Worst thing about being banned for account sharing..

[Zub]

NOOOOOOOOOOOOO knapppeeeeeeeeeen!

btw i acount shere all the tiem aind it has never happend to me :S werd.

I reckon Blizz should ban you for your horrible mutilation of the English language.

Damn that was english? i thought i was drunk for a second and fluent in german or something.

[Sam DeathWalker]

hs nglish sms ok 2 me. Wt didt u undrstd?

Always have a backup copy of the wtf folder somewhere so you can get yur macros back easy.

[Zub]

Wt didt u undrstd?

I understood everything, as i said i though i was fluent. I just didn't know what language i was fluent in
(and no, i'm not a native english speaker)

[Naylix]

ofcourse you can burn holes in what I say - however:

My previous guild was actually approached by a GM - he asked very politely, why the entire guild suddenly all were connected from 1 IP-adress, geographically located in Denmark of all places, where as 10 minutes earlier, the guild was connected to the wow-servers from 45+ different locations all over Europe. We explained the situation, this was back when Telia had several peering issues with other major ISP's, which hit some regions harder than others. Certain british adsl customers had 10.000ms pingtime, and that made for some really horrible healing on Nefarion

I had access to a very large fibre connection back then, and still do. So I had setup a VPN dialer, that my entire guild tunnel'ed their traffic through. By sending their traffic to me first, and letting me peer directly with Telia through a server at work, I reduced their lagtime/pingtime down to about 330ms on average - enough to finish both BWL and MC without any hiccups from disconnected maintanks, healers or otherwise.

He said that was an awesome way to circumvent a problem that Telia had to sort out with their respective peers, and wished us best of luck. Had the IP been in China, it might have turned out differently.

But, I'm arguing stuff that I can't really be arsed arguing about.

When it all comes down to it, in each and every case, Blizzard has a bunch of logs and information, and a subjective person reviews these logs, and acts accordingly to guidelines and probable his own "sense" of what is happening. Ban or no ban, hope his coffey was good that morning, if you're deviating too much from what could be seen as the "norm".

And keep the peace, grow some trees and dont share your account with anyone.

[Otlecs]

But, I'm arguing stuff that I can't really be arsed arguing about.

There's no argument to be had. We're violently agreeing.

Your experience with tunneling demonstrates my point that IP addresses are one of many red flags that Blizzard actively monitor and pursue.

[zanthor]

I love the FUD. Some of these issues are straight up fact, some are flat out conjecture, and many are unsubstantiated possibilities.

The fact is, that account sharing is against the rules, and Blizzard does ban for it.
The fact is, people share accounts every day and never get banned.
The fact is, multiboxing brings you ABOVE THE RADAR, and it's just like the crack in my windshield, I'll NEVER have a cop pull me over because I have a crack in the bottom corner of my windshield... but once he pulls me over for excessive speed, he's likely to ticket me for that just because I'm being a dipshit on another issue (The speed, attitude about him talking to me, whatever).

Multiboxing puts you in the limelight, at which point blizzard is required to examine your activities, make sure you aren't breaking their rules, and ban you if you are. This way when players say "But blizzard lets MBers get away with anything because of the monies!!!1!!" blizzard can say "BS, we ban them like anyone else."

Why does there have to be an epic conversation on this issue every time someone says "My pee pee got smacked"...

[Otlecs]

"My pee pee got smacked"...

That made me grimace IRL.

;(

[shaeman]

They definitely track ip addresses.

I also believe that they have automated flagging of certain situations.

I received a ban when I logged in to one of my accounts. I was working away from home and logged in from a geographically distant ip address. This kicked my daughter who was playing on the account at the time back at my home address.

I was able to get the account reinstated when I explained that I worked away from home during the week and that the other player was my child. From that point on I only played characters on account 1 and only let the kids play on account 2 - until I got a job closer to home.

It would be incredibly easy to detect this scenario happening and to have an automated ban or automated report generated for a human to investigate.