Policy regarding Bans

from Demigod Forums

Dear fellow forum members / stardock staff

Another question came to my mind the minute I finished my previous post.

See I own 2 Warcraft 3 CD Keys to play on bnet. But due to blizzard ridicuosly policy of banning by IP, there has been 3 times that we could not play because someone non identified person in my building used a hack , cheat or I dont know what kind of crack , so as they banned by IP, the ban also affected me and my brother (legit players who happen to share the same external ip , with all the people of the building). Even by calling them to their HQ , they said they could not do nothing. Well that really pissed me off , since we are clean and legit players , and we dont like paying for the mistakes of others.


That said , whats the policy at stardock regarding bans, do you ban by IP also , or by cdkey or by user account?. I hope you can help me in this one too , or putting me in contact to someone who can help in this inquirie.

 

Thanks a lot again in advance,

Eduro

demigod
1,228 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from Demigod Forums Top

I'm not sure what mechanisms we have in place for the game itself, but as the chat lobby uses IRC and is independent of the game itself, pirates or very disruptive users there may be banned using a standard IRC hostmask, which would be IP-based. That would not affect one's ability to play the game, though.

Reply #2 from Demigod Forums Top

I'd imagine though for the game itself it'd be much easier to disable the offending account, since the in-game username is the account name?

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Reply #3 from Demigod Forums Top

Probably.

Reply #4 from Demigod Forums Top

Dear kryo , thanks again for your fast reply.

I am not too tech savy , but if you use that IRC hostmask to ban people, and it is IP based, do you ban The IP , or do you ban the user account using the IP in that moment?. Lets put an example so you can clear things for me a little bit please:

Lets say me and  9 persons in my bulding who might purchase the game play all happily from day 1. We all share the same external IP (but have different local /internal IPs). If this would be Blizzard, if one is an offender or an eleventh person comes and tries to use a pirate copy, he would be banned. But that ban is external IP based , so everyone will pay the price , regardless of whether being legit users or not.

If this would be Stardock´s Demigod , and it would be also IP based , would it be external IP based so everyone will pay the price? or how would that offender be handled separately and the rest be able to join normally?

 

This would really clarify things for me , and it is a dealbreaker for my purchase. I really dont want to be calling you with complaints as I have called blizzard in the past.

Thanks for everything.

Regards,

Eduro

 

P.S. If you dont know the answer, can you please put me into contact with someone who can give me a certain answer regarding this issue. Thanks.

 

 

 

Reply #5 from Demigod Forums Top

or do you ban the user account using the IP in that moment?
End of quote

A standard IRC ban is based on the unique combination of the user's name *and* IP together. That's pretty trivial to evade though, but I personally don't generally bother with a pure IP ban unless someone actually does try to evade the ban and continue whatever trouble they were causing. Finally, bans are usually temporary anyway.

As noted above, all this isn't that big of a deal--it ONLY affects the chat overlay. It has zero bearing whatsoever on your ability to play the game online as you wish. And in the unlikely case that you have become a victim of someone else's ban, it's a simple matter of popping on IRC through an external client (Impulse has one) and asking about it in another channel.

 

As Annatar noted, if we had to boot someone from online play altogether, it would probably be by revoking their serial key (and there's no mistaking with that).

Reply #6 from Demigod Forums Top

thank you very much for all the help and time provided in answering my inquiries.