- Author: Pride
- Date: September 25, 2021
- Updated: September 25, 2021
- Expansion: TBC Classic
Protection paladins in Classic have seen a surge in popularity with the release of The Burning Crusade, and part of the reason why is because they excel at farming gold thanks to their stellar AoE damage and survivability, making them an extremely useful alt to have for gold generation.
A particular hotspot for farming gold as a prot paladin is Stratholme, the Eastern Plaguelands dungeon, where paladins can farm upwards of 300 to 400 gold per hour thanks to the dungeon’s high mob density.
However, popular paladin Discord servers are currently outraged after a recent development: a large number of paladins have been banned starting this week, with the given reason for the ban being “Exploitative Activity (Cheats/Hacks)”, and the only common link between them being farming gold in Stratholme. On some occasions, the bans were permanent.
Blizzard has not yet issued a response on this issue, but as it has wide-reaching effects it is very likely they will. It is speculated that this is a result of a change to their bot detection software, which causes repetitive but legitimate player behaviour to be flagged as bot-like.
It is clear that paladin players are not happy with this situation. A forum thread made by the user “Surv” on the topic has already gotten 120 responses in just over 12 hours, while another by the user “Shygirl” is on 98 responses in just over a day. Meanwhile, a Reddit thread on the same topic is currently among the most viewed threads on the Classic WoW subreddit.
Thankfully, there might be hope — user “polonar16” on the Reddit thread is quoted saying “After investigation by a GM I have been cleared of any wrong doing and my ban has been overturned. Thank you to OP and everyone else who has been supportive.” Other players are reporting having similar experiences, with their bans being reversed by Blizzard Game Masters.
However, there is no telling how long that process will take considering the number of players affected by this issue, and Blizzard’s customer support has been notoriously slow in recent years. Thus if you want to avoid potentially getting banned falsely and having to wait for a GM to restore your account, it might be a good idea to keep your paladin out of Stratholme for a while, at least until Blizzard resolves this.
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Okay, guess I’m done farming strat. I’ll just buy gold, then.
Yh that’s gnna fix the prob for sure……
Duhh
If this is true, it is absolutely rediculous.. I don’t have a paladin but this is not a problem of the player.. They just use the game the way it was created.. Maybe change the game in a way it’s not possible to exploit it. Seems more like they went for the easy way out and blame their mistakes on others. I think it is good they adress it but this is a very lazy way of dealing with it.
Or just set a CD timer on the dungeon like 30min or an hour
The majority of the gold paladins earn in Strat comes from charging people 15g per run. What’s next, Slave Pens?
Are the slave pens a Blacksmithing or Engineering craft?
Asking for a friend.
No. I make 300 gold per hour without boosting anyone.
I remember watching WowHobbs doing this exact thing about 14 years ago. Crazy how times change.
Game is dead
fuk i got banned 3 ayss ago !!!
Oh lol gg blizz another pro move
If You got banned by powerlvling im stratholme dont give up. Write honest , accurate description od your problem and od they reject appeal do IT once more from another account until some normal GM także cafe od this matter. I had my 4 accounts banned and it took me 2 weeks before I found normal GM. Made around 6 Appeals.
So banned from bot detecting software. From bot like activity. Just gotta message a gm.
Some people are botting and a few non botters got caught up
People that stay banned will say it’s BS, but remember legit players have already been unbanned
“muH eXpLoITatiOn!!!”
Imagine being this cucked by your [removed] irl politics.
Mod Note: Removed offensive language.
The problem here is that people playing wow now are all speed speed speed, don’t belive me?
Go lvl on retail and compare it to classic, furthermore original TBC did not have the token for lvl 58, that’s utter bs tbh and I’ll guarantee that because of the mindset of new players who cba with effort they will have a lvl 68 token when wrath classic launches.
Just bear in mind that having a shortcut is not always a good idea.
Let’s be honest here, people who not playing fairly should be banned as using a bot is an exploit with 3rd party software / hardware.
That being said I don’t know how a security programme can possibly get mixed up between players and a bot unless the player ALWAYS does the same pulls the same way every single time and uses the same key presses every single time.
Seems to me that their security is kinda thick :p
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Mod note: Comment removed: Troll
…………
And this is the reason why Blizzard games are relatively cheater-free. Yes, being banned like this is a nuisance but it is something to expect if you are doing something abnormal in the game.. If other games, I’m looking at you Battlefield, would stop giving people the benefit of the doubt and be aggressive toward cheaters then their games can survive for a long time like WoW.
Well F gold farmer, whenever I saw a level 70 prot pally farming in stratholme I know if it’s a fking bot so I always report them
May your entire family genetics stay broken
Dungeon boosting and exploiting the game by utilizing it how it was not intended and excusing it with «we are just playing the game» is pretty dumb. You just dont want your cookies taken away. The game would be 100% better without the toxic culture of boosting and warping game content for shortcutting.
While I don’t entirely disagree with you, I see it from a different lens. Sure, boosting is 100% not how Blizz ever envisioned the game being played. Being able to kill 170 xp yielding elite mobs in 3-4 minutes is crazy. However, if they have an issue with that. They should fix it, not ban the players. And if they are too lazy or unable to fix it, make it explicitly against the rules.
Oldschool Runescape has a prayer mechanic. Basically imagine passive paladin seals, but they take mana constantly and there are no cooldowns. Well, if you click them on/off in 0.6 second intervals, you keep the full benefit of the prayer while not losing any mana. It’s a difficult but strong exploit that people turned into a mechanic and OSRS devs decided to develop content around the mechanic, even recognizing it’s not how it was meant to be used.
The problem is not the players here. The problem is the company.
No, if it is in the game and an intended party is the game is can’t be “against the rules”. Everyone can do it if they want, since it is boring to most of us we won’t. Blizz needs to not auto ban paying customers that are just playing a dungeon.
You realize people have always farmed dungeons for gold, right? Even back in the “precious old days” you yearn for? You just don’t like it because -YOU- don’t do it and thus it shouldn’t be done. What a smoothbrain take.
None of today’s extremes happened in this way. People were playing based upon the RP of the world and lore more than anything. Yes people farmed gold, but the game just wasn’t designed for this generation.
Lol…I farmed on my lock first, back in 2007, when the game was at its best. All downhill after, but anyways, strat for the rivendare
s deathcharger I got lucky and it dropped on the 7th farm. The tiger from ZG dropped from the 97th run, and yes I could easily solo those bosses with a lv 70 lock in the two set is the only relevant set, but also the 4 set when it dropped. Note that I first solothis boss with the and the two sets only. With a void walker and a good player with some skill, this can be done even asdestroy. Onyxia AS WELL. My second was a pally and I did the same thing….but lock was even easier 😛You’re exactly right, but today’s gamers are impatient and don’t give a dam about the world or your character’s part in it. They are extreme min maxers who just want instant gratification.
Isn’t min maxing the opposite of instant gratification? Putting in a bunch of extra work/hours in order to get marginally better outcomes.
It depends on how theyre doing it, if theyre exploiting flaws in the layouts of the map that ‘glitch’ NPC’s than I think they should be suspended and it shouldn’t be allowed. The main example of that is Slave Pens in TBC classic, people go on the wall and move back and forth to become invincible basically, because the NPC’s have to follow a certain path and they can never reach the player if theyre a frost mage. They have officially asked players not to do that and wared players recently but, many still do, and there hasn’t been a mass ban like this. However, simply farming mobs in dungeons for gold is just part of the game. If WoW wants to prevent boosting they can hotfix exp to be like retail, where a high level player grouped with a low level player negates ANY exp gain, but they haven’t done that. So unless people are using game breaking tactics, I dont see anything wrong with it, but the boosting does kind of suck. Its no different than buying a level 58 boost from Blizzard, youre just buying it with gold. The odd thing is, if Blizzard added this exp boosting hotfix, more people would have to buy the level 58 boost for multiple alts, and they’d make more money…. kinda weird situation here. You’d think Blizz would wanna maximize moneymaking
Shhhh we don’t want them to hotfix the xp 🙂
Wouldn’t actually have a problem with it if it killed boosting
The boosting is toxic and should be removed because even on the high pop realms it’s nearly impossible to find dungeon groups because everyone is boosting. So that’s great that boosters are playing the game they want… They are making it so other people struggle to be able to play the game. Skips are a huge reason why so many bosses link all the trash around them or why keystones have trash requirements.
Mate I don’t boost yh? But If somone is genuinely bored or nerds gold badley or is wanting to fill their time with stuff to do til raid time then why not?
Dailys in tbc atm are sparse and we have bots farming all nodes and plant life in outland so wth else are peeps supposed to do.
Frankly I find your limited vision disturbing regarding this,
Every person who legit boosts is paying for the game the same as you are.
Keeping that in mind all I’ll say is if you don’t wanna pay gold for a boost then don’t but every player has the right to do w/e they like within the rules of the game.
The type of boosting that’s cancerous is raid boosting ppl who lie dead on the floor of a boss so that they get the achievement lvling boosts are fine some ppl struggle with classic due to its drawn out nature and the fact that different zones have level requirements.
I hope you can understand where I’m comming from here there is no
Nastyness in my comment towards you 🙂
Yeah, banning people right now for something that’s been done since the beginning of the game totally makes sense. Maybe don’t blame the players and blame blizzard for making their game able to be played that way in the first place if they don’t like it so much.