Happened to my brother today and I am simply posting this out of pure frustration. Apologies for the long read if you decide to do so. Forgive me if there are any typos, I had a long day and it is quite late at the time of typing this.
edit: We do not family share. We live in the same house. We have our own PCs and Steam accounts.
edit 2: This post is simply for more awareness to the issue of wrongful bans, especially perma bans. I will encourage my brother to keep on customer service.
edit 3: Was unbanned today after 2 days of appealing. compared to others that had to appeal for 1+ week(s) I can’t be upset, and my brother is quite happy as well. Thank you AGS, I was wrong for having no faith in the system after hearing of the experiences of other players. Please continue the hard work, and my sincere apologies.
edit 4: I’m not sure how to work forums too well, so I don’t know if this should be deleted or something, although I’d like to remember this experience. Help is appreciated.
He was a level 60 with around 800 something hours. Yeah that’s a LOT I know, but he’s been grinding this game hard. He finally finished crafting his own voidbent set (ONE set btw. No extra void ores/ingots to sell or anything) about a week ago, and it took him WEEKS to gather all the material and top off the required crafting levels for Voidbent armor. I’d pop in and see how it was going many times while he was mining veins and watching shows on a 2nd monitor, and 2/5 times I’d say he would be getting griefed by at least one person. About 3 days ago he decided he’d pick up fishing since he was bored and just wanted to relax after grinding voidbent and watermark since reaching the “endgame”. I did tell him that he should be careful, since I’ve heard the stories / seen the posts about fishers getting reported and griefed all the time, and he said that since he’s lvl 60 no one should think that he’s a bot, and to even more sure he decided to equip the voidbent helm while fishing. But all that wasn’t good enough apparently. Whether it was due to mass reporting or AGS’s “non-automated moderation system”, it’s ridiculous. If it was that amazing system, the only activities that could be picked up as suspicious is mining and fishing. AGS made a post saying the minimap is okay to use, so that can’t be the reason either. And it’s definitely not duping, he didn’t even purchase any of those luck trophies that people were selling for cheap since people who knew earlier bought them all off the market anyways, and he can’t even craft his own trophies since he hasn’t reached anywhere near that level in furnishing. He participates in wars sometimes, and we both queue for OPR more often, and have come across all kinds of exploiters. If I log on today and see the same specific axe/food exploiters and known griefers/dupers, and the same folks that are STILL HERE after being notorious for intentionally abusing the old hatchet/axe/hammer/macro exploits. I’m going to be so done. I get this is a new game okay, and I get that this studio is new, but can that even be used as an excuse anymore for things like this? I personally don’t think so. Please forgive the rant but dang man. Moving on, I asked if he tried to appeal, and according to him he’s been unfortunately met with the regular amazon customer service bots/employees. If they are real people then it seems they just copy/paste the same unhelpful messages, as I’ve seen many times in posts from others that are dealing with similar issues as this. I told him to keep at it, but that’s all he can even do at this point, unless they say they won’t respond to any messages regarding the issue like that one post I saw earlier on here. Then what? 800 hours and ALL that work down the drain? I can’t even imagine, I’m already upset and it’s not even my account. Absolutely ridiculous.