For more than 10 months, We have been able to track, detect and sanction unauthorized gold trafficking with tools that are always increasing in sophistication. However, because we have a huge number of players active on our realms, there is always someone not aware of our detection systems, and ready to purchase in-game items or gold for real money.
That is why gold traffickers are now mostly focused on mass advertising. First, it was done manually, and GMs blocked these accounts quickly. Then some of them used automated addons, and we implemented a level limitation for some social interactions. A few months ago, others created an automated bot to levelup hundreds of characters: they are now detected and automatically blocked. Recently, we also blocked account creation from VPN and blacklisted IPs.
Their only remaining option was to hack existing accounts with an account database from another server, as there was no other possibility for them to get new accounts. New mitigation measures are already applied on the PvP realm since the PvP update, effectively blocking more than 95% of the spam messages, whispers and mail.
Dozens of accounts have been accessed resulting in a ban hammer from the system, since gold sellers were using accounts from legitimate players to advertise/commit unauthorized transactions. As retaliation, some staff members haven't slept during the night in order to gather data, allowing us to ban more than 300,000 gold and 3,000 accounts. Staff members are now analyzing each account banned *related to this issue* one by one, in order to detect the legitimate ones from the bad ones.
Approximate time to check/verify all the logs will be between 1 and 2 weeks. This unscheduled activity may impact our roadmap. Once the check is finished, accounts which are in line with the following criteria will be unbanned:
* Account should belong to a legitimate player i.e. in line with our Terms of Use,
* The account should be linked to a valid email address - a password change will be mandatory.
Sadly, we won't be able to restore any lost item, or removed character from these accounts.
Best regards.
