Using Geforce Now might get your account locked.

[mrstealth.6701]

Last night I tried playing GW2 through Geforce Now streaming on an alt account. Did my dailies and logged. About an hour later I went to log back into that account, without GeForce Now, and was met with the error message "The code you entered is invalid." I've since contacted support and was told that my account was "caught in our regular account security review," but that it was rechecked and was now unlocked. That was about 8 hours ago, and I'm still unable to log into that account. I'm confident this will be resolved, but there's definitely a bigger issue here.

The support rep did mention that playing via a VPN/proxy is not condoned/supported, and has been associated with account fraud. This is a fully understandable position when dealing with normal VPN service, of which there are countless. But my account was flagged using nVidia's GeForce Now, a service that Arenanet has seemingly opted in to participate in. GW2 was part of the service at its launch, but disappeared shortly with many other games and nVidia moved to only have games who's devs/publishers chose to be on the platform. Despite that, we seem to still have support locking accounts that log in via nVidia's servers. They really need to be double checking before locking/banning when the login is coming through an IP operated by a gaming service Anet already clearly has some degree of official support for.

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

The GMs/CS Team give that message (about VPNs) no matter the reason the account was caught in the security sweep.
Unless the GM specifically stated that GeForce Now was the reason for the issue, it may not be prudent to assume it was.

Also, the Tech CS Team suggests using a VPN when helping players with issues, even in official documents (Knowledge Base), so using a VPN is just as much encouraged as discouraged.

[mrstealth.6701]

I can't imagine anything else I might have done for the security lock to happen. It's an account that I'm on for a short time most days to collect login rewards and maybe do some quick dailies. I occasionally move a bit of gold or items to my main account or guild storage. But that has been going on for years with no issues, and I've moved much larger amounts in the past than anything that's happened recently. I would also expect the gold receiving account to get banned as well if that were the reason.

Of course it's possible that someone had attempted to use the email and guess passwords enough times to get it locked, but that seems unlikely to have happened within an hour or less of my logging in via GeForce Now. Being an automated detection, I would expect the action to happen quite soon after whatever had triggered it. And the only thing I had done was log in through GFN and do dailies. To me it seems like the most likely explanation. Though I am curious and tempted to test the theory with a rarely used free account I made a while back.

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

You don't have to have done anything to be caught up in the security sweep. There seems to be quite a few false positives, if the posts on the forums are any indication.Seems to be some new program, or something, they are using. Or maybe, it's just different because they are working from home, now.

[FOX.3582]

This is not the first time they have banned people for their own mistakes. Good luck!

[mrstealth.6701]

@FOX.3582 said:This is not the first time they have banned people for their own mistakes. Good luck!

I did get that account sorted. It took about a day. Would have been closer to 12 hours, but whatever they did the first time didn't actually remove the lock so I had to update the ticket and wait some more.

[mindcircus.1506]

@"mrstealth.6701" said:Last night I tried playing GW2 through Geforce Now streaming on an alt account. Did my dailies and logged. About an hour later I went to log back into that account, without GeForce Now, and was met with the error message "The code you entered is invalid." I've since contacted support and was told that my account was "caught in our regular account security review," but that it was rechecked and was now unlocked. That was about 8 hours ago, and I'm still unable to log into that account. I'm confident this will be resolved, but there's definitely a bigger issue here.You got a response from CS in less than 24 hours?

[Friday.7864]

In this game bot users seem to be getting into less trouble than legit users. Yikes.

[mrstealth.6701]

Well, now I'm even more convinced that GeForce Now was the reason for the lock. I had logged into the game on another account yesterday both locally and through GeForce Now, and that account is now locked. I guess if you want to use GFN for GW2, you need to use ONLY GFN to access the game.

This is just ridiculous. If this is the level of official support they are going to have for GFN, Anet might as well just pull GW2 back off of the service. All of the unnecessary account locking is only going to create a nightmare for support staff and infuriate their players/customers.

[mrstealth.6701]

@mindcircus.1506 said:You got a response from CS in less than 24 hours?I had the problem resolved in almost exactly 24 hours. The first response, where someone attempted to fix it but failed, was after about 13 hours.

[mrstealth.6701]

The second account is being treated as compromised. I'm extremely skeptical of that actually being true, but I'm going through the requested security steps. I think the only chance of there actually being a compromise is if GFN itself was compromised or if someone somehow managed to figure out a long unique password and logged in via GFN after I did (I did check the "remember" box for two-factor), but before the account was locked.

Those unlikely scenarios aside, this seems to be an account being considered compromised based solely on a brief login through a service Anet wants their game available on. The only defensible part of this I can understand is that the account sat idle for a year or more. But still, the account is two-factor auth protected and the local play login was from the only location/ISP the account had ever been accessed from in the past.

[Josiah.2967]

I feel for all the false positives. At least they were fairly quick at responding.

[Aaralyna.3104]

Perhaps they flag accounts when it is logged in at a short period between different locations (as the GFN runs on servers of Geforce which is another location as where you live). However, it then would have been nice if you would get a mail where you can confirm its you or not (like how Google asks you if its really you when another device logged you in)

[Healix.5819]

Someone was probably using the same IP to hack/steal accounts. When they consider an IP to be compromised, anyone using it will be blocked for review. All other security measures don't matter, as they can only assume the worst.

[mrstealth.6701]

I got the 2nd one recovered, and there aren't any signs of it being compromised. My level 8 ranger is right where I left her, no items are missing. Not that they could be, since a free account can't transfer stuff. So it appears that a human investigated the account, then determined it was compromised based on the GeForce Now login, even after being told that I had logged in through GeForce Now myself.

I find it quite concerning that someone taking such little care has the power to make decisions regarding the security of, and access to, our game accounts. I don't know if the GM didn't read the entire message, or didn't understand what GFN is...which is also not excusable since it's a service Anet chose to be a part of. But it's clear that there need to be some changes in automated security and how their support staff deal with players using GFN.