So I'll preface this thread as saying I got the ban lifted in under two hours and my primary intention is to get some more information going on this topic. ***Notice of Account Closure*** Account Name: ***** Reason for Closure: Terms of Use Violation -- Exploitative Activity: Abuse of the Economy This account was closed because one or more characters were identified exchanging, or contributing to the exchange of, in-game property (items or gold) for "real-world" currency. This exchange process negatively impacts the World of Warcraft game environment by detracting from the value of the in-game economy. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is the message both my friend and I received within 7 minutes of each other on Tuesday. I've had HB/GB for about a week and hes had it for a couple of months. We both had been using gather buddy quite extensively (rather stupidly I know, I didn't put too much research into it until tuesday night ) 3)What profile were you using?: Zuabro's Uldum Mining Only 3.1 (did have herbalisim enabled though so it nabed herbs while doing the mining path) Woots twilight highlands m/h An abysall depths profile i cannot recall the name 4)What combat class were you using? if None Just put Default then the Classname: Default 5)What plugins are you using?: Prospecting 6)How many hours per day did you bot for?: 8-12 hours per day depends 6.5)What honest percentage of time did you supervise your bot? 10-50% varied greatly 7)How many auctions per day did you have?: 0-on that character on my bank anywhere between 50-100. 8)Did you Use Any Other Bots, Hacks, or Mods? No 9)Was your account involved in gold selling? No 10)EU or US realm? US realm So what we were both doing (separate accounts, separate bots, separate ip's) was farming for ore and doing the shuffle. After receiving this ban, I contacted blizzard twice and affirmed them that I had never sold gold on my account. When i was on the phone I feel like I extracted some valuable information from him on the topics of these -SPECIFIC- bans as these in particular are automated. -What happens: there are multiple flags which players 'trip' the biggest ones being; -The amount of goods which are being transfered from one character to another (EVEN ON THE SAME ACCOUNT) * -The amount of time spent online (not necessarily farming, but how much up time does your account actually have.) ** * This means mailing and trading etc. I loosely quote him "5 - 10 stacks of something isn't going to get any attention but when you mail 100-200 ( i think he meant stacks) elementium over the course of a day that might raise some eye brows." **Any form of activity that makes you look not like a human- again another loose quote "just get up and take a break, walk around get some fresh air, I know I have some friends who all they do is spend their time farming all day when they're online, but my advice to you is like I said; take a break because farming for 10 hours a day every day looks a little suspicious." In our opinion we think that our accounts were nailed strictly by sheer volume of mail we were sending from our farmers to our bankers. This was done automatically with the built in function of the bot. The conversation I had with the blizzard rep did spur some questions I would like to ask the community; 1. How do you transfer your goods between your farmer-->prospector--> Enchanter 2. I would like to start botting again, is there a cooldown period that i should adhere too? I manually farmed after i got my account back for quite a while to just make the appearance that i farmed extensively. ( I KNOW this is personal preference, and I'm just looking for advice from more experienced botters) 3. I hear talk of people suggesting to create their own profiles, are there any tutorials on doing this? I also thought I might add, this didn't feel your run of the mill call to blizzard I poked and prodded through his comments to extract more information while trying to seem inconspicuous and genuinely oblivious. I hope this post is helpful, because as I see it, as individuals with independent knowledge bases we are weak against combating the ban hammer, but with sharing useful information (or what i perceived to be useful) makes the community that much more secure. Any advice would be wonderful and thanks in advance, ~Z~
For making your own profiles: http://www.thebuddyforum.com/honorbuddy-forum/plugins/uncataloged/19740-plugin-gb2-routesbuddy-imports-data-routes-addon-exports-gb-gb2.html
3)What profile were you using?: Zuabro's Uldum Mining Only 3.1 (did have herbalisim enabled though so it nabed herbs while doing the mining path) 6)How many hours per day did you bot for?: 8-12 hours per day depends Thats why ur banned. Bot smarter. lol
Thanks so much I'll definitely be looking into that today. Thanks for the completely useless reply, I'm well aware of why I was banned. Unless you can answer or help answer some of the questions I asked please keep your snarky replies to your self. 1. How do you transfer your goods between your farmer-->prospector--> Enchanter 2. I would like to start botting again, is there a cooldown period that i should adhere too? I manually farmed after i got my account back for quite a while to just make the appearance that i farmed extensively. ( I KNOW this is personal preference, and I'm just looking for advice from more experienced botters) Also I just thought of another question; 3.is botting on a separate account but on the same battle.net ok? Or will they just strait up close my battle.net account? Thanks again, Z
Lets see, I can type whatever the piss I want. If you dont like it. Dont read it. lmao 1. Guild Bank between toons. Works for gold too 2. That account wait a week. 3.I dont fully understand the question so I cant answer.
1, mail. 3xherb\mine post -> jc\ inscript -> enchant 2, the only bans\warnings i recieved put me out of action for a day (currently 1 account down with high level gm's looking into it, currently no reason why it shouldnt be restored) note, i dont really care about my accounts that much and ive been doing it for as long as ive had this account (look at my date joined) and generally flat out. 12 hours a day or more (use to, now down to about 10) 3, 2 of my accounts are on the same bnet. never had an issue. if for some random reason say it was your brother on his account. they are totally seperate.
I'll try to explain it better; Say i have 3 accounts X, wow1, wow2. X being my primary account and I start to bot on the account wow1 (an alternative account). Where the account is under the same battle.net as my X account do i need to be worried of a ban on my primary account or just the account that was used in the botting. Upon further review this is really hard to word appropriately. So I'll try again; IS it safe to bot on an account that is under the same battle.net as your primary account. (e.g: do they ever just ban entire battle.nets over specific accounts?) Thanks again, Z
Great!! Thanks you very much. Anyone have any obscure advice they would like to lend my way before I start botting again? Cheers, Z
See that is the gray zone on it. I personally have 2 separate battle.net just for the reason I dont wanna risk it. I heard they ban all accounts but then again thats hear say. I personally think you should bot on a separate battle.net
Nothing constructive about this post at all. I have personally 'botted' almost everyday for longer than 12 hours over the course of ~5 years and have never even caught wind of a suspension let alone a ban. I'm partial to believe Z's theory from the OP that it was most likely the sheer volume of transferred goods in a small time-frame. Have you thought about using a guild as a front? You can make use of the Gbank to transfer your goods which, (in my opinion, formed from my own experience) allows transfer of large volumes of goods with less suspicion. For example raiding guilds are often in need of large quantities of herbs/ore/etc for enhancements, nothing unusual about this. My advice would be to Google something along the lines of 'how to launder wow gold' to find a guide that will talk you through setting your operation up. This is important to keep your IP's separate (farming account & banking account) and to set up the trade link through the Gbank so there is never a direct connection between the two. This will allow you to shift huge amounts of materials from one account to the other with less chance of flagging. Edit: I found a link to the aforementioned article for you. This talks you through setting up 'Mule' accounts between your farmers and bankers/main toons. Hope this helps reduce the bans! Silverbolt: How to "Launder" your gold
have been using hb and before that pirox and before that..so on and so on, for 7 years now. I have mailed myself well over 500 items a night for most of the days between now and then. The one time i managed to catch a 72 hr ban was due to a bug in kicks profile which caused my toon to attack the same mob for hours and someone else reported me farming the named quest elite. Have made countless face to face trades of gold over the years, none of the things mention in the OP, from my experience, seem to be true. Most likely you are a victim of the new slimline reporting process. In my humble experience blizzard only acts when someone reports.
