Note that I am not defending blizzard's atrocious customer service, nor their game.
But are you sure you were kicked by a gm?
A person gaining access to your account would explain both the random getting kicked to login screen, and blizzard banning the account. That is how they deal with compromised accounts, until you chew them out.
There is no such thing as "banned for no reason". There had to be some reason for it. Whether or not its a good reason (maybe some mix up or not or some situation that was mistaken as a malicious attack) in the end claiming to be 'banned for no reason' is jsut a big hoax. There is always a reason, there is no reason to ban random people it would push people away. Whether that ban should stay and what caused it would be what you should try finding out as that is the big factor here.
Let me reiterate, since this appears to be an incredibly difficult concept for people to grasp, but I have done NOTHING, I repeat, NOTHING which could by any stretch of the imagination be contrued as having violated to ToS of Diablo III (or any other game for that matter, in this context at least).
My Diablo III history has consisted of precisely the following: I created one toon for each of the available classes. I have ONLY played solo. I've played through Act I and the very beginning of Act II on Normal mode only. I have interacted with exactly 0 other players. I have said exactly 0 things in any chat channel in the game. I have looked at the AH and the RMAH exactly 0 times. I have spent exactly $0 beyond the initial purchase price on this game. The "being randomly booted by GM's" which I mentioned has been exactly that. I log into a character, and about 20 seconds later get booted back to the account logon screen. At which point (until the ban) I would be able to log back into the same character and play with no issues whatsoever (at least until the connection to the Battle.net servers would become too unstable to play anymore). Never have I been given a reason beyond "suspicious game activity". Is logging into a character to play really that suspicous? Is it because all of my characters have the same name? If so, then there should be a name validity/availability checker implemented. Is it because I have more than one character slot used? If so, then we shouldn't be given 8 or 10 available slots for characters.
I said this before, but it bears mentioning again. Had I actually done something which could merit banning, I wouldn't be complaining here. As a general rule I exist somewhat on the fringes of legality, and I am and have always been completely willing to accept any potential consequences such a life may bring some day, but in this particular instance I went the completely 100% legal and valid route, and ironically it has been the one time I've been really screwed by things.
Also worth mentioning here is that I purchased the game back on the 12'th of June, so there are absolutely no potential issue with this whole 72 hour waiting period until the transaction clears thing they've implemented.
I really don't understand why people seem incapable of accepting these things as facts. Okay, yeah, most people are lying assholes, especially when on the internet, and I do try to take that factor into account. But it is still disheartening to be forcefully reminded that regardless of truthfulness, innocence (situational at least), or any other generally considered positive traits, the automatic assumption is that I'm a lying bastatrd, and I obviously must have done something wrong. You know what I have to say to that? Screw you and the horse you rode in on.
You answered your own question.
Im sure you can see why we have a hard time believing you got banned just because they felt like banning someone and the magic 8 ball chose you.
GMs randomly disconnecting you is reason enough to wonder why, a gm forcing a logout is something you REALLY have to go all out for to get that done.
Here is another thing that is waving a major red flag, if you are innocent.. what is the problem with contacting blizzard?
Umm, I'm not sure where you're getting that I have a problem contacting Blizzard from. It's actually quite the opposite. I have contacted them, they just haven't been able to be bothered to respond. I'd prefer not to have to call them because I simply don't like speaking to people on the phone. It's a personal quirk having nothing to do with the particular issue. When at all possible, I prefer to resolve issues of this sort online. Plus I'm in a different state at the moment visiting my family.
And again, you obviously don't have to ":go all out:" to be kicked to login by a GM as literally ALL I had done when this happened was to log in. I think it happened once when I logged out from one character, then logged into one of a different class. It also occurred when logging back into the game after having lost the connection to the server. If those constitute "going all out", then we have drastically different interpretations of the phrase.
You're going to have to call them bro... Playing pitty patt e-mail games is not a real way to get your money back. Call them, you can resolve the situation is moments compared to days / weeks thru e-mail channels..
PM before you report at least or you could just block.
It's entirely possible that the banning was a mistake by Blizzard. Rumor is they ARE human and prone to mistakes.
The OP just needs to get it fxed. Stiring up more Blizzard hate isn't helping him or anyone else.
Hence my prefacing of my original post with "I just feel the need to bitch"
I'm not expecting posting here to in any way resolve the problem I'm having. I expect my submission of a ticket to the "Unfairly banned" subsection of theiir customer support to take care of that (once they get around to it).
And I probably should have mentioned this earlier, but my suspicion is that the ban happened because I had logged into a character which was over level 13 after patch 1.0.3 was implemented, and I happen to be using a copy of the game purchased via digital download. And since 1.0.3 had the side effect of limiting those who purchased digital download to level 13 and Act I for 72 hours after purchase (in spite of the fact that my purchase was nearly 2 weeks ago), the system assumed that I must have cheated in order for my character to exist at its current level. Even though it had existed well before the patch was implemented.
It is also my suspicion that I am not the only person this has happened to.
It's entirely possible that the banning was a mistake by Blizzard. Rumor is they ARE human and prone to mistakes.
The OP just needs to get it fxed. Stiring up more Blizzard hate isn't helping him or anyone else.
Hence my prefacing of my original post with "I just feel the need to bitch"
I'm not expecting posting here to in any way resolve the problem I'm having. I expect my submission of a ticket to the "Unfairly banned" subsection of theiir customer support to take care of that (once they get around to it).
And I probably should have mentioned this earlier, but my suspicion is that the ban happened because I had logged into a character which was over level 13 after patch 1.0.3 was implemented, and I happen to be using a copy of the game purchased via digital download. And since 1.0.3 had the side effect of limiting those who purchased digital download to level 13 and Act I for 72 hours after purchase (in spite of the fact that my purchase was nearly 2 weeks ago), the system assumed that I must have cheated in order for my character to exist at its current level. Even though it had existed well before the patch was implemented.
It is also my suspicion that I am not the only person this has happened to.
If your suspicion is correct than blizzard is pushing stupid to new limits. Breaking their own records here, impressive.
call your credit card company and have a chargeback issued for not giving you what you paid for, a game you can play.
Chargeback should be your last resort. If you chargeback you will potentially null in void yourself to ever playing another Blizzard game using that CC.
Chargebacks aren't normally recieved well by companies and they will not deal with the customer again in alot of cases. If you go the right route and are persistant enough you can get your situation settled without having to go the chargeback route.
1) Call Blizzard
2) Go hard
3) ???
4) Profit..
This of course if your story is true and you did not wrong in getting your account banned. Also no, just because you feel its alright to bot, gold-farm or anything other thing that might violate the ToS does not make you a victim to the system. If your story holds water.. Then you will more than likely get your situation resolved after calling and speaking senseably with a CSR..
Here is another problem with the charge back, IF your CC company does their job properly they'll contact blizzard to nvestigate the issue, when they hear you are banned they wont give your money back.
That isn't completely true... They'll block the payment to blizzard until it gets resolved via investigation. Just because blizz tells them they banned you isn't a good enough reason for them to not give you back. They'd have to do a full fledged investigation as to check and see if the grounds for banning you is valid or not and etc... Waaay too much effort on blizzard's part because they dont care about losing one mindless drone of a player. Therefore, OP will be fine if reports to his credit card company for a charge back. Also, you can ALWAYS create a new blizz account with another name and address and a different credit card number.
The line "randomly booted by GM's" looks suspicious. The behaviour you're experiencing might lead someone to think that your account might have been compromised and used for (probably) spamming. The "hacker" logs in and boots you out (yea that's what happens and used to happen when you logged from a different PC) and then you log back in again, the "hacker" gets booted, realizes that you're playing and leaves you alone.
Again, this might be just a wild guess, but if i'd have to put my money on something, i'd bet that your account was compromised and used for "suspicious activities". You do not own an Authenticator, right?
Im not ruling out the posibility they made a mistake, it happens and if they did they will have it resolved, all it takes is patience but here is the thing.
Originally posted by SkinFlayer
At this point, I'm just becoming so fed up with the experience that I don't even know if I want them to bother unbanning me.
This strikes me as odd, if you are so innocent, which you may very well be, again what is the problem with contacting them?
There is no problem with contacting them. I did. As soon as it happened. They haven't replied yet. The problem with contacting them again is that my desktop and I are in different states at the moment, it's the weekend, and I have other work to do which relates to my real world job.
Also, one other thing to clarify. I suppose banning for no reason may have been a poor choice of words. Banning for no apparent reason, or banning without supplying a definitive reason may have been better choices. I'm not trying to imply that Blizzard it applying the Ban hammer to people picked by a random number generator. My whole original point (which I seem to have lost along the way) was that some of the changes introduced in the 1.0.3 patch implemented an extremely overzealous system of account banning which has the side effect of banning legitimate customers simply because of the method with which they decided to purchase the game, and that IS something that Blizzard should be held accountable for.
For all I know when they suspect an account has been compromised they ban it for your own safety. The only way you'll know this is by contacting Blizzard Customer Support because if this was the case, you'll have it unbanned.
As for complaining about Blizzard doing their job of banning accounts that supposedly break the ToS, this thread is pointless.
call your credit card company and have a chargeback issued for not giving you what you paid for, a game you can play.
Chargeback should be your last resort. If you chargeback you will potentially null in void yourself to ever playing another Blizzard game using that CC.
Chargebacks aren't normally recieved well by companies and they will not deal with the customer again in alot of cases. If you go the right route and are persistant enough you can get your situation settled without having to go the chargeback route.
1) Call Blizzard
2) Go hard
3) ???
4) Profit..
This of course if your story is true and you did not wrong in getting your account banned. Also no, just because you feel its alright to bot, gold-farm or anything other thing that might violate the ToS does not make you a victim to the system. If your story holds water.. Then you will more than likely get your situation resolved after calling and speaking senseably with a CSR..
Here is another problem with the charge back, IF your CC company does their job properly they'll contact blizzard to nvestigate the issue, when they hear you are banned they wont give your money back.
That isn't completely true... They'll block the payment to blizzard until it gets resolved via investigation. Just because blizz tells them they banned you isn't a good enough reason for them to not give you back. They'd have to do a full fledged investigation as to check and see if the grounds for banning you is valid or not and etc... Waaay too much effort on blizzard's part because they dont care about losing one mindless drone of a player. Therefore, OP will be fine if reports to his credit card company for a charge back. Also, you can ALWAYS create a new blizz account with another name and address and a different credit card number.
I simplefied the whole chain of events, you are right, blizzard will have to give them the grounds for the ban, blizzard doesnt have to to a full fledged investigation, Its also a large hassle for the CC company to debate if the ban was right or wrong, sp quite often CC companies just side with the company.
Again, a ban regardless if it was right or wrong is NO reason for a refund, they are only obligated to re-instate your acount if you where wrongly banned.
The line "randomly booted by GM's" looks suspicious. The behaviour you're experiencing might lead someone to think that your account might have been compromised and used for (probably) spamming. The "hacker" logs in and boots you out (yea that's what happens and used to happen when you logged from a different PC) and then you log back in again, the "hacker" gets booted, realizes that you're playing and leaves you alone.
Again, this might be just a wild guess, but if i'd have to put my money on something, i'd bet that your account was compromised and used for "suspicious activities". You do not own an Authenticator, right?
You are correct. With both parts here. And in my support ticket, i did mention the possibility of my account having been compromised. It seems a bit unlikely as I quite recently changed the password to the account, but the hackers out there are quite resourceful and creative. It also seems a little odd that my account would be hacked, but I see no indication thereof (no extra or missing gear/gold/characters/levels).
I also do not own an authenticator, and refuse to shell out additional money for such a thing. I play one game which uses a battle.net account, and I already spent more than I wanted to on it ($60 is steep when you're a grad student).
Also I would run a full malware and Virus scan on my computer to make sure you are not infected with a trojan.
Yes, definitely do that.
And also, take into consideration that the most used technique for account hijacking is e-mail/password collected from a fansite (and not only, any website where you register that e-mail "works"). If you use the respective e-mail and the same password on other websites, i advise you to change the combination as soon as possible.
The line "randomly booted by GM's" looks suspicious. The behaviour you're experiencing might lead someone to think that your account might have been compromised and used for (probably) spamming. The "hacker" logs in and boots you out (yea that's what happens and used to happen when you logged from a different PC) and then you log back in again, the "hacker" gets booted, realizes that you're playing and leaves you alone.
Again, this might be just a wild guess, but if i'd have to put my money on something, i'd bet that your account was compromised and used for "suspicious activities". You do not own an Authenticator, right?
I second this. I had my Blizzard account compromised before. Scammers are sneaky bastards. Contact Blizz and tell them. If you haven't received an email response right when you were "banned" and you can't log into battle.net, then yeah, your account is probably compromised, and not banned at all.
Im not ruling out the posibility they made a mistake, it happens and if they did they will have it resolved, all it takes is patience but here is the thing.
Originally posted by SkinFlayer
At this point, I'm just becoming so fed up with the experience that I don't even know if I want them to bother unbanning me.
This strikes me as odd, if you are so innocent, which you may very well be, again what is the problem with contacting them?
There is no problem with contacting them. I did. As soon as it happened. They haven't replied yet. The problem with contacting them again is that my desktop and I are in different states at the moment, it's the weekend, and I have other work to do which relates to my real world job.
Also, one other thing to clarify. I suppose banning for no reason may have been a poor choice of words. Banning for no apparent reason, or banning without supplying a definitive reason may have been better choices. I'm not trying to imply that Blizzard it applying the Ban hammer to people picked by a random number generator. My whole original point (which I seem to have lost along the way) was that some of the changes introduced in the 1.0.3 patch implemented an extremely overzealous system of account banning which has the side effect of banning legitimate customers simply because of the method with which they decided to purchase the game, and that IS something that Blizzard should be held accountable for.
Look Im sure you understand this already, Im not saying you are guilty at all. But Im sure you can see the inconsistancies in your story simply put dont help your case making yourself more believeble..
You down right said they banned you for no reason, now you are saying they banned you for no apparent or definative reaon, which suggests they DID give a reason.
You also implied you are unsure if you should bother to try to get your acount unbanned, which implies you didnt bother to contact them, now you are telling you did, which btw Im more then willing to believe.
Again, Im not saying you are guilty, if you are innocent I DO understand your fustration and you DO have my sympathy, unfortunately at this time all you can do is have some patience and wait. Im sure you understand why it looks suspicious the way you present "us"your case.
To be honest OP it sounds like someone else has been logging into yoru acoutn besides you, which would explain your getting logged out and then being able to log right back in. You got Banned for suspicious activity (logging in from 2 different places aty the same time is pretty suspicious). Quit honestly get your ego in check your not that important that a blizzard moderator/gm/admin is going to start picking on you and kicking you off the servers.
The line "randomly booted by GM's" looks suspicious. The behaviour you're experiencing might lead someone to think that your account might have been compromised and used for (probably) spamming. The "hacker" logs in and boots you out (yea that's what happens and used to happen when you logged from a different PC) and then you log back in again, the "hacker" gets booted, realizes that you're playing and leaves you alone.
Again, this might be just a wild guess, but if i'd have to put my money on something, i'd bet that your account was compromised and used for "suspicious activities". You do not own an Authenticator, right?
You are correct. With both parts here. And in my support ticket, i did mention the possibility of my account having been compromised. It seems a bit unlikely as I quite recently changed the password to the account, but the hackers out there are quite resourceful and creative. It also seems a little odd that my account would be hacked, but I see no indication thereof (no extra or missing gear/gold/characters/levels).
I also do not own an authenticator, and refuse to shell out additional money for such a thing. I play one game which uses a battle.net account, and I already spent more than I wanted to on it ($60 is steep when you're a grad student).
I know what you're feeling. I have been "hacked" somehow "out of the blue" a few years ago (my WoW account was). If they find valuables they just leave you naked but if you are a new player (did not thoroughly read your initial post, but i assume you are, because of the behavior) they just use your account for spamming. Those spammers you see in chat, many of them are regular accounts hijacked.
Btw, when i was hacked, the hacker sent a ticket to the GM's that i've been hacked. My items were restored and he sold them again. This happened in like 5 hours. As the other poster said, call them, they do not trust anything coming from your compromised account. Also, they might think that your e-mail was also compromised (fortunately i used a different password to access my e-mail, but was too lazy to make a new combination for Curse - i think that's how they "got" me)
For all I know when they suspect an account has been compromised they ban it for your own safety. The only way you'll know this is by contacting Blizzard Customer Support because if this was the case, you'll have it unbanned.
As for complaining about Blizzard doing their job of banning accounts that supposedly break the ToS, this thread is pointless.
You know what's even more pointless than my having created the thread in the first place? Your telling me that doing so was pointless. Even more pointless than that is my bothering to point out how pointless your labelling of my original post as pointless was.
Though I suppose depending on how you look at it, all postings in forums which do nothing other than put forth opinions are pointless. Anyone who thinks that forum posts have any effect on companies (especially to forums which have no direct connection to companies) , or really serve any purpose beyond mental masturbation or the letting off of steam by ranting to people who frankly couldn't care less, are severely deluded.
Like I said earlier I also suspect it is an issue with your account being stolen. That doesn't mean it is still not blizzard's customer service at fault here, they have terrible response time and absolutely no secondary measures in place to prevent people from accessing your account.
They would much rather your account just stay banned. They got your sale, they might get another out of you if you stay banned. There was a good look at how they used this to inflate their (already large without doing this) wow sub numbers written awhile back.
What did the email from Blizzard say? They always send an email with the reason why you were banned. I remember my cousin got his WoW account banned because someone stole his account and used it for third party trading or something. Good thing he filed a complaint that the account was stolen before it was banned. But he received an email explaining why he was banned and after explaining the situation to Blizzard they restored his account.
If you truly haven't done anything, email them. They will come back to you in a couple of days and they will resolve the problem for you.
Originally posted by Baitness
Like I said earlier I also suspect it is an issue with your account being stolen. That doesn't mean it is still not blizzard's customer service at fault here, they have terrible response time and absolutely no secondary measures in place to prevent people from accessing your account.
They would much rather your account just stay banned. They got your sale, they might get another out of you if you stay banned. There was a good look at how they used this to inflate their (already large without doing this) wow sub numbers written awhile back.
Lies. Blizzard will always restore your account if you didn't do anything wrong or if your accout was stolen. Their response time has been 1-2 days replies to my emails which is more than satisfactory.so Also they do have secondary measures to prevent people from accessing your account. Autheticators anyone?
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
Like I said earlier I also suspect it is an issue with your account being stolen. That doesn't mean it is still not blizzard's customer service at fault here, they have terrible response time and absolutely no secondary measures in place to prevent people from accessing your account.
Well, i'm not a Blizzard defender, i actually kinda hate them for what they did to Diablo, but...
I've never heard of anyone owning an Authenticator and being hacked. It seems to me as the best measure that anyone can take to protect themselves. Probably there were situations of accounts with authenticators hacked, but how many, 10-15 people? I know the thing costs a bit of money, but there's a free version for phones. Not to bash anyone, but the physical version costs under a month's sub. If you buy a 60 bucks game and you love to play it, and gonna play it for a long time, it's worth it. If you consider the game a piece of garbage (as many do), why bother, just let it go.
Usually around this point you know the OP did something that they aren't admitting to.
How's that? Is that something you'd do or something? People that work for Blizzard can't make mistakes? What with that attitude? Because it hasn't happened to you doesn't mean it won't. At least give people the benefit of the doubt.
So, since the universe really seems to love irony, as we've all been going back and forth here, Blizzard did finally decide to get back to me, and I have in fact been completely vindicated. To quote from the reply
@ have been compromised. We found evidence of an exploitive IP accessing your Diablo 3 and using a farming bot while on the Korean servers. That is what triggered the ban on the account when our system detected the bot. I went ahead and removed the ban though since it does appear to be a hacker and I sent a password reset to your registered email. So you should be able to log in now and as far as we could see there was no damage done to your characters, the account was only being used to farm."
I'm mildly let down that my inital thoughts on this having been related to the 1.0.3 changes turned out to be untrue, but can't be right all the time. I am however quite pleased at being able to now turn to everyone who was so convinced that I must have been the one responsible for having done something wrong, and say I told you I didn't. Hey, whaddya know, someone claimed they were telling the truth, and they actually were. Surprising I know...
Comments
Note that I am not defending blizzard's atrocious customer service, nor their game.
But are you sure you were kicked by a gm?
A person gaining access to your account would explain both the random getting kicked to login screen, and blizzard banning the account. That is how they deal with compromised accounts, until you chew them out.
Good luck to you.
Do you have an Authenticator?
There is no such thing as "banned for no reason". There had to be some reason for it. Whether or not its a good reason (maybe some mix up or not or some situation that was mistaken as a malicious attack) in the end claiming to be 'banned for no reason' is jsut a big hoax. There is always a reason, there is no reason to ban random people it would push people away. Whether that ban should stay and what caused it would be what you should try finding out as that is the big factor here.
You're going to have to call them bro... Playing pitty patt e-mail games is not a real way to get your money back. Call them, you can resolve the situation is moments compared to days / weeks thru e-mail channels..
PM before you report at least or you could just block.
Hence my prefacing of my original post with "I just feel the need to bitch"
I'm not expecting posting here to in any way resolve the problem I'm having. I expect my submission of a ticket to the "Unfairly banned" subsection of theiir customer support to take care of that (once they get around to it).
And I probably should have mentioned this earlier, but my suspicion is that the ban happened because I had logged into a character which was over level 13 after patch 1.0.3 was implemented, and I happen to be using a copy of the game purchased via digital download. And since 1.0.3 had the side effect of limiting those who purchased digital download to level 13 and Act I for 72 hours after purchase (in spite of the fact that my purchase was nearly 2 weeks ago), the system assumed that I must have cheated in order for my character to exist at its current level. Even though it had existed well before the patch was implemented.
It is also my suspicion that I am not the only person this has happened to.
If your suspicion is correct than blizzard is pushing stupid to new limits. Breaking their own records here, impressive.
That isn't completely true... They'll block the payment to blizzard until it gets resolved via investigation. Just because blizz tells them they banned you isn't a good enough reason for them to not give you back. They'd have to do a full fledged investigation as to check and see if the grounds for banning you is valid or not and etc... Waaay too much effort on blizzard's part because they dont care about losing one mindless drone of a player. Therefore, OP will be fine if reports to his credit card company for a charge back. Also, you can ALWAYS create a new blizz account with another name and address and a different credit card number.
@ Initial poster
The line "randomly booted by GM's" looks suspicious. The behaviour you're experiencing might lead someone to think that your account might have been compromised and used for (probably) spamming. The "hacker" logs in and boots you out (yea that's what happens and used to happen when you logged from a different PC) and then you log back in again, the "hacker" gets booted, realizes that you're playing and leaves you alone.
Again, this might be just a wild guess, but if i'd have to put my money on something, i'd bet that your account was compromised and used for "suspicious activities". You do not own an Authenticator, right?
There is no problem with contacting them. I did. As soon as it happened. They haven't replied yet. The problem with contacting them again is that my desktop and I are in different states at the moment, it's the weekend, and I have other work to do which relates to my real world job.
Also, one other thing to clarify. I suppose banning for no reason may have been a poor choice of words. Banning for no apparent reason, or banning without supplying a definitive reason may have been better choices. I'm not trying to imply that Blizzard it applying the Ban hammer to people picked by a random number generator. My whole original point (which I seem to have lost along the way) was that some of the changes introduced in the 1.0.3 patch implemented an extremely overzealous system of account banning which has the side effect of banning legitimate customers simply because of the method with which they decided to purchase the game, and that IS something that Blizzard should be held accountable for.
LOL I just created an account to post exactly what Simmihi just said.
@OP you sir have had your account compromised and taken over. The Only way to deal with this is to call Blizzard, dont email them.
For all I know when they suspect an account has been compromised they ban it for your own safety. The only way you'll know this is by contacting Blizzard Customer Support because if this was the case, you'll have it unbanned.
As for complaining about Blizzard doing their job of banning accounts that supposedly break the ToS, this thread is pointless.
Also I would run a full malware and Virus scan on my computer to make sure you are not infected with a trojan.
I simplefied the whole chain of events, you are right, blizzard will have to give them the grounds for the ban, blizzard doesnt have to to a full fledged investigation, Its also a large hassle for the CC company to debate if the ban was right or wrong, sp quite often CC companies just side with the company.
Again, a ban regardless if it was right or wrong is NO reason for a refund, they are only obligated to re-instate your acount if you where wrongly banned.
You are correct. With both parts here. And in my support ticket, i did mention the possibility of my account having been compromised. It seems a bit unlikely as I quite recently changed the password to the account, but the hackers out there are quite resourceful and creative. It also seems a little odd that my account would be hacked, but I see no indication thereof (no extra or missing gear/gold/characters/levels).
I also do not own an authenticator, and refuse to shell out additional money for such a thing. I play one game which uses a battle.net account, and I already spent more than I wanted to on it ($60 is steep when you're a grad student).
Yes, definitely do that.
And also, take into consideration that the most used technique for account hijacking is e-mail/password collected from a fansite (and not only, any website where you register that e-mail "works"). If you use the respective e-mail and the same password on other websites, i advise you to change the combination as soon as possible.
I second this. I had my Blizzard account compromised before. Scammers are sneaky bastards. Contact Blizz and tell them. If you haven't received an email response right when you were "banned" and you can't log into battle.net, then yeah, your account is probably compromised, and not banned at all.
Look Im sure you understand this already, Im not saying you are guilty at all. But Im sure you can see the inconsistancies in your story simply put dont help your case making yourself more believeble..
You down right said they banned you for no reason, now you are saying they banned you for no apparent or definative reaon, which suggests they DID give a reason.
You also implied you are unsure if you should bother to try to get your acount unbanned, which implies you didnt bother to contact them, now you are telling you did, which btw Im more then willing to believe.
Again, Im not saying you are guilty, if you are innocent I DO understand your fustration and you DO have my sympathy, unfortunately at this time all you can do is have some patience and wait. Im sure you understand why it looks suspicious the way you present "us"your case.
To be honest OP it sounds like someone else has been logging into yoru acoutn besides you, which would explain your getting logged out and then being able to log right back in. You got Banned for suspicious activity (logging in from 2 different places aty the same time is pretty suspicious). Quit honestly get your ego in check your not that important that a blizzard moderator/gm/admin is going to start picking on you and kicking you off the servers.
I know what you're feeling. I have been "hacked" somehow "out of the blue" a few years ago (my WoW account was). If they find valuables they just leave you naked but if you are a new player (did not thoroughly read your initial post, but i assume you are, because of the behavior) they just use your account for spamming. Those spammers you see in chat, many of them are regular accounts hijacked.
Btw, when i was hacked, the hacker sent a ticket to the GM's that i've been hacked. My items were restored and he sold them again. This happened in like 5 hours. As the other poster said, call them, they do not trust anything coming from your compromised account. Also, they might think that your e-mail was also compromised (fortunately i used a different password to access my e-mail, but was too lazy to make a new combination for Curse - i think that's how they "got" me)
You know what's even more pointless than my having created the thread in the first place? Your telling me that doing so was pointless. Even more pointless than that is my bothering to point out how pointless your labelling of my original post as pointless was.
Though I suppose depending on how you look at it, all postings in forums which do nothing other than put forth opinions are pointless. Anyone who thinks that forum posts have any effect on companies (especially to forums which have no direct connection to companies) , or really serve any purpose beyond mental masturbation or the letting off of steam by ranting to people who frankly couldn't care less, are severely deluded.
Like I said earlier I also suspect it is an issue with your account being stolen. That doesn't mean it is still not blizzard's customer service at fault here, they have terrible response time and absolutely no secondary measures in place to prevent people from accessing your account.
They would much rather your account just stay banned. They got your sale, they might get another out of you if you stay banned. There was a good look at how they used this to inflate their (already large without doing this) wow sub numbers written awhile back.
What did the email from Blizzard say? They always send an email with the reason why you were banned. I remember my cousin got his WoW account banned because someone stole his account and used it for third party trading or something. Good thing he filed a complaint that the account was stolen before it was banned. But he received an email explaining why he was banned and after explaining the situation to Blizzard they restored his account.
If you truly haven't done anything, email them. They will come back to you in a couple of days and they will resolve the problem for you.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
Well, i'm not a Blizzard defender, i actually kinda hate them for what they did to Diablo, but...
I've never heard of anyone owning an Authenticator and being hacked. It seems to me as the best measure that anyone can take to protect themselves. Probably there were situations of accounts with authenticators hacked, but how many, 10-15 people? I know the thing costs a bit of money, but there's a free version for phones. Not to bash anyone, but the physical version costs under a month's sub. If you buy a 60 bucks game and you love to play it, and gonna play it for a long time, it's worth it. If you consider the game a piece of garbage (as many do), why bother, just let it go.
How's that? Is that something you'd do or something? People that work for Blizzard can't make mistakes? What with that attitude? Because it hasn't happened to you doesn't mean it won't. At least give people the benefit of the doubt.
So, since the universe really seems to love irony, as we've all been going back and forth here, Blizzard did finally decide to get back to me, and I have in fact been completely vindicated. To quote from the reply
@ have been compromised. We found evidence of an exploitive IP accessing your Diablo 3 and using a farming bot while on the Korean servers. That is what triggered the ban on the account when our system detected the bot. I went ahead and removed the ban though since it does appear to be a hacker and I sent a password reset to your registered email. So you should be able to log in now and as far as we could see there was no damage done to your characters, the account was only being used to farm."
I'm mildly let down that my inital thoughts on this having been related to the 1.0.3 changes turned out to be untrue, but can't be right all the time. I am however quite pleased at being able to now turn to everyone who was so convinced that I must have been the one responsible for having done something wrong, and say I told you I didn't. Hey, whaddya know, someone claimed they were telling the truth, and they actually were. Surprising I know...