Blizzard may actually be cracking down on account sharing

Anyone who has been here more than a month knows account sharing is against the ToS/EULA for WoW (and most MMOs for that matter). One of the most public displays of account sharing I've ever seen is top PvP players boosting / carrying toons to high rating. There are several sites out there that will broker the deal to get any character any PvP rank, for a price. Blizzard has stated in the past, paying in game gold for in game boosts is fine. This would be the case where you pay me 1,000 gold and I run arenas with you until you're 2200 (or whatever). This does not make it fine to pay real currency for someone to boost you. What these players were doing was taking real currency and playing other people's characters. You and I know this to be account sharing.

Tuesday a few top rated players found their accounts banned for account sharing violations.

I've known quite a few people that have paid for these services. You've probably seen them as well. Recently I've been spending a lot of time watching various top arena player's stream. They'll openly talk about doing "sells" or carries. I've always wondered why Blizzard seemed to look the other way when it should be relatively easy to find account sharing simply based on IP login history. Maybe they've just now realized that the arena carry business is as large as it is and took action. Impossible to know their reasoning. This wasn't the scourge of the WoW arena world, this was top players. Blizzcon and MLG tournament winners and finalists. These were WoW Arena poster boys. Maybe Blizzard is trying to clean up the image of WoW arena so they can make another venture into E Sports since MLG hasn't seemed interested in Arena tournaments.

I'm not here to discuss whether this is right or wrong. I'm simply wanting to shed light on the issue that for whatever reason Blizzard has taken action against people sharing accounts. A lot of these guys lost day 1 accounts. Let it be a lesson, if you're going to break the rules, be prepared for the consequences.

It's another one of those cosmetic clean ups that pisses some people off but changes nothing in the long run. Just spoke with someone who does carries, and instead of being open about it they will just continue their business in a more hidden way. Plenty of ways to do this over a proxy, tunnel or vpn. I'm fine with them punishing the gold sellers, arena boosters and whatnot. But they should definitely take action against the buyers as well. If you know that there is a good chance that you'll lose your account, there is less chance that you'll spend the $ to buy gold, an arena boost or even an account. Now I've never heard of people losing their accounts who buy stuff, only those who sell it. And in the long run it would be better for the game to punish the buyers as hard imo.

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Originally Posted by zenga

It's another one of those cosmetic clean ups that pisses some people off but changes nothing in the long run. Just spoke with someone who does carries, and instead of being open about it they will just continue their business in a more hidden way. Plenty of ways to do this over a proxy, tunnel or vpn. I'm fine with them punishing the gold sellers, arena boosters and whatnot. But they should definitely take action against the buyers as well. If you know that there is a good chance that you'll lose your account, there is less chance that you'll spend the $ to buy gold, an arena boost or even an account. Now I've never heard of people losing their accounts who buy stuff, only those who sell it. And in the long run it would be better for the game to punish the buyers as hard imo.

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I always thought that Blizzard has a reputation for not necessarily "punishing" buyers, but they have revoked rewards that they garnered (gold, rankings, etc.) from outside transactions.

Never really understood why account sharing is against their rules. It's how I got into this game and look how much money Blizzard is making off me now! The trial version of the game is shit compared to messing around on your mate's geared character for the day and getting hooked.

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Originally Posted by valkry

Never really understood why account sharing is against their rules. It's how I got into this game and look how much money Blizzard is making off me now! The trial version of the game is shit compared to messing around on your mate's geared character for the day and getting hooked.

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it's not really about how much money Blizzard makes, it's about making the game fair and trying to prevent real-money transactions I think.
Accounts that are played 24/7 with people taking turns, accounts being sold etc.

regarding your comment and playing with your mate's account for a bit, I would assume your friend would show you around on his account first, and let you play a bit while he's there (to make sure you're not doing anything noobish with his account for example). That's ok as long as he's there, and it shouldn't take you a day to get hooked :-)

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Originally Posted by zenga

It's another one of those cosmetic clean ups that pisses some people off but changes nothing in the long run.

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Exactly. Everyone knows they do this, including Blizzard. Openly bragging about is a challenge that Blizzard can't really ignore and remain even slightly trustworthy.

Everyone knows it's a completely corrupt system, we just can't have people admitting to it. ;)

Sharing has to be against the policy, because if it isn't and someone screws the account over...
Blizzard would be responsible for "fixing things".

When it is against the policy, anything that goes wrong is your own fault for breaking the rules.

That's not saying Blizzard cares or doesn't care about the sharing.
Just that they don't want to be liable and have to fix crap if they say its okay.





On my server, someone was offering to boost people to various arena ratings.
I enquired, and they wanted to discuss this on Skype.

I asked them how much gold would it cost me...
And they wanted to discuss pricing outside of the game.
Which pretty much says it wasn't gold they were interested in, if they couldn't/wouldn't name a price in the game.

As long as there is money to be made, there will always be carries for cash. Doesnt matter how many accounts blizzard bans, only now I think that the carriers will be a little more careful. Guys charge 200+ for 2200, you can do that in 2 hours with account sharing. The backlog they currently have is astonishing.

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Originally Posted by Svpernova09

I've always wondered why Blizzard seemed to look the other way when it should be relatively easy to find account sharing simply based on IP login history. Maybe they've just now realized that the arena carry business is as large as it is and took action.

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They actually require you to change your password when you log in from different IP addresses alot. I play on a lap top and I am constantly on the road. Some days I log in from 5-6 different IP addresses.

I have to change my password constantly and despite me having an authenticator and emailing/calling blizz and telling them stop making me do this I am me. They still insist I change my password once a day.

From an e-sports point of view, I can see why blizzard decided to do this. It's like the dress code for the NFL and fining golfers for spitting on the green. Starcraft 2 is the golden child of e-sports right now and Warcraft 3 and WOW were for a long time up there in the foreign (foreign = non Korea) community as high profile games. Original Starcraft outside of Korea is dead, so is WC3 and competitive WOW arena is painful to watch. Imagine watching a junior high school football game from five different helmet cams instead of the bleachers. So for Blizzard to want to try and clean up e-sports as it becomes more and more popular is completely understandable.

However I wonder how Blizzard feels about the pro Starcraft 2 scene. There is a LOT of money changing hands. High profile players are making a lot of money by streaming their play on TwichTV through advertisements. All day long, people are paying $20-$200 an hour for training/coaching sessions. Sponsors are all over the place from big companies like Intel and Monster to micro retail websites you have never heard of.

What is the difference when someone says I'll pay you $x for some Starcraft 2v2 games and someone who says I'll pay you $x for some Arena carries.