Now more than ever, I am beginning to question the GMs' guidelines to banning players, and their standards to handling ban appeals.
Yesterday, a known hacker in Reboot was unbanned and restored to the rankings. There exists positive proof this player broke Terms of Services, and this was not the player's first unban.
On the same day, multiple people were banned for meso farming on their Kannas. Contrary to frequently-seen botters, these players were actively controlling their characters, even chatting with people immediately before they were banned. They did not receive any sort of GM whispers, nor a 'White room' treatment before the ban.
A player who, a few weeks ago, suffered what was believed to be an unjustified ban, was denied opportunities to appeal his ban, despite providing video evidence proving his innocence beyond a reasonable doubt. The GM claimed the stream vod link was 'blocked', when it was easily accessible by everyone else who attempted to.
There are even hypotheses that GMs handling ban appeals don't read tickets beyond the first line anymore.
I guess my point here today is, is there any reason for players to continue playing legit and following Terms in 2017? After all, it would seem that following Terms doesn't make a player any less vulnerable to getting banned out of nowhere.
People in my guild and alliance are currently too scared to farm. They fear that if they tried to, they would get banned for no reason, and would be denied the opportunity to appeal, even if they were to record every second of their farming. They're too scared to play the game.
In a time when legitimate players are fearing for the safety of their accounts, why is nothing being done to change this situation? Hackers and known abusers are getting off easy. There seems to be a trend where more hackers are getting unbanned and pardoned than people who truly deserve the pardon.
In other words, the only reason to follow Terms under current conditions is a matter of conscience.
I can already foresee the fate of this post, based on what's been happening recently. Due to that, I have backed up this post locally, and I will continue to pursue this.
Something needs to change, and it needed to be changed yesterday.
Comments
Also, this is a good post but have you posted anywhere else besides General Chat o. o since no support in this section of the forum?
FUD in this thread.
*Implying Game Masters don't read tickets so there would be "no point" filing one, undermining the entire support system.
*Implying players fear for the safety of their accounts by playing normally.
*Implying hackers can just hack without consequences.
*Implying that playing legit will "get you banned" just as easily as hacking.
As a volunteer I have seen some cases of "innocent" players getting "falsely banned". I know at times it can look super convincing when you have a mob of people supporting the "falsely" banned player. It's not always what it seems, that's the reason why cases of banned players are handled internally and not with an audience taking sides in a conflict they don't have all the evidence in. And yes false bans do happen, not saying that's never the case either.