Ahn’Qiraj Coming This Month and More Bots Banned in WoW Classic

Time for a bit more WoW Classic news as Blizzard continues its offensive against the bot peril.

Classic is as classic does

After reportedly banning 74,000 accounts for EULA violations about two weeks back, Blizzard was back to announce another 40,000 accounts banned.

Since the launch of WoW Classic, we’ve taken action daily against accounts that were botting, hacking, and selling in-game services for real money. This continual effort has resulted in the average daily number of accounts actioned consistently increasing in the Americas, EU, Korea, and Taiwan. In May of this year, we witnessed a surge in the number of botters, and our intensification of efforts to eliminate them brought our average of actioned accounts upwards into the thousands per day.

Since our last post about this issue on June 17, we’ve continued to remove exploiters at a high pace, typically 2,000-3,000 per day, with over 4,000 accounts actioned on some days. This daily effort has resulted in actions taken against over 40,000 accounts since June 17 in the Americas, EU, Korea, and Taiwan.

We’re dedicated to driving the the exploiters away wherever we can, as we continue to make our response to this one of our highest priorities. This is a long-term effort that becomes continuously more difficult, as exploits and those who use them are driven by real money profit motives. We take action constantly, 24/7, to enforce the Blizzard End-User License Agreement 43. Any account that violates or assists others in violating license limitations on hacking, cheating, and other unauthorized use of the game is subject to suspension and removal.

As always, we greatly appreciate your reports. Player reports have been and will remain highly valuable to us, as we must evolve our detection and response methods to stay ahead of the organizations who would otherwise degrade the game for legitimate players.

The war on bots and such carries on.

Meanwhile, after having done a load test that brought the test server to its knees, presumably with more players than they expect to jump in on a live server, Blizzard has announced the start date for the Gates of Ahn’Qiraj event.

Starting July 28th, presumably after the usual maintenance window, the event will be available on US realms, and on July 29th on EU realms.  Per the posts:

At that time, players can begin the quest chain to craft a Scepter of the Shifting Sands, and players can turn in gathered resources to advance the Ahn’Qiraj war effort.

Once both of those activities are completed on a given realm, the gates of Ahn’Qiraj will be available to be opened.

I have been, somewhat unintentionally, hoarding cloth in my bank.  I had a mind toward getting first aid up on all my characters.  But when this starts I suppose I can clear some bank slots by donating to the cause.  We are now getting into things I actually remember happening back in the day when I first started playing WoW.

Also, a clarification about nature resist gear that is currently not available in WoW Classic was posted, though only in the EU forums, listing out the gear that was not yet in the game and that Blizzard was looking into when to release it into the game.