I had a friend named Ragamuffin on Argent Dawn. He and I started playing on that server at around the same time (the day of launch), though we only met and became friend after about a year of playing WoW. Prior to my departure from that server, Ragamuffin had had his name changed 7 times. Each time he had his name changed, he petitioned against the forced renaming and the GMs ultimately reversed their earlier decision. There is no exaggeration there, I can even recall some of the names he temporarily had. One was a Japanese word that escapes my memory, but was a term that meant "someone who stabs their friends in the back". The reasoning behind the name changes was that Argent Dawn is an RP PVE server, and has some additional strictures, including a tighter naming convention. The guild we were in at that time was just sort of shocked that it kept happening, but now I understand Blizzard a little better. He's still there, and his name is still Ragamuffin. I just checked him out on the Armory but I have no idea if it is still the same player or if Blizzard has continued their eternal crusade to change his name.

My point in telling this anecdote is that Blizzard's customer service obviously begins and ends with the guy in the seat at the time the call comes in. When someone reported the name Ragamuffin, the ticket just went a random dude in a random order, and each time they went on applying a formulaic response that did not include checking the history of prior similar events. I doubt there even was a record of the prior name changes performed (and un-performed) on Ragamuffin's toon, or else Blizzard would have not bothered to waste time and man-hours making their staff do (and subsequently undo) that work in at least 6 repeated cases.

Yay, more fun -- this just happened today, to a personal friend of mine whom I would be *very* surprised to have been running anything shady:

About a month ago a rogue and paladin from our guild were messing around in Orgrimmar ganking people. Suddenly, the rogue got booted offline without a GM message or anything, and found the following in his mailbox:

I'm sure you can imagine the uproar on Vent. We eventually realized that a friendly horde warlock had been putting up CoR on both the paladin and rogue, which of course means that they get the fear graphic above their heads, and they don't get feared. I'm really not sure who is more retarded: the lock that reported him or the GM who banned him.

Anyway, a few emails later (you can't call Blizzard on the telephone for this) he received this:

As a light-hearted followup to my own anecdote, I now have irrefutable proof that the universe has a horrible, twisted sense of humor:

[23:44:56] [Party] [Unicornlord]: ok. since ur set as afk and killing below ur lvl im reporting you, lulz

From some random lv60 hunter who decides to farm Wintersaber rep. At lv60. This is just as I ding exalted too, less than 2 days after my suspension is revoked. If he only knew the irony... :P

Who is going to be satisfied with the response they get on a banning? Either it gets reversed or you want it to be reversed, everyone would just call the number and complain until the person at the Blizzard's end hangs up. They simply don't see any point in paying to maintain an 800 number and a rack of phone jockeys to listen to people whine, say 'you're banned', then hang up after some trigger condition.

How exactly? They use in-game logs to gather information, so they already have all the data they need for a decision. They have come back to review to see if there's a mistake, but if the logs show that you logged in from China 20 minutes after you logged in from Nebraska, they don't care what real-time discussion you can offer. If their chat logs show you 'spamming tells' to someone, or show you swearing at someone, they don't care what your justification is. If Warden spotted glider, the fact that you claim it was your friend who installed it is irrelevant to them.

Those people well versed on the borderline issue the game has are the ones reviewing cases now. Sticking them on a phone would simply reduce the volume of cases that they can review, as well as encourage them to find a better job.

Why do you think it would shut people up from proclaiming their innocence? Reading the Bliz CS forum, there are a lot of people who protest their innocence right until a CM mentions something like 'so, how did you get to china so quickly that day?' 'do you think the market for greys is going to stay around 5000 each?' and so on. A lot of the hack sites will put up a post requesting that their users make posts about how they were unjustly banned each time there's a mass bot ban.

If blizzard could make a phone line that only people unjustly banned could call, they wouldn't need an investigation department at all, they'd just need to say 'OK, call this number, if you can you get unbanned, if not goodbye' and everyone would be happy. Since Blizzard cannot make such a phone line, however, any discussion of such a line needs to take into account the fact that people who were legitimately banned would call it too.

Yes but you are using the benefit of doubt against him, what has no room in the nature of this discussion. We are based on assumption that person X is banned for no reason (As it can happen) and how that person receives information about the reasoning of that ban.

He asked 2 pretty solid questions: "1) What exactly are these policies?"
What I understand are pre-information of reasons to get banned. What can be compared to the reason that the person X is after.

2nd question was: "Shouldn't the "information presented" against the account, amongst other things, be made known to the account holder?"
What I understand as reactions after the assumed unjustified ban and how person can acknowledge if he actually did something wrong, or was banned for wrong reasons.

I suppose you can try to make another topic questioning this imaginary person X if you like. falkon2 own story was merely an example, where for some reason the poster was receiving end of ban (And for the sake of argument, we need to assume that he is imaginary player who was banned without real reason as he thinks so based on hes own ingame knowledge). It could have been anyone who created this topic, asking for same questions. It does not change the nature of those questions if the OP was not giving example.

Maybe it wasn't the fact he was using a throwing weapon to do it so much as the fact he was doing it at all? That whole thing with rogues getting hundreds of Heroic Dungeon chests a day with zero effort/risk was obviously an exploit. Those were chests that were only supposed to be accessed a handful of times a day by a full group of 5 people, and instead were being opened and looted hundreds of times by a single person, without having to take the time to clear instances, and without being saved to the instance after looting it. Any rogue that did it and didn't realize that what they were doing was total bullshit is just retarded, fair and simple.

edit - I knew a number of rogues across a few different servers that did the heroic chest exploit and made in excess of 3,000g a day, day after day. Epic flying mounts in 2 days, then huge net balances in their banks so they'd never have to farm anything again for months. Anyone that got caught doing that and was banned, deserved it.

1) The policies for banning are the rules. Violations are subject to anything from warnings to temp bans to account closures- generally based on how many strikes you have against you. (Although they've changed that recently- some offenses are now bannable on your first strike) Regardless, you should acknowledge any action against the rules may have serious and long reaching consequences. This is not a democracy and the only vote we have is with our wallets.

Anything beyond that is about as controllable as being struck by lightning. When "bad shit" is going on- don't be dancing on the open field with a giant stick in your hand- even if you're just a simple shepherd guiding your poor confused sheep innocently along.

It's really that simple to stay out of trouble. Don't be an asshole to the people around you, and if someone is doing something that's likely to have GM interference- get as far away from them as you can. Don't get caught in the crossfire, don't pull stupid stunts, and do your best to keep from giving other people reasons to report you. I've made it through 2 and a half years of playing virtually every day for multiple hours with one warning on my account. I deserved that warning and I'm damn lucky I was one of a large enough exploiting crowd (Hiya ZG Bijou exploit!) that Blizzard wasn't feeling inclined to just ban us all and be done with it. Am I a saint? Hell no. I gank people (although rarely), I curse in guild chat, party chat, and whispers with friends (Never among strangers.), I exploit as much of the economy as I think I can get away with (surprisingly little since I'm too damn lazy), and I AFK occasionally in AV while reading my book (honor farming sucks.) I name my characters things that won't get them name changed, and I don't buy gold/leveling services or bot.

2) Hell no. The information shouldn't be presented. Their intent is to keep enough of their methods opaque enough to still be able to *catch* botters and exploiters. By hand delivering them specific information about the method of location and confirmation- it makes it absurdly easy to dodge detection. It's difficult enough for them to catch these people already. 1-5% false positives (REAL false positives, not people who are good at lying their way out of a ban or who are "really really trustworthy". No one is a saint- most people wouldn't believe that I have a real warning on my account for exploiting because I'm so against it NOW, but it's there and I'm certainly not honest about it often. It's damn embarrassing.), is an acceptable rate when the other 99-95% of the people are working against the operational intent of the game and hurting many more than the number of false positives put through difficulties. Put it this way- if you lose 1% of the population base because you're being overrun by botters/farmers/exploiters who go unpunished- that number is far far larger than losing even a 5% false positive. There are millions of accounts out there with one-two stupid infractions or no infractions at all. True false positives are rare- but when you've got 9 million accounts, of course everyones going to have a friend of a friend. All you need is one or two splashy stories to instill a disproportionally large mental picture of how common true false positives are.

This was in response to my email asking for more information regarding the suspension and what triggered it. It's not like I actually expected a coherent answer, but yeah. I just hope that it means the final warning was revoked as well; somehow I doubt further emails will get me clarification on even that simple matter.

I was in Korea last weekend and logged in a few times to chat with guildies. No action has been taken on my account so I'd say you're probably safe.

It's been stated on their support forums that as long as you don't break the laws pf physics (Korean login 20 mins later, e.g.) you're quite safe.

That's an interesting restriction though. It would not be out of the question for someone traveling to access an account through a remote desktop app (and hence through a home IP) while in transit and then access that same account through a foreign IP once they arrive.

That's a false positive. How often is that rare scenario going to happen- as opposed to the number of times that they manage to tag someone for it because they're actually getting power leveled or selling/buying the account?

I love hasty action by GM's:



Followed up with:



Silly really, cause apparently someone reported me for pissing them off somehow, which caused them to get a tad obscene in party chat, then reported me for saying what they said.

Luckily someone actually took a better look at it, yet still AFTER emailing me for actions taken against my account.

Yes, yes, total blasphemy when a mistake is made, but its still makes me wonder whats going on down at Blizz/GM HQ.

As for the readability of the screenshots, get out the reading glasses gramps!

All it basically said was that I had received an email about actions taken against my account, followed up by a message telling me to ignore the first three messages I received.

Customers tend to assume that the people they phone for support have a large repertoire of practical experience with their problem - where as most Customer Service training focuses on being polite, creating a good impression, and dealing with problems. To assume that all Blizzard GM's are raiders or even play the game is a massive assumption to make.

There are countless examples of times that a GM has made a ludicrous statement where they show they have no real knowledge of an in game mechanic (the GM mentioned earlier who thought Shaman water walking was exploiting is a good one) which a player of even a basic level of understanding would realise was a false report.

It's more likely that given the amount of support required for a game this popular, that a number of GM's are simply experienced Customer Service operatives given a rulebook on how to police World of Warcraft, but lacking the understanding and experience of being a seasoned player to realise what actually is and isn't exploiting.

I think the expectation of the level of support you are getting from first tier Customer Service operative who likely spends most of their time dealing with tickets about bugged quests, missing items, or other trivia is too high.

However, it should be easier for players to contact more senior or experienced GM's particularly for more serious account actions like bans or suspensions.

Lastly, almost all companies Customer Service policies are opaque for a reason - divulging them empowers the Customer against the Organization.
I think the most you can reasonably expect to get is a time frame for how soon you will be contacted regarding your complaint or problem by a GM, and being kept informed about the progress of any escalated problem.

What's going down is that someone sends a mail, goes "oops" and then sends you a mail saying "hey, don't worry about it".


What is so wrong about that? I don't really see the point to this thread - it's filled with story of people who were "innocent" getting suspensions, and people who were innocent getting suspensions overturned.

There's a reason Blizzard has such a strong system of Checks And Balances, and the pinning on of "teh GM must have had a bad day" is rediculous - who knows what avenues suspensions and decisions such as closure go through.

This is essentially already in place. You speak to Account Admin for any suspension or identiy related disputes, which are "above" GMs. You speak to Specialists regarding any loot, character, or item issues - etc. However, a vast majority of issues seem to be handled by regular standard Game Masters.

Sorry for double post - no way to delete post.

I honestly don't mind it much, if anything its pretty funny, but thats not the first time that has happened to me in particular. I only have those two screenshots of that particular case.

If that has happened to me more than once, how many times has it happened to other players? If its a simple problem of mailing to the wrong person, why isn't more care being taken? This game is at what, nine million subscribers? With that many customers, I would think that more care would be taken when problems arise.

This is what I normally do to protect myself against getting suspended for some unfair reason.

Normally when I am farming elementals, I will manage to clear the area pretty fast, sometimes when a competitor come, he will see me tagging all the mobs and killing them before they have a chance to. They will whisper me the likes of "WTF, going to report you for farming" followed by some insults with reference to my family and China.

What I do is to report the person first for threatening me and using expletives before he report me. This way, my chances of getting banned/suspended is less