#6 - Sept. 2, 2010, 9:34 a.m.
We understand that some people are using proxy or 'tunneling' services as a way to overcome latency issues; generally because their ISP may not be taking the best and fastest route possible to our servers. Hopefully we can address some of the misinformation going around about what the use of these proxy services means for you and your account.
Using these services is not now, nor has it ever, been a violation of our Terms of Use. Simply using a proxy is not enough to cause us to take action on your account. But! they're not officially supported either.
The reason why use of a proxy can be an issue is that the majority of organizations that abuse the game by selling virtual goods use proxies themselves. While we work to detect and stop these activities, we also work to prevent any ‘false positive’ results; but they do sometimes occur. Our false positive percentage is minuscule in relation to the number of accounts actually found in true violation of our policies, but they can happen and we work as fast as possible to review these cases and get our legitimate players back in the game.
If you do use or want to use a proxy/tunneling service, you can help prevent the likelihood of becoming a false positive by using the proxy service consistently.
We're continually improving our abilities to detect those that violate our policies, and with that we're continually improving our ability to more accurately identify (or rather, not identify) those that are using proxies legitimately.
