Blizzard Suspends Over 74,000 WoW Accounts

Blizzard has suspended over 74,000 World of Warcraft accounts which they found to be in violation of their End User License Agreement (EULA).

The news was relayed in a forum post by Community Manager Kaivax who wrote that Blizzard actually rarely communicates when such actions are taken,

“We rarely communicate publicly about this, because we’ve found that describing our sources and methods can make it easier for malicious actors to work around them, but we feel that it’s worthwhile to expand on the subject today, as many players have recently asked us for more details.”

To that end, over 74,000 accounts were suspended, with the primary reason being botting. This presents a challenge for Blizzard as they have to prove that the accused player is indeed botting and cheating. To that end, Blizzard notes they have several systems in place to account for such behavior, however, it’s not always easy,

“Yes, there have been cases where a legitimate player appeared (to another player) to be botting. In those cases, where a legitimate player is reported and then cleared of wrongdoing, it can be very frustrating to the reporting player to again see what they think is a bot.”

Blizzard notes that the issue they’re trying to solve is a challenging one, due to real-money trading influencing cheaters from working around Blizzard’s preventative measures. Blizzard notes they are continuing to work on their measures.