The content of this post refers to The Burning Crusade Classic.
Paladins all over the world are being banned this week just for stepping into Stratholme and killing mobs to vendor their loot / sell boosts to low level players. The Paladin discord is exploding with reports of people who have been falsely banned for “Exploitative Activity (Cheats/Hacks)”, we seriously have had a LOT of players report they were banned ONLY for killing mobs in Stratholme, with more posting all the time.
Is something we are doing breaking TOS? As far as I can tell, none of this breaks TOS. You don’t have to tell us exactly what is being flagged, just tell us if we are being banned wrongfully based on the video at the bottom.
All we do is pull a bunch of mobs at once, aoe them down, and loot their corpses. Some people sell boosts too – which obviously includes receiving gold from trade from low level characters (in small increments at a time).
We usually bind “interact with mouseover” to scroll wheel for this to loot faster and use addons like Leatrix Plus to loot faster. We use rocket boots & lots of block rating gear, force reactive disk, etc. to make our pulls easier.
Is this not a legal way to play the game? To my understanding none of this breaks TOS. Because a LOT of innocent paladins are getting banned for “Exploitative Activity (Cheats/Hacks)” that do not use any 3rd party programs or software to do their farms. Some of them don’t even boost, only vendor.
You don’t even have to tell us WHAT IT IS specifically we are doing that is being flagged, since people who DO bot would love to have that information. None of it is against TOS to my knowledge.
I think whatever automated or manual system you have is broken. If any single human being looked into any of these bans they would likely see that they are banning long-time customers, hard-working paladins that choose to play the game rather than buy gold (WHICH ONLY GETS YOU BANNED FOR THREE DAYS BTW), and are not cheating in any way shape or form. If these are manual bans, them something is going seriously wrong.
This actually happened two months ago as well, and some of those people are STILL banned, but most were overturned for “Wrongful Bans”. There was also a forum & reddit post on the topic when it occured, but it seems to have occured again, only bigger this time.
This is so frustrating, many people have their appeals denied and have to appeal anywhere from once to SEVEN times, just to have their tickets “escalated to talk to a supervisor” (their words not mine), and if they make it this far, it seems it is more likely that they have their bans overturned… But some will never make it this far. Blizzard is losing customers by the minute with this enforcement strategy banning so many innocent players.
None of the banned players can post here, without using a separate account, because you aren’t allowed to post on the forums while you are banned, unfortunately. So I am just desperately trying to raise some awareness on the issue, as this is our daily gold farm for most of us, for months now, and we are afraid to go back inside the old city.
If you buy gold - 3 day ban
If you farm it - permanent account closure
Here is an example video of what we are doing in Stratholme:
