Blizzard’s auto-ban algo in Alterac Valley is a pathetic excuse for moderation, gleefully smacking World of Warcraft players for the audacity of PvP in a PvP battleground. Players shell out $15 a month, only to have a ChatGPT-grade bot ban them for killing the enemy faction—the entire point of AV. X posts fume: a main tank banned for daring to fight, leaving 39 players in the lurch (@TheBlakeNesbit, May 2, 2025), and calls for transparency shrugged off (@AFC__Jonathan, Apr 25, 2025). No human review, just a dimwitted algorithm dishing out suspensions for basic gameplay. Shades of 2022’s ban blunder, where mass reports triggered “AFK” bans for active players until streamers like Asmongold forced Blizzard’s hand. Delta Force pairs AI with humans, but Blizzard’s budget bot can’t be bothered. Perhaps ditch the algo and try moderators, or do players not merit that much effort?
Bots dont understand humans… and should be banned from existence.
Every action (besides the 7 day mute) is handled by a person. They use templates for sure but any ban has been the work of an employee.
People are not getting auto banned, a quick looksee at the CS forums will tell you in most cases, the people catching non-participation bans in AV were not attacking or healing in most of their games. A few false positives which are overturned though.
All your tank can do is submit an appeal themselves.
Took me a minute to find links,
Best of luck to your tank on his appeal!
I hate to tell you this, but Blizzard doesn’t use ChatGPT, or any other AI in their efforts around enforcing AFK/Non participation penalties. Their process is relatively strait forward, far cheaper, and far simpler, if a person reports you, you get put on the next list for review. Blizzard will periodically run a report for all flagged users, and pulls a number of metrics which look across multiple BGs, and likely creates a participation score based on some calculation, this is extremely easy to do with most reporting packages and even with a simple sql query, this allows them to easily identify those that fall out of what would be considered having actually participated. They then review this report and action anyone who falls below a certain level. For anyone reported and which meet the participation requirements, nothing would happen.
Now obviously this won’t be as effective as a really good AI system would in getting rid of people on are AFK in realtime and not participating, but AI would be relatively expensive to implement, versus using the current cheap batch process. Lastly as anyone could easily tell you the responses are templates and obviously not AI generated, as again AI generated responses would likely provide more information and be less general.
So no you did not get actioned because of mass reports, you got actioned because you were reported, a report was then run that showed you spent the majority of the games you participated in basically AFK where you contributed no damage or healing.
Just own up to breaking the rules, the only other explanations are that you’re so unlucky as to have been cursed by a witch or even worse the AI just hates you for your freedom and luxuriant corporeal form.
Have to actively participate in AV, can’t just sit at towers.
I mean by those cs responses it sounds like it’s highly prejudiced to damage and healing equals participation. So, you can do towers you just need to kill the archers.
Just speculating here but if the auto reports result in a flag that’s reviewed by a person who just clicks the “accept recommendation” button of the auto-report system, it amounts to the same.
I’ve seen the posts in the CS forum and they’re very quick to say that bans are handled by a person, yet there’s still a lot of people posting and not understanding why they were banned. There’s also been a few successful appeals that I’ve followed.
On the flip side, I play AV (on Era though) and tend to just mostly play how I want. I haven’t gotten a ban for it, even though I do advocate for off-meta strategies. Sure they’re in people’s best interest but you know how the meta crowd is, anything different should be flammed immediately! 
All of the above is anecdotal. We only have what people say on the forums and the very thin stuff we see from Blizzard CS reps. However, there’s been a pretty marked increase in chatter about this. I don’t think we need to automatically believe everything everybody says on this, but that goes for both sides. I’m starting to suspect there’s more to this than Blizzard is letting on and while it may well be true that the ultimate ban is handled by a human, it’s really hard to know how engaged that human is with the process. There’s a lot of reasons why that might be, some good, some bad, but I think for the purposes of this conversation that’s maybe beside the point.
I’m headed into this AV weekend (again, on Era) to play a lot of AV and pursue my own enjoyment. If I don’t make it out the other side because I didn’t play how people want, I’ll report back in whatever amount of time is required to elapse before I can post again, lol.
is it possible that humans can make mistakes?
id like to further add that what were seeing is just information bias. how many of these squelches get self corrected in comparison to squelches that escalate into false bans?
we will never actually know because of the information bias where only one part of this equation actually gets reported on. people think its broken because you only see the complaints about people getting falsely banned and sometimes being overturned becuase they were legitimately falsely banned. we dont see the quiet part where it works as intended.
ERA has 1 AV going on right now and a 30 minute queue. You guys can’t afford to report one another
Question: how do you differentiate between AFK and guarding objectives?
I agree we can never really know but I guess my point here is this applies in both directions. It’s maybe not helpful to try to shut down conversation with a simple “Well Blizz said nah, soooo”. All we really have is to apply our best logic and reason to things and/or just send people to the CS forum to get whatever help they can I guess.
Personally, my faith in both sides is low these days.
Ha, I chuckled 
I think the best way to answer this is to ask “what would a reasonable person do in this situation?”
A reasonable person sitting on an objective might…
- … react when an enemy comes near.
- … observe that there are already too many defenders in the area and move on.
- … observe that there are already too many defenders in the area and engage in conversation to work it out.
- … submit various inputs to their client (ie, moving/looking around).
A reasonable person might also do none of these things and might have actually stepped away to go to the washroom or address something that needs their attention. However, over time, you’ll find that a person who consistently fails to do any of those above points game after game is probably just not participating. I bet you it would only take a handful of games to make that determination too.
This is a probably great application for AI analysis, though I doubt Blizzard is wiling to invest in this game even though there’s clearly people enjoying it. More people than a lot of games on steam that people consider successful.
They mostly target guys capping flags near graveyards they want to camp.
This is how most of those “I was falsely banned in AV” posts go:
Guarding an objective that they admit only gets attacked 1 in 10 times. Doing it every single game no matter what else is going on in the game. Complains they got suspended for non-participation because they had 0 damage or healing in the majority of their games. Tries to rule lawyer their way out of it by saying they “weren’t afk” but were instead “strategically guarding a location”.
Suspension does not get overturned, of course, because they deserved it.
Here’s a tip: If the objective you are guarding gets attacked only in 1 out of 10 games, you probably don’t need to be sitting there guarding it every single game. Your team will report you, Blizzard will check the logs and see that yup in the majority of your games you did absolutely nothing except right click a flag and sit there the rest of the game, and they will likely give you a well deserved suspension.