Blizzard’s new bans will chiefly affect a number of players in top raiding guilds, with the intent to deliver a message to those engaging in dungeon boosting by targeting some of the most well-known practitioners on each server. Community manager Bret “Ornyx” Forbus wrote a forum post to explain further:
Blizzard has garnered a reputation for being heavy-handed when it comes to punishing players that go against the developer’s Terms of Service, and this move is no different. Now that World of Warcraft is experiencing something of a renaissance, the value of a high-level raiding account is immense. The top-level players affected by this ban will likely lose thousands of hours worth of playtime with the banning of their characters.
Blizzard expanded on its comments about the bannings with another statement from global community engagement manager Josh “Lore” Allen, who said:
It’s hard to imagine a punishment that much more severe than losing a top-level raid character in World of Warcraft - Blizzard could likely ban an offending players’ entire Blizzard service at that point, given how much time goes in to maintaining a character like that. Still, now that Blizzard is letting players exchange World of Warcraft tokens for Battle.net currency, it’s possible the company wants to crack down on some of World of Warcraft’s Terms of Service violations now to ensure the community knows there is zero tolerance for any such actions.
The World of Warcraft community will likely see this as a win, but it is possible there could be some long-term repercussions from this action. Targeting high-level guilds and their members is always a dangerous course of action, and those raiders might not think the punishment is fair since the practice has existed for quite some time now.
World of Warcraft is available now for PC and Mac.
Source: Battle.net
