Some games from Activision Blizzard, including World of Warcraft, were playable for a short time on Nvidia’s cloud gaming platform GeForce Now. This was apparently a mistake, and those who took advantage of the offer now seem to face penalties.
Update: There is now an official response from Blizzard (via reddit). According to them, this is not an issue with GeForce Now, but rather botting.
Reasons for the ban: The reddit user and WoW player Rogtrain accepted Nvidia’s offer to play WoW through GeForce Now. GeForce Now is a so-called cloud service.
The service allows players to stream games at full performance on weaker devices. In simple terms, this means you control a more powerful PC remotely and view the game on your own device.
According to his own statements, Rogtrain only looked around on his Lightforged Paladin for five minutes to see if the service was any good. A week later he received a ban until August 2021.
Why is the ban so long? The use of cloud services violates Blizzard’s terms of service. This is explained in several places in the EULA. One possible applicable point could be:
Code and/or software that has not been expressly authorized by Blizzard and can be used in connection with the Battle.net client, Battle.net, a game, and/or its components or features to modify and/or simplify gameplay.
Blizzard End User Agreement
The reason the ban lasts so long is that Rogtrain already received a ban for purchasing gold for real money during The Burning Crusade, approximately 13 years ago. Penalties at Blizzard are cumulative and apparently do not expire.
Update – Here’s what Blizzard says about it: In an official response from Customer Support Dromogaz on reddit says:
We have reviewed this on our side and after thorough consideration, we can confirm that the measures against your account are valid and will not be overturned. The action was taken because botting software was used on the account.
Rogtrain defends himself by saying that there appear to be issues with the detection software, as he does not use bots, nor do others who were banned at the same time.
The user ChipsHandon12 also sees this critically and wants to know if GeForce Now falls under “botting software” or not. Evidence is also being requested. Other users are now teasing Rogtrain about having cheated and been caught.
Blizzard and GeForce Now
This is the background: GeForce Now mistakenly offered a number of Blizzard games for a period, including WoW. Shortly after, however, all games from Activision Blizzard were removed.
This disappointed fans, but the reason was apparently a misunderstanding. Nvidia was allowed to offer the games during the beta until February 4 and assumed that this would continue without issue afterwards (via golem).
However, Activision Blizzard seemed to disagree.
Is there a cloud service for WoW? It is currently unclear whether the games will return. However, Activision Blizzard is currently in negotiations with Google, during which the Overwatch League has switched to YouTube.
It is therefore conceivable that Blizzard games will soon be playable via Google’s cloud service, Google Stadia:
