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ArcheAge: Trion Responds to Accidental Banning Accusations
BillMurphy
Former Managing EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 4,565
There have been several reports of legitimate players being banned from Trion's ArcheAge here in the NA and EU in an effort for the company to curtail botting and illegal activities in the game. We reached out for comment from Trion's CEO on the matter, and this is what Scott Hartsman wrote back:
Yes, we're doing lots of things to deal with the bad actors, and we've been making massive improvements day by day. The game is already in a vastly better state than it was originally, and also better than what many other games call acceptable. And we're still working to make it even better. While it's not perfect yet, it's getting better constantly. We do want to be as close to perfect as we can possibly get.
We've been going through ongoing ramp-ups of bots, hackers, spammers, and fraudster bans over the last few weeks. The overwhelming majority of the bans are legitimate. The ones that aren't are rolled back as rapidly as we can. That's a tiny minority, and getting them sorted out is a huge priority - Both for their sake, and to improve future accuracy. Then we use that info to re-tune to be more accurate in future passes.
Additionally, sometimes innocents being "banned" is also necessary - When an account is hacked, it's usually immediately used for farming/spamming/botting. We have to suspend the entire account until we get an appeal from the owner, since the accounts need to be re-secured, or it just ends up right back in the hands of the abuser.
Most of the time when an innocent person is "banned," that's what happened. The person usually doesn't realize at first that both their Trion account and email account have both been compromised. The addition of the glyph token emails has cut this down tremendously, since now a hacker also has to have a person's email account to get in also. We've recently made it harder for bad actors to create new accounts, so they're now going after accounts that have old credentials that have been compromised from other sites again.
Unfortunately, and this is the one that surprises most people - When actual hackers (especially with teleport hackers and gold storage accounts from the gold sellers) get banned, they tend to be the ones with the most eloquently written, heartfelt pleas of innocence, making it time consuming to sort through a haystack of legitimate bans to find a needle of a valid appeal.
I looked at a sample of 500-ish bans yesterday, and one account was borderline enough to err in the favor of the customer and reverse a ban. That's barely a measurable percent of the bans, much less a measurable percent of total users. The rest were either botting/hacking or compromised accounts. While this person may be legitimate, and if they have an appeal in, it'll definitely get looked into. Looking at the end of his thread, it looks like that may have already happened.
In other exciting news, I grabbed another few dozen to check over myself after hours last night to make sure we're still tuned correctly. One very angry gentleman who thought he had "Trion" problems had a CC that was stolen and being used actively in China, and his bank was the one causing the blocks - Our folks went out of our way help him get that solved as well as make sure he was able to be in and playing. That's one of the kinds of helpful things we do that no one ever hears about.
And yes, we're responding quite constantly - On our forums, on reddit, on twitter, over email, in tickets, etc. - Just not in every single instance that the topic gets raised.
Obviously, the battle against the bots is an ongoing quest for Trion. And we'll only really be able to tell if it works when things calm down. If you're experiencing account hacking or banning issues, it's probably the best advice to reach out to Trion's Support, though we're hearing reports from players that the quickest and most reliable method is online chatting, rather than filing tickets, as Trion's support department has been overwhelmed.
Good luck, and godspeed.
Try to be excellent to everyone you meet. You never know what someone else has seen or endured.
Comments
I, personally, have friends that work at Trion support. They are really doing the best that they can, and are trying to make sure that any real players affected get back in the game ASAP.
However, this is really a result of Trion (the company) not being ready for this. They dont really have the tools, policies, or even a good understanding of the problem. The people in the trenches are doing the best that they can, but they are learning the hard way, and were thrown in this pit of lava, and told to learn how to swim.
The bottom line is that this is a lot harder than Trion management was willing to believe.. until they got hit by the bus, and now they are trying to dig their way out. Have some patience and understanding for those doing the grunt work.. and perhaps things will go better next time (if there is a next time).
im 100% sure they never ban some innocent soul, 99% of the times its botters, hackers who just realised they did wrong to late, will say after their account got banned.
serv them right...
I was banned about thirty minutes after I created my account. I had logged into the game and played a bit. I changed some game settings and had to log out for them to take effect. When I tried to log back in I had been suspended.
I do have to say, it didn't take too long for every thing to be set straight. I posted my complaint on their forums, which was FILLED with post of the same nature. About an hour or so later I got an email saying I was banned. I replied to that email stating my case and then the following day I woke up to another email. This email stated that they had looked into my account and found nothing wrong and I was reinstated.
Over all I like the fact they are coming down hard on cheaters and spammers, I do think they need to throttle back on the way they go about it. When I was banned it was because they said I had used language similar to the cheaters and spammers. I had in fact only typed one thing, in a whisper, to another player about how much we both hated the gold spam. Trion was able to go back and see that apparently and I was cleared of wrong doing. If saying this, "You and me both, bubba" in a whisper can get you banned for using language similar to the cheaters then yeah, I think they need to rethink their process.
Overall though I am really enjoying the game.
That Guild Wars 2 login screen knocked up my wife. Must be the second coming!
yep, "i will just buy abit of gold here, everyone is doing it!"... seen it often enough.
"I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!"
So I can understand a bit of delay on solving tickets, but:
I'm still waiting to get my hacked account back, opened the ticket 40 days ago, and only today they finally managed to give me an answer that wasn't an automated one.
And again, had to answer them 3 times before they actually decided to check the attachements I sent them 1 month earlier.
Point is, customer service can't take up to 40 days to answer a major issue ticket, there's NO excuse.
I logged a ticket with Trion on 1st of the month about a problem, got an automated reply promising a response within 96-120 hours, 4-5 days in other words. 200 hours later, or 8 days, still nothing from them. Not even a courtesy note to say they haven't had a chance due to backlog, just nothing.
You don't promise a response within a certain timeframe and then not stick to it, even if it's just an update with no progress. You promise a response, you damn well give one. It's unprofessional not to.
Their best isn't good enough.
That's too funny !! What a crew they having involved with this game.
what the...heck is this?!
LOLOLOLOLOL
The Deep Web is sca-ry.
Wow , that's some BS right there. Good catch with the vid.
This could end up being very interesting.
Sorry did either of you bother to read? They say that they make mistakes..if it is 1 out of 500 that is still less than 100%.
So stop with the auto attacks. Not everyone that gets banned will be guilty, Everyone makes mistakes, no need to include yourself in that category by assuming things, and attacking people on forums. Leave it up to the game dev's to sort it out.
These games that release with all these issues and then act surprised by them.. just blows my mind. Plan in advance and use beta for something other than cash cow, and just maybe some of these issues can be fixed before launch for a change.
Get so sick of all the excuses..and people lowering their expectations. Now even the game companies seem to except that it is okay to release games in this condition, just sickening.
That's interesting. When I was playing on the Enla server earlier, someone reported in faction chat that he had just seen around thirty bots in exactly the same area as your video. That infers they are running exactly the same script on multiple servers. I'd have thought that would have been easy for Trion to pick up on?
Stuff like this happens. At least they're righting the wrongs..so to speak.
However, I do take exception to Trion saying they went "out of their way" to help banned players. No. It's not "out of their way". it's exactly "in their way" to fix their errors.
If the game wasn't so heavily P2W there would be a lot less incentive for bots and gold sellers to exist.
Just sayin'
Here is something i just don't understand....
If they are rolling back bans that are not legit,why would they not use that same process for determination prior to banning?
This makes it sound like they are not using proper diligence when making bans.They are basically saying you are guilty until you jump through hoops to get your account back and that is simply not acceptable.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I'm not touching this game. With the required time sync required to get ahead, it's just not worth it.
Botters / Farmers have destroyed MMOs - especially the FTP ones.
I think I'm done with AAA MMOs.... at least until botters / cheaters / farmers are taken care of. It will happen eventually.I think they you jumping through hoops is completely acceptable until things get taken care of and with as many Hack attempts that get done daily, to make sure you are the person you say you are I would gladly sit in a queue for 2+ hours to talk to someone to get it taken care of.
The hacks are probably not fixed because they're nigh unfixable due to the way Archeage's base is designed. Most of AA's aspects are handled client side instead of server side, and as stated by DD (head dev) during Ultima Online, "Never make anything client-side. The client is in the hands of the enemy."
To fix the hacks would probably require re-hauling a lot of AA's core programming structure from the ground up, both clientside and serverside. It hasn't happenned for 2 years in other regions and I doubt it'll happen here.
Maybe it's just not as big a deal in Korea because most people use Internet cafes there. Hard to have the hack you need on the computer when you're not even using your own computer. (although other regions still have lots of hackers anyways)
I have to agree that this isn't exactly something Trion could have foreseen concerning XLgames 3rd-party security software.
In a nutshell a very large majority of the hacking community follow games using the Hackshield software, and these hackers have a great deal of experience with Hackshield protocols and bypassing them at this point. They have plagued the Korean servers and now they are doing the same thing to the NA / EU servers.
Trion is doing a amazing job cleaning up XLgames mess, but it's going to be a long journey for Trion before we see a truly bot-free ArcheAge.
Fishing on Gilgamesh since 2013
Fishing on Bronzebeard since 2005
Fishing in RL since 1992
Born with a fishing rod in my hand in 1979
I just typed hackshield hack into google and came up with a ton of links to sites showing how to bypass hackshield. There's even videos on youtube on this subject.
How is it possible that Trion couldn't forsee this when it's all over the internet? Even a cursory investigation into hackshield would have revealed these problems. Are we seriously expected to believe that Trion made no efforts at all to research Archeage or Hackshield before they commited to this project? If they did look into it and missed this then either they didn't give a shit, or they missed it and are guilty of gross negligence.
If I could find this stuff in 2 minutes then Trion have no excuse.