Hello,
My very dear friend, removed, who I actually met on this game some 18 years ago and have since formed a lasting real-life friendship with, was recently permanently banned for activity on classic anniversary. Initially, we suspected that he had been inadvertently banned in one of the AH bot purges and that it would be reversed once we got ahold of a real person, but after much back and forth, that did not happen.
Some context on what my friend was doing:
His primary method of making gold on WoW anniversary, always entirely for his personal use, was to purchase tailoring materials off the auction house, craft items, disenchant them, and then sell the enchanting materials on the auction house. This activity is not only within ToS, but is encouraged and is honest work (people need enchanting materials). Thus my friend was very surprised one day to find that his extremely old and honestly really bada** account was suspended from all versions of World of Warcraft—-permanently. No warning, not even a clear idea what rule he broke. The account is otherwise, to my knowledge, immaculate. My friend does not receive regular account actions or anything like that in the two decades he has played this game.
Thus we initially suspected his account must have been flagged in some way because of the volume of materials he was disenchanting, and that upon review his account would be restored. No big deal. However, that did not happen. After much back and forth, my friend was informed his permanent suspension would stand. We were shocked, but I now believe I have figured out why this is.
You see, it takes a great deal of time, because of the tailoring cast times, to craft and disenchant these materials. So my friend got the idea to do this while he had downtime at work. However, my friend is a nurse and it is not feasible for him to take his computer to work even though there is often a lot of downtime. Thus he came up with what seemed like an innocent idea: he would simply login to his computer from his phone. It turns out, this is against the terms of service. He did not know this at the time (if he had, he never would have done it to begin with). I also was unaware of this rule until tonight when I dug it out of the terms of service just trying to figure out what he did wrong.
From what we can both tell about the situation, this is the only rule that would have been broken. My friend:
-Has never sold nor purchased gold, nor would he ever risk his account to do so, which is of incredible sentimental value to him (basically it was his entire childhood). He has “the Insane” title. He was a multi-gladiator. He’s formed many life-long relationships with this account. He has mountains of memories on this account that he still talks about to this day. We’re talking about something incredibly dear to him that he would never risk on suspicious activity. We invite any GMs to scrutinize carefully any transaction they wish. He simply would never knowingly violate the ToS.
-Never allowed the account to be accessed by another person. It was only him logging in via his phone and even this he never would have done in a million years if he had simply known or been told it was against the ToS.
-Did not automate the process in any way. It was him pushing each and every button, each and every time.
-As far as we can tell, violated no other ToS.
Yet whereas I would consider this worthy of a warning, or perhaps even a temporary suspension if I was having a bad day as a GM, this proceeded from a situation of zero feedback and zero knowledge of wrongdoing to… a permanent suspension.
My friend is extremely distraught over this, and honestly I am as well, and the in-game GMs do not seem to care. I do not know why. So I am here to please ask you to have some mercy on my friend for this game that he has loved so much his entire life. Please reduce the suspension from permanent to something temporary. Even 6 months or a year, whatever is appropriate. Just please do not punish my friend permanently for something he did not know was wrong, and will never under any circumstances do again.
I hope you will consider my request. I know my friend very well and I promise he will not make you regret it. Thank you for your time.
