they don’t need to test the economy - just if the auction house is working when they make massive changes. People don’t use the AH on the PTR or even beta enough to get rid of bugs.
Eh. Not really. Not anymore. Blizz doesn’t actually ban anyone. They haven’t for years. Blizz learnt a while back it’s actually more effective to never ban anyone. What they do instead is hand out suspensions instead. Sometimes those suspensions are tantamount to bans since they can be for multiple years. Some people have been suspended for centuries (not a joke btw).
So when people say “banned”, they actually mean suspended. It’s just a question of how long and if it’s long enough to effectively be a permanent ban. Fun fact, it’s the same for this forum.
I completely understand what you mean. And you are right. But a lockout is a major inconvenience, effectively the same inconvenience as a suspension… if not worse because you did nothing wrong and you’re being punished for nothing.
Yes, it is not intended to be a punishment, but if you pay to play a game, follow the rules, and suddenly are locked out from playing: You deserve large compensation.
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new auction house is already bad enough without the gold duping. Theres bots for every reagent posting every second and buying anyone matching any price of lower with addons and scripts. Blizzard doesnt really care about ingame economy unless it has something to do with their wow token.
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What bans?
I want to be banned 
I feel like I’m missing out man.
Did you hear that no long ago, some Gamestop stores were selling Anthem for $.01, just to clear it out of their inventory? Somebody picked it up and went to the register to ask if that was right. The cashier said yes, and when the customer hesitated, the cashier took a penny out of the penny jar and rang it up.
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well maybe that is why my account is locked sure would have been nice to get a email or something instead of just crickets when i message them about why?
What are you even talking about, is it this???
“As we take further steps to return player accounts to their previous condition, a very small number of players will be locked out of their characters for an additional time. We’ll return them to availability as quickly as possible.”
That doesn’t sound like a suspension to me. Where are you getting your info?
No one been outright banned. Those who got extra gold from the malfunction of the AH have had those toons frozen until all the gold can be removed. I am not even sure if they are really going to suspend accounts that may have clearly tried to exploit the gold issue to fraud the game of millions in free gold. If they do ban those people who deliberately tried to fraud the game of gold, they deserve to be banned.
does not matter what you call it the fact is people including myself are locked out of our accounts since last night and this is how we find out what might? have happened? wow just wow epic fail blizz
both, and the expiring auction part of it happened all the way up until last night
the people harping on “maybe they shouldnt have exploited a bug!” are beyond ignorant of the actual bug
canceled auctions paid out gold and sure you could abuse it, but EXPIRED AUCTIONS did it too
poor jim dumping their loads of rare gems for high prices on ah that nobody bought and expired faced the same fate as people who abused the bug
Yes, completely and utterly unaware it was bugged when they cancelled an auction and the item they cancelled was still listed, 100% completely not at fault of the person.
Sure if they only had a couple of items listed, but I am telling you now the old motto is “Abuse early and abuse often” because generally Blizzard simply put a stop to these practices and than do nothing more.
This is the second time ever I have seen people get banned for something that ‘was not their fault’, the other time was during BFA when you could purposely bug out WQ’s on the last step and get the rewards, but it would not register as complete, so you could complete WQ’s an infinite number of times.
Infinite rep, gold, WF/TF items, and it’s the same here, people no doubt recognised they could list something, cancel and duplicate the items and would have 100% abused it because historically people don’t get slapped with a ban hammer since yeh, it’s not their fault for the bug, but it is their fault for abusing said bug.
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Ok so maybe ban was the incorrect word… but it is more than just locked out… I get that you’re an MVP, but people who did nothing wrong but play the game are being impacted by Blizzards negligence. They have every right to be as pissed as they want to be about the situation.
I have enough experience to know better than to use the AH after they messed with it, and I more than likely won’t use it for a good month… Because lets be honest here the truly capable people are no longer employed with Blizzard that is why we’re ending up with huge bug, after huge bug, after huge bug. I hope they as a company pay for this dearly, it is the only way they ever learn.
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It seems like the more ‘legitimate’ people affected by this used a lot of TSM auto cancel scans when undercut and kept re-posting ending up with a decent chunk of stuff Blizzard has to go through.
But can you be surprised? There are people that have had their characters locked out for more than 6 months due to bugs from faction+guild transfers.
One of my earliest memories of WoW was being locked out of the game for 3-5 days around Christmas 2004 because of some server bug or something. Blizzard actually refunded game time to all affected in that circumstance. I can’t recall if that has happened since, but it would be a good idea to compensate the people affected by this psuedo-ban.
I remember back when TBC originally launched and there was a huge issue that resulted in like 3 days of lost game time and they gave every active account 3 days of game time.
After that, there were only a few situations where the game was down for more than 24 hours and each time Blizz gave back game time for the issue. It’s been many MANY years since such an issue that resulted in the servers being down for 24+ hours though.
That said, for those who are affected by the lockout due to this issue, I’m hopeful that Blizz will compensate them appropriately (assuming they didn’t attempt to take advantage of the circumstances).
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That’s pretty common lol
Locks and bans/suspensions are pretty synonymous.
You may not think so but they do the exact same thing regardless of if one causes a black mark on the account and the other one doesn’t (this isn’t visible to the player outside of an email (in which this case - there was none)).
It prevents the player from accessing their accounts to play. Especially when there is no concrete length for the lock. (a 2 hour lock is massively different from a 24/48/72 hour or more lock)
Furthermore, clicking on the portion of the bnet app where it says “Account Locked” leads you to the battle.net/Blizzard help page where is literally says “Account Banned or Suspended”
As for hoping that there would be appropriate compensation, there wouldn’t be anything appropriate. Reason being there are so many things rotating out this week, it’s a colossal amount of missed opportunities. (High Opportunity Cost). What compensation for missing once in a 6 month span for legion timewalking, 3 week span for the next fated Sepulcher?
Yes, its a pessimistic view of things but it’s as close to reality as you can get with how Blizzard is handling communications.
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Nobody forced them to abuse the exploit, and yet they did it.
Not feeling bad for those who have zero morality.
wiggles toes