This Friday evening and most of Saturday NCSoft’s GM teams have been banning massive amounts of accounts that were promoting Kinah selling or other services that broke the game’s Terms and Conditions. Gold spamming in game has reduced severely, but some players have been affected by the banhammer as well and we are waiting to see to what extent has this affected the legitimate players out there. What is also noticeable is that queues on all servers are almost non existant. Whether this is something related to removing bots and goldspammers from the game or has the initial rush finally slowed down remains to be seen. I seriously doubt that it was the bots/goldspammers alone though, because that would mean that 10-20% of the game’s population were gold sellers (that’s how big the queues were). There are also reports that players that were in contact with gold sellers have also been banned and that you wil not be able to connect to the game if you are using a proxy service.
A great image displaying GMs at work has been posted @ Aionic Thoughts and you can read their post about the issue as well here.
Prior to the massive banning 10 NA servers have had their character creation temporarily disabled. The official news is here and the servers are:
[Oceanic] Nezekan
[East] Marchutan
[West] Ariel
[East] Israphel
[East] Lumiel
[West] Siel
[East] Zikel
[East] Azphel
[East] Triniel
[West] Vaizel
At last! They should have done this a long time ago!
I couldn’t agree more. I remember in other games it was done similarly. Just as you think things got out of hands there were massive bans. Things got out of hands already in Aion and I was almost tempted to start writing a Post Mortem post, but they reacted. I hope that this saves things enough to see players retain faith in the game.
Does the blocking also count with the gmails from gold spammers? I’m blocking and deleting them as they arrive.
NCsoft is itching for a class action law suit. First, it designs a game that REQUIRES massive amounts of game currency. Then they sell it to thousands of players for Big Money. THEN they dream up banning players to try and stop abuse of their chat system by Chinese scammers. It’s a joke.