To those wrongfully banned in the 30,000 lot recently for exploiting

[fizzbob]

blizzard does a lot of shit poorly but i've never had CS treat me like shit yet. if you don't deserve the ban, from my personal knowledge of how they do things, they 100% will not ban you

if their automated bot detection bans you, they will fix it in minutes if you weren't actually botting. they pretty much know what everyone is doing in-game when they go through the records so if they wanna keep you banned, they see something that warrants it

[whoranzone]

Permanent bans for duping but not for botting. Blizzard.

[kenlongjr]

No. And Blizzard wouldn't perma you for that. OP is clearly lying.

Myself - 100% nothing but a few disconnects, 100% banned
Don't care if you believe me or not, but you're wrong.

---------- Post added 2013-01-10 at 08:50 AM ----------

No, permanent bans for knowingly using a bug, whether or not you exploit it, apparently.

[Raelbo]

At the end of the day, no matter how much time have you invested in the game, no matter if you earn just 1 gold exploiting, no matter if you were "just trying out" the exploit. If you cheat you can get banned and you clicked "I accept" to terms of use, which include: (not the exact same words) "Blizzard can end your account for no reason, whenever they want to"

Yes, they absolutely can ban your account for no reason whatsoever. But that would just be bad business. At the end of the day they want to keep as many subs as possible but they also want to get rid of people who make the game environment less fun (because when the game is less fun, other people leave).

So the reality is Blizzard aren't interested in permanently mass banning everyone who has made a few gold from exploiting a bug. They are after the big fish. For the smaller fries, if they can give them enough of a fright to deter them from trying anything like that ever again, that is perfect.

Which is not to say one should ever be complacent about these things. Making an example out of a few relatively minor transgressors is also an effective deterrent against others trying the same thing.

[Decklan]

I've known plenty of people (myself included) who have "used" a bug and thought "huh, neat, that was cool" and then never did it again and didn't have any serious repercussions to our accounts. At worst I got a 1 day ban once.

Then there are the people who exploited bugs (i.e. used them over and over again, not just for fun but to gain an advantage/items/money) and then cry afterwards that "they just did it once for fun".

[Raelbo]

Myself - 100% nothing but a few disconnects, 100% banned
Don't care if you believe me or not, but you're wrong.

I absolutely believe that there are people out there who inadvertently triggered the bug and had absolutely no idea that it could even be used to exploit the game.

I also believe that this could likely have resulted in a perma-ban being issued automatically by the system.

If this is the case, especially based on the OP's story, you should get your account back if you appeal. If somehow you are genuinely innocent but they refuse to reinstate your account (and it is likely that this will happen to someone out there - or that some people simply won't have it in them to fight it enough) you have my sympathy

[Freeasacar]

Exploiting, major or otherwise, is exploiting. Doing it for fun or because you're curious doesn't make it something else.

I call bullshit on this. Humans are inherently curious and have been since the dawn of time. We didn't have to go to the moon but we did. Not just because we could, but because we were curious. Curiosity is a base part of human nature and denying that makes you no better than an animal.

Defending Blizzard's retarded policies and unwarranted bannings also isn't doing you any favors. You cannot sit there and tell me that thirty thousand people.. THIRTY THOUSAND. Just think about that number for a moment. You cannot tell me that thirty thousand people ALL exploited this glitch to gain any sort of meaningful monetary gain or otherwise on purpose. Whenever a mass ban happens in any game there's always at least a handful of accounts that fall through the cracks and for a ban this size, that handful is considerably larger just as the number of unwarranted bans surely is. Don't be stupid.

[Edlarel]

1) They probably did a ban on anybody who did as you described above. Get them out of the game now.
2) They went back through the list (probably using complaints like yours as a basis) and restored anybody they couldn't find directly using this to exploit the game world.
3) To avoid 1 in the future, don't do something just for kicks.

[Sarac]

I wouldn't have bought another account after being treated that way.

He did DC himself, Blizz can't know how or why he did it. Could be that his account was under investigation.

I call bullshit on this. Humans are inherently curious and have been since the dawn of time. We didn't have to go to the moon but we did. Not just because we could, but because we were curious. Curiosity is a base part of human nature and denying that makes you no better than an animal.

Defending Blizzard's retarded policies and unwarranted bannings also isn't doing you any favors. You cannot sit there and tell me that thirty thousand people.. THIRTY THOUSAND. Just think about that number for a moment. You cannot tell me that thirty thousand people ALL exploited this glitch to gain any sort of meaningful monetary gain or otherwise on purpose. Whenever a mass ban happens in any game there's always at least a handful of accounts that fall through the cracks and for a ban this size, that handful is considerably larger just as the number of unwarranted bans surely is. Don't be stupid.

Just because we are curious doesn't make it right, hence we have laws. Humans are violent and selfish creatures as well...without rules our world that we know now would not be around.

Blizz was protecting it's playerbase...if they wrongfully bann 1 out of 10k people by accident than I'd say they have still done a good job.

[kenlongjr]

Got a response from Blizzard

Thank you for your follow-up contact. An additional review of the previously communicated action taken against the World of Warcraft account (USERNAME) on (battle.net email) has been completed. Unfortunately, we could not find anything you did wrong at all. Allthough we did look back a bit and saw that in 1993, you were playing Contra for the Nintendo Entertainment System and used the "up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right b, a, start" code to gain extra lives. We find this to be a great disadvantage to other players and and economic catastrophe on the "coin-op" version.While this is not in direct violation of our policy, we already banned you so we're not going to go back and fix it. Therefore, the account action will not be reversed or amended.

[Freeasacar]

He did DC himself, Blizz can't know how or why he did it. Could be that his account was under investigation.



Just because we are curious doesn't make it right, hence we have laws. Humans are violent and selfish creatures as well...without rules our world that we know now would not be around.

Blizz was protecting it's playerbase...if they wrongfully bann 1 out of 10k people by accident than I'd say they have still done a good job.

Violence and selfishness are done intentionally. Curiosity is done naturally and innocently. Don't lump them into the same category.

[loki504]

I call bullshit on this. Humans are inherently curious and have been since the dawn of time. We didn't have to go to the moon but we did. Not just because we could, but because we were curious. Curiosity is a base part of human nature and denying that makes you no better than an animal.

Defending Blizzard's retarded policies and unwarranted bannings also isn't doing you any favors. You cannot sit there and tell me that thirty thousand people.. THIRTY THOUSAND. Just think about that number for a moment. You cannot tell me that thirty thousand people ALL exploited this glitch to gain any sort of meaningful monetary gain or otherwise on purpose. Whenever a mass ban happens in any game there's always at least a handful of accounts that fall through the cracks and for a ban this size, that handful is considerably larger just as the number of unwarranted bans surely is. Don't be stupid.

if alians from mars clearly told nasa to NOT land on the moon. and nasa still did it. then the alliens are in there right to shoot nasa on sight.
but ofc compairing the moon/univers to a video game in beyond me.

---------- Post added 2013-01-10 at 04:00 PM ----------

Violence and selfishness are done intentionally. Curiosity is done naturally and innocently. Don't lump them into the same category.

curios or not. he broke the rules. there is a reason i'm not going to hack/exploit sites. and if i do its my own fault.

[Pann]

if alians from mars clearly told nasa to NOT land on the moon. and nasa still did it. then the alliens are in there right to shoot nasa on sight.

curios or not. he broke the rules. there is a reason i'm not going to hack/exploit sites. and if i do its my own fault.

Wow! We've had this rule breaking compared to murder, embezzlement, assault and now interstellar war! I wonder where the analogies can go next?

[Raelbo]

Defending Blizzard's retarded policies and unwarranted bannings also isn't doing you any favors. You cannot sit there and tell me that thirty thousand people.. THIRTY THOUSAND. Just think about that number for a moment. You cannot tell me that thirty thousand people ALL exploited this glitch to gain any sort of meaningful monetary gain or otherwise on purpose.

What this tells me is that ban process was automated. They ran a script on the server that checked everyone's account and executed bans automatically. And before you complain about 30K being a "big" number, consider that WoW has 10M subs. In that context 30K is small (0.3%).

And yes, I do suspect that a large percentage of those bans were warranted, even though you are definitely going to get quite a lot of false positives from such a process.

I would also not be surprised if that number was far bigger than what Blizzard were expecting, which likely would have strained their Customer Service team trying to rectify the false alarms. In the end though, it is the most expedient method of sorting the problem out. The thing is that the DMF is only out for a week. A lot of players who put in legitimate effort to make decks would have been counting on being able to do business, but all the cheaters have messed things up for them. The choice Blizzard had was to be slow and careful and hurt a bunch of honest players, or to be quick and brutal and hurt another group of players.

No matter what they did, some people were going to be pissed off which really did put Blizzard in an unenviable position.

At least this way it hit the real offenders hard, and this kind of action absolutely deters other would be exploiters, reducing the frequency with which similar events will occur in the future.

Personally I reckon Blizzard made the right call given the situation - with the proviso that they manage to restore the accounts of those unfairly caught up in it all (eg the OP). For those who were negatively affected - yeah it sucks, but the real blame lies with the exploiters, not Blizzard.

[Agile Emily]

Can't really judge anything from one source but if they'd banned people that got challenge mode gear on alts when it was bugged i'd be screwed as well. All you had to do was zone into a dungeon and they mailed you a full set of challenge mode gear. Doesn't matter if you had intentions to or not, zoning into a dungeon triggered it. A blanket banwave is a pretty stupid action regardless.

In that case, yes, a blanket ban would be unreasonable. Zoning into a dungeon is something that millions of people do daily, and the vast majority of them would likely have never known that that bug was there until it happened.

Doing something very specific to do with milling/vendoring/whatevering herbs and then DCing yourself is not something that millions of people will do every day, and therefore the people doing it are more likely to have done it due to hearing of the bug by word of mouth and deciding to try it themselves. That means that they intended to exploit, and deserve a ban.

[Baar]

In my case, I used it a few times, only the disconnect, not once did I even craft a single item in the last week or so. You know what Blizzards response was?

"We have clear evidence that you used this to exploit the daily cooldown of certain profession items" Sometimes I honestly question what blizzard is doing.

You even admit it so????????

[impending doom]

Some of the "analogies" are seriously flawed here.

Some people say that it doesn't matter if you cheat for 1 cent or 1 million. Really? In the real world it does make a huge difference, and so does in Blizzard terms if you actually read it, permanent bans are given only in extreme cases, depending on the severity of the act. And the people who only DC themselves did not gain even that 1 cent(or copper). The bug to make you DC doesn't give you any advantages, you need to perform additional steps in order to actually exploit it to create dupe items.

Really if people would care about consequences of exploiting, why not focus more on the real abusers.

The difference is that when I do something wrong, I don't whine about the punishment.

So if you pee on the street and get thrown to jail for 3 years, you wouldn't whine at all? If everyone who broke some rule (most of these never gets noticed) in the game were given perma bans, there would be less than 10% of players left. And IRL the % would be even less.

[Agile Emily]

So if you pee on the street and get thrown to jail for 3 years, you wouldn't whine at all?

If you knew the punishment for peeing on the street was three years in jail, then no. You suffer the consequences of your actions, which is something that many people seem unable to do.

[runeghost]

Let that be a lesson. You should've made your money by botting.

[Xeraxis]

If everyone who broke some rule (most of these never gets noticed) in the game were given perma bans, there would be less than 10% of players left. And IRL the % would be even less.

No, some players actually know how to act in a social setting and have at least perused over the ToS well enough to know what not to do. Stop assuming everyone plays with their time invested characters as haphazardly as you.