced, or banned by simply copy and pasting a message that in total is non toxic and if anything positive, but is also something people don't like to hear.

Obviously the account was a smurf, I am masters on main on all 3 roles. I had the burner in gold in the ELO reset to test the following.

The experiment started with copying and pasting the following message into the public chat

Yo yo!! Good luck and have fun, and remember! The game is dead, and comp is pointless!! So don't be toxic and instead have a fun game! :D

Then remaining silent for the rest of the game. Whilst also demolishing, but making sure I won/lost certain games to remain at a consistent balance. (Mostly because I believe gold/plat players are actually the most toxic and most likely to abuse the report system, as I have always found higher ELO players enjoy banter and chatting, and also are intelligent enough to realise you can mute someone, or mute the chat if you have a problem. Obviously only reporting if someone is racist or actually abusive (as some people tend to be).

So, anyways for the test. It took 2 days of play before I was silenced, which consisted of a 4 hour session and a 2 hour session. So in total 6 hours, I wasn't counting the games but I'm pretty sure is averagely about 30 games if assuming 5 games per hour.

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I then obviously out of interest sent the message I had copied and pasted to the blizzard team in an appeal ticket, asking if there was something wrong with the statement? BOLD MOVE I KNOW :)

I mean, although its something they don't want to hear, sadly it has a partial truth, and isn't considered toxic in nature, if anything it provokes healthy response....

You would think.

Nope, the 1st email was the automated response (that everyone seems to be getting), and when challenged further, the blizzard team reported back saying that I had simply "broken rules" whereas they couldn't tell me where I had broken them.... Despite highlighting their T&C. But we all know blizzard isn't know for its competence.

Anyways, on average I actually had more negative response to the comment than positive, people would use racial slurs, or "fuck you" or other short messages basically showing their toxicity immediately. 2 in 3 games there were toxic people. And I'd say usually around 2 a game.

However on the beneficial side of this, there were also people that said "totally true" "Respect" etc etc. Either mixed in with the toxic or on the off game where there was no toxicity.

My findings after this proceeded further to find that the games where people had replied toxicly at the beginning, were the games where there were flaming, and should the enemy team win, they would say "ez" or "dif". Now obviously I don't actually think any of them statements are toxic, if anything they're only egocentric and show lack of faith in ones own abilities. However peoples opinions can differ on that!

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As a note I did another bit of an experiment during this, where I recorded the names and ranks of all players that blamed myself (the smurf) for the difference in the game... having been 3 ranks above them. This was by ONLY playing tank?! Out of the averaged 30 games, I had a documented number of 12 games in which lower rank players blamed myself, for the difference. Because its very easy to "blame the tank."

Conclusion:

I enjoyed this experiment and honestly, it showed the following:

1. The report system is VERY flawed and abusable.
2. The hatred and toxicity of players can be seen from an early stage
3. Averagely 2/3 of games became toxic, and were by the same people who were toxic at the start.
4. Lower ranked players will try and blame anyone and everyone else for their failures, in 30 games 15 won and 15 lost... 12 people tried to blame the tank (a better player) thats 4/5 of games... Which is hilarious.

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People should ignore toxic players, mute them, or just avoid them... its that simple! And the blizzard support team should be better :)

Thank you for reading if you got this far, and I hope this really does open the eyes of blizzard to really fix the actual toxicity and report abuse problems in the game.

Let me know if you thought this was an ethical experiment, and if you would have changed or altered any of the variables to make it a fairer (or more interesting) test!