Blizzard Bans a WoW Player For “Account Sharing” By Mistake Proving That Any Anti-Exploitative System Could Fail
A situation that thoroughly explains that no anti-cheat or anti-exploit service is working as intended, and even the most experienced could sometimes resolve in a fail. Recently on WoW’s SubReddit, u/Entres9 created a thread due to his painful ban, for which he acclaimed has done none of the things that Blizzard told him.
He’s been accused of account sharing in WoW, which allows Blizzard’s system to come down to a conclusion that he’s using some third-party services to achieve something he couldn’t do by himself. More precisely, he had reached the Mythic Argus achievement after he swapped IP addresses or something, which resulted in nothing else but a brutal ban by Blizzard.
This is how Blizzard fights against third-party services, including their chase down and cessation of some of them. Now, even though the ban hadn’t lasted for a long time, he had been told that his achievements would be revoked, and no Mythic Argus achievement could be possible to retain once again on the account.
The message he received at first was as follows:
“This account has been suspended because a player on this account used a different game account to take part in exploitative play.”
Despite his 2FA security measure being activated, he still won the bitter from Blizzard. The response as we stated above, had something to do with his Mythic Argus achievement being achieved while he hasn’t been playing.
“From what we can see, your Mythic Argus achievement was not earned while you were playing, and while someone else was logged into your account – so whether you bought it and gave someone your account details, or whether it was a friend, that doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that doing things like this are against our rules.”
This is where Blizzard triggers that a third-party service might have been used by the player (not in this case), which sends somewhat a red code towards Blizzard’s system of detecting any fraudulent player’s actions.
The point from all of this is simple. Not a single anti-cheat system or detection tool is perfect even if created by the most experienced. Luckily, the damaged person has somehow managed to retain his account and all his achievements by profoundly involving himself in the case.
The conclusion is simple and teaches us all that to do if you use two different living places (2 IP Addresses). It also depends on how frequently you’re logging in from them both, which presumably tricks Blizzard’s services and results in a cruel decision brought by the same.
You can find the whole conversation here, in which he also confirms he has been unbanned.
