WoW player mistaken as bot, wrongfully banned for grinding game’s hardest achievement

A World of Warcraft Classic player has claimed they were wrongfully banned at the hands of Blizzard Entertainment, saying their account was mistakenly identified as a bot.

In a post to the Classic WoW subreddit last night, a user by the name of Shamm-Bamm revealed their troubles to the community, saying they had their account mistakenly permabanned while in the middle of the grind for the game’s hardest achievement: Insane in the Membrane. 

Thankfully, the player said they were unbanned, but not after a round of headaches and a missed raid night.

Insane in the Membrane is notorious for being one of the most difficult-to-earn achievements in WoW history as it requires you to reach Exalted with six different reputations and Honored with another. The reputations required are mostly aligned or against the goblin-and-pirate-oriented Steamwheedle Cartel faction, meaning you’ll have to spend a lot of time in areas like Gadgetzan, Booty Bay, and other similar goblin-controlled zones farming mobs for hours on end to even scratch the achievement’s surface. 

You’ll also have to farm dungeons to get rare item drops needed for the Darkmoon Faire reputation requirement, as well as Heavy Junkboxes needed to complete the Ravenholdt reputation grind that’s required. 

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It’s at that section of the achievement that Shamm-Bamm encountered their most major problem. Evidently, the game recognized their running in and out of dungeons in an effort to reset them as bot-like behavior, and they were banned. While it’s true that many WoW Classic bots run dungeons over and over again, Shamm-Bamm’s actions were completely in line with the terms of service as they claim to have no third-party programs installed on their computer and that all actions done on the account were done manually. 

“I have never broken TOS in this game and have been playing since the launch of Classic its pretty ridiculous how this happens,” Shamm-Bamm said in their post. “I am guessing me resetting those dungeons flagged me or something. I remember seeing someone else post something similar to happened while they were farming this.”

In recent months, WoW Classic has been experiencing a plague of bots and hackers as speed-leveling and gold-farming bots have infected the game in droves. It’s likely that Blizzard’s anti-botting measures automatically detected this player’s actions as ones that would be similar to those of a bot and swiftly brought down an unwarranted ban.

Thankfully, Shamm-Bamm brought with them tons of screenshots and evidence that they were actually farming the achievement the old-fashioned way. Plus, the player claims any member of their guild could vouch for them as they’ve been communicating their progress on the grind for weeks.

Those pieces of evidence (as well as the support from the WoW community on Reddit) came in handy as Blizzard got back to the player at a quicker-than-usual pace, fixing the issue and restoring control of the account back to Shamm-Bamm.