I mean its a hot potato I know, if someone gets banned its hella sus etc etc
But still curious since I have a friend who is very casual and just playing to relax who got banned for “cheating” recently, and reading on forums it seems like previous reports get stuck in the “only the investigative team can touch these issues” while it sounds like that team doesnt know what the heck they are doing xD
Is there any insight into this special team? do they have the tools necessary to properly investigate this? Why cant AGS deliver a more clear reason attached to the ban?
It’s been a week already with no word and I feel sorry for my friend, so thought I’d see if theres more people out there waiting befuddled
there are wronlg given ban but they are very few most of the time you wil be banned for breaking th erules like me otherwise someone wouldnt be banned just because he was selling a piece of jewelry hundreds of people were selling it at the auction house. so all of them should have been banned however if the players who buy the thing you sell are buying with rmt gold they will only delete your gold if they find it but which debatable
TLDR: False bans do happen. Have been happening since new world. Is every single case on these forums legitimately innocent? Probably not. The number of actual false bans are probably pretty low compared to the number of legitimate bans. As to why AGS does not provide more information: In their own words they don’t want to clue in cheaters as to how their detection processes work and potentially give them a means to bypass those systems.
On the whole the appeals process for this game is a complete joke. In most cases where I have seen people get unbanned, it can take weeks if not months for the team to finally take action. In those cases they also did not provide any notification that they were unbanned, nor did they admit any wrong doing.
The largest issue being the fact that they require evidence from players to prove that they did nothing wrong, but with their accounts being banned it is literally impossible for most people to get any evidence to prove their innocence. As a result of this most players that are dealing with this simply quit the game. Why would you continue investing time or money into a product that basically dropped a giant F bomb on your head?
Of course this is not limited to the appeals team either - in general this game has virtually no player support at all. CS team members are given strict templates that they are required to follow, with few exceptions. They have virtually no developer level access to the game. They can restore recently deleted characters and move characters to a different location. That’s about it. Anything else has to be submitted to SGR to handle, and on an individual level those tickets are generally thrown out. They really only deal with issues that effect a large percentage of the population.
So if a bug happens to delete an item from your inventory, you are basically screwed unless it also effected a large number of other players. In general it does seem like SGR really do not care at all about this version of the game, and as a result AGS are left holding the bag for the majority of issues. 9 out of 10 of those issues they will basically be forced to tell players “Sorry, we can’t help you”, not for lack of wanting to assist but because they literally can’t.
I have no confirmation on this but it is probable that the same is true with the appeals system. AGS may actually have no control over account bans at all. Which would explain why a single case can sometimes take months to resolve.
false bans do happens. it happens since new world too.
but afaik, for ags and most people in this forum, every false ban complain is guilty no matter what. so if you got false ban, good luck getting support on this forum. most will just flame you and said you’re a cheater/rmt… even if you have proof to show that’s it is indeed a false ban.
There were also problems with the support team at the smilegate developers. If you look at the 2022 roadmap, they talked about it there. They admitted that they had insufficient teams. and the players, of course, wanted more people to hire their companies. smilegate said they would do something about it because it was a fiasco there too. theres areason is just as a bad in the same way of course there is no chance for a person to prove himself in the appeal process and people decide to quit
Thanks for the thorough reply, yea I read some threads like the one you linked and that’s why I decided to make this post, as you write;
The largest issue being the fact that they require evidence from players to prove that they did nothing wrong, but with their accounts being banned it is literally impossible for most people to get any evidence to prove their innocence. As a result of this most players that are dealing with this simply quit the game.
So we lose a player and potentially group of players if they play together with the banned person.
I just hope AGS could look into this and try to do better if they find this special department is a bit loose with the bans
The only thing i’d like to add is that even if SGR is the one responsible for fixing these issues cause they code the game, AGS still holds accountability for having a dogshit contract, whathever that is. If thats how your publishing is going to work you either don’t care or had no idea of what you were doing when this was decided.
on a side note, even at new world, which is developed by AGS, they didn’t seem to have much care for customer service. It was (is) also laughable there, so no reason to think i’d be different if it wasn’t for SGR.
All that said yes, sometimes the seemingly innocent fellas are guilty.
What happens when you keep banning people who sold their lvl 9 GEM to gold sellers…and you actually RMT?
Gold sellers have an abundance of gold, lots of it, and they dont need it. Why not create more chaos in the game by just buying random AH items and creating more false bans. Its not like they wont get more gold later. There will be more and more people who just put correctly price items on the AH and it will be bought by bots and the system will flag that account to be ban. Eventually, AGS will have to stop banning players and gold sellers will continue to find other ways to get RMT their gold.
Thats the next step if AGS keep banning PLAYERS and not bots. They have already killed a a good amount of their player base by doing this by directly banning and the effect that it caused in their economy that made people quit.
Why go after paying player base and not ban bots in the first place? Or just go take their gold they bought and put them in the negative.
I predicted this back in July that gold farms would go this route. Leave it to an inexperience “gaming” publisher to handle a golden egg.
I don’t think conspiracy theories about how bans happen is helpful for this discussion, unless there’s inside sources confirming this I’d rather gather testimonies from wrongful bans (not the oh I traded my way to full lvl 10 gems, but rather the “I was minding my own business not doing anything out of the ordinary and BAN”)