What is the punishment for account sharing ?

[cFortyfive]

From 3hours to a permanent ban everything is possible.

[feellucky]

One of Blizzards rules is that you are not allowed to share an account unless it is with a minor.

Has anyone been caught and punished for it ?

There is a MVP chastising someone on the EU forums for not abiding by the rules, but also admits account sharing herself in the past.

On this thread http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/to...1585121?page=2

Is it you can break the rules as long as you don't get caught. ?

Probably the same as buying gold, nobody does it but there are a lot of fat Chinese gold farmers selling it.

This happened back in vanilla when I was going for HWL, I was on a fairly low pop so it wasn't that hard as long as you won games but every once in awhile you would notice someone with tons of Honor stacked up for a week. I found out from others that they were account sharing so that basically they could keep the same character on all the time and rack up points. I didn't really care but others got pissed and complained to GMs, I think quite a few were banned for short periods at least because they would disappear for a few days and then be back on all the time again. I think it was mostly people trying to sell the characters after with ranking and gear because they never responded.

Blizzard can ban your account for it if they want but they don't actively look for people doing it, but if you do something that will get their attention or someone complains they may start looking.

I also used to share accounts with guys I did arena with, helped us improve immensely by playing the others class for awhile. Those kinds of things I don't think they really care, but they could still throw out a ban hammer cause its technically against ToS.

Though there's nothing wrong with you playing from different computers or locations and they can't really prove its not you unless one minute you're playing from LA and the next NYC etc...

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A friend of mine and I tried to get his account banned once, by logging into it rapidly from two different locations. He was on his laptop at work on the other side of town, I was at home. He'd log in, as soon as he got in-game, I'd log in, and we rapid fired this for about 30 minutes. Absolutely nothing happened >.>

I've shared my accounts over the years with other people who I trusted enough to do so. And people have shared their accounts with me. I met a guy back during Wrath who said he was taking a hiatus and just gave me his login info, and he lived several states away. I played his account for a while, leveling his main's JC and getting one of his alts to 80, and about 2 months later, he came back and started playing again. Again, nothing ever happened.

Did you report the account to a GM for something, botting, afking etc..?

[Tziva]

I would be wary of people saying Blizzard doesn't care. Their enforcement may not be super aggressive, but their official position is in opposition to it, and they completely have the ability to permanently ban the account for sharing if they wish. If you call and ask them, they will say it's not permitted and the account can be closed. Will they close it? Maybe not, but it's still a risk.

I do know multiple people who have had temporary suspensions because someone logged into their account from a distance that was further away then they could have reasonably travelled in the time between their home IP and the new IP logging in. Blizzard doesn't know if you're travelling, or sharing your account, or legitimately hacked. I believe they have automatic measures in place that can trigger a lock on your account for doing this. In most cases, they will lock your account if they catch you, and you have to call and explain to have it unlocked.

[SL1200]

I have a couple accounts and I've been known to let friends try wow out by letting them play on my second account. The main issue is the Authenticator. You can't have an authenticator on a shared account without making it a real hassle to log in for whomever doesn't have the authenticator. With things like text messages it's not that big a deal, but I chose to just take the authenticator off the account and just kept anything valuable on my main account.

Not long ago they added new security to the accounts. If you log in from an unknown ip address it can cause the account to get locked. This caused me to stop sharing accounts for a while, but i found out that they'll stop locking the account if tell them that it's a friend's house you play at occasionally. I think you can also tell them you use vpn, or use a vpn and it won't happen.

As far as penalties, anything could happen, nothing, warning, account suspension, ban. I don't think i'd ever let anyone play on my main account.