WoW Classic - 120k Accounts Banned and Death Knight Character Creation Changes

[Lumy]

WoW Classic - 120k Accounts Banned and Death Knight Character Creation Changes

Greetings,

Over the past few weeks, we’ve taken actions that removed almost 120,000 malicious accounts from the World of Warcraft ecosystem, including both Wrath of the Lich King Classic and Classic Era. This is in addition to our usual, ongoing banwaves, which often include actions against tens of thousands of accounts per week.

As a supplement to these recent actions, we want you to know that as of next week’s regional maintenance, we will be returning the original Death Knight character creation restrictions to Wrath of the Lich King Classic. This means that unless you already have a level 55 character on your account, you will be unable to create a Death Knight. We felt it was very important for the launch of Wrath of the Lich King classic to give anyone who wanted to hop into this iconic expansion the ability to do so with as few barriers as possible. Allowing every account access to Death Knights-- even if they did not meet the historic requirements --was important. However, now that the initial launch period has passed, we no longer wish to allow the unrestricted creation of Death Knights on brand new accounts. It’s a tempting vector for malicious actors to use to get into the game and start exploiting very quickly.

We hope that this helps slow the proliferation of malicious behavior in Wrath of the Lich King Classic. It’s important to keep in mind that as long as there is a demand for gold and other services that players are willing to pay real money for, these malicious actors will keep coming back. Please-- never hesitate to report suspected cheating such as buying and selling gold for real money, automation, and advertisements for power leveling or any real-money sales in chat. Your reports greatly help our efforts to take actions that improve the game.

Thanks to everyone who has commented on this issue over the past several months, and thanks to everyone who helps by reporting suspicious activity.

[exsanguinate]

Finally. Freakin finally.

[anveena]

took them long enough

[ONCHEhap]

Perhaps it should have happened before letting bots thoroughly fuck up the economy.

The gold injected in the game isn't going away, and will help finance GDKP runs for the rest of wotlk classic's life cycle

[Gravity2015]

120k accounts banned - wow, that decission could not have come easy - thats a ton of income ?

[Seiken3]

About time. I can't count how many reports, massreports and tickets I've made to the GMs about this. Though, I fear things might have come too late as we're getting close to the end of ulduar...

[anon5123]

About 5 months too late there, blizz

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120k accounts banned - wow, that decission could not have come easy - thats a ton of income ?

Yeah, and all 120,000 of those accounts are going to buy another sub and resume botting. Cash injection for blizz.

[Skirdus]

reminder that netease (china) ended their partnership with blizzard before they even got around to taking care of this

[Gravity2015]

About 5 months too late there, blizz

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Yeah, and all 120,000 of those accounts are going to buy another sub and resume botting. Cash injection for blizz.

yah that crossed my mind immediately after posting :P - good call

[Appelgren]

About 5 months too late there, blizz

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Yeah, and all 120,000 of those accounts are going to buy another sub and resume botting. Cash injection for blizz.

Damned if they do, damned if they don’t.
No way of pleasing some people

[twothe]

Reason to wait and do ban waves: they can upgrade their cheat detection tool to get them all at once, and don't run into the risk of bot tools just upgrading and making probably month of research on how to detect them pointless.

Reason to ban them immediately: with all the RL money they made in between they can easily afford to just make new accounts.

[kranur]

Amazing ... 10 comments and not one bitching that the free DK is going away ... could it ... nah, it's too early.

[SinR]

Well, I guess we'll stop seeing Reddit posts about "WEH MY BATTLEGROUND WAS ALL DK BOTS"

Now we get to see the "WEH I WAS WRONGFULLY BANNED" posts

[anon5123]

No way of pleasing some people

Sorry for not fellating blizzard for finally doing the obvious correct choice of action months late.

[Nalam the Venom]

Only 120k?

I thought bots were in the millions

[NoiseTank13]

Don't be too mean to the two guys still working on Classic people, blame ActiBlizz for sniffing the seat of their interns chairs and not doing anything.

[Aerisot]

120k accounts banned - wow, that decission could not have come easy - thats a ton of income ?

I wish I could say it was, but they are all likely gold farming bots and just bought the wow tokens and haven't had to pay a thing.

[munkeyinorbit]

I wish I could say it was, but they are all likely gold farming bots and just bought the wow tokens and haven't had to pay a thing.

Where do you think the tokens that they pay gold for come from? The FreeGameTime fairy? There's a 33% premium on top of the sub price and someone pays for it.

[Ringthane]

Sorry for not fellating blizzard for finally doing the obvious correct choice of action months late.

But you admit they did something. And if they'd done nothing, you'd be on here whining about that. Thereby proving his point most effectively.

[vizzle]

I wish I could say it was, but they are all likely gold farming bots and just bought the wow tokens and haven't had to pay a thing.

I don't know how some of you guys still make this mistake. Just because an account buys game time with a WoW token doesn't mean it's not contributing to Blizzard getting profit. Those accounts might've bought tokens for game time, but someone actually bought those tokens because there was a demand for them. If the demand goes away, then people buy less tokens because there's less need for them, and Blizzard loses out on profit. Without them, the tokens don't get sold, meaning the whales buying the tokens with cash have no reason to buy more of them.

I know it's an extra step, but I promise you, the math still works out with Blizzard getting money and those accounts contributing to that.