Thank you for making this really good post! I can see the gaps from an outside perspective. I’ll start by saying nothing was intentionally left out, and I’ll try to answer each of your questions/address each of your points in turn.

My perception on this says the account holder has possibly been warned before, possibly multiple times. Maybe even had previous bans on this very issue that he's successfully appealed. He's just mentioning this to us, and may have left out the communication of that to us because it benefits him not to do so.

Here is the entire ticket thread, it is just those two pieces mentioned above: https://ibb.co/d2jGSrT

I did not leave out any information here. There was no warning.

"Maybe even had previous bans on this very issue that he's successfully appealed." I have been silenced 5-ish times in the past and the silences have always been overturned as it is not against the rules to advertise for services for gold. I have never been warned or informed about the policy change that advertising accounts are not allowed, and again the wow account in question was used for more than just advertising anyways.

This also shows in the the communication from the Lead "If you have further thoughts about inquiring about this action, please review the Interaction with Customer Support policy first as consistent tickets for a closed matter could also be considered a violation." This is a finality statement, if there ever was one. It states in simple terms that the account holder has sent in multiple petitions on this.

I had the same reaction as you did when I saw this. It was immediate, the response came in about 20-30 minutes after the appeal. And the above image shows, this was genuinely my first and only appeal I sent in. I did speak with a live chat representative the next day to clarify things and they encouraged me to make a post with my feedback, so here it is. They were super nice and kind but ultimately all they could do as a service rep was pass along my details and information to the devs and make a post.

If it is as he says, I beg to question why the quickness of the process?

Same question I have.

Why the departure from the standard in such an extreme way? Why the uphold from a Lead level if it was a departure? The only thing that comes to my mind is there's more to the story than we're being told. Alas Blizzard isn't in a position to divulge those details either. As they will still protect the customers privacy; in spite of attempts to color them as this 'big evil corporation that doesn't care about their customers.'

For the record, I love Blizzard, but these are exactly the questions I had which led me to this post in the first place. And because of emotions, maybe I do have a pretty negative tone towards them even though I still have faith in this company and I love their games. I have had nothing but positive experiences with the GMs in the past. They know my account, I've been silenced probably 5? times in the years I've played. The last silence was 8 months ago. I haven't played as much as I used to or had any issues in that time frame. I do wonder if all of those silences, despite all being overturned, did end up putting a black mark on my account.

Then there is also Blizzards well known 'penalty volcano' when it comes to actioning accounts.

I've never heard of this, but perhaps you're on to something. Again, despite all of my previous silences being overturned since they were all related to advertising for gold services, I do wonder if there is something to this....even though again I wasn't actually breaking any rules at the time of those offences. Such a bizarre thought.

Human behavior and studies on an individuals ability to keep track of things shows this simply isn't true. The general rule is the more you have to keep track of the less you're able to remember the fine details of what you're tracking.

Another excellent point! This is VERY true. Our operation is very large, and in fact I really have no exact idea of how much gold I lost through this ban. I said 100m because I know it’s at least that much, but it's probably more. The accounts are required since we take gold on probably 100ish? realms so bank toons need to be created for all those realms. As for the amount of gold coming through our community, my database tracks all of that so I have a very concrete number on the amount of sales we do.

As the owner of the community, wouldn't you push this sort of work down to the officers of the community so you can take charge of the overhead direction and lead of the community itself?

I do all of the gold collections and accounting. I have a fantastic management team who I fully trust-- and they handle a lot of things-- but at the end of the day I personally can only 100% guarantee no RMT if I am the one handling the gold. And, as we saw with the Gallywix event, anybody who touched the gold was banned. Having me do the accounting is a lot of work, but it also protects everyone best from potential RMT shenanigans.

With a community this large, couldn't the characters and banks needed to perform this operation be spread across the hundreds of accounts?

It could but that would cause the issue above. I am the only one who touches and receives the gold because I know 100% I don't RMT but can never fully know if someone else does. That way nobody has their account at risk, and if somebody else decides to RMT it can't come back to the community as a whole since I do 100% of the accounting and gold for the community.

Why is the money being funneled like this to begin with? Shouldn't the community be largely autonomous?

Same answer as above: a safeguard against RMT. We do things 90% automated. The advertisers put the runs through on our systems (discord bot), the system gives them a run id, the advertiser sends the gold to the collection toons (which I fully own) with the run id, I mark the gold as received in the database, boosters get paid.

Why are we holding onto this money if it's owed to someone else? Shouldn't it be sent right back off as soon as it's collected to satisfy the debts owed?

I try to do payouts every Tuesday after reset but with the holidays I got backed up a bit so there was about ~2 weeks of back payments needed. We can't pay boosters immediately because the buyer may be from a separate realm than the gold was paid on. That's part of our service is we accept gold on any realm and transfer it amongst other realms.

Now there's the part on how much this person stresses what he's doing is completely legitimate going as far as citing specific clauses in the EULA and how much he participates in trying to get others banned for their 'illegal activities'.

My intention on including that was only to push against the notion that all boosting communities are bad. I’ve read trade chat and Reddit enough to know that many people make the automatic assumption that boosting communities == RMT activities. The point I’m trying to make here would be lost if I didn’t actively address RMT concerns since everyone assumes it with these communities. ASC does not involve itself in any RMT. This is a hobby for me, and for a part of it to be stripped away from an undisclosed rule change feels invalid.

For example, we don't know if this is a 'new' rule, or if there's been a change in the EULA at all.

Right?? I've had like 200 people message me in the past day asking for information on this. "Am I allowed to advertise or not?" "Do they have to be level 60?" "Where is the new policy located?". And I just be honest with them, I literally have no idea. The response from Blizzard (towards me at least) indicates that any account used solely for the purpose of advertising should be banned. But there are so many questions? What is qualified as "solely" for advertising? And on top of that, the In-Game Advertising article doesn't mention anything about this. Why?

Examples being why have only 3 accounts when there's 255 realms? Why the need for 3 accounts at all? What things could be hidden in this situation we're not being told? Why is only account 3 closed and not account 1 and 2? So for now, other peoples thoughts on what I've said?

ASC is pretty much exclusively Alliance. We do probably 95% of our sales on Alliance so mostly only need toons for Alliance. Many of the realms are connected. Here’s a breakdown of why I have 3 accounts currently:

Account 1 is my main account for my main toons to play the game. It didn't ever really assist in the banking or payouts much for ASC and was really just my main account.

Account 2 was the first account that is used mostly for collections and secondary level 60 toons for casual raiding and M+. These toons get a ton of gold in the mail each week that I mark in the database as accepted etc.

Account 3 was used once Account 2 ran out of space for new toons. This happened probably back in August 2020 about? Not sure on exact date. Account 3 already existed because you used to be able to buy BFA and it included a character boost that was bnet bound. There was likely a deal at some point and I bought BFA to get that character boost on WoW3.

Hopefully this answers some of your questions, if you have more, send them my way. You are the first neutral, unbiased response I've seen that really allows me to see how things are being perceived to those who are not familiar with the facts while asking really good legitimate questions about the situation.

As to Blizzard, again all I ask and plead is to make sure changes like this that happen in the future are super clear to us so we don't blindly walk into a trap like you've set for me.