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.
39 Likes
This is good, but will not solve the problem, as they will buy your paid boost and continue to do so.
To fix the problem completely, you need to either remove this paid boost, or at least remove the loot from the TBC dungeons, where the bots are now even after the wave of bans. Zul’Aman, Botanica, Tempest Keep and more.
8 Likes
Thank you of course, but please bring back the good old rdf(lfg) system from 3.3.5a. Please, I’m tired of waiting.
10 Likes
At least its something, came back to WoW after few years and I have NEVER seen this many bots in any game in my entire life, can’t even level in peace lower-level zones without some 58 DK stealing your nodes, kills and just ruining the experience.
This is just a band-aid and they will come back. Either Blizzard has to stay on top of this with frequent banwaves or remove boosts or bring back Tokens or something.
I’m also afraid that this is just pandering by Blizz and that they don’t actually intend to fix anything and that this is the last we hear about this, really difficult to trust nu-Blizzard on anything other than what they actually do.
No respond on any of the thousend bot posts in last months and now they thank people for reporting.
Great you ban bot in waves so they already made the profit when they get banned.
Dk change could have done 1 month after release the dmg is already done now the economy is broken. People running around with over 300 k. While every farm doesnt give you good time spend gold reward.
I guess its time for classic era hardcore/fresh.
But thanks anyone for reporting dk bot with the name bzzhdjdj that is running bg for 24/7 blizz had no idea he was a bot.
2 Likes
Dear Blizzard Initial launch period was over about 5 months ago.
2 Likes
All I’m reading is “We don’t want them to bot without first paying us for the Character Boost”.
4 Likes
Ok , now when you made enough money from bots for the q report , how about taking a head out of your *** and implement RDF .
3 Likes
Now there is enough space on medium servers for them to start accepting transfers like the big servers are right? 
1 Like
finally you’re talking about it. yes it’s a necessary step but this won’t be enough
Now let’s talk about RDF. Launch period is over and more and more people started to leave. We’ve seen first hand now that, imho, not having RDF doesn’t create a better community in the slightest. How do you feel about RDF after 5 months into this expac? Where are your thoughts on this?
3 Likes
Hey thanks for doing something, better late than never.
DK restrictions should have been a given from the beginning, as when someone wanted to play a DK back in the day they would simply have to level another character to 55 first, and then switch to the death knight. This argument that you didn’t want to gatekeep any players from the authentic Wrath of the Lich King experience is a load of nonsense.
I sincerely hope you dole out permabans for all of these parasitic player accounts as they have no place in and deserve no access to World of Warcraft. I also hope you continue to do so as only this would demonstrate that you’re serious about the prohibition of botting. Make botting accounts an example and track their gold flows and ban closely associated accounts as well.
Yes I know it’s a revolutionary thought but maybe you would net an actual profit for hiring Game Masters to oversee this game. It’s becoming more and more difficult to justify paying the subscription for these “services” (read: neglect) as of late.
Thank you, though.
3 Likes
BGs are still full of bots, clearly “120k accounts” was no way near enough to make a visible change
I still see dk bots in bgs,work harder.
What about bots dk in Botanica, Blood Furnace, Mana-Tombs, Zul’Aman, Tempest keep, Sethekk Halls? They all there, thousands of them. And why didn’t you immediately limit the creation of DK, why wait?
1 Like
Astrologers have announced a week of bans. The number of DKs has halved.
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And then bounced back up because between banning and locking DK on fresh account creation was entire week.
1 Like
We need RDF! RDF! RDF! RDF! I hope they see it.
3 Likes
So what you basically did was force the botters to first buy your boost before they can start botting again lol. There has to be some way to force blizzard to uphold to customer’s standards…