In World of Warcraft
A player in World of Warcraft (WoW) is the actual person behind an in-game Alliance or Horde character. Unless you are a bot, webcrawler, or highly-advanced web browsing AI, you are a player if you play WoW.
A player is distinguished from player characters in that one player can control multiple player characters. Player characters can also be distinguished from most NPCs as having a blue-colored name bar, unless they are tagged for PVP in which case the name bar will be green. The game mechanics in WoW also make this distinction in a few ways.
- Validating
[Guild Charter] signatures, so only one character of player can sign a charter, thus preventing only a couple of players from starting a guild with many alts. - Checking Auction House purchases so that one player cannot bid or buyout their own auctions
- On PVP servers, a player is limited to creating characters for either Horde or Alliance, but not both. PVE servers do not have this restriction.
- When a GM ticket is submitted in game, the GM can get in contact with any character associated with that account that is currently logged on.