I’ve seen a ton of bans recently, some might be innocent, i understand there’s a great deal of cheaters as well. However id like to see innocent players falsely banned to be able to come back.
If it’s just because of a purchase made of a duped/exploited item, temporarily ban the player, remove the duped/exploited items, and put a notification saying “during the time of items being exploited you acquired a few of these duped/exploited items, your temporary ban will be lifted when these items are removed from your inventory.”
I’m not one of these banned players nor do i honestly know any of them. I’ve seen a few complaints in my facebook group about it.
I would like to see some improvement made to the appeal process.
When you get banned for “cheating” you receive a message that says you violated section 3, play fair, of the code of conduct, and “click here to appeal you ban.” That is all the information you receive.
Section 3, play fair, of the code of conduct says:
Do not use exploit bugs or other unintended uses of game features.
Do not cheat, bot, hack, or use other software or services that give you an unfair advantage through, for example, unattended gameplay or game modifications.
Do not engage in real-money trading of in-game items and in-game currencies.
We reserve the right to determine what constitutes unfair play and to take corrective action we deem appropriate.
As you can see, “cheating” includes a lot of things, and based on point 4, they can ban you for anything.
Therefore, AGS needs to specifically tell people why and when they broke the code of conduct, so they either know what they did wrong or can provide evidence to support their appeal. If you have no idea why you were banned, you cannot defend yourself adequately.
Additionally, AGS needs to be more clear about what evidence they need from players. There is a section to send “logs or videos,” but it doesn’t include how to find any pertinent logs.
Moreover, it is unreasonable for players to record all of their gameplay to “prove their innocence” in case of being banned. No other game requires players to do such a thing.
AGS improving their ban appeal process is a win for AGS and players. If you told players what they did wrong there would likely be less ban appeals and fewer erroneously ban threads, which would be less work for AGS, and players would likely feel the ban/appeal process is more fair and transparent.
Yeah while it’s great to see exploiters get bans, AGS’s appeal process is horrible. I got a 24 hour ban from a mega-company mass reporting me once, and support was so bad it was basically unusuable.
First ticket reply said that the ban against my “Lost Ark” account would be upheld. I don’t play Lost Ark.
Second ticket reply also said that the ban against my “Lost Ark” account would be upheld. I still have never played Lost Ark.
Third ticket reply said that there was no penalty applied to my account. Obviously, there was.
Fourth ticket reply said there was still no penalty, and asked me to send them logs from my computer.
Fifth ticket reply said that the penalty was a mistake and was removed. It wasn’t.
Sixth ticket reply said that the ban was justified and would be upheld. I decided just to wait it out at this point.
So yeah, make sure you stay squeaky-clean, because if you get a wrongful ban you might as well throw in the towel with support like this.
Of course it’s not too surprising, given that it used to be opening a ticket to report a bot would get YOUR account banned and not the bot…