An Interview with Funcom About Recent Player Bans

[B. de la Durantaye]

Recently there have been player bans in Age of Conan. The community has been asking for details as to what has happened and what players can do if they feel they have been wrongly banned. Today we were able to get the following details from Funcom Senior Customer Service & QA Manager, Mathis.

Read the full interview here

[Notleh]

Funcom, we support you in taking a strong stance on exploiting and doing what is needed to keep the AoC economy strong. I would have gladly given up a couple days of playtime to resolve this issue if I was asked.

That being said, you are taking way too long to resolve this issue and doing a poor job of communicating with those effected. Way too long. Three days now and not even an email to a few of the effected accounts that I know of. You say they will be contacted, but as of this posting they have not been contacted.

You say a small number of people were effected, but this is not accurate. In my guild 2 accounts were suspended, but these two accounts had many resources and gold; as well as all of the guild permissions. This effects hundreds of people.

My guild leader received donations from dozens of guild members to build our guild city and was thereby deemed to have an "excessive" amount of gold. Well, duh...building a city is not cheap. If the banks had been in the game then it would not have been necessary to have one or a few players collect the gold.

Other guild leaders were also targeted. Please do what you said in the interview and handle this efficiently instead of giving your biggest supporters the cold shoulder.



Nearly 3 days and no response from Funcom to my guild mates.

Please uphold our faith in you Funcom and get the legitimate players back in the game. Quickly.

[Savanja]

I'm happy to see some answers on this. For those still awaiting a solution, I hope it resolves soon!

[Notleh]

btw, ty to Machail for conducting this interview, and Funcom for responding to them so quickly.

[Martuk]

Its good to see it be proactive, but unfortunately some innocents got caught in the crossfire. Leave it to a few sploiters to ruin it for everyone else. I blame them rather than Funcom, but that doesn't make it any better in some cases.

[Pitdroid]

Originally Posted by Martuk

... Leave t to a few sploiters to ruin it for everyone else. I blame them rather than Funcom...

Completely agree.

[Notleh]

Well, it looks like my account has been put on hold. No notice, no warning, no nothing. I just cannot login.


Was it because I spoke out against this horrible costomer service? I do not know since Funcom has not sent me anything.


Just a warning to everyone else out there: do not get too much gold or Funcom might ban you. I had 15 gold. None of it was exploited or duped or anything. I was a level 75 necromancer and was making 60 silver an hour just killing mobs on quests and leveling in Kheshata.

If my account is put on hold then any of you can be as well. Think what you will, but when the silent Funcom ban stick hits you do not say that you were not warned.


Be careful and do not make too much money.

[Baseline]

Here's the original - now locked - thead on the AOC boards: http://forums.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?p=511052



Me. The Guild Leader of The ßox, on Deathwisper, just got banned very quickly. Basically, a GM just sent a generic PM about exploiting, and kicked me off without answering my inquiry as to why exactly.

My guild has spent the last week hardcore grinding coin in Keshatta and pooling all coin and resources to me to get our guild city completed with all walls as of just yesterday.

I had over 60 gold in my inventory today, pooled from our guild of nearly 100 people and friends of the guild, all grinding in raids in Keshatta with us. Yet the GM still banned without a specific explanation.

The bottom line here, is that Funcom just banned me, the leader of the guild, because a lot of our enemies on the server petitioned in saying I was exploiting, duping, etcetera, and they probably looked at how far we were with the city and how much gold I still had and believed it.

GG funcom. You said that it's going to be a guild effort to do this. You said that everyone would have to pool their resources to the guild leader and architect (both me) to make the cities / sieging happen. We did that, and you banned the guild leader.

Not surprising. Other people on the server have had their gold purged and bans have been handed out very quickly to anyone with any real pooled progress.

Here's a tip funcom, learn to differentiate between Dupers/Exploiters, and people pooling their endless hours of hard work into one person.

I won't be buying this game again, and you just pissed off about 100+ very vocal people that pooled a lot of resources, time and coin to me. You've also spread a lot of negative publicity about your game for how quickly you ban and ruin a lot of peoples pooled efforts.

[schroedingercat]

kinda frightened by this and the fact that the interviewee completely dodged the question about gold pooling for city building.

[Annatar]

Originally Posted by schroedingercat

kinda frightened by this and the fact that the interviewee completely dodged the question about gold pooling for city building.

Funcom would be analyzing the method of gold generation beyond that of the guild bank/mule being sent the gold. There may not be any issue with a guild having 500 gold in the bank, but their account may be suspended if the 20 players sending that bank/mule the gold have used an exploit to get it. So I doubt that pooling gold will get you suspended, but how people have been choosing to 'fill the pool' (so to speak) is what is getting them in trouble.