That’s because they’re not Blizzard employees. Customer service is completely outsourced. Most of the people doing CS haven’t even used a Blizzard product.
“The people getting banned are taking advantage of an unintended gameplay style to generate significantly more gold than would be possible through intended means”
Ban every mage by that logic.
If i had to guess off the top of my head its prob an autoloot addon or something that’s speeding picking up loot off 100’s of mobs.
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DO u happen to have the addon that lets u loot super fast? That’s my guess if anything.
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I wonder if there’s just some new bot detection automation that happens to pick up some false positives.
If people get upset that not only are the bot detections algorithms effective enough, but that they are 100% perfectly accurate, and in no way ever ban those who aren’t actually exploiting, then we’re probably asking for too much.
I see you have posted in the customer service forums as well, and for some reason it’s been flagged. I’ve seen times when someone who has been banned posts on those forums, and receives an answer, which is usually along the lines of, “In your case, you were banned because you actually exploited.” I suspect many others have seen that too, and that’s why the post has been flagged.
100% chance this is a result of an algorithm they use being terrible. They automate ANYTHING they can these days to “save money”. Chances are it lumps loads of people together and a human is supposed to review the data it gathered about supicious behavior. Most likey it focuses on certain areas of the game that are popular gold making locations(mara run mage farm in classic had this EXACT same issue with false bans), but likely has a FAR to large workload/doesn’t review/skims over the data. Appeals are a horrid experience with blizzard so i feel badly for anyone with a flase ban that has to slog through the system to get their voice heard. Just keep in mind this is a company that can’t detect flyhacks within their software in 2021…so don’t give them too much credit for competence.
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This! Based on what I’ve heard about this add on it sounds like a form of automation.
I have an addon that doesn’t load the loot screen, but that’s all it does. I’ve seen a good handful of people without it in this ban wave too. Honestly, my best guess is they monitored for number of resets per hour over a day or two and we all just were in the right place at the wrong time /shrug
I think this fine to do, but they need safeguards in place.
“Has account been active for more than x days/weeks/months/years”
“is the player sending tells/guild chats during the window of interest”
“does the character have raid gear/saved to raid in the last Y weeks”
Some kind of sanity check to flag for manual review before this nonsense.
There’s also a metric that they might use, such as online hours and activity hours.
My mates in retail got banned from those metrics even though all they did was afk in Oribos using an anti-afk method, such as using a heavy object to hold down a button.
And they got banned for “Automated Program” or some sort.
They simply dont care enough for any of this…it’s a numbers game to them. if they can autmate bans they honestly dont care if a few people get swept under the rug. As long as they continue to make revenue. so little nuanced details like you describe are probably never going to happen.
Willing to bet a lot of these paladins are being flagged by players who are unhinged over botting and boosts, so they are just reporting any paladin they see in Strat instead of being certain they are a bot before hand.
Just another reason why automating the bans is bad and why we need actual gms to go through these things.
I want to know the thought process of people that think cheating is just casually achieved with addons. I’ve had so many people try to suggest it.
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Addons have nothing to do with this.
This has something to do with the in-game reporting system definitely.
As you can see from the latest Developer Letter to the community, they clearly stated that they improved on “better visibility into the impact of your in-game reports of harassment, and more serious penalties for people engaged in disruptive behavior”.
This pretty much says everything. They pretty much cranked up the in-game reporting (automated banning) system penalties for those who got reported, by about 2-3x harsher.
I’m pretty sure exploitation, botting, or whatsoever has only a 6 month ban period if you got reported, because my ex-guild leader was banned for 6 months for legitimate botting. Blizzard ban cases normally double whenever you do a repeated attempt, and funnily enough, after my ex-guild leader was banned for 6 months, he continued botting, which leads to account closure.
I just wish they actually don’t hand out perma bans from automated banning, because that is ridiculous. What’s worst is that they say that they actually review every single report (which Blizzard and a lot of Blizzard Simps claim that they do), but clearly they don’t because LOTS of unjustified and wrongful ban happened.
For those who don’t know what developer letter I’m talking about, I’ve linked the letter here.
My ban was permanent and it’s the only action that has ever been taken on my account.
The ban was overturned today, but now I’m honestly too afraid to play for fear of being autobanned again.
I kind of wonder if I should just quit at this point. Why should anyone be afraid to play the game normally lol.
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Oh yeah, I forgot about how these people were clearly innocent. Silly me, I guess.
Huh?
That’s clearly false. Because you’re replying to me.
Wait, I thought they were clearly innocent!
I’m going to continue not doing that.
Now what?
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Meanwhile, in another thread…
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I got a handful of friends that actually “claimed” that they are innocent, both on retail and BCC, and they were also permabanned because of the same reason, botting, exploit, and yada yada.
Every single one of them appealed, but they got replied with an automated message saying that nothing can be done, the decision is final, and the ticket was just closed.
The thing is, they explicitly said, even if the account got unbanned, and the case was overturned, they will quit the game regardless.
Even until now, they are trying their hardest to get the case overturned because they don’t want to quit the game on a bitter note because of a lame automated ban. We’ve been playing together since Wrath, and they haven’t had any issues until now. They don’t want to leave a 10+ years journey and memories to end with a bitter note due to an automated ban.
That is what triggers me the most.
Many many many successful overturns require multiple appeals just to get someone to look into it. Usually the underpaid overseas slave labor just auto-shuts the appeal and that’s that.
Tell them to keep appealing, assuming they truly are innocent. If they were cheating, it’ll never be overturned simple as that.
I got lucky and it took a single appeal to get it over turned.
I’m sure that’s the case, but I don’t think I’ve done more than 2-3 hours of strat in a day, any day. The threshold just seems so low ><