that punishment pyramid has nothing to do with botting.
blizz takes botting very serious.
if you are caught botting you will most likely get a permaban.
if you are caught botting on an older account and you cry to customer service, you may get it reduced to a 72hr suspension.
that is rare and you should be lucky enough to have that happen once maybe twice.
Generally that is directly true!
But if you decide to take the most security steps for your botting accounts, like moderation, human-like behavior, etc., you could lower the ban chance a lot!
And this could directly save your ass multiple times in the future.
For example, I used several gathering accounts in Mop and WoD after, which had 3x bans each, either account closure, reversed to Final warning+72h after appeal or direct 72h suspension, but due to the safe botting, these had happened with time window of 7-11 months between them, so it seems the accounts have clear record timer of several months or so.
Some say its 6 months counter (We could never confirm it) but they definitely have it, because I have denied appeals on plenty of accounts which received the account closure in less than 2-3 months after the first 72h, and the contacted GM directly refused to look into them.
But with these, which had not received penalty in the last 6 months or so, the GM was always polite enough to look into it, and check why I have received the penalty.
That way I even reversed the account closures on two SOR accounts, seems the GM was not following a policy to check the matching wow account - battle.net account ownership.
