Using Shadow for WoW: Bannable?

Been playing Blizz games for a year on Shadow. No ban.

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A VPN is ok cloud computing is not. Regardless if you have been playing on it for a year it is against the EULA and you can get banned.

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Then I’ll open a ticket, ask support directly, and see what they say. It would be very disappointing especially considering that Shadow claims to have “measures in place”.

Thank you for contacting Shadow support.

We have not had any notices of users being banned for playing any Blizzard games while using our service.

Shadow is aware of Blizzard’s EULA against cloud gaming services and we have measures in place that will protect your account in the instance that any action taken upon.

If you have any other questions, please feel free to message me back in a reply.

I just want to continue to play WoW and Shadow is my only hardware option right now.

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Warcraft did a mass suspension of shadow/other cloud users right when bfa came out. Ive not heard of any suspensions since. But the eula has not changed.

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This is frustrating. Shadow’s support responded to a followup question with this…

Thank you for providing that EULA excerpt. Not to sound like a broken record, but we’ve yet to see any Battle net accounts impacted by playing Blizzard games on Shadow. Additionally, GeForceNOW is generally in the same “cloud computing” category as us while also offering Overwatch as an available title.

At the moment, I don’t have any more information or reassurance I can provide, so I’ve reached out to those in-charge of dev relations in Shadow for a more official response. Unfortunately, I don’t expect a response from this team until Monday afternoon, but I’ll keep you abreast of any updates I receive.

My apologies for the non-answer, but please let me know if you have any questions while I further investigate this.

I’m waiting for a followup response to my ticket here from a Blizzard rep asking for clarification because they’re being vague about this as well.

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GM’s don’t typically give a yes or no to a program or something like this. it opens the door for exploitation. you can read the eula yourself and in this case it is obvious what it means, there is nothing to be clarified. shadow is cloud gaming and cloud gaming is specifically not allowed.

shadow probably has a fair number of warcraft players who use them and they’re not complaining of bans, so shadow isn’t going to say “oh yes this is against the rules stop paying us money.” they can offer no reassurance at all, except to say that they have users playing warcraft who are not complaining about being banned, so it seems like warcraft is not strictly enforcing this aspect of the eula, at the moment.

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Hey all,

While we in support cannot say if a program will or will not get your account suspended or banned (other than the obvious botting programs) - I can confirm that this is indeed against the EULA as of this writing. As a result, there is always a possibility that if we detect the use of such a service we may take action against the account. I recommend against using cloud gaming software to play our games.

Keep in mind that I’m not part of our legal or dev teams, so that’s the extent of the insight I can provide here. I just wanted to ensure that you knew the official stance from the EULA.

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That’s all I was asking. I’ll continue to monitor my support ticket for further details and clarification, especially in regards to Shadow’s stance…

Should the worst case scenario occur, we would immediately notify our developer relations team (the same that I mentioned in my previous message) who would make sure that any negative measures taken against your account are reversed as soon as humanly possible.

This is why I’m seeking clarification. They’re promising me everything will be ok. Everyone over here is telling me to opposite. I just want to know if I can play.

In the event that a suspension happens for any reason, you’re always welcome to appeal it, but we get the final say in whether or not a ban remains. Their development team is of course welcome to reach out to ours but again, I can’t guarantee they’d be able to do anything.

Regardless, it’s against EULA, so your best bet is to play the game locally if at all possible. I understand that not everybody has a PC capable of running the game, but this isn’t something we can support or endorse at this point in time. The only way to ensure that no suspensions come to your account for now is to play the game locally and adhere to the EULA for the game.

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Thank you. I appreciate the response.

I honestly don’t believe anyone is asking you to officially support it or endorse it, just not outlaw it as such. It’s a hamfisted approach to a problem, and that’s frustrating.

Serious question. Outside of botting and automation how is playing a game in a cloud gaming scenario giving the player any advantage? Not following why this is against EULA.

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They said that streaming apps are OK if you stream from yourself directly to yourself, but not if you stream from a third party’s computer, or if the stream is processed by third-party servers.

That means direct-connection protocols such as VNC or RDP are OK, but cloud-based protocols such as Shadow, GeForce NOW, or TeamViewer, are not.

You’re mistaking giving an advantage for being the reason.

I can see that Blizzard would not want to have to support a third party hardware, your connection to the third party and then the third party connection to blizzard. How would hardware troubleshooting happen? How would connection troubleshooting happen? Can Blizzard set system specs as required and recommended and then make sure that every third party offering to let you play their games meets that standard on the platform? What about drive and platform updates?

It doesn’t have to give an advantage - it just has to be something Blizzard chooses not to support. In this case, to date, they stipulate that it has to be your hardware to run the games. Their platform, their rules.

The real issue is that it makes it much more difficult to detect of you’re using botware or other cheating software. One of their main methods of seeing if you’re cheating is by monitoring what other software is running on your computer. If you’re running through a cloud service it opens up possibilities to increase cheating and botting.

I don’t believe this is true; they can only look at memory space of their game(s).

This thread is almost 2 years old and the EULA has yet to be updated. I’ve played wow since 2006 and can no longer play it over 720p on my mobile computer that is required for my nomadic lifestyle. I cannot enjoy wow like this and refuse to risk my account due to this EULA policy. Please get your act together and solve this. Either allow for cloud gaming or provide an option directly. This pandemic has been awful for GPU prices and your customers deserve modern solutions. I’m sure you would love to up the subscription price. I will sincerely miss playing WoW. Goodbye.

You know, when you choose a “nomadic lifestyle”, the core of that is giving up many of the modern conveniences we “non-nomads” enjoy regularly.

As your nomadic lifestyle goes on, you’ll find more and more that you cannot enjoy the exact same things we of one-domestic-location can. You sacrifice one for the other. Such is the life of a nomad, despite the insistence of every tech company on Earth that you can “go anywhere and do anything” with today’s technology.

Sometimes it won’t be feasible due to the tech, and sometimes it won’t be feasible due to the rules. You’re experiencing the latter, which is part and parcel of a nomadic life.

Good luck.

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Rawro,

This thread is indeed 2 years old and since then we have decided against supporting cloud gaming services and asked that our games be removed from them, because of cheating implications that are impossible to work around on our end.

As this game has both an economy and competitive environment that can be destroyed by the allowance of these services, we are unlikely to support them going forward. I hope this has at least provided some insight as to why we made this decision.

Locking this thread to ensure that players who discover this topic in the future can easily find the latest information, however, if you have feedback for the game, it can be provided using the in game suggestion system or at #community:general-discussion

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