How long does an account stay flagged?

[Pierlala]

Hello.

Few days ago I received a permanent ban. After appealing this it got turned over to a 72 hour ban. I got my account back yesterday. I used the bot on my main account. It helped me level up almost all of my toons and made a decent amount of gold with it. This was my main account. I am not planning to use honorbuddy anymore on this account. But I feel emtpy now. As silly as it sounds. Honorbuddy was fun. It gave the game more purpose. The thought of doing everything by hand makes me shiver haha. Anyway...back to topic.

Since this is my main account which I value a lot. I was wondering how long an account will be marked as botter or flagged. It bothers me. It felt great being able to use the bot while not being caught. But now I am scared to continue. Even if I make a new account. Should I move over my characters to another account and use my now flagged account as bot account? I don't know what to do. Or do they flag your IP and van that account too if I get caught again?

Please. I would like to hear people who are still botting while being banned for 72 hours.

 

[Pierlala]

Also...is it true that from now on Blizzard will pay extra attention to my account and monitor it?

 

[Giwin]

No one knows, that's the problem. Nobody can give you a real answer, it's only guesswork.

I think they keep logs for the entire duration of the account, lost a lot of accounts and the best thing to do would be to decide if it's worth the risk to bot, if the account was involved in gold selling you can sometimes get an IP ban so your main could be banned even if it wasn't used for over a year.

"Since this is my main account which I value a lot", "It felt great being able to use the bot while not being caught. But now I am scared to continue." - I strongly recommend not botting.

I believe that these are auto bans but usually someone looks over when it's a perma ban (not 100% sure of this) but I think that a Senior GM needs to confirm botting before a perma ban is put on.

 

[-M_M-]

Long ago and far away, there was an event with a free combat routine bot which resulted in a massive ban/suspension wave. I won't go into details, but I can tell you that MANY accounts were suspended and banned as a result. My main account was suspended, but I continue to bot on it occasionally.

The way I see it, if you don't give them something to investigate, Blizz won't know that you've had action taken on your account. If you're very worried about losing your main account, like Giwin said, it's probably best to avoid botting on it. This is especially true if you intend to AFK bot.

Look at it this way - there are a TON of WoW players out there. People get suspended for a number of reasons besides botting. It would be physically impossible to assign a GM to watch every single penalized player continuously. Something like a player report is the only thing that tips them off, and it's then that they might get around to watching you for a bit. Even then, unless you're running into a wall for hours on end or doing something that screams bot, it's possible that they won't even notice.

I'm not trying to create a false sense of security, but this is the logic that I use while botting and it's kept me in the clear even with a suspension on my account. The Honorbuddy forum mantra is "Don't bot what you can't afford to lose", so naturally we're going to recommend that you avoid botting on your main if you're worried about getting banned.

 

[Uber]

Accounts are flagged forever, your best bet is just to start over and make a new main account or stop botting on your main and get a secondary account.

 

[Macatho]

I just got banned on my main account just for inviting bots to the guild. Different IP-adresses and everything.

Anything can happen if a GM caughts you.