Several World of Warcraft players unexpectedly had their accounts banned recently, seemingly due to a glitch surrounding the Tailoring profession. The World of Warcraft accounts that were affected by this ban believe it was an automated response due to the use of an unintentional exploit.Late at night on December 13, a wave of bans hit several World of Warcraft accounts with no apparent explanation. Though many of the bans were set for a week, some of the bans were as long as 30 days. While there appeared to be no rhyme or reason to these bans, a common thread appeared between the accounts–all the banned World of Warcraft players had Tailoring in Dragonflight. This led players to believe the bans involved Azureweave and Chronocloth. These high-end Dragonflight Tailoring reagents have cooldowns to prevent players from overusing them. However, a glitch was causing these cooldowns to reset from odd tasks, such as entering dungeons or joining groups. The banned players are believed to have abused this glitch, though many probably did so unknowingly because the cooldown is not displayed.
Luckily, this story has a happy ending. World of Warcraft seems to be overturning some of the bans surrounding the Dragonflight profession. Many players who found their accounts had been banned have already regained access to their characters. Though players who can be proven to have purposefully abused the Tailoring exploit may keep their bans, most will probably have the ban lifted soon if they have not already.
Players are glad World of Warcraft is lifting the bans, but are frustrated the incident happened at all. On one hand, it is good that World of Warcraft has systems in place to prevent people from abusing exploits in the game. On the other hand, players are understandably frustrated when World of Warcraft’s glitches cause them to get in trouble, especially if they did not know they were breaking the Terms of Service in the first place. Many players think World of Warcraft should go a step further and give the affected players some free playtime to compensate for the mix-up.
World of Warcraft: Dragonflight’s launch came faster than most players expected, leading many players to wonder if the expansion would be ready. While the majority of the expansion seems to be solid, World of Warcraft players have discovered some problems, mostly surrounding the brand-new Profession and User Interface overhauls in Dragonflight. Hopefully World of Warcraft can fix what glitches are still present in Dragonflight so it can avoid similar incidents in the future.
World of Warcraft: Dragonflight is available now for PC.