Entire BNET account banned despite following directions from CS. How to appeal if I cannot log in anymore?

Support Customer Support
1

A couple days ago, I had heard from cs@blizzard over email in regards to my wow license appeals, stating that the action would not be reviewed further, and to stop making appeals, as they may action my Battlenet account if I do. They told me that I was free to make a new account to play WoW.

I accepted my ban at that point, as much as it hurt to lose my extremely old WoW account on a first time action in 20 years of play, and cancelled my active tickets (to note, in my tickets I was never instructed to stop making tickets or face penalty, only in the email).

I even did not reply to the CS email as I figured that might be taken as further bother. The only thing I have done since, with anything even remotely related to Blizzard entertainment, is play Diablo 2 resurrected with my friend for about an hour last night.

A couple of hours ago, despite following those directions, I received this email:

"Action(s) Taken: Account Closure

The Battle.net account has violated the Blizzard End User License Agreement. As a result, this Battlenet Account and all associated game accounts have been permanently closed. As the owner of this account, you are responsible for all actions associated with it. We will only overturn penalties if there is evidence of a compromised account. Read our Account Hacked article for details: [link removed for forum rules]"

This does not seem in line with typical practices, or even the email I had received less than 48 hours ago. I followed the directions of Supervisor GM Pengerothi to the letter, but now have lost access to Starcraft, WC3, all the Diablos, Overwatch… Everything. They told me to feel free and make a new account, but this new action that has come in unprompted prevents me from doing so.

I’m not here to plead my case, as I’ve learned that this isn’t the place for it. I went to make a ticket to at the very least get my games completely unrelated to World of Warcraft back, but as the Battle.net account itself is banned I am not able to do so, it seems. How do I appeal this action or understand why it happened? I thought I was doing exactly what was asked of me and made an effort to show I have accepted the penalty on my license at this point, despite how much it hurts.

2

You can make a starter account and reference the account that was closed. Closing a whole account is, to my understanding, rather rare. Good luck.

9 Likes
3

I would follow the above advice, also do NOT spam CS with requests, submit a single request, keep the request simple, do not try to justify or explain any actions as none of that matters, simply request to find out if its possible to move your other game licenses to your new account.

Understand it will likely take 2-3 days at minimum for them to look at it, and spamming and repeatedly creating new contacts will only hurt your attempts to get the other games restored. Only if you do not hear from anyone in over 5 days should you send a follow up, reference your request and ask if there are any updates on it. Then wait, and be patient. Again, keep it short and simple, your previous actions don’t matter, so don’t attempt to justify anything, simply don’t even bring it up. Make sure your polite, don’t be sarcastic, and don’t be passive aggressive, remember you want them to help you.

Spamming CS and reopening closed cases is almost never a good ideal, they are already busy and forcing them to wade through spam, will almost always be a bad idea. While its true you can continue to appeal until they tell you otherwise, I would for the most part never recommend more then a single appeal, as if two people have looked at it and both found against you, not only is the answer unlikely to change, but you risk further actions do to the likely spam.

4

Not being rude, but battle.net ban is pretty rare you had to have spammed a lot of tickets to warrant that. When they say all licenses, they mean all games.

2 Likes
5

Not at all, no. One ticket per response, stopped one ticket after the specialist investigation was completed, and sent one email which returned the response I described in the OP, where I cancelled that last ticket to respect Blizzard’s wishes.

6

GM harassment is only one way to earn an entire account closure, but even then I don’t think I’ve ever heard it done.

Horrendously egregious language violations, repeated terrain/game mechanic exploitation or repeated use of automation software could definitely do it, however. Among other things.

2 Likes
7

It’s pointless to speculate why. Players have no access to anything and people come in here telling similar stories all the time, and almost every single one of them turn out to be blatant lies. The only option you have on hand is to make a new account and try to appeal the closure of the other one, though if that entire account was closed for employee harassment, then you may be met with a cold reception again.

A Support Forum Agent may decide to join the thread and tell you what specific part of the policy got you banned, but that isn’t guaranteed, and they cannot directly intervene in your game account sanctions.

Closing an entire Bnet account means closing down every single individual game license and as such, correct me if I’m wrong, requiring you to rebuy all of the games again. Something tells me that GM harassment is not what caused that to happen but I’m sure an SFA will drop in and make a comment on it tomorrow.

2 Likes
8

The only thing I could think of given my genuine attempt to be as respectful and open as possible is an escalation of what they determined for my initial account action, but delayed and independent of what was said through communication. I do not want to engage with further speculation here as it feels tangential to “pleading my case” which I know is not permitted, and I would appreciate some insight from a SFA as well.

Update: My ticket response on the one I sent from the new account merged the ticket back to the primary one on this banned one, and appears to have misunderstood it as requesting an appeal on my license action - saying it was already verified and maintained, and that I can reopen the ticket and complete a survey, despite it being a new action and being unable to do either of these things.

I’ve put in a response trying to even more directly specify that I’m talking about the BNET account and not the WoW license, I really do not want them to think I’m continuing to appeal the license action after being asked to stop.

9

Frustrating that it’s confusing account and license but hopefully you can get an SFA to chime in. The recent ban waves have hit a lot of people who didn’t deserve it. GL

1 Like
10

Thank you. I hope so too.

There hasn’t really been any update on my side of things yet, the replies in tickets thus far have just asserted that it is being upheld, and that my BNET ban, well… They said “The account was not closed for following on multiple contacts regarding the WoW account closure, the Battle.net was closed due to another reason and you may find information regarding the closure on the email that was sent.” Except the initial email for the BNET ban only said what I posted in the OP, which is that it was for a EULA violation.

I’ve had to do a lot of thinking and piecing together the mixed signals I’ve gotten over tickets, and the only explanation for this severe of a penalty on a first time infraction is that they think I was a part of something I wasn’t. I’ve written lore posts loved enough to get new articles written about them, I’ve written countless guides, I’ve gotten really big bugs fixed. I’ve played the game for 20 years and I don’t think blizzard would license ban, and then BNET ban me if they didn’t think I was associated with something really nefarious.

I can’t get into the specifics here due to the forum rules, but I’ve cobbled together my best guess and submitted an extremely lengthy detailing of how this likely happened and all truthful context that should mirror their own data and help resolve the situation, but I can’t say for certain if it’s going to be read by the proper channels. I think the security team itself would have to look over that.

If any lurking SFA can take a look at my most recent ticket on the new account I had to make given that this one is banned (US103958406), and get that seen by the right people, it should at least absolve me of what prompted the extreme reaction and hopefully bring forth a lesser one. I’ve seen much younger accounts get off with 6 month, 1 year, otherwise license specific bans for honor botting, account sharing, multibox automating, what have you, and nothing I’ve ever done while messing around with my twinks could even remotely be classified as disruptive.

I won’t pretend that this means I shouldn’t be penalized in any fashion for messing with what I shouldn’t, but I also know that the severity of this ban is inconsistent with what is typically a pretty firm and reasonable reaction and must be because of their assumptions of either motivation or connection to someone that abused things in a much more graphic way.

11

They may be able to chime in, but that doesn’t mean that they are able to do anything. They’re not a part of the team that reviews these nor do they pass them on. That’s the whole point of putting in an appeal, is to have the right team look at it.

Nor is there any evidence that there were “a lot” of people who didn’t deserve an some sort of account action. Not to mention that you’d have to assume that this person (who seems to be taking some responsibility, aka not innocent) is involved in whatever ban wave you think they might be a part of.

That’s not going to help unfortunately.

They cannot. They can let you know to wait on your appeal and that’s about it.

You need to wait on your appeal. If it’s been closed and upheld, you can re-open and appeal again until such time they strongly advise against doing so.

5 Likes
12

I should really turn email notifications on, because apparently 20 minutes ago my Battle.net account was unbanned! I appreciate the consideration here. I was also informed that “The restriction has been lifted for the Battle.net account itself but the ban on the WoW account will remain and not be removed” which is very unfortunate, but not so strongly worded that I won’t try and possibly appeal it in a year.

Thank you to anyone here who might have put more eyes on this!

2 Likes
13

In a year, they will no longer have any data available to overturn that decision. It will be a lost cause then.

I’m happy to hear though that they were able to overturn your battle.net account action.

4 Likes
14

Well… Maybe six months in that case. I have read on these forums that manual security ban data does not expire compared to other types of bans, but I’ll lean on the safe side anyway (after half a year of good behavior on hots and d2)

15

I hate to tell you, but that doesn’t make any difference unfortunately. There’s no such thing as good behaviour effecting the outcome of an old account action. That’s not how it works nor has it ever worked that way.

Even 6-months from now, the data, the evidence itself that lead to the account action, will no longer be accessible to the hacks team. Based on what you said was in the email…personally, I’d cut my losses. Further appeals may lead to your battle.net being actioned again.

They’ve been clear that the WoW account action will stand. Since it’s an email, that means it’s already been escalated and reviewed by the higher-ups per se. Waiting 6 day, 6 months or 6 years isn’t likely going to bring that WoW account back unfortunately :frowning:

7 Likes
16

You’re probably right, and I’ll make my peace if that happens. They haven’t told me not to appeal it in the future, and I’ll stop if they do as I did before.

17

Here’s the thing, when communicating with blizzard on these sorts of matters. You need to be concise and to the point,

No colouring in trying to use excuses or whatever, no lawyering, no threats, do not mention youtube or any other site in defence. Just be concise and to the point stating only facts from what you know you’ve done, as only the facts matter.

Also make sure your ticket is short, no one like to read walls of text that are un formatted with no spaces or punctuation.

3 Likes
18

Keep in mind, once they tell you to stop for that action, it means also into the future they will not look into that same action. (If I am wrong on this part, someone correct me please.)

Honestly, better to just add a new license and play from that license. You can have up to 8 WoW licenses within the 1 Battle.net account, and with everything being Warbands, shouldn’t need to farm for all those cool mounts, or regain those old achievements, farm for those epic transmogs, etc.

2 Likes
19

Didn’t you say they told you exactly that a year ago?

20

You must be mixing up my thread with someone else’s. This incident is my first and everything regarding it has taken place in the past 2 weeks.