Tobold's Blog
Saturday, August 05, 2006
 
The truth about powerleveling

I received an e-mail from the CEO of a powerleveling company, PGMx, directing my attention towards an article called "The truth about powerleveling". I don't condone powerleveling, but the article *is* worth reading, listing the inherent dangers of powerleveling, getting banned or getting hacked. So the advice that if you absolutely want to do powerleveling, open a fresh account and level a character there instead of using your standard account with existing characters is quite solid.

In my opinion the level 1-59 part of World of Warcraft is far superior to the level 60 part. So powerleveling has somebody else do the good part of WoW for you, just so that you arrive at the bad part without effort. I always compare it to paying somebody to watch TV for you. And then of course you can't play that character as well as if you had leveled him yourself. So I can't recommend powerleveling at all. Buy gold if you must, but level the characters yourself.
Comments:
Unpaid advertising. Was that what you intended? It's no more the "truth about powerleveling" than a poorly disguised advert from the makers of Ariel would be the "truth about washing clothes".

There are several myths in the post, e.g. the idea that there are people with packet sniffers at the "bottlenecks" of the Internet who are somehow able to steal your account information when it's used by a Chinese guy working a 14 hour gold farming shift, but not when you use the account normally.

To put this into perspective, it would take one competent programmer at Blizzard two hours to design and implement a cryptographic authentication method that never sends your WOW password or a password-equivalent over the Internet. You can walk into a library and pick up a book on how to do that. Do you think Blizzard were too busy and forgot? Or isn't it more likely that underpaid powerlevelers make some extra cash by selling the especially nice accounts to a third party for "harvesting" ?

"Oops, Blizzard must have detected your unauthorised use and deleted the characters, yeah, that's it, it was Blizzard, they're the bad guys. Or maybe one of our competitors, did you ever use them? Bunch of crooks."
 
I don't know anything about packet sniffing, but I do know that for buying a powerleveling service you need to send that person your password, and the person you sent it too might well decide that selling all your stuff is worth more than doing the powerleveling job for you. And then you have problems explaining what happened to Blizzard.

So whereever the danger is coming from, if you absolutely want to buy a powerleveling service, it is safer to do it on a fresh account. You can always move the character for $25 to your old account later and delete the second account.
 
there was some drama on FoH the other day how some large guildleader got banned mid-raid for taking over their best tanks account. Account Sharing, apparently, is a large TOS breaker in the minds of Blizzard. Obviously this guy had other things that must have lead to this final action. But also obviously, if you pay someone to level your account you'll also always be at risk. That and other things...
 
Account Sharing might be a big no-no with Blizzard, but EULA 3.Ownership(B) allows you to transfer an account to another person, but you must give that other person everything, inc. manual and disks, and keep nothing yourself. To comply 100% you must even uninstall WoW from your PC.
 
Account sharing is against TOS? That's stupid. Don't the expect families to share a single account - at least for a while? You don't just run out and buy 3 copies of WOW. You buy one and let all test drive to see who is actually going to play, then you buy individual accts.
 
If Blizzard TRULY cared about account security, they wouldn't have an inferior authentication system and make it so easy for hackers to get in and damage an account.

All the hacker needs is a password and they have free reign of the account, doing plenty of damage before the true owner is able to react.
 
Link's broke
 
... which given that the link was controversial might actually be a good thing. :)
 
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