In the sandbox MMO ArcheAge, the official forum is filled with requests for clemency and appeals from players who claim to have been banned unjustly.
It is the third act of the drama. After being plagued in the first act by a whole flood of hackers, bots, and cheats, Trion Worlds fought back in the middle part and massively banned players. Now, the forum is overrun by players who describe their utter disbelief that it was they who were banned. They would never have done anything wrong and now their account is gone.
ArcheAge knows only one topic: The bans
Anyone who takes a look at the “Dev Tracker” in the official ArcheAge forum experiences a monoculture. Players lament their fate. They have been banned unjustly, they have been waiting for days for their appeal to be processed, they criticize the communication greatly and are outraged.
There are mass threads from players who want to emphasize their appeal against the ban with a post in the official forum. Probably also to put pressure on the operator. Such a clemency request ultimately costs nothing, and one reads from players who have succeeded with a complaint. So why not try it themselves?
The problem is also that players who have been banned lose their Glyph privileges and have difficulty reaching a support staff member.
Employees of Trion Worlds write to them that the forum is not the right place for this, they need to write a ticket to request a review of their ban and contact support. Meanwhile, these hints are handled with copy & paste in the ArcheAge forum.
Are you your brother’s keeper?
Trion Worlds points out that players should be careful whom they trust with their account. They know from their own experience about cases where the actual account owners were operating legally, but the brother with whom they shared the account resorted to illegal methods. A glimmer of hope for banned players: Community Manager Scapes reports that some of the recently banned players may have had compromised accounts. They are working to return these players their accounts.
Mein MMO says: As an outsider, one has no way of checking how many accounts were actually banned rightfully and how many were banned unjustly. But since this is being fought so publicly, doubts are rising about whether every ban is as final as thought, and this creates even more work for Trion Worlds and delays the processing of cases. As stories emerge that hackers and those rightfully banned have succeeded with a clemency request, surely everyone will try it: they have nothing to lose. What does he have to lose?
A real market has arisen around this phenomenon. In certain forums, there are even “service providers” who specialize in writing “clemency requests” to publishers. This does not only apply to ArcheAge but is a service offered for other MMOs as well. If the price is right…
