Blizzard finally implements an idea parents have used for centuries

[Xanthippe]

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[...].

[...]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.

Except that parents can't silence children (other than permanently, I suppose) - but they can and do double penalties, sometimes to great effect.

[Evildrider]

This is probably just another way to shoehorn a new "feature" into the expansion.   

[Rendakor]

This isn't new. I got muted for 8 hours for swearing in general chat back in Vanilla.

[Merusk]

She didn't mean the punishment type was new, but the implementation of doubling-down.

If you were squelched a second time in short-order it would be 16 hours. Under the old policy it would have been another 8.

[Rendakor]

Ahh, I see.

[Soulflame]

An excellent new tool for griefers.

[SurfD]

An excellent new tool for griefers.

Only if you think people will be able to grief silence someone past a review board.   According to the article the silence penalty only kicks in after a "review", so unless people are able to bait you into something that would get you silenced, i doubt griefers would be able to effectively use it to grief someone.

[Soulflame]

I suppose it depends on what the review board consists of.

I can't imagine it'll be actual people reviewing most cases.  Blizzard still has millions of subscribers, right?