Here’s a heads-up for anyone using Smoothping, iiNet, Lowerping, WTFping or other proxying software. You’re probably fine (sorry if the above title is a bit sensational!) but there’s a few things you need to be careful of.
This week I finally transfered off Terenas to move to the green pastures of Stormscale-EU. Along with the migration, I faction changed to horde as my human racial felt pretty weak (being able to equip a PVE trinket in PVP only works when you actually have a decent PVE trinket to use!). After a relaxing evening of Shaman/Rogue 2v2 I went to bed, looking forward to starting up a new RLS the next day.
Unfortunately, the next day I was unable to login – “You cannot login until the character update process you recently initiated is complete”. Checking the account page, everything seemed to have gone through ok, so I gave Blizzard a call. The woman I spoke to said my account wasn’t ‘clean’, and my payment had been declined. I then had to login to WoW and empty my mailbox so they could undo my faction change (I was warned that failing to do so immediately could result in my account being permanently locked). Five minutes later Dcruize was human again.
After waiting a short time, I tried the faction change again. This time, I was given a message saying that the process had failed. Strangely enough, the faction change icon appeared next to my character on the selection screen. Rather than use it, I raised a GM ticket asking for help.
I received the following email the next day.
Thank you for your ticket. Following an investigation into actions taken against this account we believe this account may have been accessed via a Proxy Service.
We appreciate there are circumstances when use of a Proxy can be beneficial however such services are routinely used to attempt to hide the actions of Online Trading companies and users attempting to use exploitative third party programs. As such, we do not support the use of Proxy services and if you continue to use these, we regret that this will likely prevent your use of the Paid Faction Change service and may result in suspensions placed on your account.
I made a forum post here and after a few posts from a blue, the matter seems to have been sorted out.
To cut a long story short, if you plan on transfering/faction changing, don’t use a proxy service for a while. I’ll be playing without mine for a week or two to keep Blizzard happy – if anything it means I’ve got a good excuse for getting sapped in mirror games 
Additionally, appologies for the slackness between posts! I’ll be posting as soon as my workload drops. In the mean time, if anyone has ideas for useful articles or questions, drop me an email/comment and I’ll take a look.
Hey, I was wondering what proxies you were using. I am pretty new to 3rd party addons in general and was wondering what ones might be best to avoid. I know for the most part blizzard dislikes addons but they can’t do everything that the players ask for all the time…..
maybe one day GS won’t be such a big deal eh?
Proxies are kind of different to addons in general, they’re bits of software that encrypt your connection to the wow servers. Normally, all the data that is sent to and from your PC goes straight to Blizzard’s server. When using a proxy, all the data goes through another server first before getting to the Blizzard one. What makes this useful is that because the data you are sending is encrypted, your ISP treats it as high-priority traffic which greatly improves the quality of your connection (for me I get 240ms normally, but 80ms through a proxy). A good proxy server would be physically located close to the Blizzard server, though normally they will charge $3-$5 a month for the privilege.
Addons are generally ok and won’t get you into trouble with Blizz. You used to be able to get addons that would pretty much play the game for you, but Blizz made a lot of changes a while back that has pretty much fixed this. I haven’t heard of any addons getting people banned/suspended for a very long time, so you should be perfectly safe using ones from curse.com, wowinterface.com and the other big addon sites.
Just don’t get involved with Glider/levelling bots or powerleveling services, they certainly will get you banned
Glad to see you back man, I want to know if you could do a post about general gearing for pvp, how much is too much res? Or when is it better to have pve gear instead? Anyway great site!
THANK! good info and always appreciate a reply.
PS. WoWremedy.com the link on your sidebar is a dead link. they say something about going out of business.
(2nd and last time.)
Hey ho Cruize, where you gone to lately? what mad server is it this time?
hows the arena goin man?
type back! Cheers smithey
Hi mate, long time no see! I’m currently playing horde on Terenas and Stormscale, we think we’ve finally found a 3s partner (only took 3 transfers….)!
Are you back? I’ve still got a mage on Terenas that I’ll be levelling, it was just rather quiet there hehe.
“my human racial felt pretty weak (being able to equip a PVE trinket in PVP only works when you actually have a decent PVE trinket to use!”
Oh God! Tell me Medallion of the Alliance (bought last night) doesn’t share a cooldown with Every Man For Himself. I spent 68,000 honour thinking that I was going to get TWO chances to break stuns.
If not, it’s toally f***ing useless!
I’m afraid it doesn’t stack with the human racial BUT it’s still one of the best PVP trinkets even for a human. The only better trinkets would be from endgame PVE (assuming your second trinket slot is taken with the Battlemaster’s trinket).