So, this was in my inbox this morning:

***Notice of Account Closure*** Greetings, This is a notification regarding your World of Warcraft account. Access to this account has been permanently disabled for exploitation of the World of Warcraft economy or for being associated to accounts which have been closed for intended exploitation. While we try to be as lenient as possible in our assessments of the results of exploitation investigations, reoccurring trends in exploitative endeavors on your account have ultimately resulted in account closure. As a result, this account will no longer be able to access any aspect of World of Warcraft. This action has been taken in accordance with the Terms of Use (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/legal/termsofuse.html) and our game policies (http://www.blizzard.com/support/wowgm/?id=agm01712p). According to the World of Warcraft Terms of Use, to which all players agree when installing World of Warcraft, Section 3, Paragraph C [Rules Related to Game Play] states that you may not do anything that Blizzard Entertainment considers contrary to the "essence" of World of Warcraft. Thank you for your time and understanding of our position in this matter. Please feel free to contact us with any questions or concerns you may have. Regards, Account Administration Blizzard Entertainment www.WorldOfWarcraft.com

Hmm. Access to this account has been permanently disabled for exploitation of the World of Warcraft economy or for being associated to accounts which have been closed for intended exploitation. That’s interesting.

It’s especially interesting considering I cancelled my subscription over a month ago since I simply did not have time to play World of Warcraft. I’m fairly certain I have not logged on to any WoW server in well over two months, possibly longer.

I was considering re-activating the subscription at some point, if and/or when I have more free time to play MMORPG-type games (I just like typing MMORPG) — so this is a little annoying.

I replied to them; hopefully they can explain exactly what it is about NOT PLAYING that flags an account as “exploitative”.

UPDATE: Folks keep visiting this post, so I can only guess that this keeps happening to people, or that people are still trying to resolve it.

In my own case, my World of Warcraft account is still closed. The only means they will accept to re-open it, apparently, is for me to send them a fax (yes! a FAX) of my driver’s license. I don’t have a fax machine, nor a scanner most of the time, so I keep putting this off. I finally got around to doing it one day, and they replied that the incoming fax was too fuzzy and that I should scan my ID again and re-fax it.

That was about a year ago. I haven’t bothered to re-fax it yet.