#0 - July 29, 2008, 3 p.m.
I'm writing this on behalf of a player on a Japanese SNS site who had their account banned, and he is unsure why. After several emails going back and forth with account admin, he was told that he was banned for [Offense: Unapproved Third Party Software ].
Now according to the player he was using standard mods, which he did list on the thread, though one in particular stuck out as being the possible cause:
QuestJapanizer
To my knowledge, this mod takes the text quest of the game, runs it through an online English > Japanese translation website, and places the result in the quest text box.
Is this classified as 'illegal' mod behavior that could result in a permanent ban? The Japanese WoW community considers this a normal mod and it is widely used. If it is in fact a ban-able offense to use this mod, then perhaps it would be of greater customer service to include some information pointing to this mod in your warning email?
To this player he is using just another one of his 30 or so UI Mods, and suddenly receives an account closure email with no clear reason, asks for clarification but is responded purely with 'illegal 3rd party mod'. Japanese players often use mods to allow unicode font to display in WoW in order to type in Japanese, now to someone with little knowledge of how computers work would this seem so different? I don't think so.
Surely there is a way to prevent mods that cause such behavior to stop functioning when the game launches, as this is clearly not a malicious mod?
In conclusion,
Please clarify if using this mod:
URL: http://d.hatena.ne.jp/lalha/20080220/p1
Direct to ZIP: http://lalha.sakura.ne.jp/wowaddon/QuestJapanizer.0.2.zip
Is in fact a violation of the terms of use?
If you are able to verify this is the cause of why he was banned, is there any chance of his account ban being lifted?
Thanks,
Frap