Just having that feature enabled isn’t a problem, but it is a problem if you use it to streamline multiboxing.
I found it looking in installed applications and it was along the lines of workflow organisation software. It’s called “Power Automate” most reviews 2.5 star rating of it, ask why is it installed as default and don’t want it installed. It’s listed in Microsoft store and in your installed applications folder in system settings.
1 Like
That’s not a default app that gets installed with Windows 11 and if you do manage to see it pop up in the start menu or something, it means it’s likely a placeholder that when you open it, it will install the actual app. It’s possible they tested rolling it out to some devices, but I’ve never seen it installed on a machine, out of dozens of fresh Windows 11 installations that I’ve overseen over the years.
Even if the app is installed, so long as you’re not using it, while WoW or Battlenet are open, you will not get banned. Almost every mouse and keyboard software supports macro scripting, which can be used for automation. You don’t see millions of players getting banned for it. Why? Because they aren’t using it to cheat or make anti-afk macros and whatnot.
The moment you use any form of automation with WoW, then yes, you’re likely going to be flagged and banned sometime between the minute you did it, to maybe six months later, depending on when they decide to reel in the ban-wave drag-net.
3 Likes
Btw, I’m not suspended nor have I used any automation. I’m also not playing wow atm. I have only been commenting on my experience with windows11 which I’ve only been using for a couple of weeks. I had seen the automation software on my system and came to the conclusion that it was installed by default., I know nothing more about that program than what it said in the description about it.
Im against Microsoft putting bloatware automatically on systems that people don’t even ask for most of the time.
2 Likes
I’ve been playing with windows 11 for about a year. Haven’t been banned or warned.
I stopped getting banned back in 2014 when I stopped botting.
Sadly he’ll remained perma-banned. I myself was targeted by Blizzard’s internal auditors around 5 years ago. I never have used third-party software for any aspect of gaming throughout Azeroth. I’m actually a WOW purist - using only the WOW UI and the penchant of game discovery. I was banned for exploiting the WOW economy and using third-party software to do so. It took me 4 1/2 years to finally get that answer, but I have no idea how I could be “that good”…to mimic a software program? Needless to say, I had to start another account that I’ve grown to love even though I truly miss all the toons I’d endlessly worked on. May your friend try starting a new account and join us who have all suffered loss while being harmed for honestly just loving a game. Peace!
Blizzard does not just action people just for simply “loving the game.” They take appropriate action towards people who breach the In-Game Code of Conduct/EULA/Other Policies.
7 Likes
So let me guess, you were using something like autohotkey to pixel scan and AH snipe, and you thought you were safe doing it from within a VM sandbox or from within a linux interpreter sandbox like Proton/Wine, but still got caught…
When they ban, it’s usually because they have pretty damning evidence of it, contrary to what the vocally loud minority on the forums/reddit/twitter claim. Yeah, every now and then, they’ll have some false ban wave that gets a couple hundred people(usually due to Warden’s heuristics getting tripped up by common programs that they haven’t adapted the whitelist for), but those people go through the appeals process and then get it overturned. I’d take a gamble in estimating that after an appeal phase, less than 1 in 50k people remain falsely banned. You’d be surprised at exactly how much telemetry and data that online game companies actually keep record of.
Yep, and that goes along with the 65% of people playing WoW that are on Windows 11 as well (the steam hardware survey is skewed and only shows Windows 11 as being ~55%, but that’s because a while back, they added a ton of stats from Chinese users and most of their PCs were still on Windows 10).
But in your case, it sounds like you learned your lesson. Cheating in online games is not good…
1 Like
Just want to correct this to this for you, Pawg
Right, but like I said, it’s usually very temporary and almost always gets rectified within a week of them realizing they falsely banned innocent players. But again, it’s actually pretty damned rare for it to happen, when you think of the fact that there are likely at least 1-3 million subbed users at any given time.
The point I was trying to get at with my post was a the numbers, and the term “false ban waves.”
When you use the term “false ban waves,” people will misinterpret it as, “Blizzard says they do ban waves, but they don’t.” And while some of us know what you mean, most people won’t. And they could use that to spread misinformation in regards to Blizzard’s endless war towards bots, making some people think, “what is the point of reporting these bots if Blizzard won’t really do anything about it?”
And the numbers, it is highly speculative to think hundreds of innocent people get caught in ban waves. Yes, it is true, it is quite a low number of players who are caught, but we don’t have any actual data to back any numbers up, especially when we don’t know how many do get banned in the ban waves, and how many of those are innocent players caught in it.
That is the point I was getting at within my post, and why I said to “just want to correct this for you.”
2 Likes
Blizzard bans constantly, but sometimes they wait to round up a bunch of accounts in a single wave, rather than playing whack a mole with cheat engine coders constantly coding around what got detected. Holding off on mass banning is usually reserved for bot farming, since they use sophisticated bot scripts to try to evade detection. But during that time that they are holding off on dropping the hammer, they are still banning for all sorts of other things. Especially for low hanging fruit like people using autohotkey scripts.
Sometimes, there is an actual false ban wave where something completely normal, that a bunch of people share in common, trips Warden’s heuristics and bans people wrongfully. That happens and has happened at least a few times that I can remember, though Blizzard very rarely will make a statement about it and instead, just quietly lifts the bans on any affected users.
I think you’re missing the context of what I was explaining. Think of Warden like an “antivirus,” it’s constantly being updated, but sometimes it doesn’t get updated in time to account for some new common change to operating system environments. So some new update happens to let’s say AMD’s GPU software or drivers and it does some new operations in memory that look potentially suspicious, that Warden’s heuristics weren’t updated to whitelist yet, it can trip the detection and lump a bunch of people into a false ban wave(I’d assume/hope that some siren would go off on Blizzard’s end and that their team would do some verifying before just automatically mass banning them all, but it’s highly dependent on what got tripped). This exact thing happened with Valve’s anticheat a while back. It was something about changes they made to anti-lag(AMD’s version of Nvidia Reflex) with the drivers. Thankfully, they fixed the issue and unbanned people that were falsely banned. The same kind of stuff can and does happen with Blizzard’s anticheat as well.
Now in other cases, it could just be that they finally dropped the hammer on a bunch of people using macro scripts in a specific mouse and keyboard software and in some of those cases, people weren’t actually intentionally using them while playing WoW because maybe they had some global macro for spamming the left mouse button to play some clicker game. Some of those innocent people might still remain banned because they didn’t have quite enough evidence to prove their innocence, like the user might have potentially used it many times in a row to perform some action within WoW or some other Blizzard game like Diablo.
Another example of people being caught in false ban or punishment waves(usually just suspensions or they removed the ill-gained items/currency) is when there’s some exploit or bug with a boss/mob/quest/etc where it’s super obvious that what they are doing probably is NOT okay, but they decide to farm it for days anyways, Blizzard will draw the line somewhere like “if accounts were found to have exploited this more than 10 times, they will be actioned.” So in some cases, there might have been people that really genuinely didn’t understand that what they were doing was exploitive, but they did it 15 times and got punished. Those people would be in the gray area of being falsely banned, since they didn’t actually have any direct intention on exploiting, but then the problem becomes proving innocence and well, there’s a million and one cheaters/exploiters that cry wolf, so it’s hard to prove you’re not one of them.
But wow, the coffee kicked in hard. Didn’t mean for this to turn into an essay lol…
1 Like
Oh? How so? It’s pretty difficult to see the work that’s being done when you put in a ticket. It’s extremely easy to assume that you know what’s going on, especially if they uphold an account action.
o.O
Account actions are not automated and there is an appeal system. If they didn’t want to accept appeals (as they’re not required in any way to), then they wouldn’t allow you to even appeal.
Please try not to spread completely inaccurate information in the CS forums 
13 Likes
I think its time to close this tipic its starting to go off the rails.
4 Likes