EverQuest II unceremoniously wipes its ‘prison server’ and permabans every account

lmfao

It was hypocritical for them to have a "cheat" server on one of their games and then taking a stronger anti-cheat stance.

Perma banning the accounts though for those that chose to play there or was moved there 6 years ago is pretty harsh though imo. Just do not let those accounts play EQ2 without CSR intervention.

I guess it is like going to the Wall, either by choice or by force... Winter is coming!

... It was a Prison server for people who had been caught cheating in an undeniable way. This wasn't a server that they chose to be on. They also knew from the start that it could be closed at any time for any reason. There was no poor customer service involved in this at all.

The prison is in your MIND!!

They had a server which they sent cheaters to, then they decided to close that server as was stated could happen from the start of that server.

Also, there is no such thing as perma banning on any online game. It is more so just the amount of effort that you want to put in to getting unbanned. None of this was unforseen, so they should have been ready to put forward an effort to reclaim the account in the other games.

There most certainly is a perma ban in online games a simple example of this would be the ban of accounts that do a chargeback that get that account and all others associated with the credit card banned (as well as any activity from that card in the future). Maybe you are referring to players being able to create new accounts with different payment methods to get around the ban but that doesn't mean that accounts are not getting permanently banned.

You could choose to be on it though

While people could join the server by request the question remains if they took advantage of the server and took actions that would violate the rules on other servers. If this is the case they might not get a reprieve from the results of the prison server going away.

That's a lot of conjecture there

Never said it wasn't, but it does make sense that people who transfer to a prison server for rule breakers might be doing it in order to take the same actions without fear of punishment. Just because it was a prison server designed for rules breakers doesn't mean that they might not be still monitoring it to not only track what was happening but help improve cheat detection overall.

Could it be as mundane as the server did not generate enough revenue to justify keeping the electrons moving?

But the EQ PvP thing continues?

Last I heard they are doing great. Two raids of raiders raiding raids!

Maybe they have a sympathetic developer in their corner of the server room.

I knew the fix was in.

It appears that the server was shutdown on the same day that EQ2 got upgraded to 64 bit and that might be related.

It was a decently populated server, by EQ2 standards, especially when you consider that many folks ran full raids, or multiple full raids (full raids are 24 accounts) on the server. Additionally, you had to pay a sub to play there, no freebies. Also, krono sales on the server were basically non-existent, so those folks were subbed with a credit card for 24+ accounts. There are some threads about it on the EQ2 forums, if you are wondering how I know these things.

Those folks are also all doing chargebacks on their accounts, one guy is up to 58 chargebacks for year long subs. I mean, those accounts are already banned, so it's not like there is a reason not to do a chargeback.

Also, they still have the silly PvP server up that maybe 4 people play on. That is far less profitable than Drunder.

Drunder also kind of killed the idea that all botter/boxer/whatevers just do it to RMT. There was no one to RMT to on Drunder, because everyone had the same advantages and didn't need to buy anything. People still played there, just to play the game the way they wanted to play it. They weren't hurting anyone over on their prison server, they were isolated from the rest of the player base, and they were happily giving DPG money, both in subs and marketplace purchases. Seems like a poor choice on DPG's part.

Considering the server and the amount of chargebacks you are talking about I would question if those would actually get approved especially if they have not recently renewed the subscriptions.

Perhaps then they really are turning a corner on allowing things that "aren't hurting/bothering others." I do not doubt there was a time when they needed every sub they could get and management made a clear choice to allow/ignore certain things while still leaving themselves an out in the terms of service.

Just making money cannot be the only thing steering a company, they need principles too. It is fine if they do not align with every other person's principles.

It is obvious they have been doing more to curb certain behaviors and they do keep reiterating what they are against. Having a server that ignores/allows those behaviors is funding a test bed for developers and users of those tools which is kind of silly when you are also investing resources to combat them.

I have no doubt there is an entire rainbow of reasons people do the things DPG has said they do not allow but that really is not the point. It is difficult to navigate both sides of an issue like this and it appears they are no longer choosing to attempt to.

Drunder isolated botters from the rest of the community, which is really the best thing DPG can hope for. They will never "win" the arms race against cheaters. Drunder gave them a good way to minimize the botters impact on the rest of their playerbase. It was 100% a win/win/win for DPG, the botters and the regular players. Getting rid of it isn't going to get rid of the botters. It is going to force them back onto the regular servers. Good chance you see an uptick in botting on normal servers now. They were happy where they were, should have left them there. Drunder was a pragmatic solution to the problem.

Drunder may have been a test bed for the bot programs, but it was also a wonderful place for DPG to test their bot detection methods. The botters will always get sneakier in hiding themselves, now DPG lost a tool to refine their cheat detection methods.

A lot of people seem to have somehow deluded themselves into thinking that they are beneficial to EQ's bottom line despite the fact that they cheat, because they pay for so many accounts. I feel like it somehow isn't clear to them that, this is incorrect. they do way more harm than good and daybreak making decisions like this is clear evidence of that. Games that don't take a hard stance against cheaters, never last. Any new player who comes in and sees cheaters monopolizing content leaves and never comes back.

Every online gaming company in the world spends millions of dollars fighting cheaters, and they somehow think that they aren't a problem, it's baffling.