I honestly never thought I would be posting on these forums with a complaint. From day one, I have been giving AGS the benefit of the doubt saying that too much pressure has been placed on them as a relatetively new studio and that the [BRUTAL] amount of bugs and issues with the game is simply a learning process for a game with huge potential. Me and a close group of friends have stuck with this game since open Beta, playing multiple hours through thick (closed trading posts, unplayable levels of desync, overpowered builds, abilities that dony work as intended, etc., etc., etcā¦) and thin (the combat and game feel is great when it works, player interation is great, etcā¦). However, AGS said āthis is not enoughā¦ they are unaffected by our ruseā¦ we must punish them moreā. And thus, for no discernable reason what-so-ever, my buddy was permenantly banned in the middle of a pvp gaming session for cheating.
Now there are a few parts to this that really make me angry. Ill preface by saying I spent a good couple of hours reading similar issues on the forums and some of my assumptions here (like the way he was banned being from easy-anti-cheat) are from those readings.
The first is that my friend has absolutely no reason to cheat.
A) He has over gold cap and is keeping his extra in his own guild storage so he has over 800k (im just going by the last screenshot he posted a little while ago). He earned this by farming some and working the trading post every day since release, and general gains from playing the game like trophy mat drops. He has close to bis on all his pieces and has no reason to spend any money there. So his money situation is great. He is good at pvp, regularly getting first place in OPRs and and hold his own in open world PVP. And lastly, he only plays to play with us 5 so theres no external competition in the game that would drive him to cheat.
B) he has no reason to lie to us about cheating. We have been close friends for years now playing many games and cheating has never been part of gaming for us. We are all above 30 years old and play for the leisure and social aspect. Lying about cheating wouldnt do anything for him hereā¦ in fact i would go so far to assume that if he was cheating, he would not only tell us, but we would all probably share a laugh when he got banned.
C) other than open world pvp, we dont really do much in the game. We play specifically to cature forts, find enemy groups doing chest runs, and the odd OPR game. We have played for so long that there is no real intrinsic gain for us other than the fun we get from facing a pvp challenge. But that fun wouldnt exists with cheating so why would he?
So with that all said, its clear to me that the fault is on AGS using automated anticheating software that is KNOWN to detect harmless programs (like PC fan control software). Sick!
The second reason is that we have been reporting known bots throughout ourā¦ 3 or 4 servers now (thanks to the constant merges) and some of these guys are STILL IN THE GAME THROUGH MULTIPLE SERVER MERGES! I have personally reported a bot 10-15 times at least, everytime i see him and my friends do the same. He is actually well known as a bot throughout the server. I just saw him farming orichalcum a week agoā¦ I HAVE BEEM REPORTING THIS GUY FOR LIKE 5 MONTHSā¦ The same is true for a number of other bots in the game as well. I specifically know of people in guilds on our server that use exploits to gain advantages in wars and nothing has ever happened to these guys other than the odd 1-2 day slap on the wrist ban. But no. Permenanty ban the guy who wasnt cheating. Nice work AGS! Your sadistic system is working as intended
The third thing that drives me nuts about this is the complete lack of transparency on the ban. The way the ban happened was my two friends were capturing a fort when my banned friend was suddenly disconnected. He then tried to log back in and was given a ban message. He immediately tried to appeal the ban and went through the ban appeal process. Not even 5 minutes later he received a (clearly) copy and pasted message about the terms and conditions and told the ban is not being lifted. WE HAVE NO IDEA WHY. We are all sitting here on our hands, unable to do anything about it because the whole process is automated! What in the world! What a way to show you appreciate your player baseā¦ its so frustrating to see 1000s of hours of legit play go to waste because AGS just doesnt give a flying rat about usā¦
And this brings me to the final issue i have with this system. Why on earth does an automatic ban system have the ability to permenantly ban an account on the first ban? Why would it have this? Especially since there are known issues with other harmless software? Also why would it just default to āyour account is never able to be played againā? No warning, no nothing. Even if my friend WAS cheating, why would he not receive a warning like a 2-3 day, or even 1-2 week ban as a āhey dont do that againā? Instead, a broken, automated software with known issues is able to permanently ban someone, zero disclosed reasons (as stated above), and is paired by a copy/paste appeal system with zero additional information about the ban.
You have FINALLY showed us how little you care about your player base. You did it! You finally ruined the game for us and it wasnt even our choice. We wanted to keep playing this game despite all its querks and faults because we still found it enjoyable. But now you literally give my friend no choice but to stop and, out of principal (and desire to play with our friend group) weāre all moving on to something different. Thanks for nothing AGS, please PLEASE take a good look at your ban system and stop kicking people when they are already down. Good lord what a waste of 8 months.
