Banned for copyrighted character name?

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Ethan_RangerR wrote:

I've got a friend that was recently perma-banned with no warning. He wasn't botting, he wasn't flask-macroing, he was just playing in our group as a competent cursebot.

I scoured ToS and only found a couple things that might have applied, 7d: "Knowingly perform any actions that may cause the computers used to support the Website, Materials and Services (the “Servers”) to become overloaded or crash." and 15a: "[Usernames that] infringe the rights of whatever nature of any third-party including without limitation copyright, registered and unregistered trade mark rights, rights of , privacy, confidentiality and any other intellectual property rights"

We reasoned its probably not the first one, he had a lot of MTX on but he wasn't doing any of the huge AoE attack speed boosted things that would actually lag the game.

As for the second, his most recent character was named "HiTek_Toucan," and HiTek is a trademarked name owned by an electrical material supplier company. Then again, is (unintentionally) using a trademarked name as a part of one character name, really bannable? I mean, couldn't they just notify him and give him X time to change the character name? Or set the name to something random like "BananaBoy" and send his account a message? I just find it hard to believe that they would instantly permaban someone for something so minor, when there are solutions that dont involve him losing thousands of hours of characters and hundreds of dollars of MTX?

I'd love to hear from a GGG staff, or someone with a good understanding of ToS and ban policy.

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Ethan_RangerR wrote:

well that sucks. He appealed, but hasnt gotten a response yet (not shocking, ban was 6AM EST today so I doubt they'll reply for a while)