I’m still wondering why Blizzard doesn’t allow playing World of Warcraft remotely (locally). It’s not so much a question as I can probably guess the answer, being a reverse engineer hobbyist.
This is somewhat ridiculous, but I’ll explain my reason, as it is quite valid. I live in a small two-story house with limited space, and I simply don’t have room to keep my powerful computer, which has an RTX 4090 and a Ryzen 7950, on the lower floor. I’d like to connect to my PC using NVIDIA Shield Protocol to play the game because I have a eight months old child sleeping downstairs when I would typically have the chance to play. I can’t go upstairs if the baby starts crying. I keep the upstairs at a chilly 16°C since no one really uses it anymore, and we are planning to move once we find a suitable house.
I’m sure Blizzard will never provide an explanation as to why remote play results in a ban, but I can make an educated guess. It’s likely because RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) emulates the mouse and keyboard virtually, which your anti-cheat system flags, leading some tech engineer to review it and place a ban for botting.
I can confidently argue that if I buy a wireless mouse to use alongside my wireless G915 and connect it directly to my computer, and then stream the game’s display to a laptop downstairs, there’s no way for you to see that.
Could you please provide a real, clear, and honest explanation as to why this is not allowed? I’ve received a simple “No” in a ticket response before, but I would appreciate it if you could explain this properly so everyone can understand. This has been a topic of discussion in multiple forum threads.
I don´t work for Blizzard, but this is my wheelhouse, so I´ll provide you with a more informative answer than you will likely get from Blizzard (simply because anything they say with details is basically them indirectly telling players how to circumvent their own protections, whereas I am under no such restrictions here)…
You basically already hit it on the head. Part of the issue here is also even more touchy becaus of Multiboxing, as RDP is one of the primary ways to effiiciently mirror one input onto multiple machines, which is expllicitly NOT allowed, whihc is the pimary reason RDP gets flagged.
It´s annoying as a single user, but the widespread negative ramifications of allowing it far outweigh the benefits.
And yes, you can set up your own infrastructure to get around this limitation, and that is unfortunately what you are almost certainly going to have to do. ANd the point iin your proposed setup is that you´re still “physically” performing teh inputs on the machine in question, with no chance to mirror them onto x other machines. So they “can´t see that” because there’s nothing to see, as you are not acting in violation of the ToS.
GForce now is now supported for remote play with WoW after the Microsoft acquisition.
All other forms remain unauthorised. They don’t need to explain to you besides what is written in the Terms sadly and shall refer to it for any questions you may have.
GFN is a bit different, though, as it´s itself a cloud service…
the Game runs on Nvidia´s servers and they just stream the output to your machine and allow your HIDs to interface with their server in real time…
Yes, one could argue that it´s basically the same as using RDP to stream from your gaming rig, and in essence that´s correct… the difference is that “Most” people, especially not thoiose with financial interest like botters, aren´t going to simultaneously run 8 GFN clients and use it to circumvent the multiboxing restriction.
FOR INDIVIDUALS BASED IN THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC AREA: As an integral part of its End User License Agreement (EULA), Microsoft agrees to allow Consumers to play, solely for their personal use, Eligible Games on a Streaming Service on any device that they own, as defined in and pursuant to the Commitments entered into by Microsoft and made legally binding by the European Commission in its decision under Article 8(2) of Regulation (EC) 139/2004 in case M.10646 – Microsoft/Activision Blizzard. See https://www.xbox.com/en-US/legal/activision-blizzard-cloud-game-streaming-eu.
Referring to this clause, it should be permissible to use NVIDIA Shield/GameStream Protocols to stream and play a game on your own devices within a local network. My internet connection to the world is not great anyway, so I wouldn’t even be able to play when away from home. However, local network speeds logically perform well within the internal network, so achieving +120 FPS is not an issue.
That said, I find it odd that some discussions on this topic have mentioned that Blizzard has prohibited the use of devices like the Steam Deck. I am not familiar with that device myself. However, my intended use case as described in the original text should be fairly clear.
Blizzard’s staff says one thing, while their Terms of Service (ToS) says something completely different. Generally speaking, ToS documents are often written in a way that leaves room for interpretation from the perspective of an average user, making them unclear or not straightforward enough for everyone. I still wonder what their official stance on this matter is.
It has been known that they never reveal anything that might guide users toward so-called “workarounds to success,” but perhaps that’s partly the point of this message to poke them a little.
You can argue your interpretation of how it “should” be for forever and a day, but the fact as ist stands is that is is not allowed via any means but GFNow, period. And there is nothing unclear in the ToS about that, it is explicitly disallowed, across the board, except for the sole and very recent exception of GFNow.
And were it not Microsoft that acquired them and had previously made a commitment to EU lawmakers during the course of the aqcuisition process, it still would not be allowed under any circumstances, including GFNow.
The problem here is simple. Unless you´re sitting in Johanna Faries´ office together with Phil Spencer while arguing this and can present potential solutions to the overarching problems that these restrictions are meant to curtail, and not just argue why you should still be allowed to do it anyway, then it´s still going to be a complete waste of time. It´s like me arguing on facebook why I should be allowed to own a nuclear weapon … Everybody is always great at arguing whey they should be allowed to do something, while simultaneously completely ignoring that the other 7 Million people on the planet also exist, and “may” have entirely different motivations and plans when the same rules are applied to them. Not everybody is a good person.
never had issues doing remote play. I use steam to stream wow to my MacBook to increase its battery life and keep it cool. I do this both locally but also when im out, Never had a ban from that, didn’t even now it had been against ToS
