And you do? You are going by what other people are telling you, so second hand, possibly false, information. What exactly did you expect from this thread? We have no basis to judgde the accruracy of the bans, and neither do you. Only Blizzard has the data to verify or overturn an individual ban.
If your purpose is just to vent, fine, the forums are good for that. If you are looking for empathy I 'd suggest that the GD forums are a poor place for that 
Im not asking for you to judge the accuracy of the bans. Iâm just trying to bring Blizzards attention to an issue that continues to occur every few months. So that it may be prevented in the future.
The people getting banned are taking advantage of an unintended gameplay style to generate significantly more gold than would be possible through intended means.
Not saying its ban worthy, but to say âthrough no fault of their ownâ is a bit disingenuous. The video you linked even advertises that it is a method to kill 230+ mobs in 9 minutes while being away from the keyboard 100% of the time. Whether or not thatâs whatâs actually happening, I donât care. Look at what it is advertising.
Playing the game in a way that imitates a bot is going to greatly increase your chance of getting caught up in a ban wave.
To all the paladins that were not botting but got caught up in this, I hope you get your access restored. At a minimum, this can really hurt guilds that were counting on these players to be available for raids. Your goal of bringing attention to the issue is a noble one for this reason alone.
If you do get your ban lifted, you may want to consider if the risk of having to go through the appeal process again is worth the relative gain of playing like a bot every day. Itâs a choice. But when you choose to take that risk, you canât really say that you had to go through the appeal process again through no fault of your own. Take ownership of your decisions.
I honestly donât know why he says 100% afk in that video because if you actually watch it, itâs not. Itâs just easy. You have to play your character.
Whether itâs intended or not, itâs not against TOS in any form.
Strat farm is enjoyable. And it means I have to farm less time overall to support my raiding habits.
False. If a process takes multiple runs, it shows it needs further verification in order to ensure it is legitimate.
AlsoâŠ
Luckily, we have a means of prevention:
This is basically how it is.
An issue, in response to which, they have given players an opportunity to appeal.
Correct. It means people are also more likely to report you.
I also wouldnât put it past some of the people being boosted are only there to submit some kind of false flags against the booster in order to cull the competition.
Honestly there is very little about farming Strat that resembles what bots do. The inputs are clearly distinguishable as human. You run in slightly different routes each time. You press your keys in different orders each time.
And without really good gear, it requires a decent amount of technical prowess and skill.
I donât really think that there is any âownership of decisionsâ when we are literally just playing the game in the same way that many others do. How could any of us predict we would be banned for this. We werenât breaking any rules, so we werenât expecting to be banned. I donât think itâs fair to say that we should expect there to be a risk of being banned for farming Strat.
Nor is your secondhand experience.
Which is exactly why Iâm asking blizzard to look into the matter and try to resolve the issue if it exists so that it doesnât happen again.
Have you considered the possibility that farming Strat isnât the only common denominator? The number of people who farm Strat and arenât sanctioned would seem to indicate that this isnât what caused the bans.
Well itâs certainly not ONLY farming strat, thatâs for sure. I have no idea what sort of flags their system uses. But out of everyone that reported bans, all but one were farming Stratholme. Another was in Scholomance.
So itâs not Stratholme in a vacuum, there is likely some other flag being tripped up by the paladins. Whether it has to do with looting, or mobs killed, I have no idea. We tried to rule out some variables further up in thread but to no avail.
Considering I was banned while getting boosted in SM lol.
Now sure how exploitive I could be while moving from Cath to Armory over and over again, but heyyyy what do I know. Iâve only had 10+ characters boosted in SM since Classic originally launched.
Super exploitive I know. Poo poo on me.
Interesting. Were you boosted by a mage or paladin?
Its something that boosters are doing, regardless of the dungeon they are in. Itâs just that for us, Strat is the best gold farm we have, so itâs not surprising all but one of the reported bans we received were in Strat.
I wouldnât be surprised if some mages got wrapped up in this too doing SM or Mara.
Maybe it has something to do with how quickly you loot things, or how many mobs you kill in a given period of time.
Iâm watching your Youtube video on the topic right now. I was being boosted in SM by a paladin.
The paladin didnât get banned. Only the three alts being boosted.
Literally just running out, running in, waiting; repeat. Just like every boostee in history.
I have a VPN program (PrivateInternetAccess) that auto starts when my PC starts, but it doesnât auto-connect to a proxy. It requires that I choose a server to connect to, and I havenât connected to one in probably a year now. I just pay for it for when I need it. However, this VPN has auto-ran on my PC since I first purchased the service over 4 years ago.
Additionally, I was using a weakaura called Victoriousâ Followme to carry my other alts around.
Aside from that, I canât think of anything else that might have triggered a response from the system.
I wish a channel would open up in the paladin discord to attempt to find a common variable.
Weâve opened up a thread in the paladin discord to discuss the bans. I highly encourage anyone who was banned to come share your information and see if we can figure out what may have caused the bans. It seems not limited to Stratholme, but it does seem limited to Paladins.
Iâm fine with false positives as long as itâs paladins weâre talking about. Canât AOE tank yourself out of a permaban lol
Hi Everyone,
Iâm one of these banned paladins. Bliz permabanned my 15 year old account with 20k+ hours played, MANY unique/storied achievements (mounts, server first titles, etc etc), and a completely CLEAN history. These days Iâm a casual - leveling alts and playing the AH a bit. I would have a TON to lose for cheating and nothing to gain - doing something that would level my alts for me or whatever would take away the one thing I enjoy doing.
And I farm strat to boost those alts through the early 60s. Nothing crazy, maybe 10-20 runs most days (2-3 hours). I donât sell boosts, no gold changes hands. Just zone my second account in at the door and do the standard 3 pull on my main account paladin. Thereâs no exploitive pathing involved, no âclever use of game mechanicsâ or anything - just pull a bunch of mobs and tank them in consecrate until they die. Itâs an easy farm.
Anyway, after 3 days of tickets and appeals my ban was overturned a few minutes ago. As Surv has been saying, this is a common story and a ridiculous story. I canât imagine how they could auto-perma-ban any account, much less an incredibly old and played account like mine without at least some kind of safety check/review/sanity check.
Surv, thanks for championing this. All of you claiming âthey cheated and theyâre lying about itâ need to grow up a little.
Logged in as the wrong character - RIP. This post is mine.
My ban was overturned about 30 minutes ago. They require you to send in a photo ID, so Iâm waiting for that process to finish, but after that Iâm clear.
To all the people who accuse us of being guilty before innocent and automatically sided with Blizzard, thank you for your support. Youâre whatâs wrong with this game <3
If your goal is anything but to be an antagonistic gremlin then the obvious step would be to focus on getting the clearly innocent people caught up in this mess vindicated, not arguing every single point to farm your forum points. I see you participate in a whole lot of mindless discussion on this forum, the people here arenât interested. We donât care about the guilty people who got banned. Good riddance.
Direct your attention elsewhere or actually contribute to the goal of this thread in the first place, the garbage you type is so insanely insufferable to read and is just detracting from the efforts of the actual honest people here. You are the most memeable example of a Blizzard shill I have ever come across.
actually an appeals process shouldnât need to be done multiple times, period, it should be a once and done, but what you have is a bunch of underpaid staff saying nope donât feel like doing my job, denied. The way it used to work a decade ago was Blizzard would respond within a few hours that they are looking into it, and then 40minutes to an hour later after they looked over the data they rendered a judgement, right now Itâs closer to 2-3 minutes after Iâll look into it, that it gets denied, that proves quite clearly blizzardâs employeeâs arnât actually doing their job, and are simply passing the buck and letting it be someone elses problem.