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Abusive communication warnings are issued to accounts that receive an excessive number of in-game reports for abusive communication.
If you continue to receive in-game reports for abusive communication after the warning you may receive a communication penalty, but there are no effects on your account as the result of a warning.
Communication penalties are issued to accounts that continue to receive excessive reports for abusive communication after being warned.
Accounts with communication penalties are muted by default on all servers they join and cannot communicate with other users via voice or text chat unless they are manually unmuted from the scoreboard.
The only way to remove a communication penalty from your account is to earn XP on official Valve servers. Until you have earned enough XP the penalty will remain on your account.
Subsequent communication penalties will require more XP to remove than previous communication penalties, meaning you will not be able to communicate via voice or text chat for longer periods of time. Accounts receiving excessive communication penalties may be permanently muted on all Valve servers.
No. Communication warnings and penalties cannot be appealed or manually removed from accounts.
No. Communication warnings and penalties were designed with checks in place to ensure they are only issued as a result of legitimate reports.
A number of factors are taken into account before communication penalties are issued. If you have reported a user and no action has been taken on their account, it is because we are not able to corroborate your report or the data we have confirms no action should be taken at this time.
Reporting a user for abusive communication will mute them by default and you should no longer see their in-game text chat or hear their voice chat. These actions were put in place to reduce the effect users have on your in-game experience, and we regularly evaluate reports from the community in an effort to appropriately issue communication penalties.