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

They took a hard stance on the cheaters in EQ2. They were on a server isolated from the rest of the community, just living their little lives, only interacting with other people who didn't care that they were cheating. No new player ever accidentally popped into Drunder. You had to petition to be moved there, if you weren't moved due to CS action. It doesn't even show up on the server list for non-Drunder players. How were the players on Drunder harming anyone? Everyone there knew the situation.

Now, instead of Drunder, you are going to have a revolving door of botters on the live servers playing until they get banned and then making new accounts. New players will see that. They shot themselves in the foot with this move.

EQ doesn't have a hard stance on cheaters, there are people blatantly cheating on literally ever server in the game and it is 22 years old. It seems to have lasted.

It is possible that the playerbase # on Drunder wasn't high enough to support the server being online. This could have just been a financial thing with very very poor messaging around it.

I would believe that, if EQ2 didn't have active servers that literally have 10 people playing on them at prime time.

The game is 22 years old, inflated, and run by a skeleton crew in comparison to the dev teams of yesteryear. Very few new players are coming in at this point for such an old game. You can see their "hard" stance just from the way they ban/suspend 1 account out of many owned by the same player when they obviously know exactly who is cheating. If they really wanted to they could instant ban everyone that's used a third party program. Only reasoning is either they don't want to take a chunk of revenue out all at once, or they want to ease it in and start banning more over time. Your guess is as good as mine.

Either way seems to still be doing fine or the game would have been shut down by now.

Here's to hope! o/

surprise they don't just suspend ever account for a week just to see how many total accounts it would effect.

They did the right thing.

Permabanning an account as a result of them being on a prison server is a bit much IMO. In theory if you opted to play on Drunder and decided it wasn't for you then quit EQ2 started playing EQ or any other Daybreak game then you just lost it all.

Regardless of a persons stance on cheating you have to see that the way things are being handled here is erratic.

As was mentioned in this thread there are ways to appeal the action if you moved to the server of your own free will.

Deciding to permaban people for cheating = normal and fine gaming company behavior.
Deciding to open a "prison server" initially for cheaters, but later allow other people to join it = ehh...not that normal but it's their company.

Deciding to open a "prison server", continue to accept money from people on that server, including them buying things like annual subscriptions, expansion packs et cetera, and then banning their accounts with no warning after allowing the server to run for 7 years = probably a violation of some consumer protection laws. It's just lucky that consumer protection laws have mostly not been enforced against gaming companies, and the number of people involved is too small to attract the attention of a law firm.

Every day we see further evidence DPG is not a well-run company and may in fact be a dishonest and fraudulently run company.

Were you on the server? Was there a shop? Did subs even matter on Drunder?

Daybreak warned that the server could be closed at any time.

You'll probably be in for a rude awakening should EQ sunset.

My understanding is there were paid subscriptions, and like all Daybreak accounts you could subscribe for up to one year at a time. Currently what they advertise is a Daybreak All Access subscription for one year, gives you a year of access to Daybreak's covered games. This is more than just EQ1 and EQ2, and it is indeed possible that individual servers of those games, or even the games themselves could be shut down--but you would ostensibly still have your All Access account for the other covered content. With Drunder they actually permabanned everyone who was on the server's All Access account to all of their games, because they had characters on Drunder.

And no--I was not on Drunder, I haven't played EQ2 since around 2011.

Online games shutting down isn't unheard of, but I believe the norm is if you had pre-paid subscription time it generally is refunded.

For example when NCSoft shutdown Wild Star, they announced it in late September 2018, and gave warning that the game's last day would be end of November. They also refunded all purchases made using real money after July 1st (retroactively.) If when EQ shuts down they also cancel all of our All Access accounts I would expect to be refunded for unused prepaid time, and I believe it would be a violation of law to not offer that refund. Things like unused Daybreak Cash balances or Krono likely would be forfeit, but that is understood when you convert your cash into a digital asset.

I gotta wonder if there were actually a non-trivial number of innocent transfers in or if thats just something to harp on. I hope you both get your accounts unbanned and a transfer back to live server.

Source?

I see nothing on the article or the article's comments to indicate that this was an issue.

Since you put zero effort into your stances and just make baseless claims. I did the legwork.


https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq2/index.php?threads/the-prison-server-experiment-drunder.562937/

My guess is that people who played on that particular server, thought that cheating was allowed there, and that only cheating on other servers was punished. If I was DBG I would not have banned accounts unless they also cheated on other servers.

Maybe the prison server population used the the prison server to get the cheats "out of their system" and played within the rules on other servers. Banning their entire account is a bit harsh imho, if that was the case. Wiping chars on the prison server alone is probably fair enough, I assume getting a maxed char with cheats is fairly easy.

That said, I don't know the prison server community, so I might be wrong about this.

A link to a thread from 2015 from does not describe anything about the magnitude of consumer effects (shop or subs) on Drunder in 2022.

As someone who doesn't play EQ2 I don't really know. But I think even the ones who got transferred there for cheating, frankly have a claim they could raise. It is against the law to sell things that you don't deliver, and then not refund the purchase. State Attorneys General have regularly pursued claims on behalf of consumers for this behavior, and secured large settlements with companies.

The problem as I see it is until the day Drunder was shut down and the affected accounts banned, DPG still marketed to Drunder player things like annual subscriptions. In theory you could purchase an annual subscription an hour before the server was wiped out, and because your account was banned (for something the company explicitly setup--participation on a prison server) you are now out that entire annual sub.

I don't really have any issue with shutting down Drunder as a matter of principle, but I do think people who were still buying things for use on Drunder accounts should have those purchases refunded, particularly things like pre-paid subscription time. The law is actually decently clear that companies can't just keep money like that. Gyms regularly get in trouble for this when they shut down and the owners decide to keep everyone's pre-paid annual memberships. That isn't legally proper.

Jumblur, thats entirely too reasonable of a stance to take.

Unless you find something that says Drunder was F2P, we will continue to assume it was a sub only server, because thats the last information (mine) posted. Thats how a discussion works.