Stop cheating. Accept your ban. Merry Christmas.
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As someone who has been through the “appeal over and over until they say no more” thing, that’s pretty infuriating and ultimately pointless, but maybe they’ll get lucky.
I got smacked with a 14 day ban in the October before Dragonflight came out because I was doing Headless Horseman on WotLK Classic and someone in my group sent me a whisper offering me 1,000g not to roll on the mount IF it dropped, and I agreed since I really don’t care about getting the mount on Classic. Sure enough the damn thing dropped, and he kept his word and sent me the 1k.
I went and spent it on getting my alt paladin geared up and picked up dual spec, and still had a few hundred gold left… Then next day I go to login and I’m suspended. I write a ticket, and basically the response I got was “you were banned for unauthorized software or using exploits”, and I went back and forth with them in the appeal process over and over until I was essentially told “you know what you did, no further appeals can be made” and I was left completely flummoxed.
… Until I logged in 15 days later and found my gold at 0 across all of my characters, and all the gear I had bought from the AH had been removed. Then it clicked: the dude who sent me the 1k must’ve bought it from a gold seller.
I don’t know if he bought it himself then sent it to me, or if he just put in my character name as the recipient on a seller website (not sure how all that works) but somehow or another his gold wasn’t legit, and I was forced to pay the price - double. First in losing about $7.50 of game time, and then in losing everything I bought with the gold PLUS all of my legitimately earned gold. I had just assumed it was a bank alt when the gold came from a totally different character. That’s how I manage all of my gold too; I have an alt where I send all of AH fodder and then when one of my toons needs money, I log my bank alt and mail it. So I didn’t think anything of it.
Anyway, the tl;dr is that by the time I had figured out the REAL reason for the ban, I was already at the point where I was told I couldn’t appeal the issue further. The system is broken. Sometimes you can’t even figure out the real reason you were banned until the ban is over, but you are trying to get the ban lifted with the appeals so you end up burning through all of your appeals before you get to the REAL reason for your ban… I just hope that the accounts who were banned didn’t have something totally unrelated to the mass reporting as the real reason but run out of appeals because they’re trying too hard to get into the raid by tonight.
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It’s really frustrating because it’s truly on a case by case basis with CSRs/GMs. You can open 10 different tickets asking if a certain piece of software is okay, and get 10 different answers ranging from “absolutely no outside programs or you’re cheating” to “as long as you still have to actively be at your computer playing your character, it’s okay.”
For example: I use GSE. For those who don’t know, it’s essentially an addon that allows you to make extremely advanced macros well beyond the 255 character limit (it essentially takes your long macro and splits it into multiple macros and then adds “/click macro2” into the first macro, “/click macro3” into the second and so on, so that you can have your entire rotation on one button along with modifier keys for conditionals like holding shift switches to a totally different rotation for AoE, holding ctrl fires off an interrupt, alt fires off all your CDs, etc. This is often paired with an AutoHotKey script that allows you to hold down your GSE sequence key so it runs through your whole rotation unil you let go of the key.
If you ask CSRs, most will tell you this is okay because you’re still having to be there and manage your character movement and nothing will happen unless you hold down the macro key. But some will tell you that ANY level of automation, including macro keys built into software for your keyboard/mouse is cheating.
Ironically, this also goes for the OFFICIAL World of Warcraft MMO mouse that was released years ago. Even just using the capability to map macros to the bajillion buttons on the mouse. So unfortunately there’s no hard and fast rule on what level of automation is actually allowed.
+1 for appeal.
I agree that if there’s a lack of consistent guidance on what the rules are, that would be frustrating. Blizzard is often vague about what you can, or cannot do. I think that those rules also evolve though, by necessity. Selling gold in WoW, especially Classic WoW, has driven a massive market to spring up in the last 5 years. Gold buying was always a thing but I’d go so far as to say that Classic WoW has amplified it massively. For every one person who just wants to play the game legitimately, there’s 10 more who don’t care about gold and are happy to pay for their progress. Totally made up numbers here, I’m just trying to emphasize my point.
This has brought a massive slew of both bots and players farming in long shifts to meet that demand. They then lean on these automation tools to enable their business practices. While I do believe Blizzard is doing a poor job of addressing this, they do still have to adapt. I think a good example is that after 15ish years of multiboxing using automation being allowed, they finally decided that it was against the rules and banned it. This shift caught many people who weren’t farmers, botters, or game abusers of any kind, but that’s the new policy.
I guess everybody’s line is different, but I can certainly see how using a tool that allows you to work around the macro character limit and chain macros together goes a bit beyond intented use. While you may still be sitting there pressing the button, that button results in a sequence of automated actions that you’re not actually performing… unless you justify it by saying, “Well, I pushed the button.”
Under that logic, how far can you take it? Can you set up those actions to loop continuously after you pressed the button? I mean, you pressed it once, right? But then hey, you don’t want to press that button so you just set things up to automatically initiate it once you log in. You still manually clicked the button to log in so it’s ok right? Now you automate that but you turned your computer on manually and are sitting at your desk watching, so no problem?
I’m being deliberately absurd here but I hope you get my point. We humans are kinda really good at justifying things to ourselves. I probably lost you somewhere in there, having you think “Well that’s just too extreme!” but what’s extreme to you isn’t too extreme to others and brings me back to the original point. I actually find a tool that lets you chain macros together and automate a sequence of actions too extreme. Everybody has their own line… which is all the more reason why Blizzard needs to be more clear. It’s grey areas like this that could very well have lead to the bans the OP was talking about.
I’m just one dude on the forums, but I guess my advice is that it’s probably best to just play it safe. Unless you have medical reasons to do so (and some absolutely do), don’t chain actions together. Just press the buttons for the things you want to do.
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+1 for appeal, Blizz needs to be more transparent with the reason for bans
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Review their bans ASAP these guys game with us every week and are always helping others - players like these are keeping the community going
They get to automate a large part of their customer service by automating bans and dealing with the false positives because most people won’t bother. Have you ever been a part of a corporate structure before? If so you would know the cost effective answer is the right one.
Mass reports don’t get you suspended. The only automated process is a short term squelch, which is reviewed and lifted if it wasn’t warranted.
They either got reported, and the human reviewing those reports implemented the suspension. Or they matched some specific signal that they had for a mass ban wave.
False positives are pretty rare, I know of no one in my friend group who was ever banned for no reason, and that’s going back all the way to the original vanilla. I wouldn’t worry about it unless you’re messing with grey area stuff like weak auras that semi automated your gameplay, or hardware macros that do the same. Those two seem like the most common pitfalls for players who aren’t outright botting.
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“Ive never been banned so its not automated” is that really your take lol
-1 for appeal
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My take is that blizzard has shared how their process works. So maybe blizzard is just lying to us, it’s a massive conspiracy, but seems more likely that mass reports behave exactly like they claim they do. Automatic squelch is the only auto outcome of mass reports, but it gets you in front of human eyes, and it’s VERY easy to run afoul of rules in this game.
Customer service forums is full of people who claimed they were banned for no raisens, only to have a blue post reveal that there was in fact a reason.
People lie, especially when it comes to getting account actioned. For every person genuinely false positived in a ban wave, there’s a vast sea of people just hoping they can talk their way out of a legitimate ban.
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There have been many active tests of the mass report feature automatically banning people, I’ll trust that over the word of a company where breastmilk was stolen out of the employee fridge anyday. Trusting blizzard is like trusting Diddy
May we see these alleged tests?
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Sure, type in google testing blizzards auto ban system and then watch all the youtube videos testing it or talking about it. I know you won’t because you care more about being right than the truth, but its out there if you want to know.
So… players having the ability to ban other players is the most cost effective answer.
You really think that sounds correct?
Like I understand wanting to hate blizzard, but come on now, have you seen the wow playerbase? It would be one of the most absolute biggest blunders to allow wow players the ability to ban other players, and this notion is entirely based off of watching streamers get squelched, the automatic silence blizzard has used for many years. Sure bud.
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First click bait “creator” I looked at-
Whining that he got silenced for his advertising of his channel in group finder tool.
Second click bait creator-
Did a test of mass report, causing a disconnect. When he came back he had the auto silence. Which is in line with how blizzard says it works.
This content creator click bait -
Complaining about “report culture”, but admits he violated chat rules, just thinks it’s excessive.
You’re going to need to give me something here, it should be easy for a content creator to prove if all it took was mass reports.
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It is a blunder, and it is one that is happening. I’ll even do a hypothetical that if its not totally automated, that the guy in the Phillipines who they outsourced this to has no idea what a legitimate player looks like, so if someone boosting in mara gets mass reported “oh look he did a lot of dungeons must be a bot”. The billion dollar corporation doesn’t have your best interests in mind bud
Not banned, silenced.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ep9OzAuoh0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OzY1eqj2Rg
There are no vids of people being auto banned. Not saying it doesn’t happen, but being squelched is different.
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You are right the billion dollar company loves you and would never do anything bad. Especially not blizzard who has a spotless record of moral choices and high caliber employees