A month ago, a close friend of mine got banned while AFKING in a town for no apparent reason. After talking to live chat, they could not solve his problem and declined to specify what has happened to his account. Unsatisfied, he sent in a ticket. Moments later, his account was released and Nexon declined to comment what has actually happened to his account and sent a standardised reply. Thinking it was a system glitch, he let it slide.
Surprise boxes, re:zero events etc. were tempting. He spent somewhere along $1,000 - $1,500 to get the stuff he wanted from the boxes. RNG could not have been worse. In the meantime, it earned him MVP diamond. Not too bad as he's able to get some perks, he thought.
A few days later, he went back to the SAME character he was banned which was just a low level mule - to try to get some pensalirs so he can have better raid power in legion. And -bam- disconnected from server.
You guessed it. He was banned, again. He sent in a ticket, no reply for hours. Stayed up till 3AM to wait for live chat to come online and when he described what happened, live chat just responded with the same standardised reply. Feeling dejected, he went to bed and barely had any sleep. The next morning, his ticket was marked closed as Nexon, as expected, replied with the exact copy of the first ticket response except, he changed one sentence to: we have decided not to release your account because this was a repeated offence.
Repeated offence?
Unsatisfied, he pressed on. Same answers. Finally, a GM responded with: "We are unable to disclose any information to why your account was compromised due to proprietary rights." and ended the ticket stating he will be barred from all access to customer support if he asks more questions.
Needless to say, he uninstalled the game and was very very depressed. His wallet and bank account was not too happy as well.
Having spent a fair bit myself on this game (also MVP diamond), I feel the anger and rage towards the incompetency of the company, staff and game. If it was me, I could have spent that money on a holiday or buying a brand new phone!
Countless hackers occupying maps, getting to max level, being the first to kill the hardest boss in the game, reaching ungodly times in Dojo (pre-legion), reaching impossibly high floors in Dojo (post-legion) and even advertised on world megaphone how proud they are to still be free and undetected.
Maintenance after maintenance, channel & map crashes after crashes. Server instability. Has the game really been out for 10 years? It seems to be worse than a beta game and is deteriorating.
Player base shrunk & still shrinking, world mergers & even server mergers (EU & NA, really?), FM bots spamming S> mesos & accounts, Bots spamming S> mesos IN REBOOT (they have no clue do they).
Sure, they sort of made the game (a little) more popular as Reboot launched. Benefits of reboot in cash shop reward points = nil. Stacked up 100,000 reward points at one time not knowing what to do with it, just letting it expire and waste away. More players selling reboot services for irl money.
Players after players in reddit posting the same thing: Banned for no reason, unable to appeal.
I don't think I'll be maintaining my MVP status anymore knowing it will be taken away from me if something glitches/ bugs and no one's going to help you.
I'm slowly inching away from this cancerous game which does nothing for its players. I don't think I want to be playing a game where GMs are unreachable, unable to speak as per normal person and answers as good as an answering machine. Might as well make an FAQ and all the answers be "We understand your frustration on [insert the issue you are currently facing] and we are trying our best to solve it."
As my friend pleads and reaches out to Nexon to look into his case and all Nexon does is to laugh at him & threatens to revoke his access to customer support, my heart bleeds. Not so much for the sentiment of the game, but for the amount of money and time invested in it.
For all you know, that poor lad could be in depression and having suicidal thoughts. I know I would if I were to be in his shoes.
I'm drawing a line.
Comments
The reason they banned my old account was because of "Account Theft". Yeah, my account was compromised and I asked them to recover my account, but in response to getting my account back they also permanently banned it. I'm not even sure what "Account Theft" is... I asked them and they closed the ticket. I would send another ticket but they would probably use an automatic reply.
I feel really disgusted and angered just thinking about it. They don't care.
ikr. I'm quitting for good. They've just lost two of their most valuable customers who spends just to maintain MVP diamond status and heavy-marvel spenders.
It's tempting for us, especially those in reboot who wants the nx look. We've no option to trade with players who doubled or tripled the items they do not want. Sigh. We don't mind supporting the company as we've found enjoyment and made good friends. But not anymore, Nexon truly disappoints and here we are, bidding farewell to it.
Oh no! Another example of their incompetency. One day, the players will all be fed up and the game will be left to rot. Till then, they'll just continue being ignorant.
Maybe, who knows? They could not even justify the reason behind their actions, anyone who had the misfortune of taking up a banned player's ign would certainly rage. He tried reaching out to the Maplestory community on discord including the CM personally, but no luck. Like I said, the players have no way to reach out to a real person or a real GM without getting a standardised copy-pasted reply. Every single conversation with the customer support feels like we've been redirected to an answering machine. :c
#ThereIsNoHope
That is Nexon's problem. It is clear they do not want to employ competent employees, but robots who has no prior knowledge of the game. When kthxbainao was CM, he listened to the community, fought for the community - in the end, Nexon deems him to be too involved and got the boot. Never have I been this disappointed with a company which I have had hopes on.
The people that touched items from the December 2015 cube exploit aren't going to impact the game negatively. The same for those who touched an arcane weapon and ended up getting banned. Even if you let those people keep the items (Nexon claimed they deleted the illicit items), those items will be obsolete/cheap after a year or 2 (ie: Empress equips/RA equips/etc).
We can see the inconsistency of the punishment of the recent major item exploits:
December cube exploit 2015: Those who bought items/came in contact with items that were exploited were permanently banned.
July cube exploit 2016: Those who bought items/came in contact (including mules of exploiters)were NOT banned. Only those who directly exploited the bug (which was the same as the December one) were banned.
Arcane weapon exploit: Some of those who came in contact with items/bought the items were permanently banned.
Removal of duplicated items: None of those who came in contact with items/bought the items were banned.
If you can't guarantee perfect accuracy for a case (and we've seen multiple occasions in which we needed a CM to reopen a case), then don't give out permanent bans for those cases. With the hyper exploit, knowing if they did the exploit is binary--either they have the exploited skill or they don't. A permanent ban is justified. If an account touched/possessed an exploited item, instead of straight up permanently banning it (most people are smart enough to avoid doing it on their main so if you're catching people's lv 250 then something is wrong here), give them a 1~2 year ban. At least some of them will come back and the game will be less dead, not to mention that most of them do make a lot of noise on the way out which turns away new players: a lose-lose situation for both the player and company.
Personally, I've fallen in love with this game several times, and Nexon has even made some steps in the right direction in recent years (they used to not answer tickets period... I've sent 10 tickets in the past and only 2 were answered, although in recent years they've answered just about all of them), but things like this show how they're moving back in the wrong direction.
There have been a lot of flare-ups lately about false bans on Reddit and here on the forums, and none of them, especially this one, seemed suspicious. There is clearly something wrong when hackers are getting to lvl 250 often times scraping by with no ban or just a temporary ban (I know of a guy who's off the rankings and gets a ban every week it seems but still hasn't been perma'd yet because he spends a lot of NX) yet we still have flare-ups of mentions of false bans. If those hackers are getting away with it but we have a lot of players complaining about false bans, then what gives? This in itself is pretty much proof that there is truth to these FALSE ban claims by the innocent players.
I think one of the most questionable things is what sort of "evidence" do they have of such bans? I always had a suspicion that perhaps they look into how much NX you've spent on the game as their evidence (which would be incredibly sad but seemed to be a possibility for many of the posts), but the fact that your friend was MVP Diamond kinda debunks this hypothesis (although there are some clear Reboot hackers who spend a lot of NX and aren't banned yet... go figure). But are they looking through the logs and see the game message that banned him and use that as "proof"... or do they not even check at all?
I think it's time we demand answers from Nexon. A few years ago we were all afraid of hackers. Heck, even a GM got hacked by one of them! But now we have to be afraid not of hackers but rather the company who runs the game. Nobody is truly safe even if you do nothing wrong, so it seems. Nor how much you spend or don't spend on this game.
@Arwoo: I hope you read this thread and answer our concerns! Right now there is a large amount of fear in playing the game for the threat of being banned falsely and not being able to properly appeal. We all remember the Wondroid event ban. There's no telling how many other spaghetti code problems exist that only a handful of players would encounter and get perma'd without a chance to repeal. I would know a significant portion of the community in Reboot is afraid because I've asked around many of my friends and guildies and Reboot among others, and they share the same sentiment. I would definitely assume non-Reboot servers also have this as a concern as well.
@MINSMS: I'm really sorry for your friend and I hope they do something about the ban and give compensation... Maybe if they fix the ban and fix the way they handle customer support regarding this yal could come back
Please PM me your friend's IGN.