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Brilliant Business Practice: Ban Paying Customers for No Reason
ArmaniDevil
Member Posts: 83
in Eden Eternal
Boom, reach 50, Bam, get disconnected from server and banned for no reason whatsoever. I am far from being the only one, as apparently Aeria's "wonderfully executed" blanket bans have affected many.
Beware before investing folks, it could happen to you.
Comments
It is quite disconcerting. I have been playing for a long time (since my first Commodore 64, so go figure) and I have never seen this behaviour. First, there is the constant bot checks that drive you up the wall. There is a check after your password (!), and then there are constant checks right on battle. A box pops up so you can enter a code. Lets say in 3 hours of play I will see it 6 r 7 times. I am not sure if it is driven by behavior (seems to show up more when I am ou killing monsters), but if the quest says "go kill 24 of these", then yeah, you are going to go some place and sit there and kill 24 of those. So of course it looks like you are a bot. But you aren't. How many times do I have to tell them??
Then, went to log in, no dice... humm... I went to the web site to see if resetting my password would work and I am told I can't login because I am banned. BANNED?? ME?? FOR WHAT??? No email, no notice, nothing. You can file a "ban appeal". Wait 48 hours. All I got was an email that I have filed an appeal. After 48 hours it says to PM a GM. But you can't login, so you can't PM. I create a new account just to PM. Turns out the GM doesn't accept PMs... oookkkk..... I file a new ban appeal from the new account.
Finally, a WEEK after been banned, I get two emails. I am un-banned. I have to change my password and respond an endless questionaire about my name, where I live, blah blah blha... ??!!?? They only stated my account was "compromissed"... ??
By this time I don't really want to play. They might not be aware all this things are punishing the real players, and the bots don't give a hoot. A bot just creates another dummy account and goes on. They don't get frustrated, or upset. PEOPLE DO. We care about our toon, about the few things we might have collected, about the effort to get to your level. The bot doesn't care. It has cpu cycles to burn, day or night. If you ban account xyy0001 it will just create xxyy002...
This game is very cute. I like the autoroute and many other features. But the way it is been managed sucks. Now I even get spam in my in-game email folder!!! So they can annoy me to no end, but they can't stop that??? Weird.
I would tell my friends to try it, but expect to be annoyed.
I'm hoping my ticket will be processed more expediently.
All of these "hackings" and compromised accounts are the work of what I can only guess is an organized group of gold sellers. Aeria seems to be at a total loss when it comes to dealing with both botters and sellers.
Let's not forget their wonderful little TOS that that negates all responsibility on their part.
If I don't get out of this one clean, this marks the end of my F2P gaming days. I prefer to deal with companies who have at least a shred of decency left in their business practices.
Is not F2P, it is the way this company has decided to deal with this issues.
My experience with RoM has been great. I came from GW, where you buy the game itself but there is no subscription/monthly fee and that was great (and still is). While bots and gold sellers ARE an issue, they figure out a way to work on it without punishing the players.
So don't blame F2P. As I posted somewhere, this is the one case (EE) where I have seen them deal with it soo badly, vs I could say 100's of games I have played.
In most, the value of entertainment vs the money payed (free) is not bad at all.
I'll give you that point. It's just that these asian game ports all seem to be run by companies with dubius reputations.
The fact that the game is rather fun, just amplifies the situation. I mean, people who don't care to play a game, wouldn't care about any of this. I don't mind the captcha's, they're only 4 digits and i don't see them that often (I play in short spurts), but the unjustified bans are out of control from what I have read, and that's a shame.
They are not banning accounts for fun. They are doing it to protect your stuff.
This happened to me. I had been playing the game for a good 4+ weeks and all of a sudden I got banned.
It took them 4 days to restore my account. These account hackings are occuring to players who are using account ID's and passwords identical to the ones they've used on previous Free2Play online RPG's.
I myself have always used one or two of the same weak passwords on games like ROSE online, Scions of Fate, Cabal, and Nostale.
It finally bit me in the arse. I bet you the thread author and others who have been banned used the same password and username as previous games.
You just cannot do that anymore. There is too many game database's being comprimised. Once one is screwed the gold farmers can try it out on every F2P game they know of.
I logged back in 4 days later and I had NOTHING missing from my character. My guildmates said I had indeed logged on during the day for a short period. Which was not myself because I was at work.
Aeria is banning accounts that are logged into from suspicious IP addresses that they've seen before from gold sellers / hackers. They say it takes 1-2 days to restore your account after it is logged into from a gold farmer / hacker but for me it took 4 days cuz I got hit during what must of been a spike or something lol.
Anyways. I have yet to give Aeria ANY money. And they still restored my account despite me being a free player mooch. They are not doing this as some trick or scam to close accounts that have given then money. Its them protecting players from their own bad password use habits.
After this hacking and the SOE compromise I finally decided to create unique passwords for every website and game I've ever used. I suggest everyone else do this as well.