I was running my miner the other day while I was watching football. I peeked in on it every so often, probably every 10 minutes or so, but no more that 20 minutes unchecked. Anyway when I came back there was a Blizz pop up window with a counter that said "Your game time expires in 30 minutes". I didn't see anything in my chat box, whispers, a timer countdown etc (like a realm reset countdown timer). Eventually the pop up window said shorter amounts of time, and it was also present on some of my characters but not all of them (I logged onto several to check what was going on). My payment for subscription had just gone through 4 days before this all happened. I sent a report in-game to a moderator who responded the next day and said he "confirmed it was a bug" and that it had been fixed. Since then nothing else odd has happened, and I have botted a little more carefully.
Google: If you are still having problems, contact a GM or possibly use some solutions here: https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/you-need-to-buy-more-time Otherwise, I have heard a lot of people say this in raid or bg chats; It is just a problem that blizzard has. Even though it says your gametime is up, or even that your account is Frozen, others say that they can still log on and play as if there was no error.
Tinfoil hat. Just imagine them doing that, warning you that you will be banned in 30 minutes. Like what am I going to accomplish in 30 minutes? Edit: Could send your gold. Then that account would get banned haha.
I asked b/c I've been playing for over 5 years without ever seeing something like this. I've been botting for about 5 weeks and now I see it. I didn't think they were setting a timer to ban me, I was wondering if this was their way of finding out if I was a bot or a real person. But anyway, thanks for the info.
Gold_Goblin, Okay, seriously the timer window is nothing more then the game telling you that more time is needed. You told an admin and they said it was a bug. No where in any of what you said did an admin request to speak to you nor did you get a suspension email. You are fine, relax, play on...
I don't think Blizzard would try to deceive you with your subscription to verify that you're a human. You probably won't know they're on to you unless a GM contacts you in-game, or it's too late and you find out they've already banned you when you try to log into your account.
Thanks for the replies. I didn't want to be paranoid, but then again I felt like it's safer to ask and know.
Talking of being new, and paranoid, I have been doing a lot of looking around but still have a question that I can't seem to get answered: Does Blizz ban through MAC address? For example, if I run a botted account in the background (x32) and hop on my main account to play (x64) does this send up red flags? Has anyone had this issue before?
No one knows for sure, but the general consensus it that they do not. They don't even ban within the same battle.net account (though there have been some small exceptions to this). I currently have 3 banned WoW accounts (banned at separate times) in a battle.net account with 3 unbanned ones.
So generally, even if you have two wow's running on your one PC, there shouldn't be no issue. I mean realistically, I have had three accounts open on my PC at one previously (trading between husbands and friends account) etc and there has never been a problem before. I just do not, and will not, bot using my primary Bnet account. I do not want to lose it. I just worry that if I have both running on the one MAC address they will ban both Bnets :S
I believe I have noticed a pattern of Blizz liking to ban US accounts late Monday after-noon pre maintenance. This seems to be the time I have frequently been banned. Obviously for actions I did prior in the week.
I have ran one comp with 12+ bots, and only have a single bot get banned. At other times, I have had several get banned at once. In all cases, each account has an independent B.net. I have had multiple accounts on one B.net and have one account get banned while the others were untouched. Personally I feel most bans are auto triggers by a particular behavior or behaviors.
