The following is a direct copy from a comment created by one SpartanG01 on the reddit r/wow thread. It is a lengthy and incredibly articulate account of everything that may account for the bans currently happening.
I link this in the hopes people understand a little more.
So I’ll quote the relevant part of that small discussion between 3 people, none of whom are developers.
“This particular method is employed by players that boost through Timewalking. (When they are clearly not supposed to)”
It’s that last bit that is important.
What they are discussing is a relatively complicated way of circumventing an in game limitation that is clearly in place to prevent this kind of abuse and it requires a multi-step process of deliberately circumventing the queuing system.
The process being referred to here requires solo queuing for a specific dungeon on a twink character on one account while simultaneously group queuing for that same dungeon on a separate account.
Anyone familiar with Call of Duty boosting will understand why this is a circumvention of the system in place. The goal here is to “randomly” have these two groups join together. The “Randomness” is reduced by having both groups que for the same dungeon for which there is a lower population thus increasing the chances these two groups will end up in que together. Why? Because if you take a twink character and que together with an entire group of other higher level players a group wide experience debuff is applied to the group specifically to prevent the abuse of this system. By queuing the second group separately and re-queuing for subsequent dungeons you effectively dodge this.
This is absolutely an exploitation of the system. This is a scheme designed by players that not only requires a deep understanding of an otherwise invisible system but requires players to utilize multiple accounts and circumvent the randomness of the dungeon que system to achieve their goal.
Things that are not exploitation:
• Using a Twink in Timewalking
• Queuing as a Twink with another group
• Running subsequent dungeons with a Twink your group was matched with
Things that are exploitation:
• Intentionally timing the ques of multiple separate accounts with the express purpose of having them “randomly” matched together to abuse a gap in the XP limiting system
I’ve leveled 51 alts from 30 to 80 during this Timewalking event by just queuing into Timewalking and any time I found a twink I stuck with that group until they left. I probably spent ~300 dungeons runs in a group with a twink character. So why didn’t I get banned? The twink character wasn’t my character, I was only using one account and I was using the random group finder for Timewalking.
So how are these accounts being flagged and banned? My guess is its likely because of the initial use of the specific dungeon que. At level 10-11 the number of dungeons you can que for specifically is incredibly small. It would not even be remotely difficult to parse the list of characters queuing for those dungeons for dungeon groups that contain multiple characters tied to accounts accessed from the same IP address.
Which means you would have to be deliberately and knowingly exploiting the system to be caught up in this.
It also means you could avoid risking a ban entirely by doing any one of these things:
• Have someone else run your second account
- This can get you in trouble on its own though. Blizzard typically won’t action your account for logging into WoW from different IPs (I play at my friends house all the time) but if they suspect you might be exploiting and see a systemic use of specific IPs exclusively used when the suspect activity is occurring they can and will use this to justify action on an account. There was an issue when the group finder first released that involved this kind of use and people did get banned from it.
• Use your Twink to boost a friends character and have them use theirs to boost yours
- This isn’t a violation of anything in the TOS as far as I can tell and I can’t imagine how they would even begin to assert foul play concerning “queuing with your friends”. There is a difference between “We found a hole in your game and exploited it” and “Using the game in a completely typical way allows for this completely invisible thing to happen which we arguably weren’t aware of”.
• Run your second account on another machine through a proxy/VPN
- VPNs are not explicitly against the TOS however, this isn’t fool-proof. VPNs are not entirely anonymous. IP Address tracking and geolocation tracking can reveal the use of a VPN. I’m also sure Blizzard has a database of known VPN vendors and commonly used VPN IP ranges, and VPNs can often introduce network fingerprints in the form of specific latency patterns though I doubt Blizzard is using that kind of IT forensics to track players. That being said VPNs have been used in the past to abuse the Arena queuing system so it wouldn’t outright shock me if they were quite aggressive about managing it.
I can’t imagine a scenario in which Blizzard would be able to reliably tell the difference between a randomly matched group of 1 Twink + 1-4 other characters and an organized group of 1 Twink + 1-4 other characters getting matched for the same low level dungeon if there was no ip address consistency between them. —