Here’s an interesting debate on the World of Warcraft forums about a player who games from around the world because of business travel: “Play WoW on business trips and get suspended?”
You might think by the title that he got suspended from work for exploring the Tower of Azora with a group of night elves — not so. He was suspended from Warcraft for exploring the Tower of Azora from multiple IP addresses.
Let’s assume the Original Poster is telling the truth, and I’m inclined to do so, what should a MMOG company’s policy be with accounts that are accessed by multiple IPs? Clearly there are legitimate, TOS-compliant reasons when a player would use several IPs to access his/her account. Conversely, there are non-legit, TOS-breaking reasons also.
Suspend first, argue later? Ask first, suspend later? Say nothing, spy on the player at the Tower of Azora?
I’m leaning towards flagging the account and looking for other suspicious behavior connected to the account.
My opinion, this shouldn’t be a high priority for investigations. Realize, however, that I’m in the “I don’t care if people sell/buy virtual currency and accounts” camp. People in the “I think selling/buying virtual currency and accounts is wrong” camp might consider this a higher priority and some collateral damage is expected and acceptable.
I’ll qualify that with “FOR THE MOST PART, I don’t care if people sell/buy virtual currency and accounts camp”. I’ll illustrate with a high quality graphic.
Ya see? We’re not so different you and I. (In fact, I used to be much more fundamentalist in my view on IGE/Ebaying game stuffs. Over the years, I moved towards the “fuckit, I don’t care” side of the high quality graphic.)
Back to the original question: how to limit collateral damage when on a seek-and-destroy TOS-violators mission?
For future reference and for the firewalled:
(All Sizes ยป Original, for larger text)
Page image of WoW Forum thread
Are they serious?? That scares me…
I play from several IPs in the UK and Cyprus…home, friends, relatives, work… I thought I was lucky to have a super duper laptop for mobile-WoW (especially as I live in a tiny cypriot village with a less-than-desirable connection) but maybe not.
Ech. I wonder how many different IPs and how often before you get banned :/
Well, in this guy’s case, it seems like they geo-ID’d the IPs and saw several countries over a short period of time. I haven’t heard of anyone with a dynamic IP getting banned, (maybe that’s to come), that’s why I suspect Blizz is ID’ing the IPs somehow and something (quantity, big geo area) is bothering them about the pattern.
I know my husband has gamed while on business trips to places as far away as Singapore and not had a problem, but it’s been a while since he’s been on one of those trips, so if it’s a change in policy, or he just happened to fit under some threshold for frequency/number of countries…
I think gold- and account-buying is stupid and takes away the point of the game, but I’m not rabid about thinking it ruins the economy or something ridiculous like that. There are plenty of ways to counteract the effects of such deals on the economy if you’re willing to put a little time &/or effort into it.
That’s stupid and they should do some serious checking before banning the account. I travel regularly and do access WOW while out of town, so I’d have IPs from all over the US and possibly Asia. I’ve been on WOW during this trip, just can’t access BC until I get back home and tear open the box that’s waiting.
WOW is way too popular for them to has such narrow terms. They actually have professionals playing this game and we can be as obssessive about getting online as any teen sitting at home popping pimples.
There’s a world of difference between “Your account has been locked for suspicious activity. Please call 1-800-WE PWND U for assistance.” and “Your account has been nuked in our scorched earth policy. Please buy another box so we can continue to swim in our money pool.”
It looks like the original post has been removed, so I can’t tell which case this one is. But the first one is fairly reasonable, while the second is just insane.
FFS, what is with the deletion of original posts lately? Since the OP’s other responses in that thread are still viewable (UNLIKE the “my old EQ buddy was murdered” thread earlier this week), I’m wondering if there’s a bug that deletes #0 of long threads or if evil gnomes are involved.
Anyways, the original post is available (as stated above) in a Flickr screenie.
All I can say is…..lame
got a RL friend’s toon that got banned as he travels between china n singapore and he got his ac banned!!! had to send in his passport for verification before the ac was re-activated after 3-4 days. no warnings … no proper explanation and no compensation at all!