Account Banned – Seeking Guidance on Possible False Positive

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My account was permanently closed on Sunday, February 16th and I am unsure as to why. The reason listed in the email is " Exploitative Activity: Unauthorized Cheat Programs (Hacks)", but I have never used any hacks, cheats, or unauthorized modifications. I have appealed twice, but received two generic responses and the ticket was closed.

Since Blizzard did not provide any further insight to the ban, I am trying to determine what might have triggered it.

On Sunday morning I took advantage of the snowstorm outside by farming Love Tokens. I repeatedly completed Crown Chemical Co. instances and event dailies across multiple characters back-to-back, trying and get some last-minute purchases from the Valentine’s event before it went away. I also completed the event questline on 2 characters.

Outside of the game, while I was between Crown Chemical queues, I was also managing my Clone Hero library. Clone Hero is a rhythm game similar to Guitar Hero or Rock Band, and I play along to drum tracks on my electronic drum kit.

When I got banned, I was idling in game and got fully caught up with managing the files. I had been using a file conversion tool called C3 Con Tools to convert some of the songs between file types. I was also deleting and adding new files to my external hard drive where I store the Clone Hero songs for portability since my drums are in the basement, away from my main PC. At some point during this, I noticed I was logged out of WoW, but did not read the disconnect message that explained my account was closed until I had completed my tasks.

Given the circumstances, my assumption is either that my repetitive actions and character switching in-game triggered an anti-bot detection system, or that C3 Con Tools was flagged by WoW’s anti-cheat detection system. I’m leaning more towards the second option in this case, although I cannot know for certain.

So, I come seeking guidance:

I am not necessarily trying to argue my case here, but I’m seeking clarity as to whether the use of C3 Con Tools or background file transfers would violate the End User License Agreement or trigger the anti-cheat system.

From what I understand, this tool does not interact with Battle.net, World of Warcraft, or any Blizzard game in any way. However, if the answer was definitively that using the software was a violation, then I understand I have zero ground to stand on and would sadly accept this ban and move on.

I really don’t want to give up on this account since I believe this was a mistake. If anyone can provide any insight, or has had a similar experience, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thank you for reading my post.

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I can vouch for this dude. He doesn’t use any cheat codes.

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All you can do is appeal, you will never be given an answer by Blizzard on Any third party program. There being several issues with them, just a couple off the top of my head A: They cannot control what it does or does not do, and B: what it does now, may change in the future and they have no insight on that. So if you are seeking to get permission for any program not designed and built by Blizzard, that just isn’t going to happen.

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Good, because there is no arguing your case no matter the account action. There is appealing to have it looked into again, nothing more.

Literally nobody can answer that 100%.

Technically speaking, discussion of account actions is a violation of the forum rules and not allowed.

You are welcome to appeal until such time that your are warned against doing so.

No, actually, you can’t. It wouldn’t matter if you felt you could unfortunately. This is based on Blizzard logs, not their friend/guildie saying that they’re innocent.

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It is both possible that there is some program on feature running on your PC in the background that was flagged, despite you not knowing about it, and that this is a false positive. Certain operating systems come with built-in features that are technically prohibited because they streamline game activity, and there are other programs that can trigger account flags by just running in the background because of what they do to the computer. That is why you just continue appealing until you can’t anymore.

If you had two appeals rejected, then your account action was investigated twice and staff members chose to uphold that original action, but as long as they haven’t told you to stop, keep filing appeals.

Doesn’t matter. Warden quietly scans computers for any suspicious activity going on in the background so if a program is constantly converting files as you’re playing, so I can only speculate that it is possible that this triggered a flag. However, blizzard will never tell you specifics as that would just aid cheaters and criminals in exploiting the game more efficiently.

The best you’re going to get here on the forums is a moderator telling you what the status of your ticket is, and whether or not they believe your account action will be upheld, but that is not guaranteed.

No, you cannot vouch for him, and cannot confirm that he doesn’t use “cheat codes”.

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Your current appeal is open.

What was picked up, that I couldn’t tell you even if we knew - but we don’t know. Only the hacks team has access to that information.

I am not familiar with the one you mentioned, but if it has anything in it that can automate anything - it’s possible.

I’d wait on your current ticket response.

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It is true there could be something unknowingly running in the background, which does concern me. I’m making an educated guess based on timing, since the ban happened shortly after my files were finished converting. I believe this was also the first time I had run this program since resubbing to WoW before The War Within launch as well, so all signs are kind of just pointing me in this direction.

I do understand, and I think it’s probably a good thing they don’t give specifics since it would help hackers get around it.

I guess what is frustrating for me here is that messages I received on the appeal gave zero specifics and just said that I broke the EULA/ToS. Reading through those documents, I do not see where I would have violated either agreement since as far as I can tell from reading through the documents, software only violates the EULA/ToS when it interacts and/or interferes with Blizzard’s games or services.

Now, I will acknowledge that I can’t be 100% sure the program is not doing something I am not aware of and somehow interacted with the game in some way. Definitely not an expected result, and that really sucks if its the case.

Thank you for the info, I appreciate it.

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It’s confusing when looking it up but it seems to be a program that does a lot of automated heavy-lifting pertaining to the conversion, editing, and combining of various file types in order to modify certain music-related video games, I think?

It seems like it would involve a large amounts of background activity involving the modification of game files, so it definitely sounds like a plausible explanation for anti-cheat systems kicking in, assuming the program in question was actually used.

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That seems about right. I don’t believe it modifies the game clients themselves, just the song files in the folder it is pointed to. The custom scene for these games goes back quite some time, and people have created songs for various incarnations of the games. For instance, many older user-created customs were made to work in Rock Band 3, and those files are unable to run in the newer music game clients. You don’t need to have either game installed to do this, just the tool and the song files.

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Problem is its on your computer and wven if its not used for wow it can get u into trouble.

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Warden scans activity on the PC outside of the WoW application as well as within, so a prohibited program function only has to be running on your computer for it to be flagged.

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What you were doing at the exact time the action came down is likely completely unrelated to the reason for the action.

The detection could be up to a month old before the action came down, which is blizzard using fog of war to their advantage in the battle against bots/cheats.

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But to play devil’s advocate, a seemingly “innocent” tool like this could also be a vector for running scripts to bot in WoW. Especially if it can tamper with memory or files. Kind of like how you can play Doom in Excel or Wordpad, you can take a tool that is supposed to do X and use it for Y. There have been other WoW exploits in the past like this.

Thankfully we don’t see a whole ton of it anymore, but for ages, people would always have some post about being banned and after some digging, they’d finally admit they had autohotkey installed on their PC, but would swear up and down they “use it for work.” As someone who has been heavily using computers for over 30 years of their life and has done a lot of work involving using computers, ranging from coding, to data entry, to digital painting/sculpting/3d modeling, game creation, etc etc, I have never once heard of or had the need to use some kind of autohotkey-like software. The closest you might come would be macros in photoshop and that’s it.

Not saying this is the OP’s case, but to people like me, seeing a wall of overelaborated text like that, well you know how it goes…

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I ran into a random ban issue similar to yours. The only automation software on my computer is the Synology (NAS) sync software, but it works on the D drive, not the C drive where my games are. There’s also remote control software, but I’m using it to control my office computer, not the other way around. My computer’s setup has been like this for years, and I’ve had no issues playing Diablo 3/4, even played WoW last month without a problem, but suddenly this month it says there’s a cheat.

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It’s really best not to go into other threads to talk about your account actions. It’s okay to seek ways to put in an appeal, but it’s another thing to go to other places to talk about your account action.

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Other people’s situations are likely different from yours as well.

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