A lot has been said so here goes.
A game's ToS is not a law. A company is allowed to sue an individual or business if they break the ToS and if the company believes it has a negative effect on their product. This is what happened to HonorBuddy as Blizzard successfully sued by claiming the bot program had a negative impact on its game and players.
I have news for all of you when you buy an account and your name is "steve" and you're calling blizzard from a completely different state and name and claiming to be that person and etc with their id, it is called IDENTITY THEFT
That's not really true. The OO willingly sold the account in turn giving you permission to use his name and ID to take control of it, so you can't claim it's ID theft as no theft took place. I suppose you can claim ID fraud since you are not that person, but again account sales are based on the fact the OO gave you permission over the account. The fraud only comes into play because game companies do not have a method to transfer an account from one person to another, so IMO this is a gray area.
EU courts in 2012 ruled that digital license are owned by the person who purchased them, not the company who sold them, and that person has a legal right to resell it. This directly relates to gaming accounts.
http://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2012-07/cp120094en.pdf
even if the licence agreement prohibits a further transfer, the rightholder can no longer oppose the resale of that copy.
The fact players have no method to transfer accounts from one person to another and have to commit ID fraud is more of an issue with Blizzard than it is between the 2 players committing ID fraud because in the EU Blizzard is supposed to allow for license transfers which it is currently not.
The fact Blizzard lost the case in EU means Blizzard will never sue anyone over account or virtual item rights in NA. There is a very high risk they will lose and no reward if they win as this does not change any of the rules currently in place. Instead they will just wait until someone sues them then drag it out as long as possible.
So what about unbanning services that require ID and also people/power sellers and all who need ID's for verification. Who knows if someone is uploading fake ID's to gain epic verification? if you wan't all ID's to be gone and services then don't just punish my business, punish all.
This is not about IDs in general, but fake IDs and the temptation to use them. Many games do not require ID to get unbanned depending on the ban reason. Asking for an ID to verify someone's info for verification, leveling or when buying an account is also completely different from a name change service.
In all those cases you're checking that the info matches. If a person uses a fake ID, the seller will deny the transaction as it's most likely a scam. So these work themselves out and it is in the best interest for the buyer to make sure the ID is real. For name changes you know the info does not match from the start.
The only people requesting name change services are people who do not have the ID to the account they own. This can be for multiple reasons; they bought it from someone and never got an ID; they created the account with fake info so no ID exists, or the ID they got from the OO is old and expired.
No one is saying their are not legit reasons for bnet name changes, what we are saying is the probability and temptation to create a fake ID to match the name on the account is very high, much higher than in account sales or verification purposes.
At this time the new rule will stand, however feel free to continue the discussion as we are always willing to listen to our members and make any change we think will benefit the community as a whole.
