Has Square Enix Banned Logic?Follow

surprise, mistress doesnt get it.

read the post above me, actually read it 10 times, see if it sinks in.

I was wondering when the attitude found on KI or BG would surface here.

"This doesn't affect me, so it's not a problem. Besides, I'm sure they did something else wrong. It's only a handful of people, who cares."

The issue is that it's becoming more widespread. Right now, the RMT-PWNER bot is scurrying over the database, looking for patterns. When it finds them, and links a pattern to an RMT, it's banning everyone who fits the pattern, regardless of whether or not they are involved in the sale of gil for real currency.

When the RMT-PWNER was announced, I thought that there would be a person at the helm to review all ban candidates before the ban was put in place. That's not the case. You can literally be banned for doing nothing more than NPCing items now.

Add to that people being banned over chargeback issues, a problem SE themselves have created, and it leaves us wondering: Who will get banned next and for what?

You see, before this, getting banned boiled down to violating one of the following:

- Buying Gil
- Selling Gil
- Using third party tools
- Exploiting bugs in the game for profit

Now, there's these new mystery conditions imposed by their broken software. And as per the standard SE action plan for dealing with their customers, they have stayed silent what we, their customers, can do to protect ourselves from being banned. And further, they are slamming the door in the face of banned customers, preventing them from being reinstated without any form of recourse or review.

Why are we mad? Why are we fighting? Because we don't know when we'll be next! How much longer will it be until just plain normal fishing gets your account flagged? Already you can't JUST fish on a character, it MIGHT flag you. What about using your mules to AH goods? I mean, they nailed gardening mules that NPC'd items then sent they profits to their main. And what about people who share a credit card? My wife and I could be banned just for PAYING for the game!

What we want is clear guidelines. What we want is a right to overturn a false ban. What we want is some goddamn service for the money we pay! I enjoy playing this game, it's better than the other MMOs out there outside of their terrible customer service and horrid communication with their playerbase. I'm willing to fight to make it better rather than throw up my hands and walk away, or just keep playing until the day that I cross paths with the RMT-PWNER and get nailed myself.

You can't base anything on forum posts because forum posters number a mere fraction of the total playerbase. Of my entire linkshell of ~30 people, I am the only Alla poster. A 1 to 30 ratio is probably pretty accurate, although I don't want to just make up statistics based on anecdote. I've said it before in other threads - the casual people who don't really care about their accounts like those who have been playing for 5+ years do just end up moving on and playing other games if something happens to their account. We never even hear from them. How many players are going silently into the night?

SE could do a heck of a lot more to ensure they have good processes in place to work with the customers. It's not even that some people were wrongfully banned per se, it's that there is no process in place to contact customer support and get your account back. You sit on hold using a long distance number (for most of us) for hours on end only to be informed that your account is gone and you aren't going to be told why.

As for why people are up in arms over this... You know some of us don't just sit around while things like that happen to our friends.



It may be a little overused, but it gets the point across.

Edited, Aug 3rd 2009 12:54pm by Torrence

This.

Also, very very nice Article. Hopefully something will be done about it and especially for people who were wrongly banned... like... a year of free play /nod.

Hehe, yeah as I said, this isn't quite on the scale of .. well ..

I still think that it's good analogically though :)

In my defense, I did make mention that I realized it it a bit overused. I chose that particular quote because you could easily substitute



And it would still make sense and get my point across. I was not in any way attempting to trivialize the actions of the *****. The words of Pastor Niemöller are inspirational, and though they were spoken in a world much darker than the one we are living in, the principle and point he was trying to make is exactly the same. I truly did not mean to offend anyone.

The notice was their response. We're not getting a public apology for this, no "we banned innocent players and we are sorry" as this is not the Japanese way of doing business. Unless a court of law forces them to publicly admit wrongdoing, it won't happen. The best we'll get is what we already have: the update and some of those wrongfully banned quietly reinstated.

And no, Alrefie, they put logic in the cargo holds of the Enterprise, and sent it at warp speed for the closest black hole, then jettisoned it.

Edited, Aug 3rd 2009 8:47pm by Magicalsquirrel

What SE has done is the equivalent of taking their pants off and taking a **** down the collective consumers throat and asking them to pay for it. This ToS term should be illegal and the bastards that continue to **** down the collective Unites States of America citizen should be cuffed and thrown in jail.

This is not how you treat a customer.
This is not how you treat a person.
Apologise and return what you have taken.

Totally agree with how you describe their attitude and what they should do.
As a company integrity and responsibility are important. All they have to do is recognize the errors of their decisions to the public and implement an appeals system for wrongfully banned accounts. Players should be given the opportunity to contest bans and suspensions. Detailed explanation of their ban/suspension should be given instead of shady in the dark. To them we are just a typical consumer, however we are subscribing to a product that requires dedication, effort, and time(years)and this should not be ignored.

SEI, once again I am saying: Please don't take the results of your poor handling of bannings in January as a reason to continue committing the same mistakes. Be responsible and earn loyalty of your customers!

As far as SE is concerned you are a money Piñata and nothing more.

Laughable. I might consider your logic if it didn't cost money to sit and wait on the Customer Service line for sometimes more than an hour. Honestly, if a company is billing people twice and they get enough charge-backs to notice, they are doing it wrong. Don't blame people for a business's poor billing practices.