steel rake bans [Merged]

[Makisekurisu]

24 minutes ago, Airashi said:

Righto, they expect us to cop it and shut up?

Yeah ? thats what u agreed on, u don't own any right from ncsoft besides charging back, thats how it work, we are customer, we pay for sub, but we aren't the boss here, keep making topics and sooner or later you will get restriction on your forum account, just move on, its getting annoying alr.

[Sylphrena]

3 hours ago, yyyyy said:

I don't know a single person who was banned and not a single person in my legion (and friends) was banned. People in my legion were even running the SR repeat quest and no one got banned. Pretty sure at this point it's safe to say anyone who is banned was actually hacking and botting SR entry quest or exploiting the vendor.

it's the internet and people lie about the reasons they got banned. Nothing new.

There's really no need for me to go through all this back and forth with the support team and then posting all this on the forum otherwise. 

Everyone has already made up their mind about who is wrongfully banned and who isn't. You have yours and I maintain I did nothing wrong.

I am just doing this because I played the game clean and don't want an undeserved warning on my account. I do not believe the ban system is perfect and some innocent players will get caught in it, and I believe my case is in this category. GM suggested for me to post this here. I will let the Community Team do their thing and hopefully the Development Team or someone can take a look at this. 

That is the reason for this post, not for others to come in and have an argument which leads to another post being locked. 

Edit: Also I am pretty sure it has been confirmed that the repeats were not what triggered the ban

[Peto]

4 hours ago, MXJ said:

Again, no I didn't. I said that no one has provided any evidence they were erroneously banned, or any information relevant to their bans beyond "THIS IS WHAT SUPPORT SAID. I DIDN'T CHEAT I SWEAR." 

i wish i know i will be banned before i got ban, so i could prepare a camera to record me playing a game with my screen, record it from the day server start. 

idk what kind of evidence i can prove to supporters to prove im not a exploiter. all i can do is listing all software on PC and listing my playing styles (i did, but im not sure supporters is able to check anything in game except some lines of log. IMO, it is easy to detect player who is exploiting SR or not
- check entry quest, if entry quest is done long time ago => he could not exploit it
- check amount of kinah player got from any transaction, trading,etc...
But I guess our supporters are not able to check it.

 

3 hours ago, yyyyy said:

. Pretty sure at this point it's safe to say anyone who is banned was actually hacking and botting SR entry quest or exploiting the vendor

No, dont say that. i got banned 7 days. I did not hacking/botting/anything else. Just spamming my repeat quest. At the time i got banned, just 2 more quest and I have full set of SR. Ofc, my entry quest was finished long time ago (I farmed SR 3 times a day, in like ~15days to get my 3 drop from bosses: jacket, boots and pants)

[Amarah-KT]

As someone who also works in customer service..  money means more to them than customers do, but there is no money withoit customer retention.   They would rather make your food again than never again.   Most companies would like a chance to bend their policies to have you spend more.

 

By not bringing these issues to ther attention there isnt a chance to fix it for other customers.  

 

The real reason they keep locking threads is they dont want everyone else to see how bad they messed up.  Thats the only reason for that part of the TOS.   But they didnt give the players actual reasons so they breached their own TOS imo.  Get off your high horses.  Its too late for a lot of players.  Make it right before its too late for all of them.

[Amarah-KT]

It would be pretty simple to compare quest turn ins to actual instances run.  Exiting and re entering does not count additional cooldowns.

 

This whole thing is such a bad joke by NC that some of us are making jokes in retail about having to leave an instance to buy shards and getting banned.  In retail adding shards to the gold sand traders was highly requested by the players.  So sometimes they do listen to the forums.   For those players that were wrongfully hit its worth it for them to keep this alive until the strike is off their account.   To be honest I dont even want to log into classic and risk my retail account on something stupid because 90%of nc doesnt know how the game works.

 

[Bip]

17 hours ago, MXJ said:

Again, no I didn't. I said that no one has provided any evidence they were erroneously banned, or any information relevant to their bans beyond "THIS IS WHAT SUPPORT SAID. I DIDN'T CHEAT I SWEAR." 

What would that be, though? Do we have to record our PC for the entire time that we are playing now because NC is not capable of reading logs?!

Please explain.

[Inactive]

17 hours ago, yyyyy said:

I don't know a single person who was banned and not a single person in my legion (and friends) was banned. People in my legion were even running the SR repeat quest and no one got banned. Pretty sure at this point it's safe to say anyone who is banned was actually hacking and botting SR entry quest or exploiting the vendor.

it's the internet and people lie about the reasons they got banned. Nothing new.

Well I am rather a fan of a certain-group-is-full-of-cheaters-and-complainers explanation. I wouldn't put it past the group of cheaters to create accounts on the forums and start a fake discussion of wrongful bans with other accused cheaters joining in. Discussion on the forums isn't going to change anything. If you weren't unbanned with repeal, then nothing will change that, whether you were cheating or not is irrelevant. As Californians and Hawaiians could put it, let it go brah~

[Chaoticsin]

They stated quest repeatables were not a bannable offense but that’s what they banned so many for  although kibbles keeps stating they did not ban for that yet myself and all I know personally who were banned that is exactly what we did turn in hairpin/ ledger repeatables so they have no clue what they actually banned everyone for .

[Funkula]

Hi Everyone,

I've talked with the moderation team and I'm opening this thread up again (after removing some posts) so you've got one place to discuss this topic.

 

Please stay on topic and don't be rude to your fellow players.

 

Thank you!

[Aaabatery]

The aftermath? Now players don't want to run SR. And when they run they refuse to do more than one repeat.

To make clear, it is possible since 2009:

- Two hats turn ins (24 hats in middle)

- One wine turn in (5 wines in middle, so every 4 runs you turn 5 times)

- Three ledgers turn in (30 ledgers in lower). Even more but the time to clear is counter productive.

Now NC I got already two parties where people refused to do quests more than once because of the SR bans. And worse, they sometimes just tell it after you already started, wasting your CDs.

 

If you trully wish to make amends for a mistake, send an in-game survey with a clear apology and stating the multiple turn ins are not a bannable action and send like 5 SR cooldown scrolls.

[Wsnow]

1 hour ago, Funkula said:

Hi Everyone,

I've talked with the moderation team and I'm opening this thread up again (after removing some posts) so you've got one place to discuss this topic.

 

Please stay on topic and don't be rude to your fellow players.

 

Thank you!

thank you for reopening this topic it is very important to the player base to see where NCsoft is going to go with this issue. 

Ncsoft has to do something NA has lost a lot of players over this and the way they have dealt with this and the wrongful bans. 

[Asy]

I think the minimum we deserve is for ncsoft to admit there was mistakes made with those bans and give a public apology in a survey like it was suggested.

everyone made it clear by now that most of us only did the repeated quests and got erroneously caught up for that chest kinah exploit ( or whatever this is about) 

[Amarah-KT]

3 hours ago, Funkula said:

Hi Everyone,

I've talked with the moderation team and I'm opening this thread up again (after removing some posts) so you've got one place to discuss this topic.

 

Please stay on topic and don't be rude to your fellow players.

 

Thank you!

Thank you so much!  This really is a big issue in the community! Personally Ive been afraid to log into classic to play.  I almost want to start all over again so my retail account wont be in danger over a situation like this.

[Wsnow]

12 minutes ago, Amarah-KT said:

Thank you so much!  This really is a big issue in the community! Personally Ive been afraid to log into classic to play.  I almost want to start all over again so my retail account wont be in danger over a situation like this.

yes i agree most players are vet players and have used there live accounts to make classic accounts, and tbh the way this has been left by NCsoft has put a great deal of players off, if there anything like me i think what if something like this goes on with something else and players are banned wrongly, and if that happens to one player that was banned wrongly for SR they lose there account fully forever. Which is not the way to handle this at all. you can see the damage this has taken on the servers by looking at My Aion DPS, and its no wonder players don't want to do SR its put them off the game which is sad. 

[Arkadies-DN]

I'm really curious what the real answer is and what is considered an exploit vs not.

1. Using the quest entry and 3rd party tools to access treasure chests you should get access to.  Clearly an exploit.
2. Using the additional vendor in the instance to bypass kinah sell limits.  Logically not intended and probably considered an exploit.
3. Looting the earring treasure box from the platform below because there isn't a vertical check.  Probably considered an exploit since the intended path is to get the key to the door to access that chest.  This one could very easily resulted in one person doing it and the whole group getting banned since they could all receive kinah, etc.
4. Turning in repeats more than once in a single run.  Confirmed not an exploit.

Setting aside the definition of an exploit the question of whether or not you should be banned for leveraging the game mechanics in unintended ways is different.  For areas that end up materially impacting the game it's too disruptive to ignore but on immaterial impact it would've been a better path to fix the issue and warn the players for the specific activity.

Playing a game that encourages emergent strategy to achieve goals the unclear enforcement narrative here is concerning.  What other classic strategies (like res loci to avoid certain boss triggers, etc.) that have been leveraged for years suddenly attract attention and result in bans?  Perhaps this is entirely out of scope and Kibbelz comment is to be read as, it wasn't the repeats but someone in the group definitely did something not allowed and were not going to bring attention to it.  Right now though the community is just left to wildly speculate.

[Inactive]

On 8/15/2021 at 11:11 AM, Amarah-KT said:

[Customer Service Stuff]

This a game where you pay for an experience in which others closely have an impact on. It's a community with subscription attached to it and it needs governing / regulation, not customer service~

[Saitamasensei]

4 hours ago, Arkadies-DN said:

I'm really curious what the real answer is and what is considered an exploit vs not.

1. Using the quest entry and 3rd party tools to access treasure chests you should get access to.  Clearly an exploit.
2. Using the additional vendor in the instance to bypass kinah sell limits.  Logically not intended and probably considered an exploit.
3. Looting the earring treasure box from the platform below because there isn't a vertical check.  Probably considered an exploit since the intended path is to get the key to the door to access that chest.  This one could very easily resulted in one person doing it and the whole group getting banned since they could all receive kinah, etc.
4. Turning in repeats more than once in a single run.  Confirmed not an exploit.

I agree on items 1 and 2 and 4.

But on 3, that was way beyond absurd. To think that you could be ban for few kinah or when lucky getting an bound accessory.

Also you can shoot freely the box and loot it at the bottom is not a basic violation of a gameplay. If you need a 3rd party program to do it then I could consider it an exploit. If the chest drops were so good and game changing or can break the economy that I would consider it to be bannable.

A simple fix to this, just put something like a barrel or an object to block of range attacks. This is not clearly the gamers fault, it is the fault of the game devs doing this broken mechanics and the solution for this is fixing it on a program level not an administrative control like banning.

[Sickness]

what support? are you kidding me? 

My account got hacked and changed email.I contacted ncsoft and explained the issue and they said that indeed the account was hacked from another country and that they secured it.Now the real fun begins.They told me that in order to verify the account I'll have to provide some info.Im providing valid papers and receipts of all the siel,quna and bcm receipts from all those payments those years,I show them all those orders and paypal receipts,my account still has my credit card billing each month a new siel aura and their response is that they cant verify that the account is mine because i dont remember what birth date i put 10 years ago.Meanwhile my credit card and paypal with my info which i can provide with valid id papers passport etc are hooked on the account that is now on another email.

So yeah sometimes you just dont have words to explain how bad a support is,having years of paid receipts to ncsoft and treating you like a dog,they dont even cansel my subscription running when i ask im praying at this point to ban my account so the hacker doesnt enjoy it {canseled my credit card already}

 

[Airashi]

On 8/17/2021 at 9:34 AM, Arkadies-DN said:

Looting the earring treasure box from the platform below because there isn't a vertical check.  Probably considered an exploit since the intended path is to get the key to the door to access that chest.  This one could very easily resulted in one person doing it and the whole group getting banned since they could all receive kinah, etc.

I strongly suspect this being the cause for the unintended bans. On some of my runs, theres a treasure chest spawn on the 2nd floor ledge directly above the cat lady boss. This chest can easily be obtained by destroying it with any ranged skill, and standing onto the table below to loot it, as the loot window has a big range. The kinah would have been distributed evenly to the whole group, thus implicating them with any wrong doing. This would have caused a false positive on the ban list. Of course, NCwest wouldn't have a clue on this kind of thing, because well....they don't play the game.

Once again, when it comes to the intricacies and nuances of the game like this, the playerbase has more knowledge on this than the GMs. This time around the blanket bans conducted were grossly misguided, and as a result innocent players get clapped.

[Airashi]

On 8/15/2021 at 5:28 PM, Makisekurisu said:

Yeah ? thats what u agreed on, u don't own any right from ncsoft besides charging back, thats how it work, we are customer, we pay for sub, but we aren't the boss here, keep making topics and sooner or later you will get restriction on your forum account, just move on, its getting annoying alr.

Why would I get a restriction on the forum account? Just calling what I see and calling them out when they've dropped the ball.

When NCwest have conducted a mass banning event implicating innocent players in the wrong manner, it deserves to be called out. Throughout this banwave, the information received has been vague and misguided. The poor attempts at cover ups and lack of game knowledge from NCwest's behalf made it a disaster for everyone.

IF you look at all of the ban waves in recent history, they were proven to be well justifed and executed. Typically the banned players acknowledged their mistakes and served out their bans. You don;t see those banned players on the forums crying foul. They got caught fair and square and accepted the punishment. The typical comments in those threads were only the lines of: " You could have done the banning sooner" and "What compensation do the innocent players get?".

This reminds me of the mass banning event in aion retail, involving the alliance pvp instance (forgot the instance name). Many players asked to be kicked to gain an entry cd and exploited it to get more rewards. NCwest detected and banned over half of the playerbase for this. The banned players didn't make a fuss out of this because it was justified and executed correctly. They served their time (some were temporarily banned whilst a minority was perma banned) and life moves on.

However, this SR ban wave has implicated many innocent players who have kept their noses clean throughout Aion classic, but have suddenly got clapped with 7day bans for no reason. This is why they have expressed their bewilderment, anger, frustration and resentment towards NCwest. They demand answers, not cover ups. This banwave deserves the merit of a proper investigation. This banwave is unlike all of the previous ones.

 

[Makisekurisu]

21 minutes ago, Airashi said:

Why would I get a restriction on the forum account? Just calling what I see and calling them out when they've dropped the ball.

When NCwest have conducted a mass banning event implicating innocent players in the wrong manner, it deserves to be called out. Throughout this banwave, the information received has been vague and misguided. The poor attempts at cover ups and lack of game knowledge from NCwest's behalf made it a disaster for everyone.

IF you look at all of the ban waves in recent history, they were proven to be well justifed and executed. Typically the banned players acknowledged their mistakes and served out their bans. You don;t see those banned players on the forums crying foul. They got caught fair and square and accepted the punishment. The typical comments in those threads were only the lines of: " You could have done the banning sooner" and "What compensation do the innocent players get?".

This reminds me of the mass banning event in aion retail, involving the alliance pvp instance (forgot the instance name). Many players asked to be kicked to gain an entry cd and exploited it to get more rewards. NCwest detected and banned over half of the playerbase for this. The banned players didn't make a fuss out of this because it was justified and executed correctly. They served their time (some were temporarily banned whilst a minority was perma banned) and life moves on.

However, this SR ban wave has implicated many innocent players who have kept their noses clean throughout Aion classic, but have suddenly got clapped with 7day bans for no reason. This is why they have expressed their bewilderment, anger, frustration and resentment towards NCwest. They demand answers, not cover ups. This banwave deserves the merit of a proper investigation. This banwave is unlike all of the previous ones.

 

I don't believe, and noone should believe, that the majority of players banned or blocked 7 days was or are innocent, it is pretty much just a few, and know what else ? i noticed a few lv 45+ theobomos bot didnt show up after the banwave either, some people fail to realize that you don't need to be on your main account for ncsoft to know what is happening, and NEVER ncsoft said, in all these years, how they banned people, which tool or whatever, just a straight answer, you got banned/blocked for doing ''this'' but never getting in the detail of ''this'' which is the company right to not share how they do it, i'm not protecting ncsoft, hell no, but knowing aion community not even playing the game for more than a year in the last 9 years, i noticed that some stuffs never change, be it company wise, be community wise, plus people should stop using the term ''banned'', make it sound like people got perma banned, and if they did, pretty much they deserved, now about getting blocked 7 days and a flag in account, people moved on alr and stopped complaining about the block, now they complaining about the flag cuz you know....one more time and say goodbye, people are worried bout being ''smarter than ncsoft'' and getting caught in the end, just wanna make it clear that both sides aren't showing any proof, one because they don't have to, and another because they don't want, up to you to decide which side is doing what.

[Amarah-KT]

9 hours ago, Makisekurisu said:

I don't believe, and noone should believe, that the majority of players banned or blocked 7 days was or are innocent, it is pretty much just a few, and know what else ? i noticed a few lv 45+ theobomos bot didnt show up after the banwave either, some people fail to realize that you don't need to be on your main account for ncsoft to know what is happening, and NEVER ncsoft said, in all these years, how they banned people, which tool or whatever, just a straight answer, you got banned/blocked for doing ''this'' but never getting in the detail of ''this'' which is the company right to not share how they do it, i'm not protecting ncsoft, hell no, but knowing aion community not even playing the game for more than a year in the last 9 years, i noticed that some stuffs never change, be it company wise, be community wise, plus people should stop using the term ''banned'', make it sound like people got perma banned, and if they did, pretty much they deserved, now about getting blocked 7 days and a flag in account, people moved on alr and stopped complaining about the block, now they complaining about the flag cuz you know....one more time and say goodbye, people are worried bout being ''smarter than ncsoft'' and getting caught in the end, just wanna make it clear that both sides aren't showing any proof, one because they don't have to, and another because they don't want, up to you to decide which side is doing what.

1.  This thread isnt about your opinion. This is a place for players to use their voice to try to get their issues resolved.  If you dont believe them fine.  But this isnt the place to belittle them with your ill formed opinion.

2.  The proof youre asking players to provide hasnt been provided to them. 

3. During the paragon bans a few months ago there were several players who were wrongfully banned.  It was admitted to the community and corrected.  But they also seemed to have a better team handling those who understood how the game worked.  They were able to verify purchases on the broker, origins of the items, and actually researched each case.

 

[Chaoticsin]

On 8/16/2021 at 2:19 PM, Aaabatery said:

The aftermath? Now players don't want to run SR. And when they run they refuse to do more than one repeat.

To make clear, it is possible since 2009:

- Two hats turn ins (24 hats in middle)

- One wine turn in (5 wines in middle, so every 4 runs you turn 5 times)

- Three ledgers turn in (30 ledgers in lower). Even more but the time to clear is counter productive.

Now NC I got already two parties where people refused to do quests more than once because of the SR bans. And worse, they sometimes just tell it after you already started, wasting your CDs.

 

If you trully wish to make amends for a mistake, send an in-game survey with a clear apology and stating the multiple turn ins are not a bannable action and send like 5 SR cooldown scrolls.

Well I have spoken privately with a GM.  Multiple quest turnin was the reason so many were banned as they consider it exploiting the  game design if it is 20 turn in then they want 20 SR runs for that quest line. So they made a mistake stating hat repeatables was not the reason in the forum but that is exactly what they banned for just an FYI as to why many refuse to take a chance with multiple turnin runs