Account closure

Support Customer Support
1

Hello,

I recently received a ban with the reason: Offense: Exploitative Activity – Unauthorized Cheat Programs (Hacks).
I’m confused because I only play normally on my PC and I have never used any cheat programs, hacks, or unauthorized software.

I would like to understand more about why this happened. Could this be a mistake?
I’ve already submitted an appeal through the support system, but I also wanted to post here to see if anyone else had a similar issue or advice.

Thank you for your time.
I originally posted this in General Discussion, but realized Customer Support is the right place.

2

I’ll reiterate what I said in your General Discussion thread:

All you can do is put in the appeal. None of us players will have any insight for you as it’s all speculation.

Blizzard will also not give you details, as that would be a means for people to try to work around it.

Also keep in mind that the appeal is to have someone take another look at it to make sure whether it’s justified or not.

3

Your appeal is open, Priestfrever.

You need to be aware that automation of any kind is not allowed, nor is account sharing.

You’ll need to wait on your appeal ticket.

4

Thank you for the clarification. I understand and will wait for the appeal ticket response.
I just want to add that i don’t use any automation software or account sharing. My account was closed while i was actively playing, so it was very frustrating and confusing for me.

5

What caused the account to be flagged for investigation generally happens a week or longer before the action is applied.

Simply having something in memory will trigger Warden. You don’t need to actually use it. Even something that might be used for Work from Home purposes (that automate tasks, like Autohotkey) can trigger an investigation.

6

Most account actions are based on historical data, not what was happening at the time of the account action.

They were looking at what the account has already been doing, not what it was doing when it was suspended.

All you can do is appeal. Posting will not change the outcome.

7

I understand, thank you for the info. I haven’t been using AutoHotkey or any automation tools while playing WoW, so that makes the situation even more confusing for me. I’ll just wait for my appeal result and see what Blizzard says.

8

You don’t have to be using them when you’re playing, simply having them installed on your computer at all can trigger their Warden program

9

They really should tell you why you were banned. I got banned and reverted and I don’t have a clue why. They used to have a strikes system or something.

10

It’s that information that is sought after by the scammers, cheaters, botters, hacker types so that they can attempt to avoid detection.

Yes, the penalty tree. More severe penalty as the number of breaches increased and based on account history.

Wasn’t very effective at stopping the behaviours of some. Even then, some breaches of the rules were always considered very bad (botting/automation one of them), so they’ve always been penalised heavily.

11

I believe the penalty tree is still active, like chat violations among other things so yes the Penalty tree is very much alive and actively used.

12

Not in any way that really resembles the old penalty volcano. Social infractions, including chat violations, typically start with a one-week silence for a first offense. The penalty for the second offense is a one-week suspension. Every penalty after that is double the previous penalty. It used to be that those penalties never decayed (‘being good’ for extended periods did not reset or reduce the penalty of any future infraction). That part may not apply any longer.

And, as always, if a violation is egregious enough, GMs are well within their rights to to adjust the severity as appropriate.

13

Keep in mind evertime a account logs in they record the ip and computer info from that login. So that can prove account sharing like the fsa said.

Any automated program even just loaded and running while you play can trigger a ban.

14

Unfortunately that strategy breaks down in the presence of VPNs.

15

They also see the computer id behind the ip. If you use a vpn should always use the same one. So it shows the same each time

16

The MAC address or something else?

17

There are tons of user level(don’t need kernel level) HWIDs and other identifiers they can use to link PCs to accounts under the hood. Well, at least to some cosmic level of certainty. Like if you have a pool of 100 colors, a pool of 100 birds, a pool of 100, 100, 100, etc etc, and you pick one from each pool, the odds of someone else having the exact same in every category is almost lower than there are stars in the universe. So when it comes to a bunch of 32bit or 16bit IDs, you’re in the number of atoms of the universe range of probabilities of two PCs sharing the same sets of info.