Awesome! 
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You shouldn’t have had to have perfect timewalking gear sets
Good thing you didn’t need it. You specifically may have needed it, but it certainly was not a requirement by any means.
I did my affliction one in 2 tries in legion (first day) and 6 tries in TW. And it was mostly because I was being greedy.
It didn’t need a tuning change. Just because something is difficult for you, doesn’t mean it’s overtuned.
It wasn’t designed for the average player to overcome it easily, it never has and it never will be.
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Just one of the few the proud self earner fel bears. Indeed gonna be interesting. Im glade blizz is taking away stolen honor with these bans.
They can get it the legit way or they can go away.
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Affliction was SUPER easy if you had the slow legendary. That’s a poor example to give.
Some of these are easy and others are very hard. Some DO need tuning.
Regardless, that’s no excuse for cheating.
Yeah I had managed to get it on my lock on the OG tower…
I tried its new incarnation as a frost mage maybe I’m just bad at kiting as a clothie because I’d just get tagged or couldnt kill the hands fast enough. Id be messing up ALOT…
Think I burned all my attention to detail on the tank challenge after I got it I really didnt care about the other classes x3 when it makes a return though I may try for the pally one.
Starting to like hpally playstyle.
This. We need more of this version of Blizzard
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I have no stake in this but I am laughing at the morons comparing this to something serious like stolen valor. It’s a game get a grip lol
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I’m not the one who gave such an example, but people trend toward giving obvious extreme examples in any disagreement so as to create lower/upper bound limit to gauge/constrain/focus discussion. But I’m going to take a fair guess and state that others in this discussion wouldn’t accept any comparison as valid regardless.
Should rulebreakers be allowed to get away scot-free? No, I don’t believe that should happen.
Should violators be punished permanently without the opportunity to atone/make better choices? No, I don’t believe that should happen either.
My feelings on this are complex, but TL;DR: the policy is correct and overdue, but the execution is clumsy and overblown at best, malicious virtue-signaling at worst.
It is, as a matter of principle, not acceptable to look the other way when players cheat, no matter the presence or absence of direct effects on other players. There are some reading this post now who feel compelled to dogpile in situations in which someone they see as less worthy than them was receiving an unearned reward and has been caught and strung up in the public square. I’m not addressing those people. I am instead speaking to the people that recognize that this is a far more nuanced situation—one in which Blizzard has made a striking course correction in the right direction, but with collateral damage that just might have been (properly) avoided.
The Timewalking Mage Tower only offers cosmetic rewards–very nice ones, but not advancements in player power nonetheless. This was most definitely a factor in some players’ consideration of whether Blizzard would “action” their accounts (making it seem less likely). The most obvious opposite kind of situation in WoW terms I can think of is buying gold in Classic to bring to GDKPs to get more powerful items to take into PvP to smash other people with, not to mention inflating the economy and driving more players to buy gold. Mage Tower cosmetics do not even present the threat of fraudulently indicating the player’s skill to others because of how poorly it was tuned and how well-known boosting is.
There is no real threat to balance here. When I’m giving in to cynicism, my view is that it seems that Blizzard just understood that this community can, at times, be little more than a crab barrel and they decided to cash in on it. Cite the vaunted Terms of Service all you like, but Blizzard reserves the right to refuse access to your account for any reason or no reason at all as a part of their legal CYA. Whether or not tolerating this kind of player behavior is a good idea—which I will remind the reader that I believe that it is not a good idea—this still can hardly be held as consistent with Blizzard’s past behavior. I imagine a great many of these players would have thought twice long and hard about whether or not to do this had they any expectation this kind of hammer might come down upon them.
Moreover, this action isn’t even consistent with itself, if the principle involved is whether the cosmetic rewards were earned. When the Timewalking Mage Tower was initially released, there were some tuning issues (of which I assume most readers here are aware) that favored some players to the point the challenge was largely trivialized. Blizzard resolved this by applying hotfixes but did not require those players that exploited these tuning issues to earn the rewards a second time under fairer conditions—let alone actioning their accounts over the issue.
In addition, in response to a public outcry concerning the incommensurate difficulty for some specializations and the time needed to practice and grind out optimal gear for the counters, Blizzard made a second tuning pass and extended the duration of the Legion Timewalking event by two weeks (see: Mage Tower Availability Extended and Tuning Adjustments). Unfortunately for those players that felt rushed prior to this announcement, there was no way to undo having earned rewards through illicit means and attempt to earn them again fairly. Instead, they had already unexpectedly set themselves up for this account action ex post facto. I remind the reader that the literal language of the Terms of Service should matter much less than Blizzard’s past track record of its enforcement when judging fairness since it is worded in order to maximize Blizzard’s prerogatives to say nothing of its responsibilities.
Given all of the above, was removing the ill-gotten gains justified? Absolutely. Was a thirty-day ban justified? In a world in which Blizzard’s lack of tolerance for such things, timely processing of PTR feedback, and reasonable tuning of time-limited events was established in the public mind? Yes. But, do we live in that world?
Didn’t like, a whole bunch of people exploit the legion pvp WQ’s back in legion? I heard some people got to crazy high honor levels from that. Did Blizz ever do anything about that?
Nope they did not.
You can’t exploit that which blizzard purposely designed. And it’s all on blizz’s responsibility (and ultimately why honor levels have 8800 honor and not something clean like 5k, 8k or 10k honor per level) to manage player consumption plus progression.
Basically when blizz announced for bfa they were gonna make honor account-wide, there was likely a large uptick in 100 boosts (don’t think 110 had come about just yet) and people leveling one of the 6 classes that had WQ 18 hour autocomplete items. Then just parallel farm to your hearts content daily to get boatloads of honor. I think warlock/mage had the shortest campaign, even after the removal of day plus table missions (which being part of the campaign I am pretty sure were required to get tree progression).
It’s not necessarily about being too hard. A lot of people will always look for the quick and easy route to rewards, even if it means breaking the rules or cheating. People wanted to show off their book mount but weren’t willing to wait until the next timewalking event to finish.
Goodness, that’s extremely erudite and I applaud your use of multisyllabic words. I had to check out my Complete Oxford for ‘incommensurate’. Not even sure its the right word for the particular use but hey, I applaud your creative grammar. And you even use Latin. I’m impressed.
But ultimately, TL;DR aside, I’m not sure what you’re getting at. My take is that they cheated, they deserved to be slapped and have their goodies taken away and whether or not Blizzard could have done it better is ultimately irrelevant. Had people not cheated, Blizzard would not have needed to act, clumsy or not.
That’s…it, really.
It’s almost like the point is to have people with a wide variety of opinions. 
If you think that people doing this isn’t an indication the mage tower should be tuned down, that’s a you thing.
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Disagree. People need to just play better.
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And you’re welcome to that opinion, just like I’m welcomed to mine.
Thanks for reaffirming what I already knew.
Now the impossible question. Who’s opinion actually matters?
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No one’s opinion is more important than the other, but I’m still going to defend mine, lol.