So yesterday was the second time in a year that my account has been permabanned for "Abuse of the economy".
I finally got it unbanned after I was banned mid-raid no warning, as the main tank, took 24 hours to unban me.
This was when they unbanned me."Reason for Closure: Terms of Use Violation -- Exploitative Activity: Abuse of the Economy
This account was closed because one or more characters were identified exchanging, or contributing to the exchange of, in-game property (items or gold) for "real-world" currency. This exchange process negatively impacts the World of Warcraft game environment by detracting from the value of the in-game economy"
And this is the response to when I asked why it was banned." We have restored access to the World of Warcraft account . You should now be able to log in with your old password.
Important: In order to prevent a repeat compromise; once you have regained access to your account, please change your email address to a new address via Battle.net account management."
Act first, and fuck over innocent players, then let them dispute it, seems like a reasonable method. Not even a GM contacting you and saying, hey you're gonna be b& LOL."Greetings
Recently, your account was actioned incorrectly as a result of our efforts to protect the World of Warcraft environment from exploitative behavior. As part of these efforts, we recently closed some accounts engaged in or associated with exploitative activities, including the use of third party programs. While our goal is to protect our players from such activities whenever possible, these closures were not intended to affect accounts that were either not engaging in the exploitative activity or directly connected to the exploitative activity.
Due to security concerns, we are unable to divulge full details regarding the actions taken on these other accounts that initially appeared associated with your own. When we perform these actions, we do act first and then give the affected parties a chance to dispute. We will never give 'warnings' or notifications of investigation prior to these actions.
We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused and encourage you to contact us with any further questions or concerns you may have. Thank you for your patience and understanding."
And finally, what I originally thought the ban was, was me and a friend trading 20k for 80M (I paid the 20k) WoW gold to D3 gold. I've traded larger amounts playing GCG, so I didn't even understand how that flagged me.
Here's a nice rage post by me that I sent to Crithto and Bashiok, who throughout all this, both replied to me on Twitter, and kept up an active response to me, so I'd like to say thanks to them if they read this at least, Crithto's first reply was in less than an hour, perhaps I caught him at the right time, or he just actually gives good customer service. (Bashiok was about 8-9 hours later, maybe he'd gone to sleep as I'm in Australia.)
textdump.net/read/1260/
Make of the whole debacle, what you will.
PS: The last permaban, was because my account was "compromised", because I was DEing a shittonne of epics I had saved up for when I'd maxed enchanting, as well as vendoring a ridiculous amount of shit from my banks on a few toons, doing some cleaning, they promptly sent me back all my greys that I'd vendored, banned my account, which remained for about 24 hours, sent me back my archaeology fragments and deleted what I'd solved, which included the rare Amber crystal thing that makes you a tiny amber crystal, one that I haven't gotten again to this day.
Just ridiculous the hoops you have to jump through.