EMERGENCY MAINTENANCE CONCLUDED
The Team has identified a fix for the recent Catalyst Offer issue.
Summoners who purchased this offer have been temporarily locked out of the Contest to Clawback any Catalysts bought/used while active, and ensure previously owned resources remain intact.
They will be unlocked once this process is complete, and no further action will be taken on their Accounts - along with a compensation package to those affected for the inconvenience.
Doing this allows us to bring the Game back up for everyone else.
We've removed the affected offer so we can decide later whether or not to bring it back after it's been fixed.
Additionally, all summoners can expect a general compensation package due to this Emergency Maintenance interrupting their play session.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
The Team has identified a fix for the recent Catalyst Offer issue.
Summoners who purchased this offer have been temporarily locked out of the Contest to Clawback any Catalysts bought/used while active, and ensure previously owned resources remain intact.
They will be unlocked once this process is complete, and no further action will be taken on their Accounts - along with a compensation package to those affected for the inconvenience.
Doing this allows us to bring the Game back up for everyone else.
We've removed the affected offer so we can decide later whether or not to bring it back after it's been fixed.
Additionally, all summoners can expect a general compensation package due to this Emergency Maintenance interrupting their play session.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Account Sharing Bans - InfoBot "Services"
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
Infobot is promoting account sharing, which is illegal
There is so much wrong here, and none of it that hasn't been promulgated before by disgruntled MMO players with a poor understanding of the law.
1. The law governing your access to the game generally is contract law. Under contract law, you are not entitled to access and play the game unless you agree to the TOS. You cannot claim the TOS is "illegal" and so you don't have to follow it. Under contract law, if you believe the TOS is illegal and you will not honor it, you invalidate your permission to access the game. Deliberately playing the game while ignoring the TOS is theft of service under most contract law in most western jurisdictions, in particular in the US.
2. The law governing your ownership rights to the game generally is intellectual property law. Under US law, you technically own anything you create in the game under authorship rights. That would be things like user names. However, the TOS requires you to grant to Kabam an unlimited license to use those things, so you cannot forbid them from accessing your account. Meanwhile, there is no law that says Kabam must allow you to access that content. Intellectual property law contains no provision for access. If you make a stone carving of a statue using a giant rock on my property, you have content creator authorship rights owning that creation. I am under no legal obligation to ever allow you back onto my property to ever see it again.
3. Intellectual property law makes a distinction between content and medium. Kabam owns the servers. They own the game client software which you only have a license to use, not own. They can revoke your ability to use any of that infrastructure irrespective of any intellectual property rights.
4. How much money you spend on your account has absolutely no bearing on whether you are entitled to anything in the future. Virtual items in a video game are not currently considered to be material property under US and international law, so your money was spent on a service not a commodity. Spending money on MCOC is like spending money on a gardener for a rental home. No matter how much money you spend on that service, you still have no ownership rights to that property.
5. Outside of China, I am unaware of anyone that has successfully sued an MMO for being permanently banned or having their account revoked. And most lawyers that have commented on this publicly tend to say that the chance of winning such a lawsuit is extremely low and not worth the effort to try. And even if you somehow win, any service provider can terminate their relationship with you for any reason or no reason at all, so they could terminate your account even after losing the lawsuit. There's literally no way for a court to compel a service provider to give you access forever.
I've seen hundreds, maybe thousands of posts by players like you making these claims, a significant fraction of which claim they will seek legal action if banned. I'm unaware of any of them succeeding. And that's because it is mostly black letter law that they would likely fail on the merits of their case, which tend to revolve around their extremely poor understanding of the law.
Now imagine paying people to do it for you, makes no sense, right?
Winner....the great contest of the longest post wins. Congrats and keep up the good work sir/madam.
I'm only aware of Game of War becoming entangled in a class action suit claiming it was an illegal gambling service. That case was dismissed. Clash of Clans was involved in an issue regarding minors performing in-app spending on the Apple App store that ultimately involved Apple granting refunds. There is no evidence I can find that either company was sued by a banned player and had the ban reversed. I am also unable to find any evidence of either company being sued by someone claiming ownership rights to any in-game content and winning. Any such victory would be big news all over the place, and I'm reasonably certain I would have heard about it.
If you have some kind of evidence for your claims that those companies were sued and lost cases involving either account banning or account ownership, post a link. This would be legally earth-shattering news, so it shouldn't be difficult to find.
I'm sure many will disagree. You have drunk too deeply of the Kool-Aid.
Well, yes and no. It is difficult in the general case to detect account sharing in a vacuum, but there have been cases where a player shared their account details with someone else and that someone else used a mod that was detected. In this case, if the player appeals the ban claiming that they did not use a mod at all and anything Kabam detected wasn't them but someone else, then that player would be admitting to a bannable offense itself. In this case, the official reason for the ban is either that the player used a mod, or they shared their account.
The fact that they shared their account with someone that used a ban was how they were *detected* but the reason for the ban would be account sharing.
I personally don't know if they ever banned someone for using a merc as a form of account sharing. However, it would be a meaningless defense to argue that they hadn't done so in the past if they start doing it tomorrow.
This is simply not true. In the last week or so, there have been a number of Posts asking to reinstate their Accounts with only Account Sharing as the transgressions. If you're under the impression that Account Sharing alone is not bannable, you would be wrong. It's always been agaisnt TOS. The fact that people still believe it's acceptable is baffling to me.
.....and the Award for Denial and Blatant Disregard goes to.....
It's a justification that's been around for a long time. The problem is it jeopardizes people's Accounts. It's not allowed. It's not a lesser offense. It has, can, and will be banned, given sufficient evidence. Usually the people engaging in the behavior keep spreading the same rederick. "Sharing alone is not bannable. They wouldn't ban 90% of the Player Base. The Top Allies do it, so they don't mess with the ones paying......". Horsewash. It's not allowed. It's not a lesser offense. It's bannable. Has been and will be. Anything else is just an excuse to do it.
Brown nosing? What, pray tell, do I get from stating the rules? People are misinformed about what is allowed and what is not. It is not. I'm not going to be judged for being honest. If you're justifying the wrong thing by discouraging those who stand up for the right thing, perhaps you need to take your own inventory.
Ugh, your naivety is astonishing. It is as @DNA3000 stated, people have been banned for account sharing because the person they they shared with was using a mod. There may have also been some people banned for account sharing who were running the arena for 24 hours a day back in the early days. I will reiterate, people do not get banned for simply sharing accounts. If they did 90% of those in a top 100 alliance would be banned. @GroundedWisdom please refrain from speaking on things you know nothing about.
Funny you laugh since you get paid to do LOL for people (I have screen shots too)
All you did was provide an example of the exact misconception I just stated. I've been here, reading Posts. The most recent ones weren't just Modding. They were people who allowed others to log in for them. I know what I'm talking about. If you want to continue under that false pretense, that's up to you. I'm not going to let people think it's allowed. It's not. It is bannable. They have banned for Account Sharing alone. Sorry to break it to you, but any violation of TOS can be a bannable offense, and it's been done before.
You are wrong. And I can verify you are wrong simply by observing that all of the top alliances still exist. Or are you now insinuating that Kabam only bans people for account sharing who have no discernible impact on their income? Seems like you are in a tough spot here.
Boom roasted. *wink
So yes, Kabam bans people who have an impact on their projected income, and who disrupt the ranking system in a player v player game.