I have no clue what’s going on but I came back to an email saying my account was closed for “hacks”. I’ve never used a hack or bot or anything in this game and frankly the email that I got sent sounded seriously unfair.
Can someone here help me out and take a look at what’s going on with my account? Is this from wrongful reports or was my account compromised?
You will have to file an appeal through a ticket. There are no GMs here on this forum. Our Blues have nothing to do with the ticketing system, even though they can sometimes take a peek into what is going on, it’s not something that is guaranteed as this is a forum for players to assist other players.
The only programs I have running during wow play are discord and a ping booster, since I live overseas.
I’ve had this account for a decade and participate in all of the friend&family alphas, to think it got banned because of automated reports is infuriating. This just makes me never want to buy anything blizzard again.
You don’t know the reasoning behind your ban/suspension except for it being ‘hacks’. You are not sanctioned for automated anything. If someone reported you, then a real live person looked over the report and decided something wasn’t right.
This is not the place to brainstorm and debate the whats and whys of a ban. It’s actually against the CoC to discuss sanctions and the like here, but the staff tries to be flexible where they can.
File your appeal - and just for clarification, an appeal is not something where you can go in and debate the sanction. It is for a fresh pair of eyes to look over your case. That’s it.
I will also point out that you could have had the account from Day One or you opened it last week - no one is entitled to special treatment. People are judged the same. But not even Blizzard is infallible. Sometimes mistakes happen, false positives come about. That is why there is an appeals process available.
You should have gotten an email with a broad description of the reason for the ban and a link to appeal in it.
As noted above, there are no automated bans. A person checked the logs for each ban.
I got the generic “hack” ban response. Same as many others have posted on the wow reddit. I really doubt a human went through the evidence logs other than looking at the number of reports, making a quick judgement, and clicking the ban button.
I’m fairly certain what caused it was just an accumulation of reports (I’m a druid), and likely the fact that I play from China. I work overseas and have had issues in the past with my account getting locked. Its never been banned for hacking though which is odd and frustrating.
I just hope a human looks into it and I don’t get stuck in limbo.
You can doubt all you want, doesn’t make it true.
Irrelevant.
One report or a hundred, it doesn’t matter, you don’t get autobanned.
People can’t really tell where you’re playing from, so that is a non factor. Blizzard can, sure, but you aren’t going to get an account closure because of it. It may get locked if there is suspicious log in activity, but that’s about it.
Are mistakes made? Sure, but that’s why the appeal system is in place, to catch them and fix them.
Does this ping booster make it appear as if you are accessing the game from geographical disparate IP addresses? Do you use it each and every time you access the game?
Make sure on your appeal you mention your using a ping booster that will change your ip location in their system.
Its called UU booster, and I’ve used it for about 3 months now. Before that I had used smoothping and battleping without any issues. But since the great firewall changes quite often I had to switch over to a chinese ping service. Maybe because its a chinese program it raised a red flag? Without it I have insane latency spikes and very inconsistent ping. With it I get a stable 170-180ms. Thats all it does though so IDK how that could break TOS.
I don’t think that is the cause though, I’m fairly certain I just got falsely reported one too many times by disgruntled horde.
I posted a ticket and an appeal. If they look into the logs theyll show I’m innocent.
That’s simply not how it works. People can report until they’re blue in the face if they want to. Having multiple reports does not and never has caused a ban to happen. Those can only be initiated by a real live person and it’s based on Blizzard’s logs of account activity.
Now, if you’re IP is bouncing all over the place, it could look like you’re using account leveling services and things like that (having others access your account from different locations).
The only thing you can do though is wait on your appeal.
You can believe what you want. We can tell you that is likely the wrong reason, as we see cases like yours all of the time where people believe X did the thing, and it was furthest from it. As a druid player, I get that it’s the easiest reasoning to fall back on because of peoples’ frustration with botters. But if people reported you for being a bot for that alone, Blizzard’s logs would show otherwise and that reasoning is tossed out the window.
This forum though, is not to spitball the hows and why of your sanction. There are no GMs here. You’re talking to your fellow players and we have no bearing on your ticket. We can, however, tell you what we have seen dozens of times over and suggest the flaws in your logic.
Wait on your tickets. That is the only path open to you.
Yea I suppose Ill just have to trust in the CS department. The last time something like this happened to my account was in 2014. Got a closure for “economic exploitation” or something. Luckily they reverted the closure the next day after investigating. Me working in China certainly doesn’t help.
IDK how much time they put into making judgement calls into closing suspected accounts but given the millions of accounts and the massive numbers of bots, I can’t imagine its very much. Maybe I’m too cynical but I think nowadays its more shoot first ask questions later than you guys realize.
What you think isn’t fact. What we say here is going on the umpteen posts that end up here when people find themselves in your shoes. What we say is based on fact from what our SFA Blues post here.
However it came about, something you’ve done has pinged their Warden system. We are not here to discuss or debate how that happened. We are here to tell you that your assumptions in several things are incorrect, and we are aiming to correct them - for both you and any other who trips over this thread looking for help if they find themselves in your shoes. Posting what you think and not know for fact is a dangerous thing, for someone may believe you’re posting something factually correct when that’s not the case.
Think of this forum as a help desk. We want to ensure true and proper information is being shared. Not thoughts, opinions or conjecture. And again, not for discussion of policies.
You can report anyone for anything but that does not mean blizard will ban or suspend someone just because you reported them for X Y or Z NO. They look at the report and then to the logs to see if they can verify the report or find it is far from true. If far from true you never even know about it and nothing happens.
Suspensions and bans are based on their logs not reports.
I guess you aren’t familiar with the scarab lord story from classic wow US-Sulfuras, where mass reporting triggered autobans on rival scarab lords as they were pulling the boss. Eventually they undid the damage but it still was a fiasco.
Who knows what goes into issuing a ban these days. I hate to think its just an overworked GM looking at the number of reports, a few other metrics, and issuing a ban in a few minutes but it might be that way, because not even a year ago some bans were literally automated and would disconnect you just based on player reports.
There is nothing whatsoever in this paragraph that is accurate.
I honestly have no idea what you’re referring to on this.
CS did resolve everything nicely and issued karma on the report abusers but the fact that it happened in the first place is disappointing.