A family dad waited 13 years to be able to play World of Warcraft with his son – but his luck quickly ran out.
A father on Reddit recounts how he spent 13 years waiting to show his son his favorite game but shortly after, his account was banned. How did that happen?
The Stars Aligned
The father tells us that everything led up to the perfect moment: his wife is away from home for a few days, his son has a few days off, and he has managed to get an old PC up and running again. Perfect, then, for introducing his son to World of Warcraft, which he has been playing for 20 years. He buys him a month's play time, shows him the controls, and sits next to him at the computer. Together they slaughter a few boars until the game disconnects and both are informed that the account has been banned. The only thing they can read in the email is:
"The Battle.net account has violated the Blizzard End User License Agreement. As a result, this Battle.net Account and all associated game accounts have been permanently closed."
Not Much Clarity On Bot Messages
The Redditor is, of course, extremely frustrated that all of this happened so suddenly, especially to a fresh account. Since there is no button or obvious way to dispute the ban, he turned to Reddit to get to the bottom of it. After sending an email to Blizzard, he received another automated response assuring him that the ban was justified and would not be reversed. The question remains: why was the account banned in the first place? He insists that he was present for the entire hour of gameplay and supervised everything when Blizzard swung the ban hammer.
Players Increasingly Frustrated On Bot Rulings
By now, the ban has been lifted. And again, no one knows why the ban was imposed or why the account was ultimately reactivated. The post itself is not particularly significant, but it does raise the question of how useful automated bans are and how frustrating it can be when you ultimately have no idea what you did wrong. It happens time and again that players are banned because an anti-cheat program detects other programs as scripts. Often you then wait for days for an answer – usually automated, too. It is understandable that companies like Blizzard can't deal with every problem immediately, but what was it like back in the day?
Players Judge Players
With the release of Counter-Strike 2, many players have wished for the return of the so-called “Overwatch” (not to be confused with Blizzard's shooter). Here, selected experts were able to watch gameplay of a convicted player and decide for themselves whether a punishment is appropriate for this person. This is because the system sometimes marks innocent accounts, or allows cheaters to continue to run free. There have also been repeated attempts to revive League of Legends' former tribunal. Here, players were able to view details and, in particular, chat history and decide whether this player should be punished.
What do you think? Would you like to see more player interaction in decisions like this again?