Activision Blizzard was one of many gaming companies in the world to halt video game sales in Russia due to the ongoing crisis in Ukraine. For Blizzard, this also includes microtransactions. This was a way for Blizzard to show solidarity with Ukraine, which made a recent banning all the weirder.
A Ukrainian World of Warcraft player recently took to Reddit to announce that Blizzard banned them from the MMORPG. Reddit user Corvius and allegedly many other Ukrainian players were unable to play World of Warcraft due to being in close proximity to Russia. Corvius themselves are from Kramatorsk, a city close to Russia's border.
According to Corvius, they had issues accessing Battle.net for the past week. Now, Corvius believes his Battle.net account was banned along with many other nearby players. Some gamers have pointed out that Corvius isn't banned and instead maybe experiencing something impacting their IP address. But Corvius tried a VPN to get around a possible IP issue and wasn't able to log in.
"Luhansk, Donetsk, and Crimea are marked as banned regions for US companies. Legally they cannot offer services if your IP is being geolocated to those regions. Can't say who I am but we are doing the same thing. We cannot do business with those regions. It's not our fault, blame Russia," one Reddit user cryptically offered.
Activision Blizzard has not responded to the issue and it's not yet clear if Corvius and other World of Warcraft players in Ukraine will have their accounts unbanned.
"For me, World of Warcraft was one of the little things that kept me distracted from the horrors that are going on around me. And now, just because I live close to a sanctioned region, I lost it," Corvius wrote.
