Hi everyone, I've been thinking a lot about banning for linked accounts and how it could potentially be very unfair for a small minority of banned players.

For example, let's say Fred is a normal, non-cheating player that lives in the US. He stops playing for a while and perhaps his password is not so secure, and a hacker in Russia, let's say his name is Viktor, accesses his account. Viktor then proceeds to cheat on Fred's account. However, Viktor is a serial cheater. He has several accounts banned by PB and FF linked to his IP address.

Now, Fred is linked to all of Viktor's accounts, and even if Fred makes a new account after realizing his old was was compromised, he will forever be linked to Viktor over his first account.

It should be clear based on IP location that these are two different people, but I'm not sure that this sort of situation taken into consideration when banning for linked accounts.

Personally, I don't think someone deserves a permanent ban for any account they create just because they chose a bad password/had an insecure account.

What are your thoughts?

My opinion is that when you do not take your accounts security serious, you have helped a cheater to continue his practise of ruining the game for others. Therefor you suffer the concequences. 

There are plenty of ways to secure your account and it is pretty much advised everywhere to use at least a strong password. Failing to do so is either stupid, lazy or both. 2FA is pretty much a must too nowadays. 

It is a different story when there is a security breach at EA's side ofcourse. But that has not happened yet to my knowledge.

Another thing, purely practical, is that I too can use a random Russian VPN while I cheat. Then I go to EA, say my account got hacked and the usual blah blah. Then I knock on BF4DB's door with a statement from a random EA support guy that my account got hacked. EZ PZ unban. 

Do not get me wrong, I feel sorry for the people that really got their account stolen. But it is so easy to prevent.

I share Scavengers opinion.

EA's 2FA security feature has been a thing for quite a long time now. If you don't have it enabled yet whether it be a direct textmessage through your phone or your email you are doing something wrong. Experts keep warning people about reusing their passwords on different websites and suggest to use a password vault/manager brower extension. The advantage of using one is that you only have to memorize one, but fairly strong password.

Back to the topic and to BF4DB bans for linked accounts;

Given the case someone "got hacked" and now has two logged IP subnets one from Germany the second one from Russia. User X now goes ahead to appeal his ban and expects us to lift the ban because he didn't do anything.

1.) We can't prove that he was hacked. (aka that someone else actually broke into his account)

2.) We can't prove that he wasn't the one who broke into the account, hacked, got banned, and now tries to take that as an excuse.

3.) (Ridiculous example) If we would lift linked account bans for the ones who were hacked someone could go ahead and hack in his vacations in spain, claim some spanish hacker broke into his account, and get a greencard for that because we can't prove it was him due to the spanish IP logs.

Tl;dr its definitely unfortunate for the ones who actually got hacked and banned for things someone else did on their account but thats just how life is, unfair.

It's a difficult topic because both possible actions could be seen as wrong. If we don't ban these accounts people will claim we protect cheaters, however if we do ban these accounts people will claim we issue unfair bans.

Everyone can form their own opinion but we most likely won't change the way we operate regarding accounts that have been broken into.

TIPP:

DO NOT SHARE YOUR ACCOUNT'S LOGIN INFORMATION WITH ANYONE, NOT EVEN YOUR BEST FRIEND! YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR OWN ACCOUNT!