You May Not Data Mine Blizzard Products Or Services.
Except as permitted through authorized use of the Blizzard Developer APIs, You will not perform any data-mining, scraping, crawling, or use any processes that sends automated queries to Blizzard or any Blizzard game, service, or website, or use any other similar methods or tools to gather or extract data other information from Blizzard or any Blizzard game or service.
What are automated queries in this case? Are people not allowed to make scripts that perform automatic api calls to refresh their data every hour? Where in the documentation for the api would someone with little experience read to learn about what’s allowed?
What is an automated query? An automated query is a request that is sent to a computer, server, an application, or any other device but is typically generated from software like a daemon, processes or services, malware, viruses, or ordinary computer software.
so a program interfacing with the api and modifying game file addon or otherwise would be violate the tos and considered botting or scripting and will get you banned when discovered
and before you mention it TSM requires the user to click a button to update the program then the user has to update the game by logging in an out or reloading.
Where the user has to click update it is not automated.
hope this helps these are the conclusions i have come to with my research
I believe the link I gave is for the web api, so this is more of a discussion for the out of game api. I could be wrong though.
Isn’t there an exemption for automation given the first line of the paragraph?
Except as permitted through authorized use of the Blizzard Developer APIs
I know other programs like addon managers and the tsm desktop client will edit game files to update addon data. I don’t see how anyone could use the auction house api without violating the automation rule without the first sentence saying the dev api is safe to use.
For creating an online database of all current auctions, keep historical data and run statistics, monitor and create email alerts for a desired item, etc
All valid and safe uses of the AH API that doesn’t interface with the game client.
I believe the API IS the exemption in this context. This portion is about acquiring data, not integrating it. You can acquire any data through the API, but ONLY through the API.
You cannot crawl/scrape data from Blizzard’s websites and you cannot iterate requests using in-game APIs.
My guess is whatever got you banned had nothing to do with the web API. It was probably detected by the battle net/wow client either for suspicious activity in your computer or abnormal addon behavior, and those are covered by World of Warcraft ToS not the API ToS.
I thought about our last interaction in previous posts and I believe the way the X99 addon cached the item keys might be considered an automation since it queries all items present in the addon file upon opening the AH interface. While it does wait for lua events between calls, it does not require user interaction which may be a violation of the ToS. Again, nothing to do with the web API and everything to do with in-game LUA/XML api.
For anyone reading this who might still be using GSA/X99: It is NEVER a good idea to use an outdated software, specially when they were intentionally removed from public domain for safety purposes. Any change in Blizzard policy or even in detection methods can render a previously safe working addon into a ToS violation.
In response to your comment, I also had concerns about the web API’s involvement in my ban. If the detection system identified GSA and treated it as a bot, it would make sense for them to revoke its API access. However, the phrasing of the ban being related to third-party tools still puzzles me. Shouldn’t there be a separate rule specifically addressing in-game addons?
I’m curious if there are programs available that can display the interaction between different programs. For instance, I use Wireshark to monitor network packets, which allows me to observe when Blizzard accesses my program files. It’s an ongoing process as long as I’m logged into Battle.net and it seems they’re checking every folder on my pc.
Do you have any insights or suggestions regarding this? If this isn’t a targeted ban because of my gold, I still feel like I can form a valid appeal if I can gather enough evidence.
It seems that PBS performs a similar function. It also caches item keys from previous scans into the main.lua file in its Data file. In fact, I can manually edit the item keys in Notepad++ by adding or removing items that are not locked into the main database. Perhaps the way X99 specifically searches for the exact auction ID is what triggered the suspicions. However, it’s worth mentioning that I have multiple WoW clients running simultaneously, and only the ones with gold on them have received a ban.
I’m interested to hear your thoughts on this matter and whether you have any suggestions or insights to share. Thank you for your input.
There are, they are covered by the World of Warcraft terms of services.
It would not make any sense for the API ToS to have anything related to any specific game client since those have their own means of acquiring data and their own security measures.
Like I said, the use of the web APIs did not get you banned. If the API ToS was enforced on some rule you would only lose access to the APIs.
There are no bots when you have APIs, GSA was merely querying the API on a schedule, it is an automation/microservice/job whatever you wanna call it, but it is within the API terms of service. Anyone can query the AH API data as long as they respect the API quota limit, which is 36k request per hour (AH related endpoints consume 25 per request since the commodities update).
Anything non blizzard is a third-party tool, including addons. By the WoW ToS You are responsible for anything accessing your account, that includes addons. In theory they could even ban you for using addon updaters. Of course they probably have a whitelist for non-harmful tools.
Lets not forget how they banned people for using public and widely available realm hopping addons at the time.
Even this could have been perceived as a manipulation of game files. So it is impossible to determine the actual cause for a ban.
I doubt that. X99 didn’t search for an auction ID as it is impossible with the in-game API, it used to search for all auctions matching the same criteria and iterate over its results. This means in-game it is equivalent to someone scrolling down the auctions page, selecting a row and bidding.
This by itself is a red flag for botting. Why would a normal player have multiple instances of wow running unless they are doing something shady ? Even if you were manually tending to each account, multiple clients connected from the same IP address and farming gold could easily be perceived as gold selling operators. Please note I’m not implying your use wasn’t legit, I’m just saying how this could have been interpreted by an automated or even human reviewer.
Unfortunately I don’t have anything else to add unless warn again to anyone using outdated/modified version of a discontinued project to stop doing that just to be on the safe side.
Using a Sniping addon on alt accounts might have pissed off support but there are a few people running 20 or more at once. I’m surprised they haven’t been banned yet out of pure suspicion if that’s all it takes for them to determine someone’s selling gold.