• Falk

While this may almost border on seeming like a whine post, I believe that more than enough people may have experience with this that some worthwhile discussion can come out of this. I'm doing my best to keep this as non-personal as possible.

About two hours ago, I was farming Wintersaber rep. This is at like, 4-5am Server Time (hooray Oceanics) - as I'm on holidays, I really though I could catch up on my rep farming, as I'm eccentric and want really really trivial stuff like exalted Darkmoon and Shen'dralar on my character.

I get booted off the server, and on attempting to log back in, my password has been changed. Long story cut short (skipping past the half hour or so I run around in a panic trying to get people awake to see if my character is online, hacked, whatever) I remember to check my registered e-mail. Sure enough, my password was changed on request due to an account suspension for 72 hours, and apparently I'm magically on my * * * FINAL WARNING * * * for "exploitation of the World of Warcraft economy or for being associated to accounts which have been closed for intended exploitation", not previously having any infractions whatsoever.

Cut short even more, the gist of things as it is, this means that the guild won't be having me around (FR offtank for Illidan, plus one of few tanks in a severe short-term tank shortage, amongst other things) this week, making our ability to clear content this week extremely questionable.

For me personally though, that problem isn't near as humongous as being (perhaps irreversibly) upset about how Blizzard handles their policy, and with the general situation of WoW's economy (hi gold farmers) that makes this suspension even thinkable in the first place. It's both extremely ludicrous and upsetting. Not having any warnings or blemishes whatsoever, refusing to AFK bot in AV, refusing to buy gold even through the hellhole that was Naxxramas and playing a healer. And suddenly I'm on a 3-day vacation from WoW with the prospect of a permanent ban for taking another illusionary step in that wrong direction, of which I'm still 100% unsure the fuss is about. Completely out of my control, too.

Now, all that having been vent, let me draw attention away from my own predicament if I may. The point(s) of discussion this post is intended to bring up, is twofold:

1) What exactly are these policies? I guess that they do have to be flexible and ambiguous to a certain extent to combat actual "exploitation of the WoW economy". On the other hand, how does it come about that people can get flagged for no apparent reason and slapped with ludicrously harsh penalties? Is my character/account's longevity at the whim of some monkey sitting on a crate and deciding what's questionable or not? Or even worse, some automated program for which there is no recourse regarding actions taken against the account?

2) Shouldn't the "information presented" against the account, amongst other things, be made known to the account holder? From experience of a few people I've known, e-mails to the account administration e-mail (which is touted as the only way to resolve account suspension issues - billing cannot help keke ^___^) have always returned extremely ambiguous and uninformative, often stating nothing more than "going against the essence of the game". Yes, it's just a game, yadda yadda, but if you're going to prosecute me, let me know what the charges are!

I am -not- looking forward to this week, especially since a small part of me feels I've somehow let the guild down, even being aware of the fact that as far as -I- know, I've done nothing to poke massive, bleeding holes in this magical, ethereal "essence of the game". Even after my suspension expires, I'm going to be left looking over my shoulder a lot. I don't even know what I should and shouldn't be doing. Should I fish some Primal Water tonight at 5AM when everyone is sleeping, to cover raiding costs? Or would that get me another mystical red flag in whatever procedures are taking place?

 

kronchev

I do in fact wonder why, if you complain about somebody, they don't tell you what happened.

Does it really protect the person? I really don't think they're protected at all. If someone's done something stupid enough to get reported (exploiting, gold spamming, whatever), I think they're already pretty damned in the reporter's mind. Telling the reporter what happened with the "investigation" seems like feedback that should be given to, well, ease the mind of players and make them know that Blizz really cares about the game!

Do I even know if a single report I've filed has even been looked at? I don't. I get an automated email reply and a disclaimer that I will never know.

At the same time, I've seen screenshots of GM's changing things such as hunter pet names and then totally ignoring any protest from the hunter, even if the new name was awful. Shouldn't Blizz actually interact with those "under investigation"?

I seriously question if anyone looks at reports at this point. I know that there are actual people paid to be GMs but do they look at the tickets? And I wonder how inclusive their automated systems for detecting exploits and what not are, because if its like any other program, it will not be perfect and could very well be the type of thing that nailed you.

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It was a question of how the abilities of the fight are handled. I did not know the answer so I come to the place where I expect to see well formulated, concise and correct answers. Not snotty comments. - eclectic778

Vent is only necessary because of bad players. - ebbv

 

◊ Bryne

Pretty sure you're the victim of an attention-impaired GM or a typo, this stuff does happen (people getting emails regarding warnings for the same character name on a different server?). For whatever reason - probably efficiency and time - it's pretty standard in the CS for this industry not to offer any information on your bans/warnings. That sort of stuff isn't even taken down when you're banned - it's up to you to respond and have someone higher up investigate your personal case.

From a "get this ticket queue down!" standpoint I can understand - most of the people infracted are most likely botters/sellers (or cheaters/hackers, in other games) who won't contest the bans, but it's incredibly frustrating when it happens to you wrongly. I had my Steam account banned right after the Orange Box came out and received no information as to why from the time I made an inquiry to the day my account was unfrozen, two weeks later.

It seems like a little extra time and documentation would go a long way but that's not as high-priority as simply getting tickets and offenders through the system as fast as possible, from what I understand about the way the Blizzard CS department (and other companies!) is run.

 

Osse

Their policies are sometimes a bit odd. One of my arena team members had zero warnings on his account and all of a sudden got banned for about 48 hours. He got the reason of the ban roughly a week after the ban. I find it funny that there's over 100 guilds/arena team names/character's called "Blitzkrieg" but in our case it resulted in two day ban.

He got banned on the monday night before season switched by the way.

WoW-Europe.com Forums -> Another way to get Merciless Gladiator. if anyone is interested.

 

• Falk

Well, to make some things clearer, these are the activities I've done since TBC launched (when I decided to max out my reps and complete my Leatherworking list - hi Black Dragonscale Pants pattern) that may have raised flags:

1) Killed approximately 2300 Booty Bay bruisers to cap out my Bloodsail rep at revered, in the meantime dropping all four Steamwheedle reps to 0/36000 Hated
2) Farmed Wintersaber to like, 16/21k both pre and post-2.3 (where it became significantly easier)
3) Run Dire Maul countless times for that 15% key drop off the ogre bosses for 350 Steamwheedle rep per key (was at 1500/3000 Unfriendly tonight, meaning ~120 keys or 800ish ogre bosses killed total)
4) Bought out a bazillion Dark Iron Ores to hit Exalted Thorium Brotherhood
5) Maxed out all Outland reps (not particularly hard to do though)
6) Run Scholomance (Skin of Shadow), Strath (Frayed Stitchings) and scour Plaguelands (Blood of Heroes) a ridiculous number of times, bought out a massive load of Pristine Black Diamond and a massiver load of Large Brilliant Shards to do Shen'drelar rep via libram turn ins.
7) Painstakingly, on an alt, assemble Darkmoon decks from underpriced cards on the Auction House, to turn in at some point in time to hit exalted (I've got like, 13-15ish decks completed so far after two months of conservative buying - I don't have that much gold)

Now, most of this was done in very recent history as my college and other project workloads lightened up. I can see how the instance running, most of it which was in the dead of the night, could have raised some suspicion. But still... meh :/

I'd ask to keep the tone of the thread civil. It's not about insulting Blizzard and their procedures (although I do come close in my OP) - it's about some constructive criticism about how this facet of the service can be improved, even though it has no direct relation to actual gameplay.

 

Sillia

I'm still wondering why I got permanently banned from the official forums some time ago. I've never gotten an e-mail from Blizzard telling me why I got banned, my banning reason is listed as "Other", and I have not received any answers from wowcmfeedback@blizzard.com (the official e-mail address I was supposed to send to). I've never received any warnings or infractions from posts on the forum either; the only potential thing I could think of was that one time when some of the CMs got their accounts hacked, and I clicked a link posted by a compromised CM account.

Their policies aren't exactly very clear, and I'm still not sure what to do about it.

 

Taiowa

It's entirely possible that some automated program flagged you for interacting with someone who did something bad. They know the account name, billing information, and recent IPs of someone they could prove did something bad, and they can find all the accounts they'd interacted with in game, any other accounts on the same credit card, any other accounts that had been logged into by those IPs ... I assume Blizzard automates a lot of that stuff because they have money to spend on tools. (Remember the story of people getting banned from Star Wars Galaxies because they'd been /tipped money by strangers who'd duped it? That's a case of a tool making poor assumptions.)

Seeing your edit, they probably also have tools to detect people incessantly running commonly gold farmer-farmed content. If they looked at all the stuff you've done, yes, an experienced player would recognize that you're just an OCD rep farmer , but most customer service folks don't know the game that well.

Why not clarify policies? It creates a culture of fear. They think that if you know *exactly* what's against the rules, you'll play fast and loose up to that line, and if you get banned anyway, you can more convincingly argue that you didn't deserve it. If you don't know *exactly* what's against the rules, you're more likely to play conservatively. Whether or not people actually behave that way, I think that's the logic.

 

Lookit

The problem with this is that if Blizzard spells out why precisely you got into trouble, it makes it easier to avoid detection in the future for wrong-doers. If they say "We investigate thoroughly any payment of 10,000 gold sent from one account to another" then someone selling 20,000 gold will simply send 3 payments of ~6,667 gold.

I think the appropriate thing to do in your case is contact account administration and request further review of your situation, as you are not aware of any wrong-doing on your part.

 

• Falk

Heh, speaking of which, there's this BT-geared, guildless druid (armory - The World of Warcraft Armory ), who magically appeared on Frostmourne and was parked in Dire Maul 24/7... I was wondering why a guildless, above-average geared character was delegated to camping DM, when I got the answer the hard way - Trip to DM for some steamwheedle farming, oh hey! Rare spawn! I make a detour to grab some easy Large Brilliants from the BoE blues, and he jumps me. I manage to still kill the elite and loot, and spam whispered him the drops till I got ignored.*

It struck me later that it could easily have been a gold farming scheme - buy a bunch of solo characters, distribute them on a number of servers with an addon or program to alert when the DM spawn is up. That'd be nonstop farming of DM spawns for a chance at Orb of Deception which still sells for like 2k++ on many servers.

Who knows, it could have been a 'legitimate' alt of someone on the server, but with only one other Alliance guild pushing past Akama on the server at the moment, I doubt it. :P And there's a random but semi-related story of the day. If whispering this character or adding him to Friends list as a means of notification as to when I should be watching my back somehow flagged my character, I'm going to have to consult violently with someone within Blizzard.

*(p.s. if my theory is correct, I succesfully got put on ignore by a gold farming company. Wow Falk, wow... you just hit a new low in life)

 

Oaken

No idea who he was but do you seriously spam-whisper somebody in-game until you get ignored and then act surprised when maybe you got a 3-day suspension? Maybe for... spamming?

 

Dwargue

my account was banned from the WoW forums under the "spamming and trolling" clause about 2 years back.

This was when someone came to our realm forum and started flaming away. went onto their realm forum, and posted -5- posts within 15 minutes, each post containing no less than 2 paragraphs using coherent words. No prior problems on my account. I guess the rest of the people who were spamming the realm forums with 1 word responses managed to piss the mod enough to simply put a blanket ban on everyone that was reported. I was never able to get my forum access restored.

I wonder if the OP fell under a similar blanket, where enough complaints were registered, that the GM simply laid down a blanket ban. Kind of the "kill them all, and let god sort them out" approach to moderation.

 

• Falk

Cute, why don't you go ahead and take it even further out of context? The dude likely ignored me because he tried to gank me and failed.

You don't ban someone for three lines of whispers, let alone ban for 72 hours with a final warning. Please don't make me dig up that Volcano diagram Blizzard threw together to explain their amazing penalty system.

 

BeeLz

My account is creditcard restricted although I only used my creditcard once for transferring and it got billed. Never got a reason why and now I'm not able to transfer my char back. Not really ontopic but another example of bad account support.

 

◊ Merrack

I understand the frustration about an arbitrary-seeming ban, but in the time that post took you could probably have gotten it all worked out. I got a copy of that exact email a monthish ago. Within 3 hours of my "hey, guys? Are you sure it was actually me?" email, I had the ban reversed and a clean record.

Maybe next time you're farming in the middle of the night you should be chatting with guildies, saying things like "boy, it sure is boring out here in Winterspring, especially since I'm playing all the time and not botting in any way, shape, or form!"

Questions? Answers.

 

Yes

I've personally always stopped farming gold on the AH after hitting the 5-6k gold mark. To anyone that relies on reselling to make gold in game the names of people who do the same must be familiar, and we can guess how rich they are from the amount and types of sales they do. I know on shattered hand there are a number of people in the 20k and above range who are risking getting banned. At a peak of reselling one goes through hundreds of AH transactions per day.

My other main | My PvP Blog

 

• Falk

Eh, I sent an email the moment I read the suspension notice. For the record, there hasn't been a reply up to now, but I wasn't expecting an immediate response anyway.

This topic isn't supposed to be about "Best Practices: How to Farm At Night Without Getting Banned For Botting" or "Best Practices: How Falk Can Get His Account Unsuspended In Time For Tea", but is supposed to be focused on the procedures themselves; Are the measures appropriate? Can things be improved?

 

Dwargue

there doesn't seem to be any "escalation" option w/ banning, as there are with item restoration.

Think of it as tech support, you have your frontline DTS guys who sit on the phone and ask you a set of predetermined questions, with a set of predetermined answers. If those answers don't solve your problem, they can escalate your problem to someone that's more experienced. kind of a screening process.

I don't believe there is such a thing with the process of banning. In my own attempt to get my forum access re-established, I exchanged several e-mails with different blizz employees, none of which had more power to make changes than the next person. And in my case, of "spamming and trolling", there is no black and white rule re: number of posts/words in x-amount of time, so it became completely subjective of the mod who banned me in the first place.

end result was I was sent around the system, and was never able to talk to anyone who actually had the authority (much less the willingness) to overturn the ban.

I definitely think THAT should be improved upon.

 

◊ Merrack

There may not be with the forums, but there's certainly a hierarchal system in place for in-game bans. My first communication was with a normal GM, who sent me to Account Administration, where a tier one reviewed my case, and finally with a "senior account administrator" who actually approved the reversion.

No idea how much of this carries forward to the forum side, though. Blizzard seems to feel that the forums are a nice perk, but not nearly as important as game access itself. (And I have to agree.)

Questions? Answers.

 

xiaoxin21

I think one of the important things that should be worked on is the consistency of the enforcement of policy. I heard of people who gotten suspended after using "WTF" in say and some merely getting off with warning after saying something much more vulgar.

Currently, I think the policy of enforcement is the GM is given a set of rules for each offense and a range of punishment they can mete out, as such depending on their mood, different GMs can mete out vastly different punishment for the same offense.

There is also no proper review procedure, at best you can email them or post in the customer service forums and hope for a reply which may or may not come. They should set a policy of attending to each problem within 24 hours and keep you in the loop. For example when I email Nvidia on my graphics card problem, they will email me back within an hour and say it is being up to the level 2 support and after a while it will be handed to an officer which will reply promptly within like 8 hours.

 

Lookit

You are focusing on the first part of "spamming and trolling" and ignoring the latter. It only takes 1 post to troll. If you are banned for going to another realm forum and making a handful of posts, I'm inclined to think it was for trolling, not spamming.

And obviously it is difficult to make "black and white" rules about trolling.


As for this thread being about "improving Blizzard's penalty system and process" I don't know what one thinks this thread could bring to the table, since Blizzard has not made the inner workings of their process public. As for suggestions to help them reduce the number of errors, I don't know what you could suggest beyond "Make fewer errors please" since presumably only Blizzard employees are familiar with the methods in place to ensure the accuracy of their account actions.


After reading several dozen tales of "My account was actioned but I did no wrong" over the years, my observation is thus: either I feel like I'm not being told the whole story, or the poster is a rational person who ends the story with "But I sent in an email and was able to get the issue resolved."

Case in point: in Falkon2's original account of his encounter with the well-geared druid, he says "I spam-whispered them until I was put on ignore". Then he later says "I only whispered them three times, that's hardly spamming". I don't personally feel your account of things is reliable enough to base a thread off of.

As for how transparent Blizzard should be with their policies, as I said earlier they must be fairly opaque to prevent players from knowing with precision how to avoid detection when breaking the rules.

 

Kazanir

Now you're just being a trolling asshole. Falk is a long-time poster here and a respected member of an end-game raiding guild. His credibility isn't really in question. I seriously doubt that he'd post a thread like this including such detail if he had wanted his words twisted around by some numbnuts or if he had really done something that deserved a 72-hour suspension and final warning flag.

Regardless, like almost every organization in a position to penalize members, the system is almost entirely opaque and there is no oversight or way of improving upon it unless Blizzard decides to, and they have never made changes to the system to make it more transparent, especially given the multitude of players on the 'net who are dedicated to abusing the play experience of others. It's a good practice to catch the bad guys but mistakes and misunderstandings are liable to bite the honest player in the ass.

'War' is too small a word for what I'm fighting. Like a candle in front of the whole burning Sun. I told you. This is bigger than a war. Now, I am not going to die today. I have other projects, and other options.

You can come with me. I can protect you.

 

Skizzilini

This reminds me of the incident where a rogue was told by a GM that using stealth and throwing weapons in mechanar to gain access to the chests so he could farm gold was a bannable exploit. It also reminds me of the time a shaman friend of mine was reported, and subsequently accosted by a GM, for "exploiting" walking on water, when in fact that is an in game shaman ability.

Perhaps GM's are merely misinformed about the nature/"legality" of in game mechanics, what is allowed and all that, and the in-game penalty policies are already laid out. Basically, it could simply be human error, or a possible error on the automated-bot-scanning-thingy-program that Blizzard uses, and the policy enforcement & account penalties are already laid out just fine.

 

Cromfel

For the 1st question: The problem may not be Blizzard policy at all, its that someone have reported you for suspicious activity and after inspecting GM makes hasty move and judges without further investigation. I once posted very humorous post to official forums showing squirrel playing dead, and I write down on the post that this would be Eyonix teaching the new ingame pet how to perform. Pretty much every line I had there I tried to present the humorous nature of the post, and I got banned because someone had reported me.

"While the post may seem harmless and the suspension a bit harsh, clearly someone took offense and did report it to cause a moderator reaction. We'll keep this in mind for future posts of the same type though and discuss whether other reactions can be used, like moving to the off-topic forum though this would depend on the replies the thread has gathered by then."

That was the reply for my request trough e-mail where I asked if humor is becoming forbidden, as I did all in my power while presenting the joke to make sure without spoiling the fun. Many people understood it was joke, but someone didnt understand and it triggered ban for me. Specially as replies to my post were "the first movie is UBER ^^" and "This is just so funny " it still lead to 1 week ban for me. The reply is what I expected from Blizzard, from what one could say normal reaction to such topic.

How is this related to your ban? Same can be what happened in your case with similiar reaction from GM who handled the ticket. They are just human and make errors like anyone. And in many cases replies to reclamations take longer than the penalty is, hence its just better for everyone to let it go. You are most likely just victim of the demand where Blizzard is asked to get rid of the "criminals" one could call. Those who walk in stick lines same routes and dont interact or respond to any player actions. The more they need to focus on getting rid of botters, the more likely it is that someone in early hours at work pulls the ban trigger against wrong person.

For the 2nd question: I agree that banned accounts should see the evidence that is causing their suspension. There really isnt any justice in putting someone to jail without telling what he did wrong.

.:. Retribution Paladin Hideout .:. http://cromfel.battlefield.fi/

 

• Falk

So like, you're re-phrasing what I'm saying just to discredit me. I could have (and probably should have) brought up again the nature of the suspension message and pointed out that exploiting the economy of WoW has absolutely nothing to do with a spamming/trolling related infraction, but I didn't want to because like I said, the thread's focus shouldn't be about MY particular dilemma.

That's all I have to say additionally about that particular matter.

 

Metrosexuelf

In general you are just at the mercy of GMs and their customer service deparment. The policies are largely ad-hoc and that is supported by the catch-all language in the ToS that they can basically ban anyone for any reason they want.

Just to add my own little annecdote. My name, obviously, used to be Metrosexuelf. It got reported and changed but I petitioned the Account Management department and convinced them to change it back. I went so far as to ask the GM that assisted me in changing it back that it would be flagged as 'appropriate' so it wouldn't be changed again. A month later is was reported again and changed. When I asked them why that was the case especially in light of the fact that no less than a month ago they deemed it appropriate they rattled off some jargon about changing social mores or something like that.

The bottom line of all of this is that actions against your account can vary widely from what you might think are the preset 'rules.' They fudge it all of the time and there really is no final review board -- you just have to hope you get someone in the customer service department that you can convince you were in the right, not violating rules, etc.