The latest World of Warcraft story hitting the news is about Blizzard being heavy-handed with banning people. CNet reports about the boy who was playing night and day to catch up with his friends, and got banned for "powerleveling". The problem in cases like these is that there are 8 million players in World of Warcraft, and only a limited number of customer service representatives, so any appeals against having been banned take quite a while to get handled.
People have been banned for leveling too fast, coming into contact with gold or items that have been obtained fraudulently, and for logging on the same account from many different locations. While these things can be indications of terms of service violations, they can also be completely legit and innocent. For example the guy who logged onto his account from IP addresses all over the world was just a frequent business traveler, and not sharing his account for powerleveling. The method to ban people first and wait for them to appeal and prove their innocence is questionable. But it is an obvious consequence of not having enough people to look into each case more closely, and using an automated dragnet to search for suspicious behavior instead.
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