Account ban while developing an addon

Guides UI and Macro
1

I was watching an YouTube tutorial on how to develop WoW addons and the author said that we should create a trial account to test it. Otherwise Blizzard can ban your current account while testing and reloading your UI many times… or by doing some things not allowed that are against the ToS. I don’t know, I actually didn’t understand his reasons.

I found that really weird having to create a fake trial account for that… do you guys know if I should really do that or is it safe to develop an addon and test on my original account?

2

Never heard of that practice.

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3

Same.

I’ve never used a trial account for creating addons and depending on the addon(s) you are wanting to create, a trial account may not provide everything you need to test.

Stick within the bounds of the game API and have fun would be my advice.

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4

Thanks a lot, Elvenbane and Fizzlemizz!

5

I would consider the likelihood of getting banned from accidentally misusing the APIs incredibly remote. I don’t know if there are any red flags for reloading your UI too many times, but that too seems immensely unlikely .

If I personally were creating an addon that I wanted to be used by many people I might consider getting a trial account for test purposes, to make sure I didn’t create an unintentional dependency on something my account had that a new account wouldn’t have.

1 Like
6

Back in the day, early vanilla, I got an unannounced in-game visit from a GM who asked me to stop what I was doing in developing a particular addon.

Apparently I had been stressing the servers a bit.

Since then, though Blizzard has added throttlling and other controls to keep that from happening.

I think it’s possible that had I not stopped what I was doing, I might have been banned, but nowadays, I don’t think this is an issue.

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7

If anything if you released an addon that was misusing the API in a way Blizzard didn’t agree with they would -

  • Contact you and ask you to please not do the thing
  • Ban your addon if you continue to do the thing ignoring their advice
  • Change the API so that thing you were doing is no longer a thing.

They wouldn’t ban you for it. Banning an addon author simply because they were doing something with their Lua API does not solve the problem of that thing being used.

2 Likes