Interview with a GM on security

[Logless]

I had a few glitches to work through last night and got to talking with the GM assisting me. He must have been bored or in dire need of communication, because I was able to get some good, and imo, useful WoW Security info! I convinced him it was all for a college paper.

(no screenshots as I failed to think while talking to him >< )

Interesting things he told me:

1. Blizz monitors the AH pretty frequently. Auctions with large amounts of gold are flagged, and these flagged auctions (usually for common or junk items with high high buyouts) are checked by monitoring GM's. If it looks fishy, its flagged for ban.

2. Blizz monitors your mail almost more than the AH. Reason being: if they miss your gold buying auction, they can catch it in your mail. They look for low levels sending mass amounts of gold to a higher level player.

*A lot of it seems to be timing. If you can get the auction off quickly, or out of mail quickly, then it goes unnoticed*

3. Warden is constantly updated. They rarely release information regarding it in any patch notes or media. Currently, it scans for abnormalities in WoW's key files and folders, and checks for "flagged botting files and folders", and checks WTF and cache. He didn't know more than this.

4. The typical WoW user is given three "allowances" on accidentally sold items. This does depend on whether you get a nice GM, and whether or not a glitch was involved in the items loss.

5. If a player submits requests for lost or missing items 3x or more in a week, that user is flagged and monitored for scamming, a next offense likely leads to a ban.

6. Hand to hand gold or item transfers are extremely difficult for Blizz to monitor, and thus are only investigated if they get numerous reports.

7. A GM can either give you an in-game warning and investigate, or they have the choice to escalate the incident, in which case an email will be sent and sentence carried out. Regardless.

8. Permanently banned accounts are irretrievable, and users with temporary bans are monitored by GM's after. Any subsequent incidents will likely lead to a permanent ban.

9. GM's are typically assigned a battlegroup now instead of individual servers alone. They are responsible for the monitoring, call answering, and any known issues for the realms in that battle group. At any given time, at least 10 GM's are assigned to a battlegroup. He wasn't sure how often they were monitored.

10. The larger the amount of gold, worth of item, severity of incident, and how many previous warnings, bans and incidents have occurred, is the set standard for GM's in deciding how to judge the occurance.


May not help many of you, but it definately gave me some good ideas and cautions. Let me know what you think!

[bl@cK!]

nice +rep fill fill fill

[Xai0]

Nice info +rep!

[pandalicoden]

nice info.Pretty usefeull

[Aerolon]

STICKY!


fill

[Zonagle]

"8. Permanently banned accounts are irretrievable."

Not true, I was permanently banned, and managed to get that same account unbanned.

[jdismeuc]

Really nice and helpful. +rep

[Spjutulf]

Very nice information +rep

[fry010]

THANK YOU! SO usefull for my future scams, +REEEP

[Dreadvizzle]

i dont trust anything that gm said... tbh he could have just been leading you on.
good job anyways, so +rep

[ap3x2k]

really usefull info mate! rep+

[fry010]

It sounds quite legit though... Ill look up on it myself

[lenix]

All that and not a single screenshot ( even if you weren't able to think ). Weird.

[Logless]

All that and not a single screenshot ( even if you weren't able to think ). Weird.

Yeah yeah I know. I have been getting some serious flack for that. And yeah the GM could just be feeding me BS, but it sounded very legit and he seemed to be pretty laid back with me. Not over the top dramatic, not too serious or too sarcastic.


And as for accounts irretrievable, maybe thats just what they tell people? Dunno. Never got a perma ban on any of my accounts.


Take it with a grain of salt as all things.

[GMkyle]

Nice one man.