I would want to discuss a subject that interests me a lot, and especially I would want to learn the criteria of decisions of NCSOFT on a important subject.
Recently my friend got banned because he lent his character in third persons and they played with it. This is reasonable, and bravo to NCSOFT for the decision. Yes I agree that we should not lent our characters.
I live in Greece, as my friend too. In a discussion that we had he said to me that he lent his character in other players, within the Greek borders. My questions are many:
How can NCSOFT be sure that really the players have lent their characters? For example, I have a laptop and travel for business. The one day I am in Athens, the other in an island. This summertime I went 15 days vacations, and I visit 3 internet café in order to I play. Is this bannable? Probably not. But how NCSOFT can separate the good players from the bad ones?
An other example: Let’s say that i I go travel to United States. Different country, different ip' s, different everything. What happens then? Will I get banned if I play for 10-15 days in a raw?
I request, apart from you, answers also somebody GM. I want to clarify this subject in my eyes, because it interests me a lot.
However it would depend how your friends character is being played. Firstly no you should never lend your character to someone else. The problem most likely is if the person lending the character is essentially botting your friends character eg using a third party programme to run both their own and your friends. That is very much against the rules as you know and will get you banned.
But I think his real question is "how does NC know that if he takes his laptop anywhere else, that it is him using the account and not a friend.
And the answer is: NC doesn't discuss their methods for determining if someone is breaking the EULA because then people would figure out ways to circumvent their methods.
And quite frankly it is reasonable.
I know that people do complain that "honest" players get caught in ban hammers but quite frankly I wonder about that. I've heard of too many players, in some cases first hand, who were thought to be legit only to come out that yes, they were botting, yes, they did use a 3rd party program just to craft because it is tedious, etc.
You have to just take it as it comes. If you are a legit player and you get banned unjustly, don't come to the boards. This is not the medium for such complaints (no, I"m not saying you are coming to the boards on behalf of your friend... I'm just saying "in general"). This is just a place for people to discuss the game.
Real complaints should be brought to support. They might not be immediate but they do contact you and will work with you if it is reasonable to do so.
There is also the question of did NC say they had banned the player because he had leant his character to another player or not indicated why they had done it (so possibly because of my suggesion in my original post) and the ops friend assumed that the reason was because it had been leant. That would in turn lead to the op wondering how NC would know that the character is being played from another place.
I would think that it is totally irrelevant where you play your character from as there is no rule saying you have to play from the same computer (that would just be plain silly) and therefore so long as you are playing your character within the rules where it is from doesn't matter.
This is just my assumption and not necessarily fact however :)
You used "players" in plural. Most likely this means its a support character and this most likely means that one of those players loaded the character onto an illegal 3rd party utility and thats what he got banned for.
Its been stated that account sharing in and off itself usually isn't punished, you have to get in their searchlights for something else.
I believe Spam said that they won't ban an account for account sharing unless there is a dispute over who actually owns the account, and it cannot be resolved.
Maybe they hijacked each the char from each other during play. So one moment it's different IP then another IP hijack it. Then it happens again back to the old IP. A pattern that repeats itself through several days.
Mistryl has already given the official answer on this. Account sharing is not allowed by the User Agreement except in the case of an account being used by the minor child of an account owner.
With that said, all User Agreement violations are not created equal. As was stated by several of our more regular forum users, this rule is to limit our liability for security reasons. To ban every account that has ever been accessed by more than one person would not only be impossible but it would disenfranchise many of our loyal (legitimate) customers if it was possible.
The rule for account sharing is in the User Agreement for your protection and ours.
As this thread is mostly speculation about an action against an account, I'm going to close the thread now. Please contact the GM team if you have a specific question about our policies. Thank you!