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.

As I’ve talked about previously, if you’re having random lag or high latency try running through a proxy.There’s more information about that here. I’m down to 70ms now in arenas – compared to 250ms it’s ~very~ noticable (a good test is to use Fan of Knives and check the delay between the keypress and the animation/sound happening).

Once you’ve got your connection running as smooth as possible, it’s worth trying out a very useful addon called SnowfallKeyPress. By default, when you press a key you have a spell bound to, nothing happens until you release your finger off the key. This addon changes that, so as soon as you press a key the action takes place. We’re not talking about massive time savings here, but hey, every little helps!