To make this game a more fair and enjoyable experience for all players, we’ve been continuing our work against RMT (Real Money Trade) and abusers. We also want to address the concerns the community has over our ban process and investigations. In light of providing transparency on our work, we are sharing some more details with you all.
We have permanently banned a total of 489 accounts today:
- RMT buyers: 440 accounts, divided between the following servers:
| Kraken | 84 |
| Leviathan | 67 |
| Ospheros | 71 |
| Ardenia | 218 |
- RMT sellers: 49 accounts
Note: It is not always possible to provide a breakdown between servers, due to heavy overlap between accounts.
This week’s banwave is a continuation of our investigation on the gold duping exploit we mentioned last week. Last week, we banned the accounts that were used to perform the exploit, as well as the accounts that were being used to stash and sell the gold.
This week, we focused on tracking the exploited gold that had already been sold. As such, you will see that this resulted in a large number of gold buyers being tracked down, specifically on the evolution servers.
Please note that we are aware that large amounts of gold are traded amongst players legitimately on a daily basis. Because of this, we took special care not to flag any transactions that may have been legitimate.
While today’s banwave is one of the largest so far in terms of RMT buyers, it only includes players that directly received a large amount of gold, for nothing in return, from a dummy account that was solely used for gold selling. Additionally, we also manually tracked players that bought the gold on a dummy alt and then transferred the gold to their main account.
FAQ
Q. How much gold can we safely trade between accounts?
A. We don’t work with a set threshold on gold amount. What matters is the source of this gold, and whether it’s legitimate or not.
Q. What if a goldseller coincidentally buys an item of mine?
A. While this would be an extremely rare occurrence, we have improved our checking methods to rule out any possible coincidental transactions.
Q. The prices of items are vastly different between Evolution servers and Fresh Start servers!
A. We are aware, and we track the prices for each item per server. At no point have we ever compared prices across 2 different servers. We’d also like to clarify that price tracking isn’t done manually by any GM, but automatically through tracking all marketplace transactions for each item server-wide.
Q. Do ban appeal results differ depending on which GM handles it?
A. No, the GM team all work under the same policies. To avoid any bias, we ensure that each ban appeal gets handled by a different GM than the one that applied the ban. That said, escalations or cases that are related to each other will likely get handled by the same senior GM, which is why you may see the same GM name pop up often on related cases.
Q. Why were there only bans in server X today and none in server Y?
A. As our investigations include a large amount of manual checks and double-checks, it takes time. Rather than doing 1 big monthly banwave with all 8 servers included, we have decided to do smaller and more frequent banwaves in order to take faster action on the results we’ve found. However, this means that those smaller banwaves are often focused on just a few servers at a time.
Additionally, it also depends on what is being investigated at the time. This and last week’s banwave were focused on an exploit that was only ever present in the evolution servers, and did not exist on the fresh start servers.
Q. Why is player X not banned even though they are/were clearly cheating?
A. Please report them through a ticket, so that our GM team can investigate the account.
Q. Why don’t you post a list of banned names?
A. Outside of GDPR and privacy concerns, we also do not want to participate in slander or cause a banned player to receive harassment from others. A permanently banned player can create a new account and play legitimately on their new account.
We hope this little FAQ can answer some of your concerns.
Remember, play fair and play safe!