A wave of suspensions hit World of Warcraft last night as Blizzard moved to ban players using third-party tools. Players affected by the bans have had their accounts suspended for six months, until April 2018.
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Several third party tools seem to have been affected. These include programs that allow players to instantly teleport around the map, as well as scripts to help them with combat rotations, all the way up to fully automated bots which operate on behalf of the player.
A copy of emails sent to account holders affected by the bans was posted to Reddit. In the email, Blizzard customer support says the account has been banned “after identifying the usage of bots or other cheat software,” and that “this type of cheating undermines other players’ experience and severely upsets the balance of the game environment.”
Blizzard also claim that “our team issued this suspension only after a careful review of relevant evidence,” and say that support staff won’t be overturning bans. It’s not known how many accounts have been banned, but it seems to have targeted everyone using third-party software.
In happier news, a WoW player managed to beat raid boss Gul’dan all on his own – let’s just hope he wasn’t cheating.