Closing Blizzard Account

Community General Discussion
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TLDR: WoW account banned permanently, Appeal process terrible. Closing Blizzard Account

The Auto-Ban and Appeal process needs to be reworked

My WoW account was banned about a month ago for “Abuse of the Economy” cited as trading in-game goods for a Real Money Transaction. I’ve made exactly zero RMTs in WoW or across any Blizzard game. I am part of the goldmaking community and have made a substantial amount of gold in the past few years. Enough to buy over 300 WoW tokens.

I’m currently on my 5th appeal ticket with little success.

I’ve messaged Blizzard CS Twitter account, made a reddit post and a post on the WoW forums (Por favor borra esto - Wow account banned permanently) but have made no traction on my appeal.

After reading other posts and talking with other players who were banned, there are a few reasons my account was flagged.

  1. Gifting Blizzard products to friends.

I have 14 friends and family members on Battlenet, all who I know in real life. After pulling my privacy data, I found I’ve sent 44 gifts to these 14 friends. Most notably 5 copies of Warcraft 3, 10 copies of Diablo 2
Resurrected and 10 copies of Diablo 4.

  1. Buying crafting materials from the AH.

Over the past 5 years I’ve bought millions of crafting materials from the AH to use for crafting / disenchanting / vendoring. Most recently I’ve been buying large quantities of enchanting materials which may have flagged my account.

  1. Illicit gold picked up from the mail.

This is the least likely option as I’ve never bought/sold gold, I don’t run GDKPs and I’ve never used or ran a boosting service. I had opened a ticket to remove any gold mailed to my characters that I opened inadvertently , but none was found according to the GM I talked to.

So I find myself with few options. I’m unable to call or chat with Blizzard to resolve this issue. With a short phone call I’m sure I could get my unfair ban overturned.

This post is really my last chance to get someone to take another look at my account. If not I’m planning to close my 20 year old Blizzard Account. I’ve had no previous suspensions or bans across any blizzard game. I haven’t even had a chat ban or squelch. I don’t want to close my account but given few options it seems like the best choice. Unironically I played WoW from Vanilla to Wotlk and never tried Cataclysm which is coming out in a months time on WoW classic. I picked up WoW again for BFA till Dragonflight.

On the positive side, I’m replaying older Blizzard games before I close my account permanently. I’ve played through Warcraft 1 and 2. Currently playing the expansion to Warcraft 2. I’ll also play through both Starcrafts, Rock 'N Roll Racing and Warcraft 3 before my planned account closure date of May 13th 2024

Thank you for reading,
Lok’tar Ogar!

TLDR: WoW account banned permanently, Appeal process terrible. Closing Blizzard Account

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Doesn’t exist.

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Appeals do not go through any process except the link that was in your email. If you want to move your thread to Customer Support and see what kind of information you can get on how the appeal process works, you can do that.

But General Discussion can do nothing here.

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You were not “auto banned”. The most that happens automatically is a Squelch for spam chat with enough reports in a short enough time.

  1. Your account was NOT banned for gifting to friends.

  2. Your account was NOT banned for buying crafting mats from the AH. Not unless there is some sophisticated craft mat/gold laundering scheme I don’t know about.

  3. Illicit gold from the mail - that is possible. If you are dealing directly with a gold selling account that can get your account banned. If you have enough AH transactions that are all from specific illicit accounts, that can do it too, but is harder to do.

What was odd, was that you did not get any response at all to the CS post. Normally they at least give some hint, but I think for Cheating/Botting/Illiict gold selling maybe they don’t do that. Maybe they keep it to clarifying chat infractions.

Regardless, the only appeal process that exists is the ticket appeal process. If they said no, then they mean no. It seems you went through as many appeals as you could and they refused to overturn it.

Correct. Blizzard has never intended for phones or live chat to be a path for appeals. They don’t let people argue with the CS reps. The Hacks team goes ONLY on game logs and data. That is it. Either that data is correct, or not correct. Which is what appeals are for - via tickets.

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There’s some on-going drama right now in the Overwatch realm, but still directly related to Blizzard CS.
They banned some guy for swearing. In a game where a profanity filter exists.
When appealed they got automated responses. Eventually they took it to Twitter where Blizzard CS responded to say all they will receive are automated responses, as ban appeals are not a discussion. (SO what are they?)

Basically that’s Blizzard saying we made our ruling no backsies!

I wish I had some good news for you, but ultimately I would throw in the towel with Blizzard if this ever occurred to me.

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Yep, this is correct. :slightly_smiling_face:

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A profanity filter isn’t an excuse to go off the rails and ignore the EULA and CoC we agreed to. It’s been this way forever and Blues have said this forever.

You don’t get a pass on swearing just because a profanity filter can block it.

And templates aren’t automation.

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Yes, because it has been against the rules to use profanity, masked profanity, slurs, hateful speech, sexual comments, references to certain body parts/functions, advertising, spam, etc since WoW released - and for every game after.

They have always penalized people for breaking those rules if they get reported. Always. The filter exists to let parents protect minors from people who can’t follow the rules. Not to allow someone to break the rules they agreed to.

No swearing means no swearing. If you swear and get reported, you very likely get penalized. This is kind of self explanatory.

Mature Language Filter (aka The Profanity Filter)

  • This can be activated within your Interface Options: Main menu (ESC key by default) Click Interface > Social and check - Mature Language Filter.

  • Once enabled, all inappropriate words in our profanity database will be filtered and masked to appear as jumbled characters, such as ‘*##@&’.

Note: The filter does not excuse the language used. The filter serves as a temporary shield, to help parents of minors and others who do not wish to see it, to block it. Our policies prohibit the use of both clear and masked inappropriate language.

Oh, and games are rated by the ESRB for Blizzard’s pre-made content can be reviewed.P layer interactions (names and chat) are not rated. Those have to follow the Code of Conduct no matter what the game rating is.

They are asking someone to look at the game logs again. To verify if a mistake was made or not. If they used profanity then yes, the rule and penalty will be upheld. They don’t care WHY someone does it, only that they did.

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Now tell us what you are leaving out. You know the actual reason for your account being permabanned. They just don’t start out giving one. You have be be doing something over and over and over before they slap you with one so what is it?

Also, auto bans is not a thing.

The profanity filter isn’t there for you to cuss as much as you want. It’s for the accidental slip. Use of profanity is against the rules in all of of their games that have a chat feature.

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I’ve only had one living person respond to me while submitting an appeal.
The automated responses were, as you said, " we reviewed your appeal, and found that it was legit "
Never banned/suspended from the game, but have had a few on the forums over the years.
For such silly reasons too.
The craziest one was a suspension for calling someone a ’ liberal '…

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This caught my attention, I have no control of who I buy crafting materials from the AH. Lowest price sells first.

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have u tried confidence?

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yeah…uhm yeah. i highly doubt you didnt engage in some abuse of the economy to achieve this. thats over what? 6000$ worth of tokens…

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I’ve given all the details available to me, I’ve broken no in game or ToS rules yet still got banned.

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So you got a forum suspension for insulting/harassing someone. If only that was against the forum rules. oh…wait…

And they don’t give permanent WoW bans on the first offense. You are leaving out something.

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Are you well?..
Since when is referring to someone as a liberal insulting? Or harassing for that matter…

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It probably was the way you said it that resulted in the forum suspension.

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I realize you have no control over who buys what. However, the AH can still be used to move illicit gold - it is just harder to do. It requires somone to either list rare goods so they are the only one offering them, or offer goods at a price nobody else is using. Then the gold seller “buys” the targeted goods.

Once is an accident. Repeated interactions with known gold selling accounts can result in account penalties.

I have no idea what YOU specifically did. I am only explaining one of the ways others have engaged in illicit activities in the past.

You have a tendency to bring up flame bait topics, insult people/troll, try to pick fights, etc. Keep the real world politics off the forums. It has nothing to do with WoW so there is no point in calling someone anything - esp when it only serves to pick fights.

Just don’t. This does not need to derail into a discussion of why people try to use politics to be “insulting”.

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that’s only 9 million gold - lots of people have 10 times that. Blizzard watches those accounts with a lot of gold like crazy. One guy I know has close to 1 billion gold now and a few years ago I wanted him to trade me gold on one server for gold on another and he was too scared to do it.

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I was unaware that text had vocal inflection… :man_facepalming: