Hello, my WoW Forever Beta Account was banned a few days ago. I had done SFK on my warlock, walked outside, and someone asked if I’d summon their friend there, saying they’d tip me.
I received 50 silver from the person who asked, and 25 from the person I summoned when they got there. I logged off, made a new character with my friend, and was banned a few minutes after.
I did also create a paladin alt to reserve my name (De Ad) - and it was mailed 1 gold from someone randomly who probably mistyped the name. When I logged in to check the mail I thought it was going to be someone asking for the name, as I grabbed it right when servers went live.
If that’s the reason I’m banned that’s pretty ridiculous. I did not buy 1 gold, or 75 silver on a beta server that’s going down in a month.
The ban reason states I “directly or indirectly” was involved in RMT. Was I really banned for receiving a tip for a summon from someone who bought gold? Or did someone mailing my alt 1 gold get me banned? If it’s the latter that’s completely out of my control.
I’m glad there’s an effort being made to prevent RMT, as I think the game will be a much better experience when it’s not pay to win, but if this was automated it seems a bit overtuned.
Never ever take gold that does not belong to you out of the mail. Someone was buying gold and it ended up in your mailbox. Blizz has no idea if that was you, or a mistake. If your account gets illicit gold, for any reason, you will be penalized. In this case, your Beta access was revoked.
The best thing to do with unknown gold in the mail like that is return to sender or delete.
So RMT bans are not done based on player reports but data collected by the hacks team, based on players receiving actual flagged gold. Simply trading for gold isn’t going to trigger an action, you would need to not only transact flagged illicit gold with another player, it would also have to be over a certain value, and transactions even on beta of such a tiny amount are surely not going to trigger anything.
While I am unsure why you were banned on the Beta servers, assuming you still have access to your production account, its far more likely you were actioned for some other activity either attempting to exploit a vulnerability, or some other violation of the TOS, such as toxic behavior or a naming issue, where the letter you received perhaps simply was the wrong template.
At this point the only thing you can do is file an appeal, and nothing said in this forum will. have any impact on an action taken against you, especially on a dev server.
I’d be surprised if you could provide me even a ballpark number with any reasoning to back it up
It seems like a tremendous waste of resources to even bother enforcing RMT restrictions on a beta server. After all, we’re told ad nauseum that each ban is reviewed by a real person and I would argue their time is much better spent reviewing actions on live servers, not a test server that wont be around in 6 weeks.
I doubt there’s very much energy involved in it. But even if there was, why should criminal enterprises be tolerated in Blizzard’s platform just because it’s a beta? This is a HUGE beta and criminals are happy to capitalize if allowed.
I would never buy gold… not even sure what RMT stands for tbh… but yikes - if Blizz is going to punish people for taking the gold out of the mail then can’t they at least remove the option for gold to automatically be removed from any letter that isn’t from the AH? I mean, hypothetically speaking, couldn’t a malicious player choose to send purchased gold to someone they were trying to troll, knowing that the end result would be a ban? That would be horrible.
I saw someone on the forums a few months ago saying that they got a ban for opening mail with gold in it and I honestly only kind of half-believed it, because it just seems like there is so much potential for abuse if it’s really based solely on that. Even so, ever since then I’ve been a lot more careful when I open my auctions, trying not to hit the “open all” feature. But that’s annoying, of course, and has a high risk of user-error due to forgetfulness. Seems like one of those things where the cure could end up doing more damage than the illness.
Seems like it would be an easy feature to code in though - making players click a message to actually “accept” gold from somewhere other than your own alts or the AH. (Apologies, btw, if this is already the case and I’ve just never noticed.)
P.S. Blizz, if you’re reading this, and you really want to stick it to people who are trying to make RL money off of selling stuff in the game you could always start by NOT having “Sold Out” be a possibility on a PRE-ORDER item. You know, like the physical Forever Collector’s Edition. hint hint. wink wink.
Yeah, I know. I guess that sounded a bit silly but I just meant the first thing I did when servers went live was make a few characters with names I wanted to use on beta. I’m pretty sure they mailed that character the first day it went live too, not sure how they made 1 gold so quick.
It seemed like it was due to the summon tips I got because I was banned right after that though.
Oh? Are you saying it’s automated and doesnt get manual review. That doesnt line up with the claims that all punishments are reviewed manually.
One word: resources. Blizzard should be spending their anti-cheat efforts on live servers. There is literally no point devoting any resources to combating RMT on a beta server when 1) it’s hard to imagine there is any real accumulation of gold by bots this early on to even buy, and 2) it all vanishes in 6 weeks anyway. Not much of an ROI.
Rmt is a multi billion and not a typo black market. Industry for every 10 we see here complaining about false rmt bans there are 100s if not 1000s that dont report here.
No. Please read my statement that you quoted. That’s not what I said. Not taking much energy is not the same as being fully automated. You are doing a real straw man fallacy with that.
I do think it likely that they have programs that flag suspicious behavior around RMT and then the output of those programs is manually reviewed.
Blizzard should be spending their anti-cheat efforts on live servers.
[/quote]
Since you are not part of anything to do with development at blizzard you don’t really get to make that call. Additionally, you’re implying that using anti-cheat efforts in one place means that they’re not available to be used in other places, which seems illogical to me.
if this is the case blizzard needs to warn players, how can they ban players for accepting gold from strangers, thats part of the game, you trade and interact with strangers. I was banned for taking gold I was mailed. They need a big warning that says “IF YOU TAKE THIS GOLD YOUR ACCOUNT WILL BE FLAGGED”
Blizzard already have warnings in game and on loading screens. More to the point, Blizzard ahs count down and ‘are you sure’ warnings for item upgrades and alt curreries, but folks still ignore it and come to the forums that they didn’t get warnings on what they was doing.
If it is dangerous to take any gold from strangers (including tips for summons/portals/crafts, selling expencive BoE items, etc) it fully destroys the idea of in-game economy, because i can’t know, is it “illicit” gold or not.
