Botting suspensions - Classic vs Retail

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Hey folks.

Figured that you guys have been around enough to see basically everything policy related… So hoping that you can point me in the right direction here, as google is failing me miserably.

(No, it’s not me or an account I control, it is somebody I know, and no, I’m not trying to get account specific information about them)

If someone is caught for botting in classic, and eats a formal 6 month suspension:

  1. Are they suspended out of retail as well for that same period?

  2. You & blizzard state that reversals are rare… and I’ve been watching this forum enough that I believe you… If an individual appeals early/often and gets ‘capped’ so to speak (gets the message indicating that all further appeals will be ignored) … Is it ever worth appealing again if later circumstances suggest that a mistake was made? Or is that permanently all she wrote?

  3. the ‘74k’ suspension wave done a couple of months ago… was that basically only classic activities specific? Or did it feature players from both versions?

…Or is that a question that can be answered?
(I can appreciate the need to keep information from botters)

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To answer #2 if they say no more apeals will be accpeted it means that they have more then enough evidence to back it and any further tickets will result in account action like unable to make ticket. As for #1 id assume it would go hand in hand banned in one banned in the other. #3 was solely classic.

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I don’t know what kind of “new circumstances” could warrant an appeal after they’ve said they are upholding it and no new appeals will be considered. That means they have MORE than enough evidence that the illicit actions occurred, which is all that is necessary to uphold it. There would have to be some kind of MASSIVE error made. An error big enough that a LOT more than just one account would be affected. I’m not saying that such a thing is totally impossible and could never happen, but even speaking hypothetically I can’t think of any way that could possibly happen. I’m sure the chance of this is technically non-zero but it’s so small that it’s not really worth considering.

Even the mass ban that affected Wine users way back when (where Warden thought Wine was a botting program - that’s the only HUGE mass mistake like this I can think of in WOW’s history), was reversed almost immediately on appeal. Noone got to the “no more appeals will be considered” category on that one.

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The suspension applies to the WoW license itself, so that will impact both Classic as well as BFA.

So this is a complicated answer but I’ll try to answer as best as I can.

Overall, our Hacks team does what they can to check, re-check and triple-check that the actions they apply are correct prior to those actions going out. We’d love if that was 100% all the time, as we don’t want to negatively impact legitimate players, but mistakes do happen.

Now, that could be a one off, meaning that an individual account’s activities looked suspicious and to our teams and detection systems the person looked like a bot, was selling gold, or otherwise exploiting. Or, in some situations, where the “footprint” we detect from a particular botting program may also show up from something else, giving a false positive. Those tend to be extremely rare.

In both cases during an appeal we look at the information we have available to see if we can verify the original finding. We also look to see if the account was compromised at the time of the violation. If we verify the action and no compromise is found we are usually forced to uphold the original finding.

Now, with that said. Our teams also collects a lot of data, we know how many appeals we get per action, how many were found to be errors, etc… and when the information starts to take on a different picture, that sometimes allows our teams to verify an error where we may be able to overturn some possible false positives or even outright mistakes. That can happen after a person has exhausted their appeals but most of the time that doesn’t matter because we’ll go back over those impacted using the new data to find where the false positives were and overturn those, without the need to submit a new appeal.

I don’t actually recall with any certainty, Teranin. I believe it was both, but I don’t remember and I don’t believe I’d be able to provide any details.

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Heh. Pretty sure I’ve re-written this post several times now. I appreciate the information, thanks Vralok, Darth and Vrakthis… This has been helpful.

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