tbc-classic Second Battleground AFK Banwave a Day Before Burning Crusade Classic Launch

[Starym 3,779]

 

Blizzard is getting pretty serious with the bans/suspensions, as another banwave has hit merely a day before the expansion launch! The 8-day suspensions went out at the exact same time (3:08 PT) as last week's and have affected many players and, as you'd expect, plenty of them are claiming to be innocent or even have no idea what they were suspended for.

While a lot of the responses to the thread are along the "you deserve it for AFKing, we don't believe you" lines, Blizzard has had some recent trouble with suspending innocent players, with the ConsolePort drama a few days ago. That was a bit of a different story, as it caught the mod because of the way it works while flushing out botters, but it did highlight the fact that their suspension process isn't fool-proof. Luckily in that case the clearly innocent players got their suspensions reverted, but here it's a lot more tricky, as any number of those appealing or claiming to not have AFKed/played to lose/not participated could just be very easily lying as well.

The battleground issue is in focus these past two weeks due to the double honor that Blizzard added to the BCC pre-patch, which resulted in a LOT of players spending a LOT of time (some even 12-16 hours a day for a week+) to grind out everything honor related. Many of these players that played a very intensely are reporting getting the 8 day suspensions, so there could theoretically be some issue where the sheer volume of data coming from them resulted in an AFK conclusion by whichever system Blizzard uses to determine a suspensions. Players are also assuming other players reporting them may have had something to do with their suspensions, but Blizzard have stated that they base their decisions on data on this topic, not reports. We can't be sure of what exactly is true, but we can be sure of the fact that Blizzard is sending a pretty clear message on these BG AFK/pre-made loss groups with the suspensions coming 1 day before the expansion launch, as last week's were basically a warning shot (since they end on the BCC launch day).

Hopefully most of the suspensions are justified and those that aren't can get overturned quickly.

[Ragingwolf 286]

Revert all suspensions period and start fresh after the launch of TBC: Classic.  If the article is accurate and alot of innocent people got caught in the ban net it's not fair to restrict them from launch of TBC.  And If I were a Blizzard employee I would find a better alternative way to flag the truely guilty instead of based program that blankets a set behavior model.