Account trading - how to prevent it?

[Stilicho]

I was very pleased to see that account trading/sharing will not be allowed on Nostalrius. But I wonder how you plan to enforce this specific rule. I mean, I can see no way to prevent players from giving their account credentials to friends when they can not attend a raid or stop playing on Nostalrius alltogether. The only way to handle this would be to have a "one account per IP" policy, but that would mean that people who share an internet connection would be affected by the rule, too.
This might sound a bit critical, but I think it's a very important matter and would appreciate hearing your plans.

[Xadas]

putting an IP lock on an account would cause more problems than it would prevent. Blizzard has had so many problems banning/suspending accounts that logged in from a different location its almost laughable. i tried playing wow on a rainy day on my vacation in spain once. insta-suspension because i wasn't logging in from the U.S.

same goes with having friends over to chill, drink/smoke and level with. should they be suspended/banned for wanting to socialize outside of teamspeak/vent/mumble etc by doing it in real life while playing? this post is dumb.

[mrmr]

What about all the people with a Dynamic IP (the majority in EU)?

[Stilicho]

this post is dumb.

wow, so this is the community's attitude? Please read my post again, I did not suggest an ip block. I just asked HOW Nostalrius will deal with this, since a "one account per IP"-rule (which is the only technical possibility I know of) is not a viable option, as I stated myself. I was hoping that Nostalrius team has found another way to prevent account trading. Hence my question.

[Envy]

Don't judge a community based on a single answer... that's not really smarter than what that guy did.
I don't think there really is a way to prevent such a thing, nor do I think it would be useful to prevent it.

What does it change ?
But then again, if they chose not to allow it, fine by me, but good luck with that.

[secondary]

Its just stupid to prevent it. I shared my accounts since day one. Especially for farming chars that me and my friends used. Or take guild banks for example where more then 1 user have access too.
Sometimes I want to play a different class and take another personst account for it. If hes fine with sharing so should you.

[Clockwerk]

You just can't prevent it. The only thing that you can do is report people that you've seen trading accounts.

[Drain]

I don't think you guys understand this kind of policy in video gaming. It's not meant to prevent the kind of in house/family sharing you're talking about. That can be performed whether a company likes it or not and there's little to nothing they can really do about it. This is like asking, "Will I get banned for letting my brother get on my Steam account to play games I paid for?" The answer is no. In fact, he could access it from across the country if you allowed him, with an IP Address no where near yours. Valve is not going to come after you and try to ban you for having dared shared something you created/paid for.(Although you don't legally own anything on it) The same is true with game accounts. You basically can share them, but the generally census is that you shouldn't unless the person is very trust worthy.(Always remember that employees, GMs, game developers, companies, etc, will not ask for account information, as they already have access to accounts. People that ask for this information are the people that don't already have access, and shouldn't.)

The policy is meant to stop people from trading accounts in the public eye, say in chat channels, internet forums, or auctioning them for money on websites. You won't be able to say, "WTT 60 Warrior for 60 Mage" in trade chat, on this forum, or go list an auction for the account somewhere. This is what the policy is meant for. These activities, if enforced, can get the account banned. If they see your account listed on an auction site for sell, which only an owner can realistically do, then they are saying they will ban it. However, even though most games have this policy, the actual companies behind them, including Blizzard, don't enforce it. You can see plenty of auctions to this day for MMO accounts, especially WoW due to its popularity. It's probably against forum rules to link such a site to show you, but they aren't hard to find if you want to see one. Most auctions attempt to hide owner identity, but that doesn't matter. Whether you display character names openly or hide them, the account can still be easily found by using the information you did provide to narrow down(to 1) who the only possible owner could be. The reality is that Blizzard(and most MMO companies) just doesn't care.

The question is, will Nostalrius care? That's a question I asked in the illegal multiboxing thread, and even if they say "yes", you as a player can't take their word for it until you see results. Since most companies don't enforce their own codes of conduct or terms of services, this is definitely something you have to see to believe. Eventually, inevitably, someone will try to openly trade/sell an account, and if Nostalrius takes action, it's then proven with results. I mean, for years on retail WoW, I saw gold sellers spamming chat channels and sending garbage to our chat boxes and mailboxes. Blizzard could have very easily stopped this by putting level restrictions on these features, not even needing to go after accounts, but they just didn't bother in all the time that I played. It might be different today, but up until I quit during Cata, that's how it was.