Received this email shortly ago; Hello there, I am writing to many of you at one time with the same message - if my note does not resolve your problem please do respond and let me know. It appears you have been banned in error. I want to apologize profusely that this happened and let you know we're working feverishly on fixing that issue for you this morning. If you were a gold member, when your account is un-banned you may need to re-subscribe - we will figure out how much time you had on the subscription and add that back for you. Once again, I apologize sincerely this error occurred and thank you for your patience and loyal patronage of EverQuest. Kindly, Sharon Morris Director, CS. If you had hand in getting this resolved in a quicker manner I appreciate it Piestro. In the future, I do recommend when things of this nature emerge however, not to go with the guilty until proven innocent approach or remotely insinuate such. This goes for CS as well and whatever faulty automated mechanism that had the ability to hand out terminations on a miscalculated whim.
I'm gonna guess "movement cheats" are warping to selected mobs in specific zones (who didn't HATE Vex thall trash or the climb to seru? as examples) but no idea, if thats the issue, how/what would be simulating the resemblance without the actualy warp. Were GMs hidden and watching ? What did they find if they did? Or was this issue reported by players, or even an automated missed signal flaged by the account doing their normal every day lag/ports/mount's whatevers. Was it instnaced zones, or regular zones? Or both? Not a clue. But the effect hurts.
Well... account still shows banned even after the wonderful email I received where it tells you to resubscribe. Says to contact CS. Anyone with SoE want to chime in and explain why?
Those who were impacted should be receiving messages from our Customer Service department individually. We're most certainly going to apologize to those individuals. We're also in the process of making all the necessary adjustments to people's accounts to reverse the ill affects of this action. As I said before there is always the potential for errors in anything like this, and we take responsibility when mistakes such as this happen (as in this case). It's not something we're happy about, and we're doing out best to fix it with the players who were impacted. No one was called a liar in this thread, as I said before it I can't verify the truth or not in any particular case. I'm glad we were able to get players who were mistakenly identified unsuspended, that's something that is never acceptable on our part. My job is awareness, both internal and external. I believe that players are the most important part of the game, and that being open and honest with our players is the most important thing we can do. Some days are rougher than others, that's what I've signed up for. When we screw up it's harder than when we get it right, but I'm happy we have a policy and management team that supports us in discussing it when we do get it wrong. While there were mistakes in this case, nothing I said in my previous post was untrue. Some people do try to game the system and some try to create an uproar (along with flooding CS). They make these situations much worse for those individuals (such as people affected in this case) who are targeted incorrectly. We always take any report of mistargeting seriously, and immediate investigations are started to look into matters. This isn't everyone, nor do I believe that everyone who posts in frustration is a liar. It just makes things that much more complicated and I believe it's important for you to understand that as part of the general situation when these things occur.
Some 12 year old kid goes into a 7-11 store in your neighborhood and shoplifts a package of Juicyfruit gum. In response, Strategic Air Command drops a 10 Megaton nuke on the store, killing the kid. Isn't it wonderful that SAC would take the time to punish a criminal?
Ok, so... current count looks like dozens of people who all got the same message at around the same time last night (5pm-ish Pacific), but the above comment has four paragraphs - the first three emphasize that this is about cheaters cheating, the third disclaims all that in the first 2 sentences, then goes on to reiterate that these cheaters who got caught cheating are now trying to game the system (this forum?) in order to get unsuspended. Summary: there's a rogue piece of code auto-banning people without any human review and the CS people are pretty sure the rogue piece of code is telling them the truth and that everyone commenting on this forum is a lying cheater trying to get their account unsuspended. This is not only guilty until proven otherwise, this is guilty and even if you try to prove otherwise you're a suspect because you've already been convicted by this rogue piece of code. Pffff... best. customer service. evah. LOL
Unfortunately this is not an instantaneous process. CS is working really hard to get this done as quickly as possible, and it should be finished very shortly we hope. If it's not fixed relatively soon I'll follow up on your account (if it's not the one you are posting from please let me know via a private message). Clarification on the subscription issue: While CS can restore your account and the gold time on it, we can't necessarily put your membership back to recurring. It's a sticky situation. So if you wish to continue to be a gold member you may need to reactivate the recurring portion.
Mistakes are made. It happens. Good on SOE for seeing it and fixing it. I personally am delighted there is hack / exploit software protecting our game. Occasional mistakes will happen and is the cost of maintaining the integrity of EQ.
We were TERMINATED, not suspended. Figure I'd point out yet another mistake on Sony's behalf. Thanks, have a fabulous day
Please remember, Piestro is not the one who makes these decisions he is only the face of the company for the most part. He is the liason and yelling at him for the mistake is kind of like yelling at the cashier for the manager declining your check.
Today some developers learned about false positives. Hopefully they learned the time honored lesson that nobody is immune to them. Ideally CS will learn the lesson that your first response when you don't know WTF is going on is to say "We don't know what the bleep is going on but we will look into it right away." Then later when you are sure (whether you are right or wrong) you can make more definitive statements. I realize that nobody wants to let the actual cheaters get the best of them. Your customers don't want the cheaters to succeed any more than you do. But you can't let pride get in the way of good communication with your customers. So here's a tip. If your evidence of movement cheating doesn't allow you to see how the person benefited from it then it's incomplete and will provide false positives. Somebody who is going to cheat might test it and not get flagged in that case, but when it works they will use it to their benefit and you will catch them. After all, people don't cheat just to do it, they cheat because it benefits them in some way. As always, think how you would respond if you were the one banned incorrectly. I think this thread has been far more civil and calm than it might have been given the situation.
If I were suspended or banned from EQ it would be devastating. More important than the loss of the game would be the loss of connection with my fellow players. Hell, I use the name provided by EQ's random name generator as my online identity in all my personal gaming. That's why I always encourage folks who think they have been suspended incorrectly(permanently or otherwise) to contact CS. Make sure another full human review is done of the evidence, so they can make a final determination. It helps us too, to make sure we got it right. In this case we didn't, and it very quickly became clear.
I have not received an Email notifying me of the Un-Ban, but yet, everyone else I know that's been affected by this, has..... how long will this take? I am completely distraught by this event.. I have been a loyal player for 15 years, and I have never used any kind of cheat program!!!!
am sorry piestro if any of my comment's got you upset in anyway earlier was just angry and i did try and keep as calm as i could with all my comment's...but maybe you could answer a question i already reply with a ticket asking the same question that am bout to ask you but maybe you can get a quicker response and could post something on here that would be people at ease in the same boat as me.... not to long ago sony did a saving on subscription's....if you had upgraded your monthly subscription ( I.E you was on 1 month but upgraded to 3 month ... or if you was 3 month you upgraded to 6 month ) you got a discount on your subscription ( i belive it was a 25% discount ) unto you changed or stop your subscription... if people who had that offer have to redo there subscription...will we loss that benefit??? and thank you
Just to be clear, based on the responses in this thread, contacting CS did absolutely zero in this case and actually caused people to become more upset. What did work was people posting here in this thread, getting your attention and causing you to look into it. If you are going to send people to CS, and you should, then they should be capable of your claim of doing "another full human review." So far it looks like all they did was say "system says you're guilty so you are." And then they followed it up with no information that would assist the customer in defending themselves. What I am saying is that while your first response here wasn't terrible, it wasn't great considering how this situation went down. Most of the things you said should have been in your latter post when you admitted the mistake was on your end. Explanations of skepticism only infuriate those who know they did nothing wrong. The first post should be "I will find out what is going on here" and leave it at that until you know more. So hopefully you will take these for what they are, suggestions for dealing with these kinds of situations in the future.
Well this isn't the first time a wave of bans has been incorrectly targeted. Would it be so hard to do the human review BEFORE executing the ban in the first place? The entire EQ team spends a lot of time putting out the fire of the day. Does the management team not understand how much this churn costs them, both in terms of community relations and dollars spent on diverting people to put out fires? I mean no personal offense to anyone on the team, as I think this is a systemic problem, but when I hear about things like this it does not surprise me by even 0.01% ... I think "yup, this is EQ".
I just would like to know if Piestro was forced to make his first post in this thread, a slap in the face for loyal customers...just to admit 30mins later that they royally effed up (what a surprise). An apology would be in order, instead you have to go thru blah blah...what a stupid show for an old game where nobody should be tempted to cheat anymore, and where prolly nobody cares if somebody cheats anymore. There is no real competition left with how stuff is released currently, hello clever SoE people the worst thing you can do for this game is piss people off like that.
