This is possibly Lord of the Rings Online’s first big controversy: Turbine is handing out unfounded bans. How fun! (cuz it’s not me.)
Sheeba of the Gladden server wrote:
A member of my kinship was just banned for an unfounded accusation of powerleveling because he is 49. I myself am 48, as are many others at this point. This is a person I play with on ventrilo and know that he isn’t powerleveling or a gold farmer etc. Many people are getting handed these perma bans for no reason.
… and several other banned players climb aboard and relate their stories.
There’s no official word yet on what’s up, just speculation at this point, but wouldn’t it be great if Turbine was banning high level players because they were concerned about the players’ health? Something like, “We’re worried that you’re exhibiting an unhealthy fascination with our game. Also, you’re overusing our resources. $10 or $15 a month for 24/7 play is unreasonable. Thanks for playing! Have a good life.”
Financially speaking, a game house’s profit margin on a casual player subscription is many times that of a hardcore player, maybe the gaming companies should start booting people for playing too much. All I’d ask is that they’re honest, and entertaining, about it.
“Dear Former Subscriber,
Go outside for heaven’s sake. Also, personal hygiene is a requirement of modern society. This is not optional, as you seem to believe.
Loser.
Regards,
Soon-to-be-even-more-profitable Gaming Company”
UPDATE: Darn. Looks like Turbine is looking into this and will provide customer service, which isn’t very entertaining at all.
Would be funny if they had to ban someone on a $200 dollar life-plan.
It smells fishy to me since everyone always claims they are innocent and I’m naturally cynical about that. However MMO companies don’t help themselves by sending out such bland and uninformative emails as shown in that thread. I mean, one sentence in a short email with 5 different possible reasons for the banning, that’s just lazy. Then needing your community manager to post that despite the clear warning that you cannot appeal, you should actually do so, that’s just LOL.
Yeah… and that’s why this game has such a good Customer Service rating on mmorpg.com. I’ve been pretty delighted by the customer service for this game. This is likely not much more than some idiot GM screwing stuff up more than actual policy of Turbine. Turbine is not new to MMOs. They’ve never done anything like this in their past MMOs and I can’t see them doing it now.
Normally I’d figure it’s probably a few players not wanting to admit the real reasons why they’re getting banned. However, there do seem to be some common threads that kind of make sense here. If I had to guess, their scripts for picking out people who might be sharing accounts, using macros, or power-leveling take into account the amount of time you spend online in some manner, and are giving that too much weight, so that it’s catching folks who are on vacation, jobless, or otherwise spending a ton of time online.
‘Course what really gets me (having read even further) are all the “OMG fire someone!” posts. Uh, mistakes happen, guys. Don’t think when you all hit the real world you’ll want to be fired for every little screwup. And yeah, this definitely sounds like some sort of automated script screwup.
So I hope they’ve disabled it, ’cause I play a lot, and I’d hate to trigger it…
My favourite bit about this whole thing is this line in Patience’s “customer service” thread…
Right so the review of your ban is also an automated process? That in itself is pretty ridiculous.
Um, no. All that means is that the message is automated. It’s common practice for Customer Support teams, as it helps save time and therefore money. The responses you get are either pre-written and chosen by a human or pre-written and automatically sent by the machine after a particular action has been taken by a human.
In this case, the pre-written response indicates that a ban won’t be reviewed as it has already been reviewed before being implemented. All Patience was saying is that the message was, at least in this case, wrong. Take a look at some other games sometime … Guild Wars has had it’s fair share of incorrect bans over the last year or so. Their message also states that no review will be undertaken, as that review has already been done. However, they’ve had numerous bans overturned after players requested a review.
What’s happened with LotRO here has happened before in other games and will happen again in future with other games. It’s not easy for the companies. They need to clean out as many of the illegitimate players as possible (because the players insist on it), but then when mistakes are made in the process they get hit by the very same players.
They’ll fine-tune their system and I’m sure in future these complaints will come in one at a time instead of en masse as it did here (again, GW is a good example – their first large scale ban resulted in something like 250ish false bans that were overturned, since then they get maybe 1 or 2 every couple of months).
Lol glad I didn’t join the lotro phenomenon 🙂 I like your blog btw and have linked to it from my wow blog – Wow Blog If you like mine I would greatly appreciate being added to your blogroll 🙂 Thanks
Samownall