I know that posting here about this kind of issue is kind of frowned upon, but i dont really know what else I can do if I really do believe he was wrongfully banned. On his original account he put in a ticket for getting scammed out of 36k gold, a GM was nice enough to restore his gold and punish the scammer.
5 days later his account was perma banned for “hacking”. I play with this guy all the time, and know that doesnt run any unauthorized cheat programs, and doesnt have any previous warning about this issues attached to his account. I’m not sure if he could of gotten mass reported by the scammer and his people as cheating and it auto flagged him. He appeals and its rejected. He makes a new account levels a toon in like 3-4 days (there were a few sessions where he went hard gaming for 20 hours + which i do myself as well), gets a 5k hand out and a 3k handout from a guildie (he paid the 5k back to his friend) he made a decent ammount of gold in the -3 weeks- this account was open by soloing wotlk heroics and DEing wotlk epics to sell the mats, honor farming to vendor gear, getting valor capped and selling the BOEs, and playing a lot. He said he probably made around 50k in 3 weeks. he was vendoring honor gear the gear was 25 honor and paid out 8g 57 silver and he did that a bunch of times while using a macro for to click ok to equip and sell, and he spams it pretty fast. He bought a darkmoon card for 10k and when he logged on the next day. His new account was permabanned with no warning for “econ manipulation”.I feel he might of gotten auto flagged for farming in instances + his long gaming sessions without logging out, or selling the cheap honor gear to a vendor (or the combination of all 3). Ive been on discord with this him for some of these long session, hes not account sharing or anything by what i can tell.
I feel like at first glance with the gold and game time accrued in 3 weeks it would see like a gold farming account, but he was really just going hard trying to catch up because his original account got banned no warning and hes just trying to catch up. One of my other friends was auto flagged and banned for clearing kara on his mage for gold at launch and it was ruled a wrongful ban and overuled, not sure if this might be something similar. This guy isnt a bot and isnt cheating by what i can tell afer gaming with him for the last 3 weeks, but his tickets have been closed. I have screenshots of the responses and I’ll post the ticket numbers below. You can go through our chat history for a better explanation of exactly he was doing. I guess im just asking someone to take a real close look at these 2 account suspensions with all this in mind and can get one or both of these bans overturned.
Here are the ticket numbers: #99765879 #100061627 #95395729 #99837280
thank you for taking the time to read what im sure is a redundant topic
It’s nice what you want to help your friend, but the CS forum has no input or sway with the appeals team. This isn’t a bypass to the ticket que, nor they can handle any given ticket because someone posted. Along with that, they don’t talk about account actions with 3rd parties. Much in the line of talking about account actions on the form is mainly frown upon, namely when it isn’t the person in question.
I had chatGPT help with a TLDR, so I hope it’s fairly accurate:
TL;DR: My friend was wrongfully banned for “hacking” after getting scammed. He created a new account and was banned again for “economic manipulation” due to intense farming sessions and using macros to quickly sell gear. Both bans seem like misunderstandings, and we request a thorough review to possibly overturn them.
First, GMs don’t tend to ever give back gold during scams.
Second, there’s no such thing as being banned for “Economic manipulation” in wow. It’s not possible to actually manipulate the economy no matter how much you farm.
Lastly, nobody here will be able to tell you anything about your friends tickets due to privacy rules.
That’s the thing. Discussing account actions isn’t actually allowed on the forums. It’s a little more tolerated here, but there are no GMs on the forums.
Wasn’t my intention to bypass tickets, his were closed and im not sure how to get someones attention. I can see how lots of play time + decent chunk of gold made + vendoring a BUNCH of honor items just screams gold seller account, but it really is just the circumstance of trying to catch his new character up. If i was a GM i would see this and be like BAN HAMMER BOT at first glance.
That’s not how they determine account actions at all. There’s a lot of data in the background that they look at to determine if an account needs to be actioned.
It’s not, “Oh look at how much that guys is doing!”
Only your friend can appeal this via tickets. There are zero other options.
lol you’re right it is kinda hard to read, i should of paragraphed it lmao. I have the screen shots of the GM reply to what was referred to as “ninjaing” and them giving him his gold back which i was surprised about as well.
I only have screenies of the reason being hacking. He told me word of mouth about the “econ exploit” or whatever. He didnt want to post about it in case it caused further punishment, so i figured id do it. I’ll let him know what you said.
I appreciate the feedback and insight, good looks brother.
Actually, there is. But it’s called economic exploitation (I think), and it refers to buying or selling in-game items for real money. Sounds like that’s what the OP may be referring to.
What ya talking about is RMT, real money trade, is selling in game items for our of game atuff. There isn’t any actions for AH manipulation as its a free market and anyone can buy/sale at whatever price they want.
This is also not entirely against the rules either. You are allowed to sell expansions, mounts, toys, transmog from the blizzard store to others for real world currency by using the gift system.
It’s nice that you want to help your friend but there is really nothing you can do to help. Blizzard goes solely by their logs and they can see a lot more than we can. They don’t accept screenshots or testimonials. Literally the only thing to do is for your friend to post appeals until Blizzard tells them to stop. Each appeal gets looked at by a different person. Best of luck to your friend.
While it is true they don’t ban for AH related or general sales related things, there IS an economy related Ban category. It is used for RMT related offenses.
Example of the email a player would get for that category.
Account Action: Account Closure
Offense: Exploitative Activity: Abuse of the Economy
This account was closed because it was involved, either directly or indirectly, with the unauthorized exchange of in-game property for “real-world” currency. This exchange detracts from the integrity of the World of Warcraft game environment.
The account holder is responsible for all activity on the account. We issue suspensions and closures to protect our players and our service in accordance with our Blizzard EULA
We don’t take this decision lightly. Our team issued this closure only after a careful review of relevant evidence. Our support staff will not overturn these closures and may not respond to appeals. For information, see our article:
In some cases, these actions happen when a third party compromises an account to sell gold or other in-game property. If you believe your account was compromised, please follow these important instructions:
I’m also going to take a bullet here, as it were. I am going to make the assumption you had originally posted this plea on the toon that was Anime-related, then deleted it.
Before you find yourself having your own one-on-one with the GMs who handle these sorts of things, I would highly, highly suggest you self-report that name and any others you may have that toes the line of decency.
Mind you, you may get a templated response at first. THIS IS NORMAL. Just kick it back with the “I still need help” button and they’ll hopefully get you sorted out before any issues arise.
Me Note: Yeah, I know. Not supposed to do this but I cannot seem to help myself.
OP, I’m sorry about your friend. They should continue to appeal.
Please note that Blizzard has extensive and detailed logs way beyond anything you can provide. If a 1000 people report your friend and he didn’t do anything, nothing would happen.
It doesn’t matter how fast they level or much they make, it is still reviewed before a ban is issued. There is no Automatic Ban.
The hardest part is sometimes people do try to play it close to the edge and get busted for breaking the rules and nearly all of them WON’T ADMIT IT. It’s just human nature.
The fact mistakes happen is an indication that human GM aren’t perfect, so encouraged them to appeal again
Posting just to bump threads, and offer opinions without evidence, is a bad idea. Your notions of how Blizzard operates are not facts, and are best not used to bump threads that are done.