Bans by error - Discuss

[Guided Daggers]

My girlfriend, who has never botted or used 3rd party software before, and is always disgusted when she sees bots, has just been perma-banned on Guild Wars 2. She already filed a support ticket (and I get to calm her down, thanks ArenaNet ), but I was wondering if this has ever happened to any of you. Does it happen often in MMO's that someone gets banned by error?

[Alaris]

Sometimes they ban an account if they have reason to believe it was compromised... and then they restore the account when the account is back with the rightful owner, protected again.

Perhaps that is what is happening.

Good luck. Most times I heard something like that happen, it got resolved.

[RD]

Agreed with Alaris.

I don't think it's good, obviously. But it does happen. With GW 2, it seems to happen a bit more than it should, but so far ANet has seemed pretty speedy in restoring access. That's the part that really counts to me. Of course, it sucks to want to play and find that you are locked out, but it is not the end of the world.

When I played Rift for like a day, they banned me. I still don't know why - I think it was a gold seller hacked me. The process to get it back was so unbelievably difficult that I just said screw it and let the account stay locked.

[Sir Jack]

Hasn't CMetb been banned 4 or 5 times now?

It happens, but if you can prove your innocence, you should get your account restored quickly.

[Lensor]

Yes, ANet do seem to have a quite high false positive rate, as well as an agressive "proactive ban" policy.

The false positives come into play when their (rather sub-par) bot detection is concerned, and the proactive bans are for the suspicion that the account, or a card used to pay for anything in it, might be compromised.

The latter can be anything from repeated logins from "black listed" IP-ranges (beware if you ever play from Taiwan) to sudden reports for gold spamming in game. At least they are usually quick enough to unblock accounts once you can prove you are the original owner (keep all your original keys in a safe place!), but still frustrating of course.

[BladeDVD]

Usually it's not so much proving your innocence but rather getting them to look again so they can discover they made a mistake.

They ban a lot of people and with IP spoofing (is that the right word? lol I'm so out of date on this stuff) and "Chinese" botters actually playing some of the characters and all the bot programs out there, a lot of these bots look an awful lot like a real player, so I can see how it could happen.

I don't think I've ever been banned in error. My brother in law was in GW1 because of some trades he did with my wife (who was a bit of a power trader in GW1). Interestingly, her account was banned at the same time, but then immediately unbanned. My brother had to actually contact support and wait a few days.

Then in GW2 there was some kind of weird problem with his main account and it was stuck in support hell for like 2 or 3 weeks if memory serves. I know it was a very long time because he kept complaining about it, and I think he even got a character on a 2nd account up to 80 while waiting.

There are "a lot" of posts about this on the forum. Anet says a very small number of misbans happen and they blame it on human error occurring while they are reviewing accounts found to be botting or whatever else. Anet also says that some of the people saying they were banned incorrectly are lying in hopes of getting their accounts restored.

This all seems very plausible to me, while the idea that they ban simply based on reports or without human intervention, or do it to force people to buy new accounts or "they have your money already and don't care now," just don't sound like reasonable explanations, so I tend to believe Anet on this stuff.

Sorry to hear about your gf Giggles. That has to be maddening. I hear support's getting a lot faster, though, obviously, if her account was hacked it might take more time for them to investigate it and get proof of ownership sorted. Hope it goes quick. Remember if it takes longer than 3 days to hear back Gaile is maintaining a thread in the official forums to let her know about it so she can make a little noise on her behalf: https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/foru...-older-merged/

[Giggles]

Sorry to hear about your gf Giggles.

My what?

GL with getting you gfs account sorted out G Daggers.

[Fae]

Hasn't CMetb been banned 4 or 5 times ?

just 3! (2 in gw 1, and 1 in gw2)

- - - Updated - - -

Hasn't CMetb been banned 4 or 5 times ?

just 3! (2 in gw 1, and 1 in gw2)

[Guided Daggers]

My what?

GL with getting you gfs account sorted out G Daggers.

I think there was a mixup here

They got it sorted out. They said her account was noted accordingly (so I guess they'll be watching the account's activity), but she got it back. Well, we're happy for now...

[Giggles]

Glad they sorted it out so quickly.