Were you using lowerping recently? Quite a few people have been banned with the same reason for leveling alts while using a proxy server. It seems to trigger their automatic detection of power leveling services.

Neeeowp, not using lowerping (as much as I want to >_> Was about to sign up for the trial, but I spotted the discussion regarding what Internode is doing and adopted a wait-and-see stance - totally different topic though) and according to several blue posts, such services are "not endorsed but not against the ToS".

Of course, this thread alone has quite a bit of proof on how much the edges between black and white change. Heck, even the "How to make gold" thread has quite a few discrepencies on how Blizzard addresses market monopolies.

I always thought that the only people who lost their accounts were hackers/exploiters and abusers of the ToU.

Until the day I too was permanently banned for no reason. After what appeared to be a torturous week of running in circles from blizzards forwarding departments back and forth. I was given an explanation as to why I was banned.

1.) WHY DID THIS HAPPEN AND HOW CAN I STOP IT FROM HAPPENING AGAIN?

Per section 3 of the Terms of Use (WoW -> Legal -> Terms of Use), "You may establish one (1) user account (the "Account") on the Service for each Authentication Key you receive from Blizzard. To establish an Account, you will be required to provide Blizzard with certain personal information and the Authentication Key provided to you by Blizzard. Your failure to supply accurate information to Blizzard when requested, or to update that information as it changes, shall constitute a material breach of this Agreement."

I didn't recieve an email or warning of any sort for my 1 week dismissal.
The 6 phone calls I placed cost me around 12.00 each(due to being overseas long distance). Each call took 30-45 minutes due to the waiting.
I was sent from 1 department to another, only to get sent back to the previous everyday for 5 days. After I would finally get someone to talk to me, they said they were heading to lunch / dinner / break. Only finding myself calling again the next day. It was a nightmare.

I finally get an email telling me what I did wrong.
They said I share[d] my WoW account with someone else. Amazing, I dont trust anyone enough to allow them to use my account nor privvy my password to people I cant personally put my hands on if theres a problem later.

2.) HOW DO I GET MY ACCOUNT BACK?

Download and use this form to regain account access: http://ftp.blizzard.com/pub/WoW/othe...-Retrieval.pdf. For security reasons, we are unable to accept e-mailed attachments or links of any kind. Proper use of the form is the only way to retrieve account access. Please send your submission as soon as possible since Blizzard Entertainment is unable to offer any type of reimbursement for the time an account is disabled.

Sending this FAX cost me about 24.00 in transmission fees. They lost it the first time and had me do it again!!
I finally got my account back and took a break from WoW.
Needless to say, I am back and learned one painful realization... Blizzard can burn down my house and I will still play the damn game.

You're going to have innocent victims when you attempt to control or police a huge situation.

One particular problem I have is that trying to verify that you are the original account owner can take forever. Last time this happened to someone in our guild, Blizzard required identification confirmation through snail mail, or fax. And the last time a guildy had to do this their fax machine was broken. When it was fixed the fax of personal information got lost under the machine. Long story short, we lost one of our 100% rogues due to the fact that it took over 2 months to reset his account, with him trying daily. I am truly not exaggerating.

I'm not judging the GM's in your particular case, or their consistency or lack thereof, but their method to address, confirm, and rectify issues is abhorrently slow. This is something that they could invest a little more time and money into.

On another note, I know that you are obviously upset about this situation Falkon - I've actually seen some bad things happen through guilt-by-association. Assuming that you have told us your entire side of the story (which is a stretch even for a well respected poster to assume), I would guess it is indeed guilt-by-association... probably that gold farmer.

I have heard many similar stories (faxes not being received, certified letters being signed for but not received, etc.). Their customer service (outside of the extremely shallow stuff like RP'ing GMs answering simple questions and giggling CM's on the forums) seems pretty deplorable in my estimation. I haven't had any experience in other MMOs so I don't know if this is common in the industry or just unique to Blizzard.

Blizzard's in game service is a bit above the curve from what I have experience through various MMO's. Borderline on good, which is one step below impossible for an MMO.
Their account administration and services however seem to be where things are weak.

The suspension has been revoked. After pondering this thread a bit more, I think in hindsight, what I meant to bring up was this:

For things like in-game GM issues, you always have the opportunity to use, amongst other things, the feedback form as a second point of contact, should you dispute any GM action. It's a way to "keep it honest" and make sure your point of view is heard by a third party of sorts, and that the GM action may be reversed if it's felt to be inconsistent with what the game is about.

However, for account suspensions and other account penalties, the only (and I stress, -only-, as according to what they stress in multiple areas, especially when contacting billing or in-game GM response) means of communication is through -one- e-mail address. What if you're unsatisfied with the response you get? Who can you contact? At the time of posting, I was unaware (and currently remain a little skeptical) of the method Smudgey went through, which seems like a lot of roundabout effort for something out of our control.

Could there be at least a second point of contact, such as through a number you can call? I do realize that the number of calls could potentially be humongous, but at the same time, being able to discuss your case in real-time may actually get issues resolved with less overall effort on both parties' part. The only quandary comes from that the person(s) on the other side of the line is going to have to be extremely well versed on all the borderline issues the game has, and needs to have all related evidence on hand, which could be an organizational nightmare vs. number of calls coming in.

Lookit: I hope that while reading my posts, ultimately you realize that yes, I'm upset, but I'm not posting BECAUSE I'm upset and want to get my account back. Yes, of course I wanted to get my account back ASAP, but that's a seperate issue from what I'm bringing up here. I didn't post in the hopes that zomg-wow-devs-who-read-EJ would notice my character name, guild tag, server, etc and zoom off to the nearest telephone to ring up account admin and get me unbanned, stat.

I'm still trying (ironically enough, by that one email address) to find out what flagged me for suspension and an instant final warning. Here's to hoping I get a coherent reply. :/

Considering your ban was revoked today, I'm going to go ahead and assume they discovered their mistake. In the cases of unfair suspensions I've seen resolved you get an apology and some game time credited to you, but I don't think you should expect an answer beyond the official term you got in the mail plus a "We were wrong about it".

Lookit's points are the ones I've agreed with most so far. I'm a frequent reader of both the EU and US' CS forums and the "I got banned, Blizz sucks, I didn't do nuffink!" threads there are the best ones to read. If provoked enough, the GMs there carefully and very, very explicitly note down what exactly happened and how the OP was completely lying trying to garner sympathy for his case. "Proclaimed Innocence" (Pavonum™) usually strikes in favor of the GMs there which is why some people would respond negatively in similar proclaimed happenings here.

While it would also be very nice to have a real time hotline to discuss account actions, think just for a moment what would happen when people who your company just banned had the ability to talk to a person representing said company. Potentially humongous wouldn't be the first nor biggest issue I'd attribute to it; finding someone to sit through abuse worse than what a Game Master can get through in-game chats is. And the Game Master can actually punish you for doing it in-game if you keep insulting them, I don't see that happening with phonecalls.
No, I'm pretty sure they will stick to their e-mail system, and the aforementioned forums have been notably helpful in getting stuff like this resolved as well. E-mails are also a solid form of communication with a possibility to store them in a file which I imagine happens to some extent, which is harder to do with phone calls, recording them and their bigger sized files for example.

I'm sorry to hear you got unfairly banned, I know it's not fair and I'd probably lash out in frustration on any of the above ways to communicate with Blizzard if it happened to me, but with a few million customers there will be accidents. Like mentioned somewhere earlier in the thread, tools get confused or are unable to distinguish subtle differences, similarly the account admin guy viewing the results could interpret this differently and they suspend you for something you did not do. In Europe, this is simply done by mailing WoWAccountReviewEU@blizzard.com or using their support page at http://eu.blizzard.com/support, then waiting on a response.

Finally, and I really do hate sounding like a GM myself, but for every kind of change to their policies, or for more clarity about their policy enforcement or account penalties issued you will need to post on their Suggestions forums to get anything through. In-game GM's will point you to it and close your ticket, the above e-mail address will disregard your mail or send you a pre-fab message stating the same, and the support page pretty much links you to it right away as far as I would imagine. I'm not going to say this thread is useless, but beyond anecdotes like we've already seen from people who got into the same situations as you this thread will offer very little discussion value, not too mention its point will be entirely missed because this quite frankly is a thread that belongs on the WoW forums because it actually needs to be there.

Blizzard has a tendency to shoot first, and ask questions later.

However it usually takes them a really long time to reload the gun after they fire some shots off.

I remember the first time a large number of Starcraft/Warcraft accounts were banned out-right violating policies, then you didn't see it happen again for months, and in some case the people cheating and I might I add blatantly cheating immediately following one of these purges remained ban free until the next wave.

If you hang around Blizzard long enough, you just kinda get used to how they act, it's like an odd couple, you know exactly how they function but you stick around anyway because you know it's not perfect but it's better then else where. Release delays, Developer feedback, Balance issues, and of course the banning and policy reinforcements, this is the Blizzard you know and love, just have to get used to it.

This is my biggest complaint about the whole system. An ex-guildmate of mine had his warriror's account banned about 6 months or so ago, supposedly for some kind of software infraction. He had no previous record of untoward behaviour and was absolutely adamant that he hadn't been using anything remotely dodgy, and from what I know of him, I believe him completely, he's an honest, straight-up guy who played casually and was almost exclusively into the PvP side of things, so he could hardly be confused for a botter or something. Unfortunately, all attempts to discover what it was he supposedly used and overturn the ban were met with nothing more than generic and unspecific, automated-style emails reciting the terms and conditions. He was unable to get any kind of satisfactory answer out of customer service and so gave up, cancelled a second account his mage was on and left the game. Several of his guildmates followed in disgust at the random and unexplained nature of it all so the end result was several long time subscriptions lost when all that was required was the courtesy of an explanation as to what exactly it was that caused the admins to flag him in the first place.

As the original poster says, an increased degree of transparancy and understanding can only benefit everyone, as things are, it all feels rather arbitrary and capricious.

"This is my biggest complaint about the whole system. An ex-guildmate of mine had his warriror's account banned about 6 months or so ago, supposedly for some kind of software infraction."

This happened to a friend of mine as well...(exact same timeframe) he was told the issue was nonnegotiable. That they could not discuss what applications/software he used. (the type which does not like to use any mods and just wants to pvp. Logs on a few times a week ...pvps for a few hours then logs out...). Every rank of Customer Service just said we can not discuss it, but there is nothing we can do.

As for accounts taking months to restore, it use to take less then a day, but they felt people were exploiting the system. Goodess forbid you ever have multiple ip addresses or share access with someone you are married too...they will drag their feet to restore the account.

I've seen enough bizarre actions on the part of Blizzard's customer service department to last me a lifetime.

Personally, I've never had any problems with them - however, I don't see that as a credit in their favor, but rather in mine: I protect my account information like a father would protect his 5-year-old daughter's virginity.

My biggest complaint about Blizzard's responses to its player base, since I started playing their games in the early 90's, has always been that they simply don't give enough information to their gamers. When I report someone in-game, I don't want to know exactly what happened to them, or even necessarily why - but if I'm supposedly helping them keep their game clean and enjoyable, both for myself and other players, why can't the GM send me an in-game mail saying, "Thanks for your earlier report! An appropriate response has been taken.", or, "Thanks for your earlier report! Your concern did not breach any of our terms of use, and no action has been taken."

In the long run, Blizzard obviously takes the stance that, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Their games continue to attract millions of players/subscribers, and their underwhelming service department does not appear to have any influence on that.

My main account was permanently banned from the "official" WoW forums for making polite recruiting posts on realms that had open transfers to Silvermoon. This was within 2 weeks of the first realm transfers.

I had no idea that this was a bad thing at the time; I thought I was being innovative because we had a real shortage of decent raiders on our server. The funny thing is that their code of conduct explicitly states that this offense calls for a "warning".

Now, the plot thickens because the Blizzard employee not only banned me from the forums, he went poking through my billing information, decided it looked "suspicious", and froze my account!

I had to fax in notarized ID and bank account information to get my account unlocked. I sent many emails, and placed phone calls to complain about the poor customer service. I was excoriated at what felt like a pretty big violation of the privacy of my personal customer information and the administration of an overzealous penalty (exceeding their own rules). Well, it didn't do a bit of good. To this day I post on the forums on a L4 alt on a different account.

So, I guess you could say I was, well, what's that line from Super Bad about the Law?

You get the gist. Blizzard is terribly inconsistent and often horribly unfair when administering their “justice”. They probably need to hire an experienced VP of Operations who has run CS operations before and knows what they are doing. Be very careful, because you can get in trouble for doing something innocuous.

PS Oh, and don't take this as whining. It's just a cautionary tale about what happened to my account.

Chantinelle, I had a guildmate that was banned for nearly the exact same reason. It was a year ago, in fact almost exactly now that I think about it. He was banned for "unauthorized 3rd party mod". I had known him for quite some time and was a very trustworthy person. His problem I think was that he was a UI junky, constantly snagging new UI's, always testing stuff out, it would take this man literally weeks to recover after content patches. When he emailed Blizzard's account support people, he just kept getting the same email back, illegal mod, not authorized, not supported by Blizzard. They never told him what mod he had that was causing the ban, just that one he had was illegal and that he was perma banned, with no previous warnings.

That being said, I was coming back to the game on a new account, had a "friend" level one of my characters and was caught almost within two days of him starting. I emailed blizzard and told them I hadn't logged into WoW in weeks and that my account was hacked, they immediately reversed the suspension. The things they do with account support and bans/suspensions are so goofy and random, it truly boggles the mind.

You can contact the Customer Service forums. Players often post there after receiving an unsatisfactory original response from a GM or account services. Their post is typically always responded to by a blue who either fixes the mistake or confirms that they have irrefutable (in their mind) proof of wrong-doing. Suffice to say, there is definitely an avenue for people who are unsatisfied with their initial response.

Additionally, I have heard literally dozens of stories that go something like this: "I had a guildie who was banned for no good reason at all. He's an honest guy (as far as I know) so I know that Blizzard is wrong and he is right, but he never got his account back."

Let's take a quick step back and approach this from another angle: let's suppose that all the news items and exposés are true and that gold-selling is a multi-million dollar industry. We can infer from this that lots of people are buying gold. I know that if I were to buy gold, I probably wouldn't tell my guildmates. Then, if I got banned for it, I would probably be too embarrassed to tell my guildies "Sorry, I can't raid anymore because I got banned for buying gold". It would probably be a lot easier to say "I am innocent, but you know how Blizz is, I will probably never get my account back. Stupid Blizz, lazy GMs!" I would know that I'll be something of a martyr in the latter case, whereas if I tell the truth my guildmates will rightly say "What an idiot! Why risk your account for some gold?"

Perhaps this is an overly cynical view of the situation, but I simply find it much more plausible in most of the situations I see.

No, I don't think it's overly cynical at all. As mentioned in my post, my guildmate was a pretty trustworthy guy, but he loved to dabble with UI's. Who's to say he didn't pick one up that was flagged by Blizzard as illegal? Things like that happen whether you are knowingly using that mod or not. Was it 100% his fault if that was the case? No. But it's not blameless in that situation either. If that was the case it's still his fault for not checking in on any mod or program he was running while using WoW.

The first thing I posted on my guild's officer board after I got my ban was pretty much, they caught me doing something illegal and I'm probably permanently banned. Even though I had had actual friends using that account to help me level while I was away from the game. I could have just as easily said, "Oh I guess Blizzard decided that there were too many IPs accessing my account and they banned me for that". People often times take the least incriminating path when they are trying to explain or justify their actions, especially in a potentially nameless/faceless player behind the character type of situation you have in MMORPG's.

I'll state for the third time in this thread that Blizzard cannot give specific details as to why a suspension took place because it gives wrong-doers a much better idea of how to avoid detection in the future.

As for shutting people up about their alleged innocence, Blizzard doesn't care what people whine about after the fact. They take the action they feel is necessary, and if the player wants to tell everyone how innocent they are, that's all well and good. If Blizzard were to provide the "incriminating evidence" in every case, it would make life worlds easier for modders and gold-sellers who would then have a precise idea of what information Blizzard looks at to catch people.

We can't tell you what you did wrong, because if we tell you, you won't do it again?

I really don't follow your logic... it definitely doesn't apply to real-world enforcement of laws. If I got pulled over by a police officer and arrested, I'd have to be informed why I was arrested and what the charges against me were. The specific reason for this is to prevent arbitrary enforcement of rules and wrongdoing by the people in charge of enforcement. That same principle applies here.

All being secretive does is prevent Blizzard from having to take responsibility for their own failures; it doesn't prevent wrongdoing in any way. If you think the people farming gold and powerlevelling need to read posts on the forums to find out how to avoid detection you're a little naive. You realize how large Blizzard is, right? You think *every* single person they employ has high enough moral standards to not share a few technical details with somebody from IGE in exchange for a few hundred (or thousand) bucks?

There's a difference between "We banned you because you mailed X amount of gold around within Z amount of time" and "We banned you due to excessive mailing of gold."

I don't think people would object to not being given the specific criteria, as long as they got the general reason, because there aren't any hard and fast rules for what constitutes exploitation of the game economy.

I don't understand how this type of message would be any more satisfying then the "Exploitation of game economy" response you get. Every person I know who deserved the ban knew what they did and the people that didn't deserve theirs got reversals rather quickly and still pretty much knew how they got theirs.

How would the message about mailing gold be any more comforting then "economy exploiting" to the unjustly banned. The justly banned should know what they did already.

The assumption posters are making is that they implicitely will reveal their "thief-catching" methodology by telling the banned what they did wrong. That information would eventually make it to people who would use it to make their explotiing harder for Blizzard to detect. This is akin to a supermarket wrongly accusing you of shoplifting then refusing to tell you where the cameras are that caught you (except Blizzard can play fast&loose, you have no basic right to WoW). Here are some examples that would certainly be exploited by the hackers/bad people:

1) "You were banned because you have been transferring X amoutn of gold in many increments in under Y time"
2) "We saw you had the directory C:\Program Files\SomeHackingtool, and you were marked as using a 3rd party program to cheat"
3) "Our system flags anyone who kills <whatever> in <a short time OR some weird way> as possible exploiters of <some bug>"

I can speak personally about (2). A good friend of mine is the author of a program that was used pretty extensively to manipulate the game client side- I won't say what the program is, but you could do things like have a mini-map with all spawns and players on it, you could create and run sophisticated botting macros, etc. Anyway, back in early '06 I was using the program's little mini-map while leveling my first character, and one day I got a 72hr ban. In fact, all of my friends and every user of the program got the ban. They didn't tell us why we were banned beyond saying we violated the TOS, and they gave no indication of how they detected we were cheating. This made it a lot harder for my friend to release a new version of his 3rd party tool because he had to first reverse-engineer (and guess at) how Blizzard detected his software. It also spooked many users- I stopped using it altogether because the risk wasn't worth the small benefit of seeing Leeegggooolllaass on my BG minimap. In this case, Blizzard's policy had two huge benefits: it helps them stay as much ahead of the exploiters as possible and retards their progress in cheating, and it serves as a deterrent to casual cheaters.

I disagree. Any information can potentially be used against Blizzard by the scary bad guys.

It seems to me there are two basic arguments to be had with this issue:

1) What constitutes a ban-worthy offense.
2) Blizzard to User communication.

When looking at problem one, you have to remember, the first role of Blizzard as a game company is to make money. They do not ban gold farmers simply because 'it's bad for the game', they ban farmers because reselling intellectual property infringes on their own rights to market and sell the game, and to keep you interested in the game. The reselling of virtual property is not allowed in their game, and they feel that decision will make them more money than the opposite decision would, so you agree to it in the Terms of Use.

With problem two, you must continue to look at the argument from their perspective as a company, and NOT as a de-facto government. In the large scale, your 15$ a month is worth nothing to them if your actions somehow negate the use of, say, 10 accounts on your server. or 100 accounts. The problem with this model is that it does not translate to the general 'GM' level. A lot of those guys have a great understanding of the game, and wish to bring you the best gaming experience possible within whatever ruleset they are privy to, but that does not mean they are actively looking out for the good of the corporate model. A bad GM has the flexibility to completely screw you over, because that sort of deniability and control must be in the framework so that when some farmer/botter *does* act out of bounds, they can act swiftly. It's more utilitarian than democratic, but that's the way their company operates, and it's stated in the TOU and the EULA.

You are not entrusting Blizzard with your gaming rights, for better or worse.