Not so long ago I made a post about how I received a ban on one of my accounts. The post is “Bann for multiboxing”. I have submitted two appeals, both were rejected leaving me with nothing, so I made a 3rd one and today I got a genuine response, the crucial part is:
”After reviewing the complete case investigation and the penalty placed upon your account, I have found that the initial investigation was correct due to use of unauthorized third party programs, which is strictly forbidden. For that reason, I’ll have to uphold the penalty.”
I’m 100% happy with that answer since I know for a fact that it must have been the Windows Process Explorer hence that is the only program I have been using.
So if you multibox via same method stop doing so or you’ll be making same posts as i did.
To provide some integrity into my statement you may check my progression on ladder 14 simply by searching by my btag on d2emu which is Gasp003 (account which got ban) .
This account was full of characters geared with magic find items in purpose to apply final blow to the bosses as I was playing on my main account where I made builds strictly for power.
Some of you will accuse of being a cheater (well technically I am image) some of you may believe me, it’s up to you. Anyway I hope this post may save some lives and I’m also happy to answer any questions.
Cheers
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Play single player offline if you want /players X, you can use character editors to hack up a small charm with whatever other class skills you want. Blizzard doesn’t care what you do playing offline.
If you want to play legitimate multiplayer, that means playing with other players, not parking multiple mule accounts in town to boost the player count and to gain battle orders/enchant. I don’t care what anyone says, but that is NOT the intended way to play the game.
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just my curiosity, how does process explorer work? what did you do to the game exactly?
I don’t intend to use anything like this because I don’t have multiple accounts but I’m just curious if blizzard has the right to scan other processes except the game on your pc.
isn’t this illegal and protected by privacy? weird
The idea is to play on more than one account on a single PC. The problem is you cannot run more than one instance of d2r. To do so you use process explorer to kill a process within d2r client called “Check for other instances”. If this process is no longer running you may run another copy of d2r on your PC.
The way I see it is that Blizzard monitors the integrity of the game client, they see you used 3rd party program to alter the d2r client hence the ban. I definitely wouldn’t clasify it as a violation of one’s privacy. But this is just my understanding, anyway who knows what processes are running on their PC in the background.
This method was widely described as safe. There is a tutorial on how to do it on this very forum and you may even see recent posts where people defend this approach.
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Antivirus more or less does the same thing.
They are using d2r’s annual profits of $3.89 to pay for the janitor running the ban show so what do you expect.
In all seriousness, maybe whoever running it decided just to flag every mac address that had duplicates? I have run 3 x accounts in the past on the same PC, admittedly I haven’t in the past couple years and have used separate PCs/switches since it is so hard to run multiple instances on one PC..
I don’t think they can see what else you are running on your computer, but they can pattern behavior, and perhaps see which applications are directly inferfacing with gameplay.
Where have I said they see what i’m running on my PC?
I said they just moniotr d2r client and they see that the process “Check for other instances” was forcefully closed. They don’t care/don’t know how it was done. They just see it was done.
So, the user used an external program to manipulate the d2r client and that means the ban.
This is sadly my story
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There’s always more to the story.
They didn’t name any of those programs, though. Process Explorer is an official MS tool, so I don’t know in what reality it qualifies as a “third party program” within the Windows ecosystem.
The term “third party program” is ambiguous. From the perspective of the Windows OS, Process Explorer is a first party Microsoft utility, whereas their own games are third party applications. If they intend to prohibit specific MS tools, they should name them explicitly rather than relying on a vague term. This is from the perspective of treating your customers properly.
If the OP’s story is true, maybe it’s time to stop funding this company.
Anybody is entitled to their own interpretation. And anybody who was using process explorer may continue to do so. It’s safe after all.
Blizzard EULA 1, C, ii, 4:
“any code and/or software, not expressly authorized by Blizzard, that can be used in connection with the Platform and/or any component or feature thereof which changes and/or facilitates the gameplay or other functionality;”
That would include any other software from Microsoft.
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Lol… they had no idea you were using any 3rd party programs. They just knew you were playing on two accounts. The behavior they used to detect the 3rd party was that one input, exactly the same input, controlled two characters.
I think that in the end majority of these bans were explained why they probably happened. Some were lifted, some werent. But in those which werent, it seems there was always something wrong person did. Like that guy with 2 kids who were banned.
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What about two people playing on the same LAN? How would they tell the difference in interwebs traffic?
Duplicating gameplay is different altogether and requires automation.
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There are unique identifiers that installed programs can read and “phone home” with, such as your network MAC address.
You think they are collecting a user’s MAC address?
I recommend you read up on how networks work. Just because you’re on a LAN does not confuse Blizzard. This is why you can play on a LAN and clicking your mouse on one computer doesn’t mistakenly affect the character on the other computer.
This ties in nicely to answer your second question….
The packets that are sent to the server contain the information needed to route back home. ET home fone.
The reason this guy was banned, likely, is that a program was using the same inputs to control both characters. The client can detect this.
I’m just saying that information could be used to determine if multiple copies of the game are running on the same system. It gets complicated with virtual machines. It can also be used as evidence to determine if an account has been sold to someone else.
Microsoft is a very large umbrella…
That is exactly right. Its not against ToU. However, other than alt tabbing between open executions, a lot of people use 3rd party programs to allow seamless communication. This is detectable. Not necessarily through absolute proof of a 3rd party application - blizzard would have absolutely no way to get that. Its a strong enough suspicion that they’d rather just ban you because they’d rarely be wrong.
This is why when botters create their setups, spinning up a new OS to have the client operating in works well as a barrier. This is why no botters get banned by Blizzards banwaves. They do get the low hanging fruit, like this OP and the other kiddos in the discord servers.
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