Posting this here for info reasons. Basically, Aggrend is pushing back on the SoD false ban conspiracies. I think it is good he is doing that as there was a false narrative being pushed. This post by Aggrend provides some information which may be helpful when assisting those who come here with concerns, etc. I’ll link the player created post below the quote. This player was the one copying it from twitter and they provide a link there for any who wish to verify.
"I think it’s safe to say at this point that this fear is something of a boogeyman, likely created by those who claim to have been banned unfairly but left out a key detail in their anecdote, or is fabricated by those who don’t like this particular policy change and want to rally support against it by creating fear from nothing (not like anything like this has ever happened on the internet…)
Is it possible to catch an incorrect ban? Maybe. Anything is possible, but in the vast majority of cases we’ve reviewed of folks who claim “to have only traded gold with a friend” or “We had a rare item drop and split the profits” or something similar, the ban has been justified and something else illicit actually occurred. The majority is so far in the favor of legitimate bans, that any false positives are not numerous enough for statistical significance.
There reality is if you play the game, interact with the trading and AH systems in place, don’t accept large sums of gold from total strangers (i.e. if you see 1k gold pop up in your mailbox from someone you don’t know, you should return it), and don’t buy gold or buy/sell items in a dungeon/raid, you will likely be fine. We can’t give you exact specifics and guidelines for every edge case interaction between players.
Re: Cross-game trading specifically, I’ll reiterate that we do not in any way support cross-game trading. Is it against the rules? That answer is nuanced but if you arrange a trade with a stranger across games and that stranger has been involved in gold selling (a huge number are) then you could get a suspension for that as it looks like you bought that gold. If its a good friend you know and trust, that is safer and that’s the scenario we don’t want to outright forbid, but these types of transactions are not supported by us for a reason. They are another great way to obfuscate bad behavior and are more often than not used that way. You are ultimately responsible to ensure you know and trust the people you are dealing with. If you can’t verify that or be sure of it, it’s safer not to do it.
This was a lot of words to say that the actions we are taking are effective. Some folks have gotten away with buying gold in the past. Now fewer are getting away with it and its being felt. We will never win the war on RMT, at least not fully, but the things we can do is focus on ways to make it less profitable and more painful for bad actors to conduct this business. Going after buyers and cracking down on exploits in these murky grey areas is one of the things are we are doing. My advice is don’t let misinformation distract you. The fact that there is this much noise around this means that the paradigm has changed and for the most part, that is a good thing."
just had a buddy get a 14 day ban for “illicit gold buying”. last night we were doing the gnomer salvage boxes, you get the Pile of random bolts, and you can buy these mystery crates. I have been flipping the salvages and crafting the blue tradeable materials for the epic crafts. I bought around 150 of the grime-encrusted salvages off the auction house, salvaged them, crafted into a lot of the blue tradeable materials. a lot of the people flipping those i have a good rapport with so i asked my buddy to just post them all at a low price, pretty sure pissing off every person doing the flip as it became borderline unprofitable to do this. He was also salvaging the grime-encrusted salvages, and opening the mystery boxes. After about 1-3 hours he hopped back onto his alt that had posted all the blue materials and mailed the gold to me, it was literally 140g. Today he went to login and like i said earlier had a 14 day ban. the dude didnt have an excessive amount of gold, didnt randomly accumulate gold from an unknown source. all the gold he had/has can literally be tracked by the logs within the game.
He sent a ban appeal, and got the super automated robot copy paste response.
I feel like the timing of us essentially posting those blue materials at super low prices, and then 12 hours later he gets banned is a little strange. Probably made a lot of people mad and might of caused some people to spam report him.
To note, if your friend used the trade window instead of the AH, he may have received illicitly obtained gold, and that would result in the action taken against him. Unless you are standing right behind your friend while he is playing, you also have no idea if he bought gold or not. There is also nothing you can do to assist your friend with his appeal as it is solely between Blizzard and him. He can keep appealing until such time as they tell him no more appeals will be accepted and the matter is closed.
Spam reports do not cause suspensions. A GM has to investigate reports and manually apply an account action.
Yes, it is tracked, and that seems to be why he got suspended. You have no access to his gold logs, and have no way to verify his method for obtaining any of it.
Automated, robotic, and copy/pasted are three different things so this doesn’t even make sense. And no, ticket responses are not produced by a robot, nor are they automated regarding the ticket inquiry. A GM has to read the ticket and decide on a course of action to take.
A form-letter does not make it “super automated”. A templated answer is used to maintain a consistent response to all similar inquiries. Most businesses use them now because it allows them to handle more contacts faster. All account actions and all appeals are done by a human and the email sent is selected by that human.
My two cents, I trust Blizzard more than I do any normal random player. Why is that, you may ask? Because in Destiny 2, we just had a World First Raider get banned for use of a program called Artmoney. The player claimed the program quote “cannot edit anything related to gaming” which was a flat out lie. Whether or not it could be used in D2 to actually change values, no clue. But the fact the he lied about such a thing…
Anytime I see someone claimed they were falsely banned, I tell em to do an Appeal, and if that appeal is rejected, you got banned correctly.
This is of course not to say false bans never happen, they do. But I would wager 99% of all bans are correct.