I got permabanned for gold farming in Stratholme


I was permanently suspended and banned on my WoW account for gold farming Stratholme in the WOTLK pre-patch on my rogue. I spent numerous hours doing 84 total dungeon runs until I finally got the mount. These runs were over the span of 5 days, and I was shortly thereafter banned.The email specifically stated my offense was "Exploitative Activity: Unauthorized Cheat Programs (Hacks)" (AKA botting in blizzard's terms) They also added "We don't take this decision lightly. Our team issued this closure only after a careful review of relevant evidence. Our support staff will not overturn these closures and may not respond to appeals." Receiving that message directly from blizzard via email after being wrongfully banned is probably the biggest punch to the face you can get after spending countless hours farming gold + the mount, then subsequently being hit out of nowhere with a permaban.The email is literally stating that they had undeniable evidence of the account in question using "Unauthorized Cheat Programs (Hacks)" when all I did was spend every second on the account playing legitimately without any form of bug abuse or exploits.In a segment of the recent Wrath Classic Dev Interview of Aggrend AKA Josh Greenfield (WOTLK classic Producer) it's quoted and paraphrased, “When asked about queue times disappearing over night on Wrath Classic during the Pre-Patch, Josh explains that Blizzard is implementing new technology to ban bots, which means on locked realms those bots can’t make new characters and would have a drastic impact on realm queue times”. Skyfury is the realm that I am on, and it is also a locked realm, this is actually something that probably has/had a direct impact on the innocent banning of a player(s) like myself for doing an activity that also may have a lot of bots doing it.( here is the timestamp for those of you who are curious about the interview: https://youtu.be/XqR_EWUTmUs?t=1425 )Before you guys comment on the hype train saying “You probably were botting and you deserve it”, I recognize that obviously there’s no way for me to prove that this wasn’t the case since you don’t just randomly put together proof that you’re actually playing the game legit as you log on day-to-day. An actual blizzard employee looking into it and realizing the mix-up would be the only way to rectify this. I thought this was a joke at first and can’t believe it actually happened and I got to witness it first hand. In my situation Either 1 of 3 things happened:1). The account was flagged by some automated system (I had been gold farming Stratholme dungeon, in total I've done 85 runs and got the mount to drop as well, I’m guessing there may be bots doing it and I was lumped into the pile that detects and bans them?) I found a post here from about a year ago where a mass amount of innocent players doing the same thing were detected by an automated bot-busting system and received permanent bans for farming stratholme: https://ift.tt/7jqCsWU) The account was mass reported by players and was deemed worthy via reports to permanently suspend AUTOMATICALLY via an automated response system with no prior infractions or history of any wrongdoing at all. (I am on Skyfury-PvP server and wiped a raid that was summoning their group near a stone not too long before this ban and could have been mass reported by them.)3.) The combination of gold farming a dungeon and being potentially flagged as 'suspicious' by an automated system in scenario 1 combined with being reported by the people in scenario 2 was enough to get the automated system past the threshold where it gets green lights deem an account guilty of an offense and automatically send a permanent ban to an account via an algorithm.The sad part is that since I'm not a huge idol in the community, the ban may never be reversed. It could take weeks to months for that to happen if it does happen at all, so sadly It's not too far out to consider that the ban may never be lifted due to not having an audience and platform like a famous twitch streamer.TLDR: I was PERMANENTLY banned for 'botting' while gold farming Stratholme in the pre-patch legitimately via an automated bot detection system.

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