Permabans for bypassing the XP debuff. What are we doing?

Community General Discussion
1

EDIT: TO BE CLEAR, this isn’t something I’ve done. I haven’t been banned. I’m not questioning any specific account action here. This is a POLICY and ENFORCEMENT question because of the complete lack of communication around a change in what is and isn’t OK.

EDIT2: There’s a Community Council thread on this topic, Timewalking-Twinks-Bannable?

So this week there have been a wave of people copping permabans. Of course Blizzard never tells people why they got banned. Also, people will often lie about why they got banned. But if you see enough reports, you start to notice a pattern.

Background: some time in BFA (maybe late Legion?), Blizzard added an XP debuff if you queue with someone who is XP-locked. The debuff is something like you get 95% less XP. This is anti-twinking measure. Another anti-twinking measure is that if you’re XP-locked your queues will be artificially longer with absolutely no explanation. This manifests when a full group queues and you’ll hover over the queue and it’ll say “2/3 DPS”. There are complaints and bug reports about this going back at least 6 years that I’ve found. At least tell people what’s going on.

Anyway, this XP debuff doesn’t punish people who didn’t queue with the XP-locked toon. So there are ways to bypass this. For example, if you just randomly queue and end up in a group with an 11 Fury Warrior you won’t get punished.

Anyway, it seems like Blizzrad has started handing out permabans for people who somehow bypass this XP debuff. A PERMANENT ban. For what? Levelling slightly faster?

Let’s put this in perspective. This is the same level of punishment as people who wall-hack or go under the world or dupe gold or items or exploit infinite money glitches.

There’s clearly been a change of policy here. You might be tempted to argue “this was always against ToS”. You’re wrong. If you change how the ToS is enforced or interpreted then that is, by definition, a change in policy that needs to be communicated.

Example: when Blizzrad banned input broadcast multi-boxing, it was clearly communicated. Whether you agree with that or not, Blizzard communicated that change clearly.

So we have no communication, no warnings and the absolutely harshest punishment. This is like sudenly handing out the death penalty for speeding.

Another problem: if you group with someone who can’t level but is overpowered, you don’t run into this issue. So you’re still free to group with 20 (F2P/Vet) and 70 (no TWW) twinks with absolutely no punishment.

Lastly, this is a problem entirely of Blizzrad’s making. Many, myself included, warned Blizzard that lowering Timewalking to level 10 was going to create huge problems. The scaling in current WoW is absolutely garbage. If you do TW dungeons as a group of 75-79s, it feels awful and probably takes twice as long as it did in Dragonflight. It’s no wonder people seek shortcuts.

We saw this in MoP Remix. Level 10-30 felt great. 50-60 felt pretty mid. 60-70 was absolutely awful. This led to people mailing XP tokens to skip the later levels.

If people did that today, would they catch a permaban for bypassing the levelling curve? it’s really no different to what people were doing with bypassing the XP debuff.

Permaban? Really? What are we doing?

39 Likes
2

Honestly, given that we have level boosts for gold / real life money — I think perma-banning someone for bypassing some level suspension to level faster, is just really really silly. :person_shrugging:

35 Likes
3

I looked it up, and if the bypass you’re talking about involves macros and porting in and out of dungeons several times - then lmfao yeah that’s not intended, you need to be told that?

65 Likes
4

That’s one method but it’s not th eonly method. Like I said, if you queue separately and end up in the same group by chance, you will have no debuff. There are ways to make that highly likely. Is that ban-worthy?

6 Likes
5

It’s up to Blizzard but for me, I guess it depends on “those ways”. We shouldn’t get into details though as it might be considered an exploit, and if so should be reported.

If it’s anything like the first method, yeah. That’s some slapstick level tomfoolery lmao.

8 Likes
6

So bypassing a system put in place isn’t an exploit? My understanding is any form of exploit meaningless or not is still punishable by suspension or even a perma ban , it’s up to Blizz to make that call. Don’t want banned , don’t do stupid things that could result in one.

23 Likes
7

Yes, I’ve tried to be as non-specific as possible about the details, for this reason. But there are multiple methods, at least one of which is just… using the finder.

But to reiterate: deciding that’s now against ToS is one thing. If so, that should be warned and communicated. And, even if it is, what makes this a permaban-worthy offence?

1 Like
8

For intentionally bypassing a system they created.

If you didn’t intentionally bypass it, put in a ticket and pray.

12 Likes
9

Oh geez I didn’t know this. I have characters I’ve XP locked at 67 for campaigns. Now I feel bad.

1 Like
10

Communication is the key on this issue as the boundaries are not clear. The concept of not even attempting to go into this gray area in the first place is sage advice. But that still doesn’t explain the harsh penalties when I have seen people do worse and not receive perma bans.

Perma bans are usually used on repeat offenders so that is probably a possibility here.

:+1:

:surfing_man: :surfing_woman:

5 Likes
11

They really don’t like it when you bypass something they “fixed”

My buddy lost a 20 year old account for trying to save 15 cents on a sub monthly :joy:

It was the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen but they locked a day 1 account for it.

7 Likes
12

Giving a temp suspension or timeout – I can understand. :dracthyr_nod:
But a permanent ban for a mere exploit?? :face_with_raised_eyebrow: That’s a bit extreme, lol

3 Likes
13

A 3 or 7 day suspension and telling you why you got it? Sure. Harsh but whatever.

I’ve heard one account of someone getting their account back FWIW. Lots of stories about standard automated appeal rejections however.

3 Likes
14

Talk to any of these twinks and it is abundantly clear that they knew exactly what they were doing and were knowingly and purposefully bypassing blizzards intended design with scripts and/or a “clever use of game mechanics”.

But perma bans are absolutely nuts for something as relatively lowkey as the end result of this, which was… reaching lvl 80 only slightly faster than you would have just queing TW dungeons normally. Especially taking into consideration just how lax enforcement of this has been for years.

Anything that goes from little-to-no enforcement to a wave of perma bans literally overnight should at least come with some official statement of what happened, what went wrong and what people can expect going forward.

17 Likes
15

justice is what we’re doing.

10 Likes
16

It’s probably not for twinking. My guess: It’s automating gameplay or exploiting something.

I don’t know for sure and of course you have to take any testimonies (which you won’t see around here for very long because talking about actions received on your account is against the rules) with a grain of salt, but that is my initial guess.

Seeing how most 11 twinks (or 10, if you feel like mixing it up by being a Priest spamming Holy Nova) have a one button rotation it’s not a horrible stretch to find some way to automate that process.

2 Likes
17

Great ? So to you great means oneshotting absolutely everything?

2 Likes
18

I agree it’s best to be skeptical of people saying “I did nothing wrong” in these accounts. It’s at best one-sided. People are way more likly to lie than say “yeah, I deseved it”. And, like you say, individual reports on these forums are going to be… short-lived.

But there’s a lot of talk about this on various other communities (Reddit and elsewhere) and I’ve seen some accounts that I consider credible and the pattern through these seems to be it’s about the XP debuff, not twinking per se.

Obviously we don’t know for sure based on one-sided self-interested posts and Blizzard not telling you the specific reason but I’m mostly convinced it’s about this and not automation. I could of course be wrong.

3 Likes
19

The undeniably vast majority players do not lock their xp.
hence why your queues are longer.

Game is a bit more challenging than it was, now lets find a way to exploit it.

FAFO.

3 Likes
20

Blizzard has a no-tolerance policy on exploits. If you’re well aware it’s an exploit, expect the worst.

16 Likes