bv728

Blizz mostly uses account sharing as a hammer against powerleveling/farming services as far as I've seen; sharing an account isn't the actual immediate problem. I'm not sure how I'd, legalisticly (if that's a real word), write up rules that render Power Leveling against the TOS, but the issue isn't there because of the Account Sharing rules.

The fact that it means 'My friend used the exploit on my account!' can't be used an excuse for behavior is likely a fringe benefit for their CS people.

A fringe benefit that makes them cackle evilly every time they can use it against someone, for minutes at a time; they had to add guidlines on how much time per shift you can spend on maniacial laughter.

 

Hildegard

Yes. Point is most likely everyone is a bit afraid to open up, as Blizzard is reading this board. Kind of something few like to take openly about.

Hildegard Sprigglespruxx - Wissenschaftlerin am Institut für Pfuschkunde

http://forscherliga.wikia.com/wiki/Hildegard

 

Glayde

Curious use of the term world first then pluralizing it with kills.

The world first kill made no use of spy glasses etc, coming from someone from medivh, you would think they would know that.

 

Grubsnik

The whole "no accountsharing" is basically a fail-safe. No matter what happens to your account, you are the one responsible. If you try to blame it on someone else, you broke the other rule, and therefore it is now a moot point as your account is banned.

I classic counter-example is people repeatedly driving while drunk or just without a license. Where I live, it's bloody difficult to stop people who choose to continue driving, ever after getting their license rewoked. Some politicians tried to pass a law, allowing police to confiscate the vehicle, the driver was using. The problem with that was, what if the car didn't belong to the dumbass driver? What if the owner didn't know that his friend had lost his license? A whole tower of What if's, all related to the driver not owning his own vehicle problem.

Banning accountsharing fixes this. No reason to actively enforce this rule, since it's just a safeguard against all the stupid things people will do. But back to the matter at hand. Anyone know any telltale signs of seeing another player exploit? When is it just random lag, and when is he sitting/standing to confuse the opponent, or just lag-exploiting to jitter all over the place?

 

Juli

Not referring to Ascent, the first alliance kill on the other hand... And I wasn't originally on medivh, that's how I know about it: firsthand.

 

Antiarc

This analogy doesn't hold water. If you purchase a ticket and let your friend in, you're both watching the movie at the same time. If you share an account with someone, only one of you can play at a time. One of the biggest draws in WoW is playing with your friends.

I'm not sure I've ever seen them take action on this. Account sharing is rather prolific among the officers in my guild, because we trust each other and it's handy to have access to each others' characters for various reasons when need be. I have access to a number of my guildmates' accounts, and they to mine. We've even done entire instance runs with swapped characters. Heck, a guildie and I got so sick of AV grinding one day that we swapped characters and enjoyed PVPing on well-geared level 70 characters that we had no clue how to play.

 

PSGarak

Back to publishing bugs to get them fixed faster: this assumes that the reason the bug is not yet corrected is an effort or priority issue, and not a technical one. It could be that the bug is known and yet difficult to fix. Blizzard has been forced to 'overkill' a bug in the short-term, by disabling a lot of legitimate activity surrounding a potential exploit, when it wasn't hot-fixable. Not for a while now, but it has happened. Perhaps some people who were more on the cutting-edge can remember specific examples. But imagine if they had had to disable shadowstep as a temporary fix to the shadowstep bug until 2.3.2 =P.

Basically, I think the idea of publicly, rather than privately, publishing an exploit stems from an essentially subversive or anti-authoritarian mindset, then you have to force someone to take action, and that the only thing it takes to fix a bug is deciding to. In specific reference to blizzard and WoW, most bugs are, but the QA and hotfix teams still probably take at least a few hours, if not a day, to fix something.

EDIT about account sharing: blizzard added trial accounts for a reason: so that you wouldn't have to share accounts in order to get someone hooked. So no, letting someone use your account to give them a taste of the game is not a "legitimate" excuse.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

Hildegard

Hildegard Sprigglespruxx - Wissenschaftlerin am Institut für Pfuschkunde

http://forscherliga.wikia.com/wiki/Hildegard

 

Hildegard

At the moment the new Vinterveil Tailoring pattern gives skillpoints eventough being gray. Means it is possible to level tailoring extremly fast by using this exploit.

Hildegard Sprigglespruxx - Wissenschaftlerin am Institut für Pfuschkunde

http://forscherliga.wikia.com/wiki/Hildegard

 

Illundai

As far as I know that got hotfixed.

Yes, Death Knight tanks are/were too good in 3.0.x. Having 38k HP, 76.81% Avoidance (Miss incl.) and not gimping your threat in the first tier of gear is broken. (Yes this is clickable)

 

Hildegard

Which would again be a point for publishing exploits to get them fixed:

A Winter Veil recipe may be in your mailbox - WOW Insider

Hildegard Sprigglespruxx - Wissenschaftlerin am Institut für Pfuschkunde

http://forscherliga.wikia.com/wiki/Hildegard

 

PSGarak

Not really, it doesn't show that the exploit gets fixed any faster as a result of publicizing instead of submitting a bug report. The bug still gets fixed, except with a rush hotfix you have to put up with realm restarts and either more people benefit from it or you get rollbacks.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

Octaviann

Doesn't Blizzard allow up to 2 people to use a given account if they one is the other's parent and the child is a minor? Doesn't this render all of their banning account sharing moot since they can't know if, for instance, someone is sitting several thousand miles away from their dad and logs in right after him?

 

◊ Bekah

There's always a way to make something into a false positive- the number of people who actually have this kind of situation, however, is small enough to be an acceptable loss to the system.

If 9000 in 9,000,000 players get banned for account sharing in a month and even 9 in 100 of those bans are false (9%, when the number is more likely in the 1-5% range) positives, you're looking at 90 out of 9 million customers pissed off with a reason vs. the weighted good of the public as a whole in getting rid of power leveling, etc.

If the rule is solid for 99% of your customers- they're not going to throw it out simply because it's invalid for a tiny fraction of the population.

How many minor children are far enough away from their parents to make a blip on IP scanning? How common is it to be flying to/from asia with a proxy network, and then immediately switch to a non-proxy, thus making it look like you're jumped from Iowa to china in 5min? How many of even THOSE situations are likely to trigger their internal alert system by doing something otherwise suspicious or by being reported by friends/family? And, given the fact that blizzard is allowed some leniency in the actual enforcement, how likely is it really that such a case 1) exists, 2) is reported, 3) isn't given a simple warning first?


Frankly it's rare enough- and that's all that matters.

 

Octaviann

True, but what I'm trying to say isn't "They shouldn't ban people for it because might be legal". I'm trying to say, "Yes, they ban people, but how can they ever prove that someone is illegally sharing an account.

 

◊ Cadfael

Original owner plays and his friend tries to login. Whoops Account already in use, concurrent access from <different IP address> detected. That is so bloody damn easy to log automatically, I'd really be amazed if that isn't being done for long time now.

They probably can set thresholds when it should automatically alarm someone. Or they have filter for possibly known Power Leveller IPs. In any case, it's easy to do and one can catch a lot of fish with it.

 

Octaviann

I guess the known power leveler IP works. Also, they can probably detect power leveler's IPs by looking at IPs that have logged into a whole bunch of accounts which have also been logged in on elsewhere.

 

xiaoxin21

Shade of Akama Channelers will sometimes be not channeling when you enter his room. When you start the event he will start walking down immediately. The first set of elementalist/rogue/healer will still spawn, so you have to CC(poly/kill/fear) them.

This normally result in a swift death for Shade of Akama in about 1 min into the fight. This bug prior to 2.2 is repeatable, I wont go into specifics on how to bug him. After 2.2 it just occurs randomly. Not really a big point since Shade of Akama is an easy boss anyway.

 

Richiewolk

There are sanity checks in place that prevent most of the teleport hacks. If you try to warp too far away from your last confirmed position, you will get disconnected immediately (and probably banned). It is still possible to reach places that you are normally not supposed to go by "nudging" yourself in small increments, a couple of steps at most, but it's really really not worth the risk of being banned.

Much of the time people who appear to be jumping all over the place are either lagging a lot, or tapping Q and E alternately to mess with the game's position prediction stuff. Or both. Few people speedhack in pvp anymore because once 12 reports come in, they have a tendency to get banned quickly.

 

Keline

The server should be a lot more kick-happy when someone has a bad connection, there's really nothing else to do when people block their upload for a few seconds to warp around. Honestly, I've been disconnected for no reason at all so many times now, yet these hacks work just fine?
As for other cheats, Blizzard should ban and punish harder. A lot harder. 72h suspensions for all the arena ladder abuse was barely enough. Getting flagged for AFK should result in a 1 week deserter debuff for example.

However I think banning people for account sharing is WAY over the top, especially if advocated with false positive bans by certain people here...

 

sarf

Don't know it is a bug, exploit or just good use of ingame mechanics - but flying away (on a non-epic mount) and up from a Skettis dismount-o-matic bird prevents you from being hit, and the poor bird continues flying after you as an ingame demonstration of "Xeno's Paradox of the Arrow", but with a crunchy Tauren Shaman as the target.

 

Lookit

There's no need to be obtuse. If you share your account with a friend so that they don't have to purchase their own(which is the situation my post was a response to), that is exactly "One less ticket sold" for Blizzard.

Clearly there are several reasons that Blizzard has chosen to outlaw account sharing, and while loss of revenue due to friends sharing a joint account may not be the primary one, it certainly is high on the list.

 

• tonic316

You used to be able to skip straight to the last boss in Heroic UB by having a warlock use that engineering item to look far and have his pet aggro the boss thus teleporting himself and who ever was healing him in front of the boss. Also a bug i took advantage of was the instant respawning fire elementals in north blades edge. Farmed about 50 primals in the course of a couple hours tell it was hot fixed.

 

Brakar

I have no idea just how prevalent it is, but last night there was at least one druid using some kind of speed/teleport hack in wsg. More than two hours elapsed between the first time I ran into the cheater and opened a report and the last time I did before going to bed though my original ticket still hadn't been serviced. All told, he cheated his way to at least 3 wins that I was on the wrong side of and who knows how many others I wasn't. It was painfully obvious from the 10s between picking up the flag and capturing it (and not a rogue to be using the Shadowstep exploit.) As a priest, using Mind Vision was also a give away as his movment was very choppy where he would seemingly teleport small distances while with other people it will be smooth.

 

Lookit

Idly, the only response one will ever recieve when reporting another player for cheating is "Thank you for your report, the issue you reported has been looked into and appropriate action has been taken." Blizzard does not disclose actions taken against other players, so once you've submitted a ticket reporting another player there's really nothing to do other than pay it no mind and realize that you'll receive a message thanking you for your report at some point. Waiting for the moment when "justice is served" is not going to be a productive wait.