Hi, I use a VPN and it runs while I play WoW. Recently I’ve seen some stories about accounts being banned, possibly because of a VPN giving a false positive and Blizzard detects it as botting?
If that makes sense, but I haven’t gotten an actual clear answer, so I was wondering if it’s safe to use a VPN while playing WoW. I can’t seem to find an answer on their support section and it seems kinda trivial to give more traffic with a ticket. thank you!
They are not supported, but it is fine to use one. Before they got their own servers physically in Australia, the Oceanic players used VPNs to improve their ping times. Some still use them.
It’s not botting that may cause the lock/ban. If you don’t use the same one every time it can seem like you are in two places in a very short time. Like Tokyo and London. You can’t get from one to the other in minutes, so the system thinks account sharing is happening and the account get locked.
Getting banned because you use a VPN happens very rarely. They are usually overturned when you appeal.
The best thing is to have an authenticator on your account as well.
Ohh that makes sense. Fortunately I only use it for my region & the switching factor seemed to be common for those stories I’ve read. Thanks a bunch!
That’s also a very handy thing for folks to try to use as an excuse.
Can a lock happen for a VPN, yes. Do they usually get overturned quickly, yes.
Providing nothing else is going on.
Rufflebottom is correct. We cannot support VPNs, but they aren’t forbidden for WoW, either.
Sorry for the necro, but this being the top hit for “WoW Blizzard VPN policy”, it should have accurate information.
Yeeeah, that was definitely not my experience when my original account got banned in 2013 for VPNing to the US when I was stationed in Korea. Couldn’t even get Customer Service to talk to me so I could explain the telemetry they were seeing, just got “we reviewed your case and confirmed you were totally [gold selling or account sharing or whatever it was they thought I did]. The ticket has been closed, and we won’t respond to further messages.”
You should be careful giving this advice. “It’s not our policy to ban for VPN use” is very different from “you won’t get banned just for VPN use.” You definitely flag on VPN use, and you definitely perma-ban just for VPN use, because it happened to me.
The point here, for anyone like me who came here from Google: VPN at your own risk, because it can definitely get you perma-banned.