Hello, I have been playing the game since early tbc, but this is my first post on the forums, because the situation is very unfortunate and I could use some advice on how to proceed.
Let me start by saying that I am absolutely enjoying SoD - it delivered exactly what I expected from classic servers, and more. But most important of all, it brought the entire friend group from back in the day together again, with 10 - 15 people online on our discord channel at any time, leveling, raiding or just hanging out.
Recently, our mage learned how to efficiently solo RFC so he can boost our alts but once he got a hang of it he also started selling boosts to other people. However, a couple of days ago, he received a message that his account is suspended for the usage of “third party programs”, which I assume is using bots or scripts.
First of all, this is entirely false. He was constantly streaming his runs on Discord, including his first solo pulls while he was learning the layout and wiping in the process, with multiple people watching at all times. He had addons for better UI and easier counting of the mobs but no third party programs or scripts. His ban was also automatic, without any explanation at first, and he only received a reason a day later with a permanent suspension of the account.
What we believe happened is one of the two things:
He was mass reported by other mages on the server. When he started selling boosts, he was not very confident in his skills and expected to die a lot, so he set his price to 1g per run. He was eventually whispered by another mage that told him the set price is 1g 50s, and vaguely threatened him if he keeps under-pricing. He changed his price to 1g 50s after that, but continued to give discounts for repeated customers or groups.
RFC boost is very repetitive, so if SoD servers have some kind of a detection mechanism for this kind of behaviour, it may be possible that it flagged him for using bots. He did get very efficient after a couple of days, but boosting has always been allowed and never against any Blizzard policy.
After his ban, there was a noticeable decrease in activity in our guild and Discord - not just because he is our good RL friend but mostly because of extremely unexpected and unjustified nature of this suspension. He already appealed the ban, as did two of our guildmates through ticket system, but they all received automated responses.
Is there anything that can be done? He really does not want to make any new accounts as this is his old account that he had for many years (and would need to be insane to use it for botting quite frankly). Did anything similar happen to anyone else?
Thank you in advance for your suggestions!
Highly unlikely he got a permanent ban for getting mass reported. At worst it would be a 1-2 week ban. More likely he’s been using software that’s no allowed at some point and is pretending he’s done nothing wrong.
Also why would your whole guild stop playing because one person gets banned lol. Seems a bit of an over reaction. It’s not even that efficient for boosting alts anyway. Most people claim 25-30k an hour which is like 3 levels or something at 13/14. Stop being lazy and do some quests it’s just as fast if not faster.
There is no unban for botting or rmt.
And by botting i mean botting. No other software can get you banned (mouse macro or some derp overlay or your motherboard driver that injects itself into every program for no reason)
Back in days i knew some people that got banned for rmt(not botting). They got what they deserved - permaban gkick and blacklist in all friendly communities
Thank you for the reply. We know for sure that he did not use any of the third party programs as we watched him perform the boosts himself for days.
It seems you misunderstood however, we were not relying on him to boost us, rather we liked having our entire RL group together. And people are just in shock because, as I said, we all know first hand that these accusations are completely false.
Thank you, but this is not really an appeal, more like I wanted to see if someone had any similar experience. As I said, he did appeal already, but got an automated response. I just feel the situation is being handled quite poorly with zero investigation.
A ban for the usage of third party tools usually only gets handed out if Blizzards telemetry data suggests that the offender was using such tools.
My money is on fly-hacking as that seems to be quite popular for RFC boosting.
Those people are usually gold sellers. If they mass report you you can get a ban but that is usually not for usage of 3rd party tools as far as I know.
Thank you. I did not see him use any fly hacks, just blinking after jumping for no fall damage. He was usually exploiting the mob pathing by jumping on the rails of the little lava pools on the sides.
Mass reporting from eastern boosters is really common thing when u try to cut their prices. I believe it happens alot especially during expansion launches.
Ur best case scenario is to keep opening tickets, and don’t write this wall of text inside every ticket. Just say the guy got intentionally mass reported by boosters for cutting the price.
If he really was, he will get unbanned. Otherwise no bueno.
Also I do believe using any software, even keyboard/mouse macros for automation (basically any means of automation) is considered bannable, saying just in case.
Thank you for the information! I did not know about keyboard/mouse macros. I know that some equipment has those options but I never used it. I will check if he did something like that.
If it was cheaters would just create new accounts for buying gold and then wash it in GDKPs/deathrolling/trading/etc. I think taking away everything and a 2-4 weeks ban for first time offenders is the best approach.