When a bot is not a bot

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The AI is floored when picking up certain actions and can lead to people being banned by this system. The human looking up that AI report sees a reputative action and classes it as bot action{in reality that human is plain lazy}

The example would be collecting appearances lets say for a Paladin class starting lower instances. You do the run kill all bosses reset instance repeat till item drops HS out move onto next instance until list is completed.

The system picks this up and classes it as Bot. The times and days if looked at would not match as most times they would be in an evening or days off for a few hours. Thats where the AI fails and does not take into account human activity. A bot system would run for a lot longer.

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I’m not exactly sure what this thread is about (or if you meant to reply to another thread), but you can’t have any insight on how exactly risk assessment picks up on bots or what the hacks team knows about your memory through Warden.

Edit: if you believe that you have been hit with a false positive for botting, please appeal the decision by ticket. It will be checked by another pair of eyes. If Blizzard is seriously going by metrics (meaning that they did not actually track your actions but just counted the amount of instances you ran and said “that’s too much”, that would be a terrible thing for Blizzard to do.

There were times when the botting detection failed in the past (i.e. defined the parameters of what a human would do too narrowly), but those were quickly rectified by Blizzard in the case of false positives.

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Nah title is correct Paladin doing runs for appearances and gets a banned account when you know its not a bot programme. Doing instances along the same path same bosses till the item drops so your point above is mute.

If you have not done runs for a certain item like baron mount drop or others you do the same way all the time frame all the time till lock out. The team is wrong on this point where doing runs on a certain instance for a certain item. It drops you stop and move onto the next instance till the list is complete. In this case paladin on an account which I hold and the runs I did not a bot but a human being behind a PC.

Note they provided no evidence they said its a bot programme and they don’t take this decision lightly. Their team issued this closure only after a careful review of relevant evidence. The evidence is based on the AI and the times I know were a Saturday and evenings in the week after work. Thats not bot programme the team is lazy and going by AI.

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You might feel it is the same path because you do the same thing over and over again. It is not the same path on a coordinate level that is tracked to the third decimal.

When you start going into the instance and bee-line it to the first boss, you might start hitting the boss from coordinate 123.45 on the first attempt, 123.56 on the second attempt, 123.78 on the third attempt while you feel that you’re on the exact same floor tile every time.

“The instance was only ran on Saturdays or during the week nights” should not be a factor in finding out if you were using a bot or not. Bot developers tell their users to be at the computer while the bot runs (even if they might be doing other things) and not let the bot run for excessive amounts of time for this exact reason (making the play time seem more human).

If you believe that you were hit by a false positive, you have the ability to appeal their decision to have it go through a second set of eyes. If that second set of eyes however says that the botting ban was valid, that’s your appeal options exhausted.

I too main a paladin and have several hundred runs of Stratholme and Kael’thas under my belt, sometimes going at it for 8 hours a day and have not been hit by a bot ban.

If you’re truly innocent, appeal your ban.

If Blizzard changed detection from actual action tracking to counting by metrics (“did x amount of instances in y amount of time”), that would be terrible.

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I have email and support ticket and waiting on the phone as I write.

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I didn’t know they were doing callbacks for bot ban appeals (since you haven’t been able to call Blizzard directly for several years now, so you could only be waiting for a callback), but if you’re a false positive I wish you all the best for your appeal.

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There is a huge difference between running a dungeon yourself and botting, I have run the Mechanar many times manually to get rep for the Original Races armour sets, and never been banned.

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In future be careful if you do this Saturday for Class for appearance drops. You log in prepared out the instance BRD/ ETC. In the run exact route and times apart from a few seconds. You rinse and repeat this exercise. Hearth back sell items./ grey etc ride/fly back to instance wait outside for for lock down to end. Do the same thing over and over till appearance on list drops move onto next instance. Lets say you do this over a few days after work the 2 to 3 hours. Its classed as botting now it seems same activity same time day after day. Once I collected all appearances apart from 1 on the classic run in retail i got the email this morning. I should of got that last item maybe then I would not got the ban.

I am just high lighting it if it happens to other people when they know they are innocent. They should provide the evidence not just a sentence saying you have been botting when you know you have not. The system is floored and I will say this now they are to reliant on AI these days.

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I have the mammoth mount so I don’t need to do this part, but apart from that I was doing exactly as you described, it’s only 16-20K depending on your rep in old dalaran. I may have run a characters height to the left or right but what I did was the same thing. You can’t really do a different path in most places.

Please don’t take this as a criticism but the word is Flawed not Floored. Good luck on your appeal.

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From experience and friends suspension not banning is a lot more common than you think. Over 16 years got suspended once for doing what am being accused of. Its now ban able. Doing instances these days is easy but the system has changed, just try what I did for a few days and see what happens I will say you wont be pleased.

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I have no idea who you emailed or phoned as neither are a way to contact CS. The only way to appeal is to contact them as instructed in the ban email.

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You can email back to the team as well as customer support the phone number as Pulsenectar said does not exist any more said out of service when I rang the number. When banned you try as many avenues as possible just the 1 from CS. The email said CS team does not need to respond to the ticket or reverse the decision because they can not which makes the appeal system stupid if you have no way to reverse the decision. Its not me but the email they sent which I loved to copy and paste but if now will not.

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You may be able to reply to the email but they probably won’t look at it as the email is no-reply@blizzard.com the only email I know that works is hacks@blizzard.com which is used to report hackers or botters and maybe the forum contact one, which they won’t accept any appeals on.

The only way I know to appeal a ban is via a ticket and sometimes it takes more than one.

1 Like
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My friend has also been banned from also doing repetitive actions in the timeless isle farming rep so that probably got flagged up as a bot action. there are also a few other people that are discussing that they got falsely banned on Reddit and on discord as well.

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I’ll be honest, for some people their ban would be proper, remember their email tells them why. External macros can also be classed as automation.

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Hello!

As others have mentioned, if you feel that the penalty that was issued is not an appropriate one, please use the appeal function from this link.

If you already have done so, please allow for some time for your ticket to be reviewed, as our queues are pretty busy currently.

We cannot provide any further information in a forum.

17

Hi.
Today I woke up to an email saying my account has been closed, specifically this:

Account Action: Account Closure
Offense: Exploitative Activity: Unauthorized Cheat Programs (Hacks)

I have opened a ticket and will be appealing, as I havent cheated or hacked, however I fear this is a bigger problem.
Why? Well after posting on other sites (twitter, reddit etc), Ive been contacted by other people saying theyve recieved the exact same email, at about the same time, roughly 8 CEST, all on EU.

We think theres been a bot banwave that has caught out actual people, with the evidence for this being that theres 1 thing that connects our accounts:
We have recently done “old” content.

Ive been going for loremaster and did many TBC dungeons multiple times over the past couple days, someone else who has been banned farmed the Stonecore mount a lot, etc.

Theres no correlation between addons or how we download them, past offenses, or anything, the only connection is running old content.

I know bots often run old instances for trash to vendor, and if a ban wave has gone out to get rid of them, then thats a good thing.
But I fear that something that flags bots, such as resetting instances then running an old instance again (or something along those lines, Im not a coding wizard) has caused legit accounts of people just doing old content to be flagged and banned.

As I said Im in contact with many other people that have had the same thing happened to them, and we’ve all submitted tickets and appeals. The point of this post here is to either hopefully get some eyes at Blizzard on this sooner, or to maybe reach out to others that have been banned in the same manner.

(This post was made from an alt account I had lying around seeing as banned = not being able to post, if a Blizz CS rep needs info of my actual account, or others banned, I am happy to provide these)

18

There is another account reporting being banned right now. I assumed that Blizzard was still going by actual detection, not mass metrics - if they have moved to metrics (character has done X amount of instances of old content over Y amount of days) that is a terrible way to catch bots.

Please appeal by ticket as instructed in the email.

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I dont think its mass metrics. Some people that have been hit were doing 10s of Strath or Stonecore runs for mounts, I however only did shadow labs like 3 times for quests.

I think its a “reset instances” then go do it again quickly issue, not a “this person did strath 20 times, must be a bot”.
But yeah noone got reached out to by a GM before the ban or anything, just all waking up to these emails, after doing nothing but play the game.

All of us have detailed tickets submitted, dont worry, and a discord chat co-ordinating and helping others

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I just got an addon called monar’s wardrobe helper to fill in some transmog holes, I was going to do some runs to get the missing items but I think I’ll delay that to see what happens to these people.