Question about account security

I heard about Blizzard banning people and that worries me. More specifically the streamers. If i run Pong in the background and i go play there in between… stuff ingame, would i get banned? Or, what if i run a driver layer equalizer which was custom made by my grandmother?

I am convinced those people were legit and that was a false positive. Since the whole appeal is mechanical, i feel it is very important for my account’s security that i don’t get hit by those.

After i log on there is this little lag spike. I don’t know what to think about it. I made a Phantom Blade. I think this item means something, the item. I would sell it at what i consider a fair price. Which would be above average. Waiting for all the cheap stuff to sell to post mine.

Gold doesn’t mean much. Not unless you don’t have it.

No. That’s not something you’d get suspended/banned for.

Your average WoW player doesn’t have to worry about getting banned. Streamers sometimes get banned because either they become a target for mass reporting or they play so much and do so much farming that they’re mistaken as bots.

So unless you’re farming 16+ hours/day every day and you’re not using any 3rd party software which automates gameplay and you’re not saying a bunch of terrible racist things in general chat you should be fine.

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I don’t get it. Does that mean it’s ok to ban them?

No. Absolutely not. Just saying that seems to be the case for a few streamers.

false positives is likely so rare, i’m sure a lot of the bans are from people moving purchased gold between characters and getting caught in the wave.

3rd party software is fine but I wouldn’t run something that automates. I doubt you would get a ban for something like autohotkey, but I still make sure it’s disabled before I load wow.

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I don’t think they’re all that rare, actually. One person in my guild was wrongfully banned. He was able to get it reversed and they gave him some free game time for the trouble.

Let’s break down your scenarios.

No. Nothing in Pong would have any reason to even touch WOW. Of course, if you’re running some oddball emulator that just happens to include malware that tries to capture data, that might trigger a red flag.

Blizzard continually works to improve it’s flagging, but even the best anti-malware out there gets false positives in some cases when the activity of a file or a too similar file name and path are suspicious. (I work in software testing. Norton started flagging a file in our licensing dongle driver because of a name match, even though we 100% knew it was a legit.)

In and of itself, no big deal. I have sometimes had two other Steam games running at the same time as my WOW client, and I’ll swap over while flying or doing an AH scan or waiting on an AFK group member.

Especially if what you’re swapping to is completely unrelated, it’s unlikely to trigger anything, though there’s always exceptions to the rule.

Honestly, this sounds oddly suspicious just in the way you worded it. A lot like “when my BG is an honor farm against my team and I ghost” or “while I run in place and occasionally move to try to avoid an AFK”. You may have meant it the way I mentioned above, while flying. The point is that what you hear a streamer say is heavily curated by their desire to appear as innocent as possible - whether they’re truly innocent or guilty and just hiding that “off-screen”.

Like Pong, nothing there that directly should make any difference. However, since none of us know what kind of code and actions that involves, there’s no way to know if it (1) would trigger a red flag or (2) should trigger a red flag.

What does that have to do with anything? This is one of those things that is either panicked innocence grasping at straws or deliberate deception by the guilty, known as playing the sympathy card. It’s also a worse ‘argument’ against it having quirks that get you in trouble than being produced by a major computer software company.

If all of the materials and effort were done by you legitimately, there’s nothing in crafting and posting on the AH that is out of the ordinary. Maybe, if your “fair price” was >999% commonly seen market value, yes, that would trigger some suspicion.

Question About Account Security

Your post title seems a bit out of sync from what you’re discussing - account actions related to things like other software running on your computer or in-game actions that might trigger a flag.

Account Security is important always. That’s things like not reusing the same passwords on other accounts, using a separate email for your WOW account than other activities on the internet, not falling for Gmbliizz telling you to verify your account or get banned or “Susan” offering an amazing deal on gold in your in-game mailbox.

Adding an Authenticator, and even the SMS verification, are bonus ways to validate that every time you log in, it IS you, and to help keep someone else from getting a couple pieces of your information and logging in.

Account security won’t negate flags for activities that may be signs of disallowed gameplay, but it reduces the chances of someone else being the one accessing the account and stripping the gold and goods and performing bannable activities until it gets suspended as a suspected compromise.

How are you convinced? You don’t have any evidence beyond what a person curated for their streaming audience and what they said, mixed with your personal decision to grant more trust in their word. Blizzard has in-game records of the data the client and Warden sent, game records of the location and activity of the player at the time in question.

NOTE: The “time in question” is when the suspicious activity occurred, rarely the same time as the account action is taken. With some actions, like against bots, it could be weeks earlier, and they’ve conveniently ‘forgotten’ because they thought they got away with it.

Mechanical? An appeal is nothing more than a request to have a different Blizzard employee review the data that was collected initially before applying the ban. Repeat appeals each go to someone else, until such point as they have decided there is nothing new to be learned.

Very rarely, Blizzard has gotten broader data when a lot of appeals on a specific thing come up. One example was a banwave on players altering game files, which was upheld several times before it came to light that an addon was doing this in addition to the legitimate actions those players were using it for. Once the underlying false positive was found, those accounts were restored and the mark (that an action was taken) was removed.

Or did you mean automated, which Blizzard has repeatedly stated is not the case. While an appeal does not allow arguing one’s case, it is a manual process of that employee reviewing everything that was put together, perhaps looking for other data around, and making a determination.

Ending with this. I do certain things on the AH that I sometimes fear could get me actioned by association, and I’ve thought about how frustrating it could be to have to appeal, be unable to play, worry that they won’t realize I did nothing wrong. It’s gut-wrenching.

But, ultimately, I can’t worry about it. I can only worry about making sure I’m playing the game within the terms to the best of my ability, not trying to get ahead quicker through gimmicky means, and have some faith that will be obvious on first appeal.

It meant i don’t really know what i’m doing at that time.

The thing was actually a bit of a frame skip as i just log on i could not explain. While updating my addons when i realized one of them was causing this frame skip.

Guilty party is Questie.

I was digging for a reason, way off. That was the best i could find and since it was a bit unlikely… Well i started guessing all kinds of other stuff.

So yeah…

Hehe, okay. It did sound a little scattered, and I blitzed right past the “little lag spike” part, which it sounds like was your main concern. Glad you worked it out.