I have been playing World of Warcraft lately.  I have 2 accounts, like always ends up happening in games for me.  No big deal.  One has my level 55 warlock, 28 shaman, 25 mage, and such on it.  The other my rogue and hunter.  Well, the warlock account got banned!

From reading the "customer service" forums @ Worldofwarcraft.com it seems the generic message everyone gets when banned says they were banned for "exploitation of the WoW economy".  Excuse me?  I don't exploit game economies.  To me, that means using a dupe bug, or some kind of vendor exploit where an item sells to a vendor for more than it costs to buy from a vendor.  That is "exploitation" in my book.  Oh, but to Blizzard economy exploitation is buying/selling gold, using powerleveling services, or any other such thing.  I freely admit I've spent tons of money on RMT stuff in other games, but I never have done so in WoW because (1) I never saw the need as WoW is an easymode game basically and (2) I always knew Blizzard was a little hardcore on banning people for it, so I never wanted to risk it anyway.

And what's worse is that someone posted on said "customer service" forum that they were 72 hour banned for speed hacking!  But people that buy/sell gold or use powerlevelers get perma banned!!!  Ok, so actual, true hacking is less of an offense than just buying or selling gold?  WHAT THE FUCK?

Oh, and the only way you can protest a ban is by emailing their Account Admin department and waiting.  It takes around 10 days to get a reply from them, and of course nothing is resolved in one go around, so you've got to wait a really long time.  If it takes 4 go arounds, you'll wait 40 days!

This is not good customer service at all.  Blizzard is banning accounts by the thousands and it's only a matter of time before every player knows someone who was banned unfairly.  I can only imagine this will not be good for WoW's subscriber numbers ultimately.