Recent Wave of Account Actions

[Shodokan]

Over the past week or so a ton of players have reported getting banned for botting in BG's (even on that particular bot it's forum). Most seem to be banned after using one of the so called public profiles. A profile is a certain route that a bot takes to run around in a BG. Hence why you could see certain bot trains in random bg's, people using the same profile. Apparently one can make their own profile, and it doesn't look like those 'players' got banned who kept their profile private. So it was not really the bot that got detected, but rather the bot behaviour that triggered the banwave.

By the looks of it blizzard implemented a detection tool that tracks routes that characters take in random battlegrounds, and compare those routes to other players. What happened with all the boxers getting banned, and the fact that some main toons/leaders did not get the ban, is imo that they did not have enough data yet to compare. The system detected multiple toons taking the same route while it was in fact a multiboxer, and given their sample size not being big enough, the system flagged them as botters. Now that their is plenty of data available, it looks like the false positive detections for boxers disappeared.

Had 4 friends get banned. From what I've been told by a friend inside the company GMs are actually watching players in bgs once a flag comes up that they are "botting" from their internal detection system (not player reports) and taking actions based on that since there were more false positives than just for boxers, if it is your first offense you receive a 72 hour ban and a final warning and if you have ANY strikes on your account otherwise you get perma banned.

They've also implemented a new anti-botting features for gathering as well.

Thank god.

But yes, the bans shouldn't occur as often anymore if at all simply because you are boxing in bgs. You should only be banned if a GM doesn't know much about boxing but I've been told that they have made it clear if someone isn't sure to go to their supervisor before taking action.

[Oldboxer]

Had 4 friends get banned. From what I've been told by a friend inside the company GMs are actually watching players in bgs once a flag comes up that they are "botting" from their internal detection system (not player reports) and taking actions based on that since there were more false positives than just for boxers, if it is your first offense you receive a 72 hour ban and a final warning and if you have ANY strikes on your account otherwise you get perma banned.

I'm dropping out of years of lurking here to share my experience. I got 3 hour suspensions on two characters back in the end of Jan. They came after the two characters got AFK'd from an AB. There was a player in it spamming for other players to report mine AFK because I was botting. I said in the game chat that I was multiboxing which was legal, but he kept it up. I reported him for griefing / harassing. About an hour later the suspensions hit on the two characters. I appealed them, saying I was multiboxing, playing by the rules. I also told about the harassing player, saying that his behavior shouldn't be allowed. I asked that they remove the suspensions and flag my account as being a multiboxer so that I wouldn't be misidentified in the future. The suspensions were dropped (although way after the 3 hours were up), their reply didn't really say anything about the reason, etc.

I continued playing BG's heavily after that. A couple of weeks later, in AV, I got a message on my screen for a short time "frozen". I didn't think much of it, it was very short. A couple of minutes later I get a message up near the mini map saying a GM wanted to talk with me (the first time ever in the game for me). I think "Oh shoot, here it comes", I click it to talk to him. The conversation was this:

GM: I just wanted to apologize about randomly freezing you. I was on a bot hunt and accidentally targeted you. >.<
Me: I'm multiboxing.
Me: Thank you for asking rather then assuming we were bots.
GM: You're welcome. Have fun!

So, it looks to me like GM's may be looking for bots live in the game, but multiboxing isn't the issue. I've played BG's heavily since then and I haven't had another problem. Knock on wood.

[DMan]

Thanks for the heads up!

[Narij]

Thanks for the info, almost enough to make me reactivate, to bad sc2 in < a month.

[Chumbucket]

Thanks for the update. I'm still a bit butt hurt over the whole suspension ugliness but this is encouraging news. I still have several suspensions on my toons record from back in December that I hope I will be able to get removed as I did appeal but was denied.

[JohnGabriel]

Starting to wonder if the GM support staff are like located in an India call center while programmers and decision makers are in US. Making it harder to keep policies in both places up to date.

[Mickthathick]

A guy on the Consortium forums reported that he was hit with a 72hr temp ban for 'using 3rd party software' for using TSM to post options. If you haven't used the addon TSM, basically it allows you to setup groups for your items to sell, it then scans the AH and posts the itmes.

Note that for each item you post you must 'click' a pop-up button confirming you want to post it. This is easily macroed, and most people (myself and the guy who got banned included) bind it to mouse wheel up/down, thus in about 20 seconds of mad scrolling you can post 1000s of auctions.

He appealed multiple times but had no luck at all, seems their new auto-flag systems still need work.

[heyaz]

You have to be pretty aggressive in the tickets to get the right response. Threaten to cancel or escalate to a supervisor. Or call Blizzard. Has worked for me every time. I've had perma-banned accounts restored (one was hacked like 3 times and they banned it).