Hey thanks Archvaldor! I can confirm my account was just re-instated and my ban appeal has been accepted, they have now re-instated my account. Thank you for the support, I appreciate it more than you'll ever know!
I used to farm a lot years back: A few times all of a sudden all my hotkeys became inactive and the only way to fix it was to restart the game. I assume this was one of their "are you botting tests". Another time i was farming and i got multiple /w from others farming the same things and was envious that i got most tags. They /w they rapported me for cheating. I carried on with my life and every so often my game seemed to "lag": my character changed position, like it teleported from my current spot and around 70 yards to a new spot. After maybe 10 min i got booted from the game and i got banned, due to alleged botting. I guess the teleporting was a bot check test. I promptly sent a ticket in to get it overturned, but to no avail. They gave me a 6 month ban. I had 1100 days played, on that character no less. I then just uninstalled the game, battlenet and never touched a blizzard game again. F that company.
"I carried on with my life and every so often my game seemed to "lag": my character changed position, " They did that one to me too.They are trying to get you stuck in a wall. Weirdly as in your case they didn't succeed but banned me anyway. Real clown car show. In my case you could argue it was justified anyway as I was trying to glitch through the terrain earlier (what triggered the gm) but in your case in many other cases it is obvious they were going to ban people who were playing strictly within the rules.
@@archvaldor Got same checks when I was playing quite regular (2h/day sessions). Then once I resubbed after 6 months hiatus and went into 1h farming session I got insta banned for hacking... Thankfully it was revoke quite fast
Well this is worrying.. I've had my account since vanilla and never exploited really and recently on and off my druid would not be able to cast.. although it was in a dungeon a few times. Like no hotkeys or clicking skills worked
same issue is happening via mass reporting thru the chat system. (basically if someone hates you, they and other can spam report you talking in public channels until your account gets silenced and eventually banned. and the issue is the penalties stack till a perma triggers) i had to make a new account and xfer my characters to avoid losing them for this sort of thing.
So, you're telling me players are being banned for "botting" meanwhile the world is still plagued by countless bots constantly farming ores, herbs, farming world drop mounts, for months? Shame on them. Shame.
I saw a fleet of easily 20 bots, i had to follow them for 5 minutes reporting each one at a time and i only got 1 in game mail about someone being banned via my report. Feels like if we dont do it for them it will never happen@@archvaldor
Yeah...there are TONS of auction bots now and they're so obvious ( ascii names, exactly same running route, etc. ) it's just disrespectful to real players that this exists. But yes, lets ban legit players instead - Blizzard.
I have a friend whose boyfriend works at Blizzard. He doesn't work on WoW, but he does work for the company. I asked him about this to see what he thought. He said Blizzard is cheap and the system is primarily automated. What likely happened to Erosium is someone and their friends mass reported him. Likely out of spite or simple trolling. The system then automatically banned him, assuming multiple reports held some weight. An actual person won't look at whether it was warranted until he appeals, because people that were actually cheating or using bots will usually just move on and create another account.
False bans need to be taken more seriously. I recently had an itch to play old school runescape again, i made a brand new character and played for about 2 hours. The next morning i woke up to a ban for botting, I've never botted and have no idea how to even do it. I made a ticked with customer support and they denied my appeal, essentially telling me they are 100% positive that I used botting software. The ban was only for 24 hours, but regardless it caused me to lose all faith in the company and i refuse to ever play the game again. Suppose i spend thousands of hours playing my account just for it to get perma false ban next time. Not to mention the fact you can pay for a yearly membership subscription, which they won't refund if you're banned for breaking ToS (even if you didn't :p )
Issues I've had with my accounts: 1) During TBC, I log in one day to find my account stripped of all gold and items. I put in a ticket to let Blizzard know I'd been hacked. Their response was to tell me the game is unhackable and therefore I must have shared my password. Then they banned my account for password sharing. What actually happened was Thotbot's web site had a malware script in one of of their advertising banners that introduced a key logger to my computer. Blizzard refused to overturn the ban. 2. Near the end of Shadowlands, I got a 24 hour suspension for naming my pet Erectus. It was a skeletal T-Rex and named after the Erectus Rex Erector Set I had as a child, and is latin for upright. But since some whiner complained about the name, I got a 24 hour ban. 3. Beginning of Dragonflight. I'm in a PUG M+ run and someone starts telling racist jokes. I responded with "WTF?!". A short while later, I got a 72 hour ban for 'inappropriate language' - for an abbreviation. The person telling the racist jokes was still logging M+ runs the entire time I was banned.
@herkimersnerd8740 I actually got the account reinstated at the end of BfA after submitting a ticket explaining it all. When it was reinstated, I logged into while already logged into my main account, which caused a wall of achievements to spam guild chat. It was weird, because achievements didn't even exist when that account was banned.
@herkimersnerd8740 I had the same thing happen in 2006 it really is shocking when it happens and to have a good outcome really is a relief. Hope it never happens again, it seems like I might not get that level of service currently.
My account has been banned as well. "Gold buying or obtaining gold through illicit means" did nothing out of standard gameplay. Thanks for covering this, missing 2+ raid lockouts this is a huge issue.
This happened to me too. I was farming murlocs in S1 and after I hearthed back to Darnassus I was hit with a 2 week ban for the same thing. To afraid to log back into SoD now at risk of my account.
I know nobody will believe me, but I got a 6 month suspension for "botting or using illegal 3rd party programs" when shadowlands launched. All I was doing was playing the game. When I appealed the suspension and asked for details I got automated responses and nobody would help me. This was between 24 and 48 hours after the launch of Shadowlands, and I too was putting in 15+ hour play sessions trying to get as much of lead as I could in the game.
@@archvaldor It's legit one of the most boring games of all time and I'm only still subbed to it due to addiction lmao. Also, I love seeing the game burn hard after they started irreparably tarnishing it. TWW will be no different. I'm ready for more garbage lol
This happened to a buddy of mine a month or 2 ago. same message and everything. all he did was farmed naxx each week on his toons and sold the t3 tokens. they ended up banning the account he held all his gold on. he put in tickets and would just get the same replies. he has played since wrath and refused to do anything sketchy. Now he lost an account and 40 mil gold and blizz wont even respond. There is a huge flaw in their system and they wont even know cuz its bots replying to emails/tickets.
What happened to the time in which we could create a ticket and have a Game Master aid us in-game, or at least react to the message without AI automation...? Seems like a double standard nowadays.
A friend of mine bought a bunch of items on the ah, then reposted them for a higher price. Banned for 2 weeks for "buying" gold. Dude works at McDonalds.. he cant afford to buy gold.
@eduj maybe. But he did show pictures of all the replies from him trying to appeal it. Not one reply was from an actual person that looked into it. It's all from blizzard bots. Or whatever ya wanna call there ai system they use.
Heh. During SL i got banned for "Botting" after i farmed some transmog for myself and i have sold one BOE sword. 1 year suspension reduced to 6 months week later. Twas the last time i played the game XD Meanwhile some bot is probably still sitting next to dungeon still to this day without a problem XD
It's funny how Blizzard harms itself by banning its obsessively devoted players, which is actually doing a favor to those players giving them a chance for a healthier life, while those who are affected are pissed and fight to get back (to the place where they were clearly neglected)
I just want to point out the 1 redeeming aspect of playing retail wow and paying the sub is that your items last forever , im not playing anymore but i had a blast playing on ascension and i still have my items and characters and i didn't need to pay a sub Im not encouraging people to play private servers but if blizzard offers a worse product people will let their wallets decide
Good on you for supporting Erosium like that. Blizzard really should at least provide some details of how they think you've done the wrong thing and have a human check your gameplay. Getting banned for playing too much eh? I played for 24 hours straight when MoP came out as I didn't want to fall behind like I had in other expansions. It seems I'd have been tagged as a bot if I did that now. Again, thanks so much for supporting other UA-camrs.
During Legion I had lots of free time so I usually did ALL worldquests, auto pilot mindless content for paragon chests (and lots of AP). After about 2-3 weeks of this I'd get booted from the game after every other WQ. It was suspiciously annoying and no amount of disabling addons, clearing cache, or reinstalling helped.
I am unemployed and play this game for 14-16hrs/day every day while job hunting and working on my side hustle, i constantly get dced/moved and i instantly respond with "bruh what is this lag" and other things to avoid a ban. They won't ban you if you can prove you're not a bot the moment you start lagging / teleporting
I was banned for botting gold farming in classic once. I had only played for two weeks and I had only three gold. I filed a complaint and they restored my account. But it took a week. A week during the Christmas holiday when I had time off and wanted to play.
When I was in a community of moderators for Quake 3 servers way back in the day, I remember how a ban could only have been issued once SUFFICIENT evidence had been presented. Suspicious isn't sufficient. That gave me a feeling of justice, because just like in the legal field, a court must find rock hard evidence that condemns you, to prove their accusations are true. Banning someone based not on acquiring proof but rather on artificial metrics that only indicate that your behaviour is suspicious, is like abandoning science and justice and replacing them with tyranny and occult knowledge. It matters not that the tyranny in this case is not necessarily to control you and likely is just to automate everything and keep increasing profits - once they can do it like this, they'll do it for other reasons as well. If we continue with the analogy of legal system, this case would be like putting a man on a death row for rapе and murdеr just because they were seen walking the same street, are lonely and posted some sort of angry comment on a forum someday. "You are is how we imagine a criminal to be, so you are a criminal, and we will proceed with the punishment immediately". And what seems to be a 1984 paragraph at one point, might look like a norm years later. So it's always good to publicly push back.
lol right ima pvper so im just kinda waiting to see what happens will i be banned for "scripting" simply cause i land a good kick lol seems like its a high chance lol
1:50 I was expecting an ad read for brilliant lol I was expecting perhaps a deeper video into why he may have gotten banned? Or a Q&A discord call with him about it? Can we get a follow up?
In the lockdown peak farmed raw gold docks with your guide back then. 12h minimum per day for two months straight on weekends more. didn't get banned and I'm sure that after the first 4 hours the rest of the nearly 800 hours looked very much the same except bio breaks and food and occasional break to buy stuff .. did nearly lose my job over it tho. I just wanted to feel the grind of old days long past.
I have actually tried botting in MoP for mining and herb gathering but lost interest after 1 or 2 days because the yield was minimal AND I had to do some scheduling to separate gaming time from gold farming time so I didn't like being unable to play the game whenever I wanted while ultimately still remaining poor. Never got in any trouble for that. But then in Legion I was playing Ashran a lot and one time on my Guardian Druid I was in a massive lag fest of a literal 40v40 battle at the ogres' place next to the Horde camp. It would take like 5 to 10 seconds for my abilities to be used after I pressed them. We (the Horde) ended up winning the battle and Alliance had to flee and regroup and in the middle of finishing the strugglers off I saw an Ancient Artifact orb laying on the ground. At that time I knew what the AA buff was but did not know how to obtain or drop it so I panick clicked it and got it on me. The next thing I know some salty mage said "I'm going to report you". I asked him for what? And he said cheat-lagging. I laughed it off as I was adamantly certain that wouldn't do anything since I wasn't hacking or using any sort of software to meddle with my wow client or anything. I felt a little insecure about the validity of the play I made by picking up the AA but I didn't know if I could pass it and noone would ask or tell me anything so I rolled with it, we won the bg and I went on with my life. A few days later I was leveling my monk alt with my friend and all of a sudden I got disconnected and when tried to reconnect I was dumbfounded by the message that my account has been banned. I could not believe it at first but then I saw an email telling me that I got banned for 6 months for the use of 3rd party software to cheat. Appealing didn't yield any results and I honestly think since all the responces were automatic no human ever read my appeals. I later learned about the cheat lagging and lag7 software but still could not believe that just because some dude didn't like and reported me in a massive lagfest of a battle (where it's literally a common thing to be lagging like crazy) of cheating the blizz just went through with it. I would've maybe understood it because I guess it might be hard to distinguish a real lag from a cheat one but they didn't even listen to me and didn't take into the account the fact that their game ALWAYS lags when there's a lot of people clustered up together in the same spot all using their spells simultaneously and that was very unfair. Anyway at that time I was in the point of my wow addiction cycle when it was on the strong end of the spectrum and so I just made another wow account and leveled a DH and later on had a lot of fun with it. But the fact that they don't ban when you do break the TOS and do ban when you don't is so ridiculous that it doesn't make any sence to me.
This is still happening... I got permanently banned a couple weeks ago suposedly for using "third party software" (never got any warning before). That account has "only" 11+ years as I lost my first one, but I've been playing for 18 years. Losing my account is hearbreaking and the only answer from blizzard cs is a copy paste template of their ToS. Even if I created a new account, I'm afraid of playing again as I might just get banned again for playing the game... The only thing that I can think could have caused this is that sometimes I play form a laptop, connected to my gaming pc, as I don't have enough storage to install WoW on the laptop, and recently started doing it more often as the room where the gaming pc is gets pretty hot in summer...
Thank you for all of your videos - I'm always amazed at what you find and how quickly you seem to find them. Do you have any insight into how the mount selling discords work? Are they using something really clever to be able to provide attempts every 5 minutes on rare mobs with 2-4hr spawn timers?
I appreciate you emphasizing the point though. I was really hoping for better from Microsoft. Perhaps I am being narive but they handled the Age Of Empires reboot so well I was encouraged.
@@archvaldor I think you need to chill out. Microsoft hasn't done much of anything with Activision or Blizzard. They haven't even put the games on game pass yet.
I'm disabled with no feeling below my knee and limited in my legs and thighs, so sitting down for extended periods of time is not a problem for me when it comes to gaming and I'm not going to lie this is really disturbing because a couple of my friends and I would just sometimes get together and play for 8 to 12 hours at a time
I think you are probably safe, alarming as the situation is. 8-12 hours isn't really that hardcore considering how demented wow players are when it comes to this stuff.
2:16 it’s a wonder I wasn’t banned then as back in the days of wrath and cata I was putting in 50 to 60 hours a week some times even more. 6:57 it’s why I no longer play wow or any blizzard game BFA was my braking point but it was a slow build of me getting more and more disgruntled with blizzard then there was the whole blitzchung nonsense that broke me and stopped me from playing ANY blizzard game, I’ve not deleted my account as I don’t believe in the idea of me burning my bridges, I always leave room for people (and companies) to redeem themselves as unlikely as it may be.
i used to play pvp for 22 hours, sleep 6 hours and repeat (I called it mayan time) to get Rank 14 in the old days - youd get banned for that these days I suppose
I got a 24h ban because I was playing in BGs and i was trying to get my team to do better and I pointed out I was triple the damage of second place and someone said "LMAO, yeah, cause hunters are gay." And I /yelled, "Come closer and yell that into my gaping asshole." Worth.
LOL. "out I was triple the damage of second place and someone said" To be fair you must have been playing very badly to only do 300% more than any one else as hunter.
@@archvaldor Hotmogu, and I was the only one going after OR picking up orbs so I was an easy target. Lots of damage but lots of death. Horde BGs are cancer.
They have updated their bot detection techniques since SoD phase 2 to fish out bots, but without a doubt it's far more advanced now since I do not see bots in SoD anymore. If he's using an advanced macro to automate some of his play Blizzard's new automated system might have flagged him. In light of this I would be extremely careful with macros or macro software right now. I checked the popular botting spot near Thelsamar (spirit healer very close and safe zone) and have seen zero bots today.
I got banned for same reason, first it was a permanent ban and it got reduced to 6 months. I didn't bot, cheat or exploit. I have no reason to lie. Don't know what else to do. They told me to stop submitting tickets or they would ban my entire battle net.
OG and SW are flooded with new accounts (less than 300 achievement points) and millions of owned gold in their statistic. They all have the same race-class combo and all gather at the same spot, usually at the mail infront of the AH, and it's not unusual to see them moving well above the gold cap across the bunch of them. It is obvious that they are gold sellers or gold mules, especially since a lot of them have "service" or equal terms in their names. I have reported them on a few servers now and as they're right infront of the AH, I'm sure others have aswell, but not a single one of them was banned yet. But knowing Microsoft, we more likely get a draconian chat moderation AI, like they added to Minecraft, than a few GMs actually looking at player reports.
You cant use smurf twinks for farming. They can only do low level dungeon. He even admits in his own video that he did Power Leveling. If you or people in your group level too fast that triggers autobann You should not have your smurf pull you for more than 3-5 dungeons The guy just waaaay over did it. In random groups were they can all report him. This notion that he got banned for just playing the game is false
as a blizzard GM once told me years ago and i quote *A Gm can ban any account whenever they like and there is nothing we as players can do about it* and this is true as i found out on my original wow account in wotlk i tried for years to get it over turned and the last time i spoke to them i was told quote *A GM will not overturn another GM's decision even if they think its wrong* i still play wow on a new account with Erosium at times and i still collect mounts however instead of spending maybe 40hrs a week like i used too (all my spare time) i spend probably 4-8 and play other games i still believe blizzard doesn't care about there players and what happen to Erosium just reinforced this for me, even both my children quit wow in BFA due to the way i was treated and they read the responses i got first hand and in there words why would they play a game where at the click of a finger some one can just ban you and take it all away.
Yep! I farmed Genesis motes for 14 hours (on battlenet1 and battlenet2) and I would farm it on battlenet1 and then have an alarm that would beep every 2 minutes and I would loot on both accounts. I was banned on both battlenets, I've had an active sub, never relapsed since 2018. I was unbanned within 6 days which is speedy compared to some people who have been through the system for MONTHS. I am an autistic female who just enjoys playing the game, I'm so lucky I use a program called "outplayed" which films my entire play sessions, I uploaded the ENTIRE video onto youtube to prove my innocence! Imagine if I didn't have this video!
Thanks for that. I'm very glad you were unbanned. Watching your content I'm a little sad you didn't make more content for wow-you have a wonderful voice and a gift for explaining things. If you ever upload more wow content let me know and I'll give you a shoutout which should help you find an audience.
"Our team issued this closure only after a careful review of relevant evidence". Bullshit. They don't have the customer support staffing to do that. A lot of it is automated. And again, ""may not respond to appeals", is more than likely because they don't have enough staff to review all the appeals. I wouldn't doubt if they had a backlog of tickets in the tens of thousands.
Which is perfectly understandable. Lots of retarded players flood with appeals even tho they clearly broke the rules. I was bored and read the forums.. Shouldn't have
And this is why I used to sell my accounts near the end of an expansion. You would be amazed at how much people will pay for an account with a couple juiced up and geared characters.
I can't name how many times I have made bordeline mechanical routes around respawn timers just to farm recipes for my chars. Wouldn't be wasting 16+ hours in one area doing the same mindless loop if it wasn't for blizzard's shit RNG on outdated content.
I've just cancelled my WoW subscription and uninstalled , the fact they are closing down Wrath servers for Cata is unacceptable for me and I'm going back to Private Server Wrath ( Hellscream ) ...
1:49 oddly a fair few websites think I could be a bot I can only assume it’s to do with how I move my mouse and the fact that if I use a site enough I’m normally faster than the site or my computer is so I’ll have moved my mouse to where I know I will need to click before the page has even started loading, you know them click all the bikes or traffic lights things well if they start showing up it’s because a software suspects you could be a bot me I was starting to get them on every site I want to it was a pain I had to start slowing down and making extra movements with my mouse to simulate how it thinks humans (apparently humans don’t move in straight lines I say get a better mouse and clear all the rubbish off your mousemat, a cluttered mouse mat really bugs me).
I can tell you exactly how their bans work, it's all automated. Their "detection system" hasn't worked in over 10 years because they replaced their old system with a new one that they don't even touch, the same system also handles their tickets before it gets sent to someone in either Bangladesh or somewhere in India. None of the in-house GMs that Blizzard has are tasked with actually banning players and haven't been in years because Blizzard would rather cut back on personnel and make everything automated. They don't give a damn if the playerbase is sad, so long as their investors and shareholders continue staying rich. I thought that when Microsoft took over, they'd finally start taking things seriously only for Microsoft to do a big ol' 180 and be like "Yeah, na, screw you guys" which is insane considering the fact that if they had decided to restructure Blizzard from the inside out then they'd be capable of making all of their money back and more within a few years. By the way - all of this information is from former ex-Blizzard employees who were fired or quit before or after the Microsoft takeover. The first tidbit of information is from before the Microsoft takeover, the rest is from after.
If I may just say something and bear with me. Picture these 2 scenarios. 1. You sit in front of a therapist and tell him or her that you want to delete yourself, youve tried everything and it does not work, no matter what you do you end up in the same situation because the system is designed to take you there. The therapist says "take some meds, go back into the system that is making you sick and pretend that this did not happen, because you are the problem, not the system". 2. World of warcraft has a chat, which allows you to type, and the game isnt at its best state, a lot of russians are sabotaging RBGS and arenas, even mythic keys 23+ and I happen to not invite them anymore because of that. So when you realise that you dont fucking matter and no matter how much you report these people they are still able to play and disrupt the game you eventually become toxic as fuck. Inevitably they will ban you, because your hands are tied. Their response? You are the problem not the system that it has taking you there. So to summarize, you just woke up one day and decided " I want to be toxic, I want to be banned" or in real life "I want to delete myself and I decide to feel broken because... why not?" Do you begin to see the problem here with this corporation? It almost seems like the better you are, either its helping new players with the game, or gear, or making groups or comunities for people to feel like their time actually matters, or PVP even where you go RBGS and you try to have a good time and make it a less miserable experience, you will still be banned, because saying to someone "youre a fckng kunt for sabotaging the game" is bannable. Let me know if this makes sense, I dont believe I am crazy, I am seeing this more and more, at work, gym, shops, games.
Yeah it is not just you. That's a LOT of people. Maybe the majority these days. I don't think it is even arguable at this point. The only thing I can suggest is maybe try and channel your "toxicity" as you called it into something positive. I channeled my own dysfunctional behavior into this channel and it made a lot of people happy. You are very eloquent and you summarized how people feel about a lot of things very well there so maybe you should do something similar.
The last point about customer support is here actually the main weight in all of this. I would have been fine getting randomly banned (yes still sucks if you can't play your favorite game) but if I then open a support ticket to have a HUMAN investigation started and not getting any reply for days....this is when it gets bad! If you have an automatic system to help you catch exploiters etc that is totally fine in my opinion but don't deny us a real investigation and answer to our support tickets! Like a good customer support service should be! I stopped playing retail after the Legion expansion and was pretty hyped after the last Blizzcon for the new expansion. I even was planning on taking vacation so I could nerd it up like in the old days when I was in my 20s. But seeing how things are evolving right now within the company, my excitement to play retail again is kinda almost non-existent anymore sadly...
Yeah that is my problem with tech in 2024. No humans. If you fall through the cracks in any kind of interaction you are just so screwed. I've always liked tech but I'm beginning to actively dislike it.
i got banned in 2006, i was bored with the game but i couldn't quit, i downloaded a speedhack / invisible cheat, made sure that i was reported by using it in warsong gulch, got my account banned, and it cured my addiction, ty blizzard! 😂
Since it seems that nobody else is going to address the elephant in the room, I'll do it: you're not an aardvark??? WTF is this world coming to?!?!?! Seriously, though, I was shocked to hear about Erosium being banned. His positivity through Shadowlands literally made me question if he was playing the same game as I was playing. Also, his UA-cam videos are literally embedded in the WoW homepage. Seems obvious that Blizzard's ban bot needs some work, and my suggestion for them to interview the actual botters in WoW to get some pointers.
I quit WoW 25 years ago and never looked back. That's why I am posting now because I want everyone to know that I don't care about WoW. I will keep posting how I quit though because that's the kind of person I am! LOL
I've done many many many 24, 36, even 48+ gaming sessions in the past. Never gotten banned for it, so I don't think they really look at session time. And with 16 banned licenses on my bnet I'm sure they would give me no leeway in being targeted by an automatic system.
I got banned a few months ago while I was not even having an active subscription. I don't really care because I stopped playing anyway, but it's still weird.
I was perma banned at start of TBC retail for farming herbs and mainly motes of life for healing enchants from the bog lords at the dead mire in Zangarmarsh, the reason given was something along the lines of _exploiting the WoW economy_
during the love in the air holiday they invented a 10 run per hr for the holiday boss ONLY. Hit the 10 & your locked from queing the holiday boss ONLY. It fakes the 10 walk in per hr lock out BUT ONLY locks the holiday que while you can still walk in to and Que for anything.
Some pvp guilds used this to monopolize the highest pvp ranks in classic. Going for those ranks means playing a LOT for weeks. All they had to do was spam report their competition, and they'd get banned. Blizzard employees never bothered actually checking the player. For that to maybe happen, you needed to complain several times, to their decision. First, they would auto message threaten you with a permanent ban though. The company is utterly disgusting.
I’ve just been banned. I have literally just wasted 6 hours over 2 days farming mobs in feralas and swamp of sorrows just to get drops, got a handful of greens some crap blues and one schematic for sniper scope which sold for 150 gold. I reinvested and created my BS helm and my engi waist piece. Only thing I can think is me saying I’ll pay 10g for a spot IN a raid as a paladin dos since we suck ass in gnomer sod
Well I'm glad this didn't happen to me back in the day because before they Nerf Hellfire Citadel from Warlords of Draenor I was actually trying to run that over and over and over again on about 15 characters just so I could get enough gold to buy the brutosaur mount that was 5 million gold. Sadly I didn't make the cut and I lost the ability to ever get the mount and I think it's pretty crappy that blizzard nerfed is something that was a relatively easy way to make a minimal amount of significant gold
I always find it insane that companies worth billions of dollars are too cheap to hire few interns to work in CS. Seriously. How expensive would that be? They could even outsource those jobs to some "cheaper" country...
People blew up how bots were ruining the game. So now they are trying to implement something automated while firing an ass load of people. I def see less bots. However I don't think banning the loyal fans is going to have a good look. Amhpy, keyvan also got banned for AOE farming but they can just make a Twitter post and get unbanned while the hc player who's a no name gets shafted
There is one fact that Blizzard never close account on first so to get closed account u really need to make strike 3x. There is another reason why people can get banned in wow without using bot cheat.. Addon, wa, Keyboard/mouse software-macro and it is completely your fault by it since u as user did signed up their rules policy will not use third programs.
I've found the top WoW players are buying gold and cheating their asses off. I highly doubt that guy is clean. It's easy to get bans overturned anyways.
The TSM Discord has a Season of Discovery thread full of players being banned for either sitting at the Auction House for too long on low level characters or mass player reports for sniping. I hope Erosium has better luck finding a human than them, some of them are on to 15+ tickets and still getting nothing but automated responses.
I was the guy who brought kazzak to stormwind the first time. It was a lengthy process cause you couldnt just log on and do it unless you had tons of people helping you or you learned hunter kiting tricks which i taught myself from day 1 of the game. This all happened, other servers did the same thing and blizzard was mad obviously....a few weeks after and everything was fixed. I tried logging on and i got an email saying 1 month ban. The ban was like 3 weeks after....i thought well F me....but luckily i had 2 accounts so i could still play the game.
Respect for your legend. I must have done 100 major exploits but nothing as well remembered as that. Ironic they banned you-that is one of the defining moments of wow's ascendancy.
@@archvaldor Back then they were lazy and stupid lets be honest....kazzak spent like 5 days destroying stormwind for 24 hours a day. So many people went to check it out and ended up with red gear trying to get away....they waited till tuesdays reset to fix it....today they would of just reset the servers and said sorry to everyone reseting servers and that would of been it.
Ok this isn't unusual for Blizzard to do now that they use algorithms and some sort of bot of their own to track and detect, but he also could have been reported too as this seems to be on the rise with players who now suspect anyone of botting if you do not talk back in chat or are seen to be farming ... mistakes can happen when these things come into play. I know he appealed and that got the attention of a human counterpart to look at the reported content that resulted in the ban. It seems that to get a human person to take a look, you need to begin an appeal process. Fair enough as at least there is a recourse! And I know the account was released and reinstated. In a world where botting and auto programs are infiltrating MMOs and other games, issues and mistakes will arise esp when companies are relying on their own software to catch or take action. Players just need to know they can initiate a request for things to be re-examined and in most cases it will be turned around as long as things are legitimate. Blizzard is not alone as a company who is doing this and it will be up to us players to know how to ensure we request a re-examination. It sucks but it has been this way now for some time!
I have AFKed in HS and i will continue to do so, but after the recent ban wave I will just do it for less than 12 hours. This whole "ban players for playing the game" is very lazy and mostly hurts real players who just have time - like kids. Not that a kid will lay a blizzard game, this is boomer country, boomer territory and the next home for a WoW player is the elderly home, maybe even the grave as some are already in a elderly home. I just think that Blizzard is being very lazy here but to their own detriment.
The real issue are the chat bots that auto flag repeated malicious reports and there’s no way to appeal them unless “you can prove your account was compromised” What a joke.
that I no longer received an answer from blew and am still banned for the same, I am Dutch Belgium and they understand Nieks in Dutch and English that I wrote and with a photo nothing helps!
With attitude of Archvaldor and his amazing hacks by my side i am ready to commit any sort of crimes. Be that making a GM delevel my level 21 black venomblade to level 20 and sell it for million gold. Forge screenshots of me looting but not receiving mogrosh toothpick from a chest to then get it restored. Making a GM gift me a wow expansion by a mistake or auto click with xbox controller for a decade. Hell i can even steal every last fish and chips out there to inflate the price. There is no stopping a man once he really embraces the ways of the other side. Such are the powers of this man. An artist. A Legend. It is not the friends we made but the amount of bans we had along the way that matters in the end.
He could have use Programs outside of WoW to make Cutting Videos/Providing certain functions, which are useful for Streaming or other games. Like AutoHotKey or simple Stuff like the Logitech, Razer, Corsair Hardware Programming suites for HotKeys on the Keyboards/Peripherie. Those Softwares are known to can run Botting Programms, which could trigger the Blizzard Cheat System. Even if he isn´t using those Scripts in WoW, they could be active in the background and sadly trigger the System. It is something those Systems can´t really differenciate: Is someone using AutoHotKey for Work purposes only, or is he using it for Botting Ingame?
I just got banned for hacking or botting and I have been playing since 2005....never cheated or botted in my life,wouldnt even know how to and they won't even respond to my appeal.
He made another video. He was multiboxing with two characters in a dungeon. He made no mention of whether or not he was using third party software or hardware and I don't even think he realized that the multiboxing in a dungeon is what set off red flags.
That's actually implied by him twinking up. Multi-boxing is not a violation of the t&c itself. Software that mirrors keypresses is a violation but he states he wasn't doing that. You can alt+tab windows or just put a toon on follow or camp them somewhere it is fine and I've done it without issue.
@@archvaldor I'm thinking he had the character on follow, someone got butthurt and reported him and they didn't really look at what he was doing closely. They just assumed he was using the third party tools to do it.
I feel paranoid every time I farm Motherlode/Heart of Fear or spam auction advertisements in trade, that this kind of thing will happen to me. I remember a time when Blizzard actually cared about their players and took the time to personally investigate every case, to ensure that injustices like what happened to Erosium never happened. I want to jump ship so bad, but I have thousands of dollars and hundreds of days of gametime invested into WoW at this point. Blizzard has been banking off sunken cost fallacy and FOMO for over a decade and it irritates me.
Archvaldor could you please look into a useless "exploit", so in BG's you are unable to summon the Etheral Soul-Trader pet. I was able to get the pet into a BG once not totally sure how I believe it could be due to summoning him and joining the bg quickly. I was playing with a friend and he confirmed that he was able to see it as well. I just want that swag companion in my bgs :')
He's quite an old ethereal now-when they brought him in you could glitch out a lot of stuff with timing attacks.Basically join the bg at the exact split-second he spawns and he'll come with you. But probably no reliable way to reproduce it.A fraction of a second either way and the code works properly.
@archvaldor, that's quite intriguing. However, there might exist some obscure method to achieve this with semi-reliability don't you think? For example, perhaps employing a bot/simple ai that alternates between summoning and joining at random intervals until it discovers the most effective sequence, combined with an adjustable artificial ping, could work. Do you have any other theories on how to replicate this with slightly more reliability?
I'm sad reading/hearing this. All the best, good luck fighting the ban 😢 My mate got banned for "botting" while he just mindlessly grinded hides for hours, actually manually doing so. It happens often.
Hey thanks Archvaldor! I can confirm my account was just re-instated and my ban appeal has been accepted, they have now re-instated my account. Thank you for the support, I appreciate it more than you'll ever know!
Update video 👀
I'm sooo glad everything was resolved
Erosium legend
what did you do?
Players together strong.
Good to have you back.
I used to farm a lot years back:
A few times all of a sudden all my hotkeys became inactive and the only way to fix it was to restart the game. I assume this was one of their "are you botting tests".
Another time i was farming and i got multiple /w from others farming the same things and was envious that i got most tags. They /w they rapported me for cheating. I carried on with my life and every so often my game seemed to "lag": my character changed position, like it teleported from my current spot and around 70 yards to a new spot. After maybe 10 min i got booted from the game and i got banned, due to alleged botting. I guess the teleporting was a bot check test.
I promptly sent a ticket in to get it overturned, but to no avail. They gave me a 6 month ban. I had 1100 days played, on that character no less.
I then just uninstalled the game, battlenet and never touched a blizzard game again. F that company.
"I carried on with my life and every so often my game seemed to "lag": my character changed position, " They did that one to me too.They are trying to get you stuck in a wall. Weirdly as in your case they didn't succeed but banned me anyway. Real clown car show. In my case you could argue it was justified anyway as I was trying to glitch through the terrain earlier (what triggered the gm) but in your case in many other cases it is obvious they were going to ban people who were playing strictly within the rules.
@@archvaldor Got same checks when I was playing quite regular (2h/day sessions). Then once I resubbed after 6 months hiatus and went into 1h farming session I got insta banned for hacking... Thankfully it was revoke quite fast
Well this is worrying.. I've had my account since vanilla and never exploited really and recently on and off my druid would not be able to cast.. although it was in a dungeon a few times. Like no hotkeys or clicking skills worked
My hotkeys became inactive when I used to play the game for 12hrs day also
That's exactly what happened to me and why I haven't touched a blizzard game for years
same issue is happening via mass reporting thru the chat system. (basically if someone hates you, they and other can spam report you talking in public channels until your account gets silenced and eventually banned. and the issue is the penalties stack till a perma triggers)
i had to make a new account and xfer my characters to avoid losing them for this sort of thing.
So, you're telling me players are being banned for "botting" meanwhile the world is still plagued by countless bots constantly farming ores, herbs, farming world drop mounts, for months? Shame on them. Shame.
Yeah that is very ironic. You'd think they could hire someone who could do a proper Turing test.
@@archvaldor that'd cost money though, no good
I find this really weird. I've had a bot since tbc classic and never had a problem with ban even though i'm sure i've gotten reported a lot.
I saw a fleet of easily 20 bots, i had to follow them for 5 minutes reporting each one at a time and i only got 1 in game mail about someone being banned via my report. Feels like if we dont do it for them it will never happen@@archvaldor
Yeah...there are TONS of auction bots now and they're so obvious ( ascii names, exactly same running route, etc. ) it's just disrespectful to real players that this exists. But yes, lets ban legit players instead - Blizzard.
I have a friend whose boyfriend works at Blizzard. He doesn't work on WoW, but he does work for the company. I asked him about this to see what he thought.
He said Blizzard is cheap and the system is primarily automated. What likely happened to Erosium is someone and their friends mass reported him. Likely out of spite or simple trolling. The system then automatically banned him, assuming multiple reports held some weight. An actual person won't look at whether it was warranted until he appeals, because people that were actually cheating or using bots will usually just move on and create another account.
That makes a lot of sense.
A buddy of mine who spent around 10k rmt was finally caught and they only suspended him for 3 days. What a weird company.
i bought like 2-3k gold back in tbc classic and i also got similar 3 day or so bann xD.. so y they dont care.. at all
10 thousand real dollars on gold/services/whatever???!! Seriously? 10k? Jesus.
Yes I should clarify 10k USD real money.
False bans need to be taken more seriously. I recently had an itch to play old school runescape again, i made a brand new character and played for about 2 hours. The next morning i woke up to a ban for botting, I've never botted and have no idea how to even do it.
I made a ticked with customer support and they denied my appeal, essentially telling me they are 100% positive that I used botting software.
The ban was only for 24 hours, but regardless it caused me to lose all faith in the company and i refuse to ever play the game again. Suppose i spend thousands of hours playing my account just for it to get perma false ban next time.
Not to mention the fact you can pay for a yearly membership subscription, which they won't refund if you're banned for breaking ToS (even if you didn't :p )
Issues I've had with my accounts:
1) During TBC, I log in one day to find my account stripped of all gold and items. I put in a ticket to let Blizzard know I'd been hacked. Their response was to tell me the game is unhackable and therefore I must have shared my password. Then they banned my account for password sharing.
What actually happened was Thotbot's web site had a malware script in one of of their advertising banners that introduced a key logger to my computer. Blizzard refused to overturn the ban.
2. Near the end of Shadowlands, I got a 24 hour suspension for naming my pet Erectus. It was a skeletal T-Rex and named after the Erectus Rex Erector Set I had as a child, and is latin for upright. But since some whiner complained about the name, I got a 24 hour ban.
3. Beginning of Dragonflight. I'm in a PUG M+ run and someone starts telling racist jokes. I responded with "WTF?!". A short while later, I got a 72 hour ban for 'inappropriate language' - for an abbreviation. The person telling the racist jokes was still logging M+ runs the entire time I was banned.
LOL that is so dumb.
ahahahhahaha the WTF one is so sad...
@herkimersnerd8740 I actually got the account reinstated at the end of BfA after submitting a ticket explaining it all. When it was reinstated, I logged into while already logged into my main account, which caused a wall of achievements to spam guild chat. It was weird, because achievements didn't even exist when that account was banned.
@herkimersnerd8740 I had the same thing happen in 2006 it really is shocking when it happens and to have a good outcome really is a relief. Hope it never happens again, it seems like I might not get that level of service currently.
Well, blizzard must want us to just stand in a city and do nothing or don’t play their game
My account has been banned as well. "Gold buying or obtaining gold through illicit means" did nothing out of standard gameplay. Thanks for covering this, missing 2+ raid lockouts this is a huge issue.
This happened to me too. I was farming murlocs in S1 and after I hearthed back to Darnassus I was hit with a 2 week ban for the same thing. To afraid to log back into SoD now at risk of my account.
I know nobody will believe me, but I got a 6 month suspension for "botting or using illegal 3rd party programs" when shadowlands launched. All I was doing was playing the game. When I appealed the suspension and asked for details I got automated responses and nobody would help me. This was between 24 and 48 hours after the launch of Shadowlands, and I too was putting in 15+ hour play sessions trying to get as much of lead as I could in the game.
its a blessing in disguise if you get banned from wow
Wouldn't argue with that frankly. To be honest wow is pretty boring to me if you take away the exploits.
@@archvaldor It's legit one of the most boring games of all time and I'm only still subbed to it due to addiction lmao. Also, I love seeing the game burn hard after they started irreparably tarnishing it. TWW will be no different. I'm ready for more garbage lol
This happened to a buddy of mine a month or 2 ago. same message and everything. all he did was farmed naxx each week on his toons and sold the t3 tokens. they ended up banning the account he held all his gold on. he put in tickets and would just get the same replies. he has played since wrath and refused to do anything sketchy. Now he lost an account and 40 mil gold and blizz wont even respond. There is a huge flaw in their system and they wont even know cuz its bots replying to emails/tickets.
What happened to the time in which we could create a ticket and have a Game Master aid us in-game, or at least react to the message without AI automation...? Seems like a double standard nowadays.
A friend of mine bought a bunch of items on the ah, then reposted them for a higher price. Banned for 2 weeks for "buying" gold. Dude works at McDonalds.. he cant afford to buy gold.
Probs lying
@eduj maybe. But he did show pictures of all the replies from him trying to appeal it. Not one reply was from an actual person that looked into it. It's all from blizzard bots. Or whatever ya wanna call there ai system they use.
Heh. During SL i got banned for "Botting" after i farmed some transmog for myself and i have sold one BOE sword. 1 year suspension reduced to 6 months week later. Twas the last time i played the game XD
Meanwhile some bot is probably still sitting next to dungeon still to this day without a problem XD
that happened for sure
It's funny how Blizzard harms itself by banning its obsessively devoted players, which is actually doing a favor to those players giving them a chance for a healthier life, while those who are affected are pissed and fight to get back (to the place where they were clearly neglected)
thats how I should be looking at my ban today but I just want to keep playing still and haven't done anything but sit here so far
I just want to point out the 1 redeeming aspect of playing retail wow and paying the sub is that your items last forever , im not playing anymore but i had a blast playing on ascension and i still have my items and characters and i didn't need to pay a sub
Im not encouraging people to play private servers but if blizzard offers a worse product people will let their wallets decide
Good point.
@PlayerSalt Tried that, didn't really appeal to me. I feel like its missing something.
Guild Wars 2 has kept my characters and everything intact since release and there is no sub
Good on you for supporting Erosium like that.
Blizzard really should at least provide some details of how they think you've done the wrong thing and have a human check your gameplay.
Getting banned for playing too much eh? I played for 24 hours straight when MoP came out as I didn't want to fall behind like I had
in other expansions. It seems I'd have been tagged as a bot if I did that now. Again, thanks so much for supporting other UA-camrs.
Man, we need to start holding them accountable for botting the same way they check players.
I see the irony in them trying to cut down on bots by using an algorithm and ai response to appeals
During Legion I had lots of free time so I usually did ALL worldquests, auto pilot mindless content for paragon chests (and lots of AP).
After about 2-3 weeks of this I'd get booted from the game after every other WQ. It was suspiciously annoying and no amount of disabling addons, clearing cache, or reinstalling helped.
I am unemployed and play this game for 14-16hrs/day every day while job hunting and working on my side hustle, i constantly get dced/moved and i instantly respond with "bruh what is this lag" and other things to avoid a ban. They won't ban you if you can prove you're not a bot the moment you start lagging / teleporting
I was banned for botting gold farming in classic once. I had only played for two weeks and I had only three gold. I filed a complaint and they restored my account. But it took a week. A week during the Christmas holiday when I had time off and wanted to play.
When I was in a community of moderators for Quake 3 servers way back in the day, I remember how a ban could only have been issued once SUFFICIENT evidence had been presented. Suspicious isn't sufficient. That gave me a feeling of justice, because just like in the legal field, a court must find rock hard evidence that condemns you, to prove their accusations are true.
Banning someone based not on acquiring proof but rather on artificial metrics that only indicate that your behaviour is suspicious, is like abandoning science and justice and replacing them with tyranny and occult knowledge. It matters not that the tyranny in this case is not necessarily to control you and likely is just to automate everything and keep increasing profits - once they can do it like this, they'll do it for other reasons as well.
If we continue with the analogy of legal system, this case would be like putting a man on a death row for rapе and murdеr just because they were seen walking the same street, are lonely and posted some sort of angry comment on a forum someday. "You are is how we imagine a criminal to be, so you are a criminal, and we will proceed with the punishment immediately". And what seems to be a 1984 paragraph at one point, might look like a norm years later. So it's always good to publicly push back.
Can’t wait for my incoming ban for playing legitimately. Still haven’t been banned for actually breaking the rules after all these years
LOL I didn't want to tempt fate and go there but....
lol right ima pvper so im just kinda waiting to see what happens will i be banned for "scripting" simply cause i land a good kick lol seems like its a high chance lol
@@xwartornxYou wont there are people kickbotting and even cheating in awc (Jaime) and nothing happens
1:50 I was expecting an ad read for brilliant lol
I was expecting perhaps a deeper video into why he may have gotten banned? Or a Q&A discord call with him about it? Can we get a follow up?
I'm so thankful to my patreons I don't have to do that crap:)
In the lockdown peak farmed raw gold docks with your guide back then. 12h minimum per day for two months straight on weekends more. didn't get banned and I'm sure that after the first 4 hours the rest of the nearly 800 hours looked very much the same except bio breaks and food and occasional break to buy stuff .. did nearly lose my job over it tho.
I just wanted to feel the grind of old days long past.
Respect for the grind:)
I have actually tried botting in MoP for mining and herb gathering but lost interest after 1 or 2 days because the yield was minimal AND I had to do some scheduling to separate gaming time from gold farming time so I didn't like being unable to play the game whenever I wanted while ultimately still remaining poor. Never got in any trouble for that. But then in Legion I was playing Ashran a lot and one time on my Guardian Druid I was in a massive lag fest of a literal 40v40 battle at the ogres' place next to the Horde camp. It would take like 5 to 10 seconds for my abilities to be used after I pressed them. We (the Horde) ended up winning the battle and Alliance had to flee and regroup and in the middle of finishing the strugglers off I saw an Ancient Artifact orb laying on the ground. At that time I knew what the AA buff was but did not know how to obtain or drop it so I panick clicked it and got it on me. The next thing I know some salty mage said "I'm going to report you". I asked him for what? And he said cheat-lagging. I laughed it off as I was adamantly certain that wouldn't do anything since I wasn't hacking or using any sort of software to meddle with my wow client or anything. I felt a little insecure about the validity of the play I made by picking up the AA but I didn't know if I could pass it and noone would ask or tell me anything so I rolled with it, we won the bg and I went on with my life. A few days later I was leveling my monk alt with my friend and all of a sudden I got disconnected and when tried to reconnect I was dumbfounded by the message that my account has been banned. I could not believe it at first but then I saw an email telling me that I got banned for 6 months for the use of 3rd party software to cheat. Appealing didn't yield any results and I honestly think since all the responces were automatic no human ever read my appeals. I later learned about the cheat lagging and lag7 software but still could not believe that just because some dude didn't like and reported me in a massive lagfest of a battle (where it's literally a common thing to be lagging like crazy) of cheating the blizz just went through with it. I would've maybe understood it because I guess it might be hard to distinguish a real lag from a cheat one but they didn't even listen to me and didn't take into the account the fact that their game ALWAYS lags when there's a lot of people clustered up together in the same spot all using their spells simultaneously and that was very unfair. Anyway at that time I was in the point of my wow addiction cycle when it was on the strong end of the spectrum and so I just made another wow account and leveled a DH and later on had a lot of fun with it. But the fact that they don't ban when you do break the TOS and do ban when you don't is so ridiculous that it doesn't make any sence to me.
Kinda makes it hard to play now, could literally lose your account for no reason
This is still happening... I got permanently banned a couple weeks ago suposedly for using "third party software" (never got any warning before).
That account has "only" 11+ years as I lost my first one, but I've been playing for 18 years. Losing my account is hearbreaking and the only answer from blizzard cs is a copy paste template of their ToS.
Even if I created a new account, I'm afraid of playing again as I might just get banned again for playing the game...
The only thing that I can think could have caused this is that sometimes I play form a laptop, connected to my gaming pc, as I don't have enough storage to install WoW on the laptop, and recently started doing it more often as the room where the gaming pc is gets pretty hot in summer...
Thank you for all of your videos - I'm always amazed at what you find and how quickly you seem to find them.
Do you have any insight into how the mount selling discords work? Are they using something really clever to be able to provide attempts every 5 minutes on rare mobs with 2-4hr spawn timers?
Ty. Yeah you can do that with various methods to use legacy damage in tw mode.
Blizz just laid off a TON of workers
Ah, I see you’re talking about that. Nvm
I appreciate you emphasizing the point though. I was really hoping for better from Microsoft. Perhaps I am being narive but they handled the Age Of Empires reboot so well I was encouraged.
@@AlecSoD the WoW team wasn't really affected.
@@archvaldor I think you need to chill out. Microsoft hasn't done much of anything with Activision or Blizzard. They haven't even put the games on game pass yet.
boy this post didnt age well lol@@eodyn7
As a small WOW youtuber, can confirm that I make no money and do it out of the love for the game.
archvaldor using light mode is crazy
I'm disabled with no feeling below my knee and limited in my legs and thighs, so sitting down for extended periods of time is not a problem for me when it comes to gaming and I'm not going to lie this is really disturbing because a couple of my friends and I would just sometimes get together and play for 8 to 12 hours at a time
I think you are probably safe, alarming as the situation is. 8-12 hours isn't really that hardcore considering how demented wow players are when it comes to this stuff.
2:16 it’s a wonder I wasn’t banned then as back in the days of wrath and cata I was putting in 50 to 60 hours a week some times even more.
6:57 it’s why I no longer play wow or any blizzard game BFA was my braking point but it was a slow build of me getting more and more disgruntled with blizzard then there was the whole blitzchung nonsense that broke me and stopped me from playing ANY blizzard game, I’ve not deleted my account as I don’t believe in the idea of me burning my bridges, I always leave room for people (and companies) to redeem themselves as unlikely as it may be.
Automated system should NOT be able to ban but instead flag for human review.
i used to play pvp for 22 hours, sleep 6 hours and repeat (I called it mayan time) to get Rank 14 in the old days - youd get banned for that these days I suppose
I got a 24h ban because I was playing in BGs and i was trying to get my team to do better and I pointed out I was triple the damage of second place and someone said "LMAO, yeah, cause hunters are gay." And I /yelled, "Come closer and yell that into my gaping asshole." Worth.
LOL.
"out I was triple the damage of second place and someone said" To be fair you must have been playing very badly to only do 300% more than any one else as hunter.
@@archvaldor Hotmogu, and I was the only one going after OR picking up orbs so I was an easy target. Lots of damage but lots of death. Horde BGs are cancer.
They have updated their bot detection techniques since SoD phase 2 to fish out bots, but without a doubt it's far more advanced now since I do not see bots in SoD anymore. If he's using an advanced macro to automate some of his play Blizzard's new automated system might have flagged him. In light of this I would be extremely careful with macros or macro software right now. I checked the popular botting spot near Thelsamar (spirit healer very close and safe zone) and have seen zero bots today.
wdym arathi highlands is filled with bots.
This behavior from Blizz needs to stop banning people without a cause.
I got banned for same reason, first it was a permanent ban and it got reduced to 6 months. I didn't bot, cheat or exploit. I have no reason to lie. Don't know what else to do. They told me to stop submitting tickets or they would ban my entire battle net.
That sucks I'm sorry.
That's blackmail.. if people would organise themselves we could get back control of the time invested in their various games...
OG and SW are flooded with new accounts (less than 300 achievement points) and millions of owned gold in their statistic.
They all have the same race-class combo and all gather at the same spot, usually at the mail infront of the AH, and it's not unusual to see them moving well above the gold cap across the bunch of them.
It is obvious that they are gold sellers or gold mules, especially since a lot of them have "service" or equal terms in their names.
I have reported them on a few servers now and as they're right infront of the AH, I'm sure others have aswell, but not a single one of them was banned yet.
But knowing Microsoft, we more likely get a draconian chat moderation AI, like they added to Minecraft, than a few GMs actually looking at player reports.
You cant use smurf twinks for farming.
They can only do low level dungeon.
He even admits in his own video that he did Power Leveling.
If you or people in your group level too fast that triggers autobann
You should not have your smurf pull you for more than 3-5 dungeons
The guy just waaaay over did it.
In random groups were they can all report him.
This notion that he got banned for just playing the game is false
as a blizzard GM once told me years ago and i quote *A Gm can ban any account whenever they like and there is nothing we as players can do about it* and this is true as i found out on my original wow account in wotlk i tried for years to get it over turned and the last time i spoke to them i was told quote *A GM will not overturn another GM's decision even if they think its wrong* i still play wow on a new account with Erosium at times and i still collect mounts however instead of spending maybe 40hrs a week like i used too (all my spare time) i spend probably 4-8 and play other games i still believe blizzard doesn't care about there players and what happen to Erosium just reinforced this for me, even both my children quit wow in BFA due to the way i was treated and they read the responses i got first hand and in there words why would they play a game where at the click of a finger some one can just ban you and take it all away.
Yep! I farmed Genesis motes for 14 hours (on battlenet1 and battlenet2) and I would farm it on battlenet1 and then have an alarm that would beep every 2 minutes and I would loot on both accounts. I was banned on both battlenets, I've had an active sub, never relapsed since 2018. I was unbanned within 6 days which is speedy compared to some people who have been through the system for MONTHS. I am an autistic female who just enjoys playing the game, I'm so lucky I use a program called "outplayed" which films my entire play sessions, I uploaded the ENTIRE video onto youtube to prove my innocence! Imagine if I didn't have this video!
Thanks for that. I'm very glad you were unbanned. Watching your content I'm a little sad you didn't make more content for wow-you have a wonderful voice and a gift for explaining things. If you ever upload more wow content let me know and I'll give you a shoutout which should help you find an audience.
I agree Arch her vids are very soothing
"Our team issued this closure only after a careful review of relevant evidence". Bullshit. They don't have the customer support staffing to do that. A lot of it is automated. And again, ""may not respond to appeals", is more than likely because they don't have enough staff to review all the appeals. I wouldn't doubt if they had a backlog of tickets in the tens of thousands.
Which is perfectly understandable. Lots of retarded players flood with appeals even tho they clearly broke the rules. I was bored and read the forums.. Shouldn't have
Hey, my friend have a same case as Ero, and we getting same responses from "CS" as he did. We dont even know what to do anymore.
And this is why I used to sell my accounts near the end of an expansion. You would be amazed at how much people will pay for an account with a couple juiced up and geared characters.
How much would people pay for them?
I can't name how many times I have made bordeline mechanical routes around respawn timers just to farm recipes for my chars.
Wouldn't be wasting 16+ hours in one area doing the same mindless loop if it wasn't for blizzard's shit RNG on outdated content.
I've just cancelled my WoW subscription and uninstalled , the fact they are closing down Wrath servers for Cata is unacceptable for me and I'm going back to Private Server Wrath ( Hellscream ) ...
1:49 oddly a fair few websites think I could be a bot I can only assume it’s to do with how I move my mouse and the fact that if I use a site enough I’m normally faster than the site or my computer is so I’ll have moved my mouse to where I know I will need to click before the page has even started loading, you know them click all the bikes or traffic lights things well if they start showing up it’s because a software suspects you could be a bot me I was starting to get them on every site I want to it was a pain I had to start slowing down and making extra movements with my mouse to simulate how it thinks humans (apparently humans don’t move in straight lines I say get a better mouse and clear all the rubbish off your mousemat, a cluttered mouse mat really bugs me).
I can tell you exactly how their bans work, it's all automated. Their "detection system" hasn't worked in over 10 years because they replaced their old system with a new one that they don't even touch, the same system also handles their tickets before it gets sent to someone in either Bangladesh or somewhere in India. None of the in-house GMs that Blizzard has are tasked with actually banning players and haven't been in years because Blizzard would rather cut back on personnel and make everything automated. They don't give a damn if the playerbase is sad, so long as their investors and shareholders continue staying rich. I thought that when Microsoft took over, they'd finally start taking things seriously only for Microsoft to do a big ol' 180 and be like "Yeah, na, screw you guys" which is insane considering the fact that if they had decided to restructure Blizzard from the inside out then they'd be capable of making all of their money back and more within a few years. By the way - all of this information is from former ex-Blizzard employees who were fired or quit before or after the Microsoft takeover. The first tidbit of information is from before the Microsoft takeover, the rest is from after.
If I may just say something and bear with me. Picture these 2 scenarios.
1. You sit in front of a therapist and tell him or her that you want to delete yourself, youve tried everything and it does not work, no matter what you do you end up in the same situation because the system is designed to take you there. The therapist says "take some meds, go back into the system that is making you sick and pretend that this did not happen, because you are the problem, not the system".
2. World of warcraft has a chat, which allows you to type, and the game isnt at its best state, a lot of russians are sabotaging RBGS and arenas, even mythic keys 23+ and I happen to not invite them anymore because of that. So when you realise that you dont fucking matter and no matter how much you report these people they are still able to play and disrupt the game you eventually become toxic as fuck. Inevitably they will ban you, because your hands are tied. Their response? You are the problem not the system that it has taking you there.
So to summarize, you just woke up one day and decided " I want to be toxic, I want to be banned" or in real life "I want to delete myself and I decide to feel broken because... why not?" Do you begin to see the problem here with this corporation? It almost seems like the better you are, either its helping new players with the game, or gear, or making groups or comunities for people to feel like their time actually matters, or PVP even where you go RBGS and you try to have a good time and make it a less miserable experience, you will still be banned, because saying to someone "youre a fckng kunt for sabotaging the game" is bannable. Let me know if this makes sense, I dont believe I am crazy, I am seeing this more and more, at work, gym, shops, games.
Yeah it is not just you. That's a LOT of people. Maybe the majority these days. I don't think it is even arguable at this point. The only thing I can suggest is maybe try and channel your "toxicity" as you called it into something positive. I channeled my own dysfunctional behavior into this channel and it made a lot of people happy. You are very eloquent and you summarized how people feel about a lot of things very well there so maybe you should do something similar.
Same goes for RMT suspensions, they'll suspend player who have never participated in boosting or gold buying for it.
In Panda i was doing like 110+ hour per Week...
The last point about customer support is here actually the main weight in all of this. I would have been fine getting randomly banned (yes still sucks if you can't play your favorite game) but if I then open a support ticket to have a HUMAN investigation started and not getting any reply for days....this is when it gets bad! If you have an automatic system to help you catch exploiters etc that is totally fine in my opinion but don't deny us a real investigation and answer to our support tickets! Like a good customer support service should be!
I stopped playing retail after the Legion expansion and was pretty hyped after the last Blizzcon for the new expansion. I even was planning on taking vacation so I could nerd it up like in the old days when I was in my 20s. But seeing how things are evolving right now within the company, my excitement to play retail again is kinda almost non-existent anymore sadly...
Yeah that is my problem with tech in 2024. No humans. If you fall through the cracks in any kind of interaction you are just so screwed. I've always liked tech but I'm beginning to actively dislike it.
i got banned in 2006, i was bored with the game but i couldn't quit, i downloaded a speedhack / invisible cheat, made sure that i was reported by using it in warsong gulch, got my account banned, and it cured my addiction, ty blizzard! 😂
Since it seems that nobody else is going to address the elephant in the room, I'll do it: you're not an aardvark??? WTF is this world coming to?!?!?!
Seriously, though, I was shocked to hear about Erosium being banned. His positivity through Shadowlands literally made me question if he was playing the same game as I was playing. Also, his UA-cam videos are literally embedded in the WoW homepage. Seems obvious that Blizzard's ban bot needs some work, and my suggestion for them to interview the actual botters in WoW to get some pointers.
I quit WoW 25 years ago and never looked back. That's why I am posting now because I want everyone to know that I don't care about WoW. I will keep posting how I quit though because that's the kind of person I am! LOL
I've done many many many 24, 36, even 48+ gaming sessions in the past. Never gotten banned for it, so I don't think they really look at session time. And with 16 banned licenses on my bnet I'm sure they would give me no leeway in being targeted by an automatic system.
I got banned a few months ago while I was not even having an active subscription. I don't really care because I stopped playing anyway, but it's still weird.
That's new. Maybe they thought you were cheating with telekinesis.
I was perma banned at start of TBC retail for farming herbs and mainly motes of life for healing enchants from the bog lords at the dead mire in Zangarmarsh, the reason given was something along the lines of _exploiting the WoW economy_
Waiting for my ban. Why have a language filter if saying fuck still warrants a ban?
during the love in the air holiday they invented a 10 run per hr for the holiday boss ONLY. Hit the 10 & your locked from queing the holiday boss ONLY. It fakes the 10 walk in per hr lock out BUT ONLY locks the holiday que while you can still walk in to and Que for anything.
Some pvp guilds used this to monopolize the highest pvp ranks in classic.
Going for those ranks means playing a LOT for weeks. All they had to do was spam report their competition, and they'd get banned. Blizzard employees never bothered actually checking the player. For that to maybe happen, you needed to complain several times, to their decision. First, they would auto message threaten you with a permanent ban though. The company is utterly disgusting.
Thought this was going to be about the automated bans in SoD for trading gold.
Sad part is it will only get worse with Microsoft in charge.
Crazy how one takes things for granted until they lose it.
I’ve just been banned. I have literally just wasted 6 hours over 2 days farming mobs in feralas and swamp of sorrows just to get drops, got a handful of greens some crap blues and one schematic for sniper scope which sold for 150 gold. I reinvested and created my BS helm and my engi waist piece. Only thing I can think is me saying I’ll pay 10g for a spot IN a raid as a paladin dos since we suck ass in gnomer sod
Well I'm glad this didn't happen to me back in the day because before they Nerf Hellfire Citadel from Warlords of Draenor I was actually trying to run that over and over and over again on about 15 characters just so I could get enough gold to buy the brutosaur mount that was 5 million gold. Sadly I didn't make the cut and I lost the ability to ever get the mount and I think it's pretty crappy that blizzard nerfed is something that was a relatively easy way to make a minimal amount of significant gold
I always find it insane that companies worth billions of dollars are too cheap to hire few interns to work in CS. Seriously. How expensive would that be? They could even outsource those jobs to some "cheaper" country...
Banning the last remaining wow player is so sad, but very funny.
I run into farming bots every week. Sometimes they make it difficult to complete quests.
People blew up how bots were ruining the game. So now they are trying to implement something automated while firing an ass load of people. I def see less bots. However I don't think banning the loyal fans is going to have a good look. Amhpy, keyvan also got banned for AOE farming but they can just make a Twitter post and get unbanned while the hc player who's a no name gets shafted
There is one fact that Blizzard never close account on first so to get closed account u really need to make strike 3x. There is another reason why people can get banned in wow without using bot cheat.. Addon, wa, Keyboard/mouse software-macro and it is completely your fault by it since u as user did signed up their rules policy will not use third programs.
I've found the top WoW players are buying gold and cheating their asses off. I highly doubt that guy is clean. It's easy to get bans overturned anyways.
The TSM Discord has a Season of Discovery thread full of players being banned for either sitting at the Auction House for too long on low level characters or mass player reports for sniping. I hope Erosium has better luck finding a human than them, some of them are on to 15+ tickets and still getting nothing but automated responses.
I was the guy who brought kazzak to stormwind the first time. It was a lengthy process cause you couldnt just log on and do it unless you had tons of people helping you or you learned hunter kiting tricks which i taught myself from day 1 of the game. This all happened, other servers did the same thing and blizzard was mad obviously....a few weeks after and everything was fixed. I tried logging on and i got an email saying 1 month ban. The ban was like 3 weeks after....i thought well F me....but luckily i had 2 accounts so i could still play the game.
Respect for your legend. I must have done 100 major exploits but nothing as well remembered as that. Ironic they banned you-that is one of the defining moments of wow's ascendancy.
@@archvaldor Back then they were lazy and stupid lets be honest....kazzak spent like 5 days destroying stormwind for 24 hours a day. So many people went to check it out and ended up with red gear trying to get away....they waited till tuesdays reset to fix it....today they would of just reset the servers and said sorry to everyone reseting servers and that would of been it.
Ok this isn't unusual for Blizzard to do now that they use algorithms and some sort of bot of their own to track and detect, but he also could have been reported too as this seems to be on the rise with players who now suspect anyone of botting if you do not talk back in chat or are seen to be farming ... mistakes can happen when these things come into play. I know he appealed and that got the attention of a human counterpart to look at the reported content that resulted in the ban. It seems that to get a human person to take a look, you need to begin an appeal process. Fair enough as at least there is a recourse! And I know the account was released and reinstated. In a world where botting and auto programs are infiltrating MMOs and other games, issues and mistakes will arise esp when companies are relying on their own software to catch or take action. Players just need to know they can initiate a request for things to be re-examined and in most cases it will be turned around as long as things are legitimate. Blizzard is not alone as a company who is doing this and it will be up to us players to know how to ensure we request a re-examination. It sucks but it has been this way now for some time!
If they banned me for playing all day or for whatever reason that's not even remotely legit..I would have them just permanently delete my account..
I know what you mean.
I was banned on an account from which I sold around a billion gold, for economy abuse. Got automatically unbanned after 15 minutes, lol.
Question, can I get banned in battle net and all their games for camping in warmode and a pvp area on the graveyard?
You could but you probably won't. If you are very obnoxious and do it for a very long time maybe....but even then probably not.
I have AFKed in HS and i will continue to do so, but after the recent ban wave I will just do it for less than 12 hours. This whole "ban players for playing the game" is very lazy and mostly hurts real players who just have time - like kids. Not that a kid will lay a blizzard game, this is boomer country, boomer territory and the next home for a WoW player is the elderly home, maybe even the grave as some are already in a elderly home. I just think that Blizzard is being very lazy here but to their own detriment.
Considering wow is almost exclusively monitored by bots now... Being a "streamer" at any level with your wow account is just begging for a ban.
The real issue are the chat bots that auto flag repeated malicious reports and there’s no way to appeal them unless “you can prove your account was compromised”
What a joke.
I also got banned in 2016 for doing this at lvl, they never let us know that it is 3 software, they say, no response, I have a photo of this on x
what does this mean
that I no longer received an answer from blew and am still banned for the same, I am Dutch Belgium and they understand Nieks in Dutch and English that I wrote and with a photo nothing helps!
With attitude of Archvaldor and his amazing hacks by my side i am ready to commit any sort of crimes.
Be that making a GM delevel my level 21 black venomblade to level 20 and sell it for million gold. Forge screenshots of me looting but not receiving mogrosh toothpick from a chest to then get it restored. Making a GM gift me a wow expansion by a mistake or auto click with xbox controller for a decade. Hell i can even steal every last fish and chips out there to inflate the price.
There is no stopping a man once he really embraces the ways of the other side.
Such are the powers of this man. An artist. A Legend.
It is not the friends we made but the amount of bans we had along the way that matters in the end.
That was...so beautiful....
Ive been banned before for pwning too much in pvp and no lifeing it. I cant remember ban length but was like 3days to a week.
Really? I no-life pvp so hard I'm surprised that never happened to me.
He could have use Programs outside of WoW to make Cutting Videos/Providing certain functions, which are useful for Streaming or other games. Like AutoHotKey or simple Stuff like the Logitech, Razer, Corsair Hardware Programming suites for HotKeys on the Keyboards/Peripherie. Those Softwares are known to can run Botting Programms, which could trigger the Blizzard Cheat System.
Even if he isn´t using those Scripts in WoW, they could be active in the background and sadly trigger the System.
It is something those Systems can´t really differenciate: Is someone using AutoHotKey for Work purposes only, or is he using it for Botting Ingame?
Then Blizzard needs to chill the F out. Right now Blizzard is just acting dumb.
I just got banned for hacking or botting and I have been playing since 2005....never cheated or botted in my life,wouldnt even know how to and they won't even respond to my appeal.
I'm sorry. Can you hazard a guess as to why?
@archvaldor I am guessing the playing for to long maybe,had a week off and been playing for prob 10hrs a day
Stopped playing a year ago, guess it's not time to come back?
Hopefully this is the fag-end of Kotick-era Blizzard...
My 14 year old account was banned. Was just questing and boom account was gone.
I've just got banned, did you appeal?
He made another video. He was multiboxing with two characters in a dungeon. He made no mention of whether or not he was using third party software or hardware and I don't even think he realized that the multiboxing in a dungeon is what set off red flags.
That's actually implied by him twinking up. Multi-boxing is not a violation of the t&c itself. Software that mirrors keypresses is a violation but he states he wasn't doing that. You can alt+tab windows or just put a toon on follow or camp them somewhere it is fine and I've done it without issue.
@@archvaldor I'm thinking he had the character on follow, someone got butthurt and reported him and they didn't really look at what he was doing closely. They just assumed he was using the third party tools to do it.
I feel paranoid every time I farm Motherlode/Heart of Fear or spam auction advertisements in trade, that this kind of thing will happen to me. I remember a time when Blizzard actually cared about their players and took the time to personally investigate every case, to ensure that injustices like what happened to Erosium never happened. I want to jump ship so bad, but I have thousands of dollars and hundreds of days of gametime invested into WoW at this point. Blizzard has been banking off sunken cost fallacy and FOMO for over a decade and it irritates me.
If I remember correctly Osum was banned for using autologging
Archvaldor could you please look into a useless "exploit", so in BG's you are unable to summon the Etheral Soul-Trader pet. I was able to get the pet into a BG once not totally sure how I believe it could be due to summoning him and joining the bg quickly. I was playing with a friend and he confirmed that he was able to see it as well. I just want that swag companion in my bgs :')
He's quite an old ethereal now-when they brought him in you could glitch out a lot of stuff with timing attacks.Basically join the bg at the exact split-second he spawns and he'll come with you. But probably no reliable way to reproduce it.A fraction of a second either way and the code works properly.
@archvaldor, that's quite intriguing. However, there might exist some obscure method to achieve this with semi-reliability don't you think? For example, perhaps employing a bot/simple ai that alternates between summoning and joining at random intervals until it discovers the most effective sequence, combined with an adjustable artificial ping, could work. Do you have any other theories on how to replicate this with slightly more reliability?
Every time I see something blizzard has done, i'm glad I left and never came back.
It's like seeing someone you cut off in the news for some crime.
They are trying to fight bots, but I'm seeing them all over dragon isles anyway.
AI is used in call of duty moderation. Perhaps it’s being tested or used in WoW now.
I'm sad reading/hearing this. All the best, good luck fighting the ban 😢 My mate got banned for "botting" while he just mindlessly grinded hides for hours, actually manually doing so. It happens often.
Only bots are allowed to play.