WoW community divided as Blizzard bans 270,000 “exploitative accounts”

Blizzard Entertainment announced that it banned more than 270,000 accounts in December 2023. Thus far, community reactions seem mixed.

It was just last month that World of Warcraft players were calling for developers to drop the ban hammer on more users. The issue specifically revolved around bots and gold buyers/sellers in WoW and WoW Classic’s Season of Discovery.

One WoW fan launched a Change.org petition in an attempt to get Blizzard’s attention. Others settled for making their thoughts known on social media and in official Blizzard forums.

The studio has shared more details about the actions it took against “exploitative accounts” late last year. However, it seems the community isn’t entirely satisfied with the information provided.

Blizzard issued 270,000+ WoW account bans in December 2023

In a post on the WoW Classic forums page, a Community Manager revealed that the studio took action against 270,970 accounts in December of last year.

The message, provided for purposes of transparency, reads in part: “All of these actions were for cheating or exploitation, which primarily result in permanent bans or 6-month suspensions. This number does not include other actions such as those taken on accounts with character name or in-game language violations.”

Some users thanked Blizzard for sharing the information. In particular, one reply to the thread says the news gives them hope that their reports “are not going unread.” Not everyone’s similarly moved, however.

Blizzard Entertainment

At the time of writing, it’s unclear if these account bans apply to both WoW and WoW Classic or just the latter. One person in the comments asked this very question, saying they want confirmation that Blizzard isn’t “trying to make [its] efforts look better than they are.”

A few other users argued that the bans themselves don’t always do the trick. “You ban them for 3 days and they are right back… FFS,” reads one such reply.

Someone else pondered the legitimacy of the ban number, claiming they haven’t seen a reduction in the number of bots: “How do we know you aren’t just posting random numbers to pretend you’re doing something? …I certainly haven’t seen a decrease in bots in [the] game.”

And other comments mentioned false bans, with several people chiming in to say they’ve had their accounts flagged in recent weeks without justification.

The consensus seems to be that while this is a nice gesture, WoW fans would much rather Blizzard share hard data when it comes to “bragging” about 270,000-plus account bans.