World of Warcraft players using Cedega (the Linux-based Windows emulator) had their bans lifted after an investigation by Blizzard in cooperation with the Cedega development team revealed that the bans were in fact made in error.
Here is the email sent out by Blizzard:
Greetings,
As you know, Blizzard Entertainment traditionally makes a serious commitment to protect the World of Warcraft community from players who gain unfair advantage through hacks and exploits. Last week, our administrators implemented bans on a large number of accounts that were identified acting against the terms and the spirit of the game.
However, it has since come to our attention that a very small percentage of those accounts should not have been banned. This case of mistaken identity seems to be isolated to users of an unsupported, Linux-based Windows emulator called Cedega.
Once this pattern was brought to Blizzard's attention, our staff worked directly in conjunction with the Cedega development team in a rigorous and thorough review of the situation. We have since determined that your account was one of those accidentally flagged, and as such we are immediately reinstating your account to fully playable status.
Blizzard Entertainment deeply regrets the error, as we understand that this brief account closure presented you with an inconvenient and highly frustrating experience. We remain firmly committed to enforcing our regulations and suspensions for those exploiting our game, in the interest of ensuring that our legitimate customers have the best possible play experience. In this case, however, we regretfully caught a handful of innocent customers in the process, and for that we offer you our genuine apology.
In consideration of our error, we are applying a credit of two weeks play time onto your account, in addition to crediting back the time that your account was locked. This comes to a total of twenty (2O) days credit, which should be visible on your account within the end of the week.
If you have any other questions or concerns regarding this account, please do not hesitate to let us know. We appreciate your extraordinary patience in this matter and hope you will continue to enjoy your time in World of Warcraft.
Regards,
World of Warcraft Support Team
Blizzard Entertainment
www.blizzard.com
The banning of World of Warcraft players using Cedega was initially reported on Nov 15.