Greetings! Thought I would post here to see if anyone else has been banned for using a VPN? Last night I spent 3+ hours farming herbs on my Druid while watching season 4 of Big Mouth on Netflix. Maxed both Herb/Alch then posted mats and pots I made on the AH and went to bed. Woke up this morning to my account being permanently banned for Hacking/Botting. I’m an Ex-WoW GM of 2 years and understand the necessary workflow for perma- banning a WOW account. Just really surprised to see such a severe penalty enforced almost immediately and such little discourse taken prior to the action. I have never exploited or used third party programs to bot or hack.
I use Exitlag due to my wife being Active Duty Air Force and living in Alaska, while playing with friends on Blackhand; a West Coast server. Just wanted to reach out to the community and see if anyone is aware of anything like this happening before? Based on my prior knowledge of the TOS, VPNs aren’t bann-able or against the TOS? I was able to appeal the ban but given the turnaround time for CS these days I don’t think I’ll be able to access my characters anytime soon. Very disappointing. Thanks everyone and any feedback on how to better handle this or past experiences is welcome. Take care!
Edit: Thanks for the replies but they were more off topic with what is and isn’t allowed on the forums. Does anyone have any recommendations outside of just submitting an appeal? Does Blizz CS scan the forums for issues related to what I posted? Thanks.
Edit 2: From what I’ve seen on the WOW forums and other forum discussions MANY players have been affected by this automated ban wave. One of the biggest factors that they all had in common was farming, and using a VPN. If WoW’s automated software scans for third party software on players PCs and detects a VPN as botting/hacking software it’s a big problem. Are the majority of players who use VPNs suppose to just deal with the fact that they could potentially be collateral damage for “unsupported” software. If this is in fact the issue it needs to be communicated to the player base to avoid future wrongful actions against players’ accounts.
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Using a VPN isnt supported that being said if u constantly use the same VPN that usualy wont cause problems.
That being said were not allowed to discuss account action your only option is to apeal.
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Using a VPN can cause issues if you don’t connect to the same server every time you log into WoW. If you don’t turn the VPN on, or log into a different server (and if your VPN software does not allow you to specify it’s quite possible you will) then it looks like you have moved around the world in seconds triggering an Account Sharing ban.
Oceanic players used VPNs for years to get a better ping-rate with only the occasional ban that was overturned on appeal. Using a VPN in and of itself won’t cause a ban. It can result in having your account locked, requiring a password change.
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Gotcha, ya I see that it’s not supported but it’s not against the TOS and seems to be the cause of the issue I’m currently having. Not allowed to discuss being banned? I’ve seen multiple threads regarding banned accounts.
Generally speaking, discussing account actions on the forums is against our Code of Conduct.
That said, we understand that when something like this happens some aren’t entirely certain what their options are, so will come to the forums to discuss that. Trying to figure out where you need to go next is perfectly fine.
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Sorry i only said that because it sounded like he wanted a discussion over using a VPN and getting actioned for it.
Thanks for the feedback @Vrakthris - hopefully I can get this all sorted out and resolved.
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I gotcha, Darthwraith, I was just clarifying.
If someone is confused by what could have caused the action, I don’t see the harm with discussing that. Discussing the use of VPN’s isn’t really prohibited. Just using one isn’t the basis of any account penalty that I’ve seen so that part isn’t really discussing the account action.
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me and a friend received a permanent ban yesterday with a justification of using bot/hack/cheat ingame. he received an email about several reports of bot using - i didnt.
we both use Exitlag to play wow since we’re in Brazil and servers are hosted in US, so we can play on a 150ms latency.
we did farm leather on bastion on sunday for a couple of hours, but didnt make any use of other programs besides VPN. Acctually during the farm we were chatting with each other (have prints)
we did an appeal on both accounts… he turned his perma ban into a 6 months ban (still not fair), and im still waiting an answear from
blizzard (GM asked for 3 days to make account analysis)
Never received any ban, didnt understand why got that level of punishment without any chance of defense.
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You’ll need to wait for your appeal to be looked at.
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Just to clarify - an appeal is not a chance for you to build or plead a case. An appeal is only a fresh set of eyes looking over all of the data. You will not be contacted for your day in court, as it were.
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i know that, and i hope that new set of eyes sees what really happened.
I was just trying to make a point, that i always played by the rules, and trying to avoid spend my precious gold on legendaries i go on a leather farm journey, spent several hours doing it myself… finally got it, and it came with a perma ban
was it caused by use of VPN, or maybe some reports cofusing me as a bot… i don’t know, but i hope for the best
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My apologies. Most people who come to this forum in a panic do not understand how it works, so it’s usually just easier to assume it’s another instance.
that’s ok man
been playing retail for 7 years now… be banned like this hurts
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I also know someone who has gotten banned recently seemingly unjustified.
This is harsh, once I could only play the game and download new patches with a vpn. If they fixed this bug great, if not the game will be unplayable for those unfortunate.
There is no bug. Using a VPN is allowed but not supported.
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It is also misleading, Sanguinius. As Rufflebottom mentioned using a VPN is not against policy, it is just unsupported.
While there are a lot of theories of what resulted in a penalty, it is not simply for using a VPN.
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