Player invested 400 hours and spent over 330 dollars in a month, now locked out of his favorite game

In Once Human, the mood is currently bad, triggered by a bug and the subsequent reaction of the developers. Their “bug fix” caused players to be banned, some of whom had invested hundreds of hours and dollars into the multiplayer game.

What happened? MeinMMO reported on October 26, 2024, that players of Once Human had complained about login issues and the temporary loss of characters. Apparently, there was an exploit that allowed players to acquire double the amount of real money currency.

Later, the obtained amount of real money currency is said to have disappeared, causing various accounts to suddenly have a negative balance. According to the terms of service of Once Human, such account access can be blocked until the account is settled. Did players stop being able to log into the game because of this? There were no official statements from the developers or concrete evidence for this.

Once Human is a unique survival game – here’s a trailer:

Im Survival-Spiel Once Human müsst ihr zusammenarbeiten

Autoplay

A victim speaks out

What is the current status? The post by mystikx on Reddit substantiates and expands on some previous assumptions – supported by screenshots from the game, support tickets, the official Discord, and the developers’ ban notification. Here are the key findings:

His main character was permanently banned from Once Human. So far, he had invested about 400 hours and just over 333 US dollars. He can still log in with all other characters.
When he contested the ban with an initial ticket, he was told that he supposedly violated the terms of service (but not in what way). The ticket response mentions that the character was muted. Well, banned characters are mute in their own way.
According to the player, the ban came after he received the message that 3,140 Crystgins would be deducted from his account. After that, the account balance was -1,190 Crystgins.
Although all of this was supposedly triggered by a bug from the developers, the player would have happily invested more dollars in the game to balance the account. However, since he cannot log in with the affected character at all, this is apparently not possible.
When asked about the issue on the official Discord, the player was told that there is no ban status for the affected character.
Similar information was conveyed to the player through in-game support. Nevertheless, he still could not log in with the mentioned character – and with every attempt, he received the message that his character is permanently banned.
Instead, the next day a second character of mystikx was also banned. He had spent some dollars on Crystgin for this character as well. The only available character now is the one that has not had any money invested in it.
As a next step, the affected individual contacted Steam directly to initiate a refund for all previous expenditures by providing all Steam transaction IDs. A corresponding message was sent to the Once Human support.
Then, his case was investigated again. The result: He supposedly displayed abnormal behavior in the game and was banned for that reason.
In a later message, he was informed that he allegedly had been caught using a cheat 15 times on August 19 and 20. Strangely: The corresponding character was already banned on those days.
On August 22, mystikx was banned from the official Discord channel of the developers after he shared his experiences with the rest of the community there.

From here, the further updates (19 in total) and screenshots from mystikx go in circles. Although the Reddit post linked above has stirred up quite a bit of dust, the developers continue to refuse to provide a concrete, comprehensible reason for the ban or to revoke it, or to approach the affected player in any other way.