I’ve played pretty consistently since 2016 without any account issues at all, spent thousands of hours in the game and hundreds on cosmetics and IRL merch and despite appealing with support my account has been permanently banned with any specific evidence provided (the most I got was a vague statement that I had supposedly broken the Code of Conduct and Terms of Use - but no specifics were given). For context, I mostly played QP, Mystery Heroes and various Arcade modes. I didn’t join voice chat and rarely typed in team or match chat, most of the time would just be to say ‘ggwp’.
At first I was pretty heartbroken about it, all of that time spent grinding out certain titles, playing at certain times for time limited events (loved my Lego Bastion skin) and I honestly believed Blizzard would at the very least tell me what I had supposedly done after so long - but no the account was just suddenly permanently banned and now I can never access it again.
It’s been a real wake up call about live service games in general for me, of course I’m aware that I never really owned any of the digital items I had worked for or spent money on, but it really feels like they’re a waste of time and money if it can all just be removed in an instant through no fault of your own.
So just a warning to not be surprised if you are treated in the same way by Blizzard - truly hope it doesn’t happen to any veteran or new players. I’ll be taking my business and playtime elsewhere and will be encouraging my friends and those I play with to do the same.
Just keep submitting tickets and asking questions. Their AI is totally whack and eventually an actual human might get your ticket and tell you what you did.
Thank you - yes understand people would create these posts to lie so just my word for it, but I can promise I’ve had no previous issues with my account, this is the first time any action has been taken. I might try a new ticket but honestly it feels like a waste of time and has been a terrible support experience - at least they can’t take away the memories I have playing the game with friends.
Yeah, keep up with tickets to CS, ask for chatlogs or other evidence of what you’ve done to deserve this. Tell them the email was vague and didn’t tell you what the problem was (how can you correct behaviour when you don’t know what you did wrong?)
If it’s easy to fall foul of the system it should be just as easy to fix mistakes, but it’s just not.
Thank you yeah I thought I would just get pushed back with AI constantly but the latest response and the person who marked as ‘resolved’ was a GM so I’ve supposedly had a human engage with me now - and they ended with ‘We now consider this matter closed and would not look to enter into further discussion on the subject.’ - so feels like I’m out of luck.
I’ll have to try a brand new ticket I guess as the current one with a GM response was marked as resolved and they said ‘We now consider this matter closed and would not look to enter into further discussion on the subject.’ which feels pretty final
Willing to give it one more try but don’t really feel like battling a system where I’m just a random number rather than considered an actual player who enjoys the game.
You’ve hit the nail on the head with ‘how can you correct behaviour when you don’t know what you did wrong’ that was exactly what I said and have racked my brains to think of what I could possibly have done wrong…
We have people saying they had to try a few times before the chat bot handed them over to a real person for review. I’m sorry you’ve been made to feel this way. It’s a really hands off system and doesn’t do the playerbase justice.
Something similar happened to my account in 2020.
I was so upset about it that I deleted my ~15 year old Battlenet account with WoW and a bunch of other games on it.
Blizzard should recognize that poor customer service in a single game affects the company’s overall reputation, not just the Overwatch department.
Be prepared to create 20+ tickets before you get a human support agent. Then you need to convince that human to send your ticket to their supervisor to get anything done because the first human is not interested in helping you or they’re not able to deal with account bans. They will just paste text that you broke some code of conduct rule without being specific and close the ticket. If they don’t send your ticket to their supervisor go back to step one and try again.
They will also eventually threaten to ban your entire blizzard account after a certain number of tickets so your other blizzard games will be at risk. I pushed through that point because I didn’t care and finally got a supervisor and my Overwatch account back.
Good luck, you’re going to need it. (it’s not worth your time, stop spending money on blizzard games)
