Is playing more than 15 hours a day prohibited? During the 20th Anniversary launch of WoW, I played more than 15 hours in a day, and on the fourth day of the launch, while completing SM Lib, my account was permanently banned for Exploitative Activity: Unauthorized Cheat Programs (Hacks). However, I did not use any automated programs, bots, hacks, or anything of the sort.
I am very confused by this action. I have already submitted an appeal, but I keep receiving copy-paste responses from a bot instead of a reply from a real customer service representative.
I am a bit frustrated and feel it is unfair because I was accused of using a bot when I did not, yet they themselves are responding to my emails with a bot.
Extended play game time has no relevance to u getting banned.
Im gona be blunt u u need to understand blizzard never has and never used bots to answer tickets everything uve heard to the contrary is 100% wrong and false.
Every apeal is handled 100% by real GMS not bots or AI.
Playing for longer periods of time will not flag your account for a ban. More often than not bans are not from the same day, let alone the same week as when it happens, as they have to review it and investigate. Put in an appeal and be patient. That is quite literally all you can do.
Since there is a LFG channel feature in classic fresh, I level up my character by joining dungeons until my account is banned even though at that time I was running SM Lib and suddenly it disconnected and a message appeared saying your account is banned. I feel lost because of that
Again, all you can do is appeal and wait. Appeal till they tell you to stop. However, I will reiterate that your play time has no bearing on the ban whatsoever.
What you were doing at the time of the ban probably has no consequence in the ban itself. These things take days and sometimes weeks to investigate before they apply an account action.
All you can do is appeal until they tell you to stop and hope for the best. Nothing can be done on the forum.
They respond to an insane amount of tickets a day, having a template that is the same for everyone expedites their response times.
They will never give anyone specific details on what cheating/hacking programs were detected as that would only give ammunition to people who create and sell them to become sneakier.
There’s this thing call a ‘template’, the appeals team use them to keep infomation in order and keep the wait time down. Along with that, they’re not going to report what programs their system found, or how they found it, as folks who want to bot will use that to avoid being found out. Along with that, some folks are unable to really take personal responsibly on their actions.
Templates. They use form letters. Pre-made text that is reviewed and approved as the response. They have been used for hundreds of years. The person using it just has to fill in the name of the person it is being sent to, the date, etc.
There are a few templates they use for appeals. These are roughly the ones:
Appeal upheld along with a link to the basic rules
Appeal granted along with an apology and sometimes game time
Appeal escalated to a specialist. This ends the ticket conversation but it can take a long time to hear back from a specialist. Usually via email
They COULD do it. They have that information. The reason depends on the type of infraction.
For Cheating/botting/exploits/automation it is a policy decision. They do not want players to know exactly what was found, when, and how. Bot makers and cheat makers would love that info so that they can better refine their ways to escape detection. It is not fun for average players who get caught, but unfortunately that info helps the bad guys.
For social infractions (chat, names, spam/advertising) they USED to give a snippet of some of the text that was reported. Just to give folks an idea what time frame it was from. The tool that was putting that into the templates broke. It was putting totally irrelevant things in there that were not related to the account action. So, they are not using it right now. They DO hope to get it fixed at some point though. It is helpful to know what chat behavior got the penalty - too much advertising a guild? Spamming something in chat? Profanity/masked profanity? etc.
The email you get should tell you the category of the account penalty so that you have some idea what sort of infraction it was. If it is a social infraction, asking here can sometimes get a Blue Blizzard staff member to check the logs and manually pull up what the account was actioned for.
“We saw you cheat at date and time in zone with hacks.exe”
Cheater: “oh that was 2 days after using the bot, so this time let’s try 1.5 days and then a day break”
