As you know, there’s a lot of threads going on here with players posting their own variation of what’s happening with their own log in account and their experience with writing into the Support site. I am here to give my own take on what’s going on. This comes from my own experiences working in this industry as I have actual experience on what’s going on here and how I would handle it if I was the one owning this situation. I’ve done research into other threads and done experiments of my own while writing into the support team to test out their responses.
Is this my Fault?
No this is not your fault, despite what the support may be telling you or what Roxx might be posting on other threads. This is not your fault. This was the results of the latest IP Ban wave that occurred to combat bots. What likely happened was they targeted IP addresses that are used by multiple players at once because it seemed like bots were using them.
Ex: Apartment Complexes - Many apartment complexes have one ISP provider who provides a static IP address to all the residents. If you live in a high volume city like Los Angeles or Seattle. It’s possible your IP addresses was flagged as an BOT IP because of all the players in your complex using the same IP Address to log on to play the game.
It’s safe to argue that instead of investigating each IP address, Amazon did a blanket ban of all IP Addresses that had X+ players using the IP Adress as a safe way to assume they were bots. YOu were incorrectly IP banned and regardless of how much people say its your ISP problem. It’s not.
2. Why is support unable to help/ Seems out of the loop
I wrote in to support, and the results were less than satisfactory. I feel they’re slowly realizing that this is their issue and are starting to seed it out to agents, but the issue here is their live response system is slow. 24 hours after the problem occurred, there’s been no proper escalation paths to support to let them know of the situation. As a result you see some agents giving wrong information or literally googling the first result and trying to share that as the solution even though it won’t work. I ask that you recognize this is not Support’s fault. They are doing the best they can with limited information. This is a symptom of a faulty escalation path that is preventing the developers from communicating with agents to deliver a heads up. In our world, this is literally classified as a Sev 1 incident and should have been brought to supports attention as quickly as possible to start assuaging fears. It seems they don’t get live issue support as well as other games do and this is the thing causing the most fear. It’s very likely the devs are aware and looking into this but aren’t escalating to the agents so they can assist us. Instead being very hush hush. Please be patient on this regard.
3. Devs and this Sev1
So we get to the crux of this problem and it’s the following. The Devs have screwed up and they were given an important choice. Roll this back and try to find the solution while impacting all the players with a decreased performance. Keep this change and find the solution while impacting a small subsection of the players with NO PERFORMANCE. As is evident by the threads you see posted everywhere, they went with the latter option. They chose to make the most painful experience possible for few players than harm everyone with Bot queues again. (News flash this still failed). This sucks, and is honestly the worst of the two options. Alienating your player base to fight the bots is tough but you should never choose the option to fully alienate a small amount versus causing some pain to everyone. And this is where I disagree with the party. And in keeping to this choice, they’ve decided to double down on the it’s our fault not theirs stance in line with their choice. Frankly this is unacceptable and the lack of communication combined with… almost gaslighting response is horrendous and something that needs to be changed.
4. What can I do though?
Right now we can’t do much, because it’s not our fault and we literally can’t do anything. Writing in to support can help but please don’t hassle the agents. They’re a victim just as much as we are due to what appears to be faulty escalation paths. Use support to make them aware so they can escalate on our behalf. Considering the devs or no one from the team has made an official announcement on this also means the following.
IF THEY MAKE A THREAD ABOUT THIS, I ENCOURAGE EVERYONE TO RESPOND THERE
**IF THEY HAVE NOT MADE A THREAD. MAKE YOUR OWN REGARDLESS OF IF THERE ARE OTHERS. FLOOD THE FORUMS. FLOOD WHAT YOU CAN. THIS IS UNNACCEPTABLE AND THEY NEED TO BE MADE AWARE. **
It’s important that this is not brushed over or ignored and despite what they might tell you about not flooding the forums. We are literally going onto day 3 of what any other game company would classify as a SEV 1 INCIDENT (Sev 1 is the worst possible crisis for a game). So make your voices heard. Spam the forums, do not let this die. Not until we get proper communication. Not until we get a voice to reach out to us. This is their fault and do not let them get away with this. Fight back with your voice. Go to steam.
Because at the end of the say, speaking as an industry expert specialized in this. This is a Sev 1 being not being given its proper respect and we’re suffering for it for literally no reason.
So please keep fighting, and keep doing your best to force a response because this is unnacceptable.
and no statement from mods kind of sucks