Just wanted to let you know the in-game reporting system is broke. The same accounts spam over and over in trade for selling raids, services etc. Reporting them does nothing, they stay active and it’s the same names day in and day out.
The other broken part of this is that these accounts initially get blocked but only for 24 hours as they’re back with the same names displaying on my screen. Any attempt to manually ignore does the same thing and it only lasts for 24 hours as right clicking their name the next day shows the unblock option not block.
This system is gaslighting your customer base thinking we would get remedy but none comes.
Not exactly, at the start of Classic release I was reporting this certain goldseller that was claiming to sell wow gold and/or trade other game currencies. I added every character to my ignore list, they did got banned and they just came back on a new one.
Conclusion: They did take action, but they just came back as I predicted they would bypass it anyway.
Just to clarify how the reporting system works, only one report from your account will count as a report on Blizzard’s end.
When you right-click and report them for spam, it places that person’s account on ignore until you log out of the reporting character on your account. If you log into any other character or out of the game and back in again, the temporary ignore is removed.
I wish that the ignore was permanent, but alas, it is not.
If enough people actually report the person for spam, their whole account will receive a squelch until a GM looks into it and chooses whether or not to take further actions.
You do know its not the same account its one of thousands of stolen account they account hop like people alt hop one gets banned they hop to the next one.
They do but like others have said they have loads and loads of accounts. They reuse the same names over and over again and close variations of those names. No way to keep them out of the game.
Only thing that would get rid of them is to eliminate and have your fellow players to stop using their services and buying their gold.
That’s NOT how the system is designed to work though. There’s a whole team that handles compromised accounts (which these typically are) and they do not ban them one at a time. This would be bad as the botting companies would run even more rampant.
Your understanding of the system and how you feel it should work is the only part that’s flawed.
Orlyia isn’t going to be able to action any of your reports as that’s not her job.
It’s awesome that you are reporting them and hopefully others will as well. That’s the BEST way to get these accounts shut down.
But trying to convince people that reporting doesn’t work is what these criminals want you to do. That way Blizzard receives fewer reports and is not able to chut as many of them down. You’re doing their bidding unfortunately
There’s likely a misunderstanding in how the process actually works, but that’s ok as it’s not meant to be very transparent. Too transparent and the bad guys will have warning.
The blue posters here are only mods, they do not look at reports or tickets.
Tanks though for expressing your concerns and trying to keep the game free, your reports go a lot further than you know.
then how else is it supposed to be done? It is more complicated than just someone looking at a report because there is a whole team of people dedicated to this, as well as specialized staff members that look into stolen accounts and similar problems, but how else is this supposed to be done than people in-game flagging accounts for investigation?
There are already proactive methods of detection such as Warden and likely other programs we’ll never know about that comb through the servers and peoples computers, flagging staff members to accounts and activity marked as suspicious. You’re saying the system is broken but how is it broken? What is it that’s not working correctly and how did you verify this?
Whether you think the system is broken or not, ALL you can do is report accounts anyway, so just keep doing that. If you stop reporting altogether, then the problem is just going to explode.
This has gone around the web a lot, this misconception that bots equal sub money. The truth is the bots usually use stolen sources of funding, causing Blizzard to lose money when those charges inevitably fail. Blizzard does ban them, and has posted about these actions to remove fraudulent accounts.
so the stolen accounts use the said accounts gold to fund the game time via tokens or do they not buy from AH like normal players do to keep the cycle going of deleting the reported toons on the stolen accounts and recreating new clones?
Stolen accounts if not currently funded will use gold on those accounts to fund them or stolen credit cards to fund them. When one of those accounts gets silenced they will delete the characters and then switch to a new stolen account and remake those same names or ones close to the ones they used.
They do this so you think nothing happens to the spammers and you are less likly to report them. The bots do not equil subs or sub money! The scammers do not pay using their own money, They use stolen credit cards!
You think they’re going to do anything legitimately with the account?
They’ll use the existing game time (if any), or stolen credit cards etc.
The gold is worth a lot more to them to sell then to purchase game time via AH token - considering the account is likely to be closed well before game time expires, so they’ll syphon the gold to their gold selling partners.
Ultimately, the costs involved in the fight against the gold sellers/botters would greatly outweigh any profit to Blizzard.
