About a month ago, one of my 3 accounts was wrongly suspended for “buying WoW gold”.
“Recent activity shows that a user on this account acquired gold through illicit means, such as gold buying, botting, or participating in other real-money transactions. As a result of this activity we have suspended this account until 2022/11/08.
Along with this suspension, we have removed all of the purchased gold as well as any items and mounts purchased up to the total amount of gold.”
Shortly after seeing this, I opened a ticket to Blizzard support informing them of the incorrect action taken by their automated detection system, along with detailed information about the trades I did recently, as I did a fair bit of trades between WoW Classic realms (most of the time 1:1 ratio, so whatever gold their system thought I had bought, they would find the exact same amount given away on a different realm within 1 to 2 minutes. I will admit, in this ticket I got the some of the amounts slightly off as without access to the account and having a rather busy middle-age life, my priorities were not to remember every single trade amount I did the past months. However, the timeframes I provided to them were on point and for any support person with any junior-level knowledge would be able to find in Blizzard’s databases.
To my surprise, after 7 days of waiting, I received the following joke of a reply which points that no investigation was done at all.
Your World of Warcraft account is currently under a temporary suspension due to a breach of our policies. We have already sent an email with more details but can inform you that the suspension will last for 14 days. You will be able to play again after this time.
Please note that no further action will be taken if there are no more breaches of the Terms of Use or policies. Check below for more information.
This action has been taken in accordance with our Terms of Use and our In-game Policies (https://blizzard.com/support/article/42673), which all players acknowledge and agree to prior to playing World of Warcraft. These policies and conditions allow us to maintain a fun and safe game environment for all of our players.
Our Battle.net Terms of Use can be found at https://blizzard.com/company/legal/eula.html
At first, I took the reply seriously and actually read through the whole damn things, both the ToU and the in-game policies, thinking maybe I did do something that can be considered a breach. Of course, my first thought was that in fact I was wrong all along, that realm trades are not allowed, but after finishing my read I was not surprised to find out that’s not it. The funny thing is, I don’t do much in the game. I enjoy raiding GDKPs which is my main source of gold for the past 2 years in classic, as well as M+ in retail. I don’t do 16 hours grinding sessions, I don’t boost people to sell gold. At most, I did Loremaster on a couple of characters with Enchanting for extra gold and even this took weeks, I kinda doubt this was mistaken for being botting activity.
After reading the God damn articles, I was left with the bitter taste of having run into a bored employee who, judging from his/her reply, does not want to be where he is and is getting paid by the number of tickets resolved, even if he/she has absolutely no clue what the point of said ticket was.
I follow-up with another ticket, as this part of the support reply “If you continue to experience issues, you can reopen this ticket. If you have a new or separate issue, please submit a new ticket.” , obviously didn’t work - there was no way to re-open the ticket.
I waited 2 weeks since, my suspension had already ended last Monday. With access to my account restored I was able to point to exactly the trade which was wrongly detected as “buying gold”. It concerned a trade where I had received 2k+8k gold on Pyrewood Village. In literally the same minute, there are two outgoing trades from my side for 2k+8k gold on Gehennas.
It wasn’t difficult to spot this was the trade in question as now all my gold that I had left on Pyrewood Village is missing (approx. 4.1k).
I replied to my own ticket proving Blizzard this information with almost exact timestamp (my addons don’t track the exact second of each trade, but surely it can’t be that difficult to review logs/databases for a whole minute, can it?).
Today, I finally received a reply. Now, after the first interaction with their support team, my expectations were already at the bottom of the pit. Therefore, I was not suprised to see a one-line reply: " This penalty has already been upheld. Any further requests on this topic will not be reviewed."
And here goes the main point of this point. BTW, thank you, Blizzard, that after 15 years of paying for at least 1 account, most of the time 2 of them, while purchasing various items across multiple of your games, you gave me the opportunity to practically beg for a proper investigation in my tickets, which even so, I did not receive. Additionally, another kudos for allowing me to spend ~5-7 hours of my time to research this and provide all the info and clues for your support team to start an investigation, as well as the priviledge of writing this forum post.
Anyway, the point is: just because the suspension ended it doesn’t all of a sudden make it right or just. Just because the suspension ended, it doesn’t mean you have the right to:
- provide absolutely 0 support to a paying customer
- commit theft/fraud over half a month worth of a subscription. Yes, I looked it up - denying access to a paid service for no reason is indeed labeled as fraud in most (all?) countries. The fact that I disagree and wish to dispute their claim but I am denied a way to present my case and evidence doesn’t make it more or less legal.
- steal gold or in-game goods from a player’s account. OK, this is a thinner line - technically the gold does belong to Blizzard, however, no where in the ToS or in-game policies does it say Blizzard is allowed to literally steal it from player’s inventory for no reason
- in-game joy levels decreasing, as with a new expansion (classic WotLK) being suspended at the start of it missing daily CDs, raid lockouts and such, again for no reason at all
I’d like to add, I’m not sure your support team and especially managers realize this - looking at the kind of replies I got to my tickets, your support staff completely missing the point stating in the tickets seems to be a large part of the reason you have 2-3 weeks queues. At this rate, I wouldn’t be surprised if 50% or even more of your tickets need to be re-opened because the employee doesn’t have the understanding of handing the issue described within.
I don’t know what more to say to receive a fair treatment. While I realize I’m a simple pleb who is not a public figure or big streamer to have their wrong suspension lifted within 2 hours, is it that outrageous of me to ask for a fair investigation where a real human being looks into the problem and responds at least showing the slightest interest of trying to help the player instead of chasing their own payroll (which btw, these people are getting paid from our money, too).
What can I do in this situation? Is there an online authority that investigates such abuses done by major companies? While I am in the right for a lawsuit which I would likely win, let’s not get ahead of ourselves (I’ve seen similar advices on this forum, that’s not quite I’m looking for). I am not interested in any legal action against Blizzard, instead I would prefer to receive some proper feedback on my support tickets.
Blizzard can use this opportunity to learn a thing or two, instead of bashing on the player like it’s always their fault (BTW, in most companies the assumption for customer service is to start with the well-known premise that “the customer is always right”. For Blizzard it shows to be the opposite, “Blizzard is always right”. This is not OK, Blizzard, and believe it or not, it will hurt in the long run.
I’m also a bit off put that none of my concerns from my second ticket were tackled, besides asking for a proper manual investigation, the fact that you ignored that the first employee who responded to my ticket didn’t do any part of his/her job, unless you are telling me they are literally paid to copy/paste replies based on keywords they find in the ticket. In which case, that’s even worse, and yet again another thing that will hurt Blizzard more in the long run when compared to the short-term benefit of “resolving” X tickets per hour per employee.
Look into how you handle Support. After having ~20 years of experience in related fields, this is the first time in my life I’m ever faced with such a situation that I’m almost speechless (even if I just wrote this 300 lines essay). Honestly, I am not expecting any fair treatment after this post either based on what I’ve seen recently, and I wouldn’t be surprised if another employee who cannot handle constructive criticism will delete this point. But I am hoping this won’t be the case and I can raise some awarness to Blizzard’s managers, team leads, hell maybe even the new folks at Microsoft. Someone needs to take a stand and make some order in their support workflows. Does it really have to be a sexual scandal before someone takes initiative?!
Honestly, even after all this, I still enjoy Blizzard games and I’d like to avoid having to do chargebacks or stop paying for 3 accounts just to prove a point. I don’t know what more to say, I never bought or sold gold or any other in-game currency or service for real money. I have not breached Blizzard’s ToS or in-game policies in any way. All I kindly asked for since the start was for a proper review.