Well, this isn’t the first time this has come up…
Blizzard’s Western EULA is clear on this sort of thing, i.e. players found guilty of it can potentially have their accounts suspended or permanently banned.
Of course, that stance isn’t enforced and, even if it was, it’s not a global policy. They introduced the ability to AFK farm into the Chinese client. Yes, you read that right. They actually put this into the game client. You know, the thing they’ll ban Western players for, they coded into the game for Chinese players.
This is why, when they say they care about stamping out cheating behaviour in their games, you can’t trust what they say, only what they do. They introduced an official way to AFK farm into their own game code, but only for one region.
They made a public facing statement that automation is not allowed (for US / EU / Asia). Then they released patch notes that include automation in the game client itself for the Chinese version of the game.
So, they’re enabling the very thing they say they want to prevent.
So, hold on, am I getting this straight? If players on the US or EU servers automate gameplay, you’re going to give them suspensions / bans. Okay, fair enough. However, at the same same time you’re actually implementing ways for players on the China servers to have in-game automated gameplay?
Please clarify why US/EU players get (rightly) punished for automation but China players get in-game functionality to help them automate.
Basically, they say they’ll ban EU, US and Asia players for automating but then they put automation functions directly into the Chinese version of the game client to enable them to do it officially. And they wonder why Western customers think their policy isn’t clear / globally enforced.