The GM Blog: Sharing is caring, unless it's account sharing

Dear players. I am GM Nova and I am a senior Game Master here at Customer Support. I am writing this blog because I feel that there is far too little dialogue between players and Customer Support. What I am going to do, in what I hope to be a series of blogs, is to go through some of our policies, the reasons behind these policies and how it affects players and the game when they are not followed.

Many players seem to suffer from something called “EULARD” or End User License Agreement Reading Deficiency (Also known as U-Lard). Players afflicted with this deficiency are unaware of the many rules and policies they agree to when they accept the EULA, perhaps understandably so, since it’s a lengthy and sometimes confusing document. I am not going to go through the entire EULA in this blog, but I am going to discuss an important section that generates considerable grief on the player base as well as load on Customer Support, Account Sharing.

Here is the relevant clause from the End User License Agreement regarding account sharing: //www.eve-online.com/pnp/eula.asp

_2. YOUR ACCOUNT
A. Establishing a New Account
You may not share your Account with anyone, or allow anyone other than you personally (or your minor child, if you have registered an Account on behalf of your minor child) to access or use your Account. Joint or shared ownership or use of an Account by more than one user is prohibited.

B. Passwords and Names
You will be asked to select a password during the registration process ("Password"). You may not disclose your Password to anyone or allow anyone to use your Password to access the System or play EVE™. You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your Password and for any damage, harm, lost or deleted characters, etc. resulting from your disclosure, or allowing the disclosure, of any Password, or from use by any person of your Password. You may not obtain, attempt to obtain, use or attempt to use the password of anyone else. You are responsible for remembering your Account information and Password._ As you can see, account sharing is clearly not allowed. This includes giving a friend your password to train a skill for you, even if it’s for only one time. The reason for this is account sharing creates risk of abuse. I am sure that a great number of players have at one time shared their account details with someone without running into any problems. Not yet at least. You would probably not believe how much of our time is spent on cases where players have shared their account details in good faith only to have them stripped of ISK, items and even characters. We can not guarantee that we can reverse damage done to accounts that have been shared. I can however guarantee that players that log into other player's account and steal their assets are rewarded with a long vacation from EVE.

I will list the most common issues we receive regarding account sharing.

• Players ask an ingame friend to train skills for them. Friend keeps the login details. Friendship ends, the account is accessed and damaged.
• Player decides to sell a character for ISK. He then feels that the character transfer fee is too high and gives the buyer his login details and thereby the account. The buyer happily plays the account for a few months until the original owner claims that the account was hacked. In these cases the account typically gets banned permanently.
• Players share their accounts with corp members in order to allow them access to a capital ship. A player leaves the corp and decides to rob everyone on his way out with the account of a corp member. Much destruction and wailing ensues.

I would not be writing this if I didn’t feel that this is a serious problem that is draining our resources. A petition that follows a hacking case or a shared account abuse takes about ten times longer then a regular petition does to fully resolve. We get several of these in our queues every single day which greatly reduces our response time and decreases the quality of support we are able to give to others that need our help.

What I am trying to explain is that responsibility must go both ways. It is our responsibility to give you the best service we possibly can. It is your responsibility to allow us to give you this support by following our rules and policies.

Best regards,
GM Nova
Senior Game Master
EVE Online Customer Support