Mistaken Ban~A-net right on it.

Greetings

I have read several posts in here regarding unjustified bans in the past, and the general reaction when someone has this happen is "You must have done something to get banned". I'm writing this post today for 2 reasons.

1. To let people know that it absolutely does happen, as it happened to me yesterday.
2. To thank A-net for not only admitting this was an error on their part, but for quickly making it right, along with an apology.

Logged on yesterday to a message saying my account was perma-banned for violating the EULA and/or Rules of Conduct. Needless to say, I was pretty upset that all the hard work of the last year was gone for no apparent reason, knowing full well that I had done nothing wrong. It took a few e-mails back & forth to support, but within 18 hours my account was back with all my characters/loot undisturbed.

That's pretty much it, just wanted to publicly thank A-net for getting on this quickly & making it right.

Thank You!

Congratulations :-D I would have been pissed, personally, until it got sorted out.

awesome! glad to hear it. what is it that they say you did? were you a 55'er going out of bergen? if so, im screwed too in the next few days.

zOMG! You mean there's actually a post about wrongful banning that is not about how A-net is a horrible cult of malicious goons out to wrong all players and steal babies because they banned one wrong person?!?

lol

Seriously though, when you think about the job that they have to do in order to keep botting and such from going out of control, it does sound reasonable that every once in a while there will be errors and sometimes the wrong persons will be blamed. It is nice to see that A-net does make a conscious effort to make sure that they take care of the people that this does happen to.

On a side note, do you know what activity caused A-net do mistakenly ban you? Were you just farming or was it some other error that you don't know of?

Anet is not out to get us... glad to see someone point that out.

I was accidentally banned last week too. Everything was cleared up thanks to Plaync and gw tech support in a couple of days. So I would also like to acknowledge that tech support does a good job.

You know what? I didn't even ask, I was so happy to have it fixed. It had to be something other than farming though, as I hadn't even really played since doubleXP skill cap weekend when I was working on my survivor Rit-and yes, she made it to legendary and then died a spectacular death at the hands of Ghial the Bone Dancer . The only thing I could think of was some offhand crack I made at someone selling a Supe Domination Rune for 3.5k. Something along the lines of:
"Yes, because someone would rather pay you that than 100g at the rune trader"
But that was so harmless i couldn't believe that was it.

Just to be safe, Jack... Change your Password!

Scan your PC just in case there is viruses inside it!

Congratulations on the happy ending. Yes, it would be nice if more people posted their success with getting bans removed. It would encourage others to go through the sometimes lengthy process with support.

Remember that there is a person and a computer on each side of the issue. One half of each pair is prone to error and the other half doesn't think.

LOL, it sounds like your rune trader probably reported you with some lies they made up to A-Net. Some people are like that. I usually put a line into chat when I see folks "Buying all your Imperial Commendations 100g each!!!!!! I'll buy all you have!!!!!!" I'll reply in all chat that Commendations are worth 200g each in trade at quartermasters. Usually that will earn me some vicious whispers full of language I can't repeat here without goring some poor little red engine.

Anyways, I'm glad you got your account back. It proves that A-net does fully investigate "I was banned unfairly!" claims.

Good to hear, I wonder how many happy endings there are to stories like these that we never hear about on the forums. Seems like anger gets people to post far more often than happiness.

On a side note, and I say this in game a lot too when I see people like you TheRaven - those collectibles are only worth 200g (or, in the case of trade contracts, one seventh of a gem) when you actually have 5 (or 7) of them. A lot of people don't do enough quests to get that many, or they've done, say, 8 quests so they have a couple lying around uselessly. To those people, the contracts aren't worth much; each will get you an id kit, which is 100g if you actually want the id kit, but if you just want the cash there are these buyers who will pay you for them. Their profit lies in the fact that they will stand there and buy in bulk all day.

Not that I do this; it seems like an incredibly boring way to make money, plus I wouldn't like getting reamed out every few minutes by someone who spams how much the items are "really" worth. I just get tired of people calling out what amounts to an honest trade of cash for time, whilst there are people in the same district horribly overpricing crap.

wow, I can't wait to get mistakenly perma banned! It sounds so cool! That way, if and when they unban me, I can love them for it!

Just like someone surviving a terrbile accident claiming how lucky they were. You're not lucky, you're severely unlucky to be in the accident in the first place!

^While that is mildly amusing, I think you're missing the point of why I posted. Don't get me wrong, I was most definitely not happy about this-if you could see my e-mails to PlayNC you'd understand how angry I was-I'm just tired of all the A-net bashing on this (and other) site while only seeing a relative handful of threads about them getting it right. To me, they get it right MUCH more often than not, and should be commended for it just as readily as they are bashed for what are perceived by many as mistakes.

Gratz on getting your account back.

I've got a guildie who got banned about 15 months ago with the same "you violated the EULA and/or Rules of Conduct" message. He emailed support asking what he did. They responded with a charge that he was spamming porn websites in chat. He asked for the chat logs that showed this and they refused to show him any proof. Case closed. I can say he's never done this.

**A-Net: His name was White Knight Lord, just in case you read this. **

QFT! Not that anyone will reasonable & listen, but... QFT!

Hey, can anyone tell me who I have to email about getting banned? I just logged on today and my account got perma-banned for some reason! It says, I was violating the user agreement and EULA and all of that, but I don't know how that could've been possible. The only thing I can think of that was even close was that I spent the past week frequenting Bergen Hot Springs with a 55 monk (ie. a major bot area), but I was merely farming the rangers outside the door for XP for my Legendary Survivor title, which I've since acquired.

I've spent way too much time in this game - 2 years as of this June - to do something that would get my account banned. It's a mistake and I need to clear this up ASAP. Thanks.

http://www.plaync.com/us/support/index.html or another appropriate site for your geographical region, which can be found here.

Thanks. Yeah, this is ridiculous. I think I just sent them a support email on PlayNC.com (using the 'Ask A Question' thing), but I have no idea if the message got sent or not. That site is a pain in the butt to navigate and use.

Since you're in A-net's good books Jack A Roe maybe you could help save White Knight Lord's account!

I'm really freaking bummed about getting banned. I know it was a mistake, but it still sucks. Sitting here knowing that I can't play (probably) for another day or two at least, until my situation gets cleared up, is going to be hard. I've been playing Guild Wars for almost two years, and for the past 8-9 months or so, almost every day, for hours on end. I have 12 characters, most of them through every campaign, with every primary elite capped, etc.. I've made several in-depth posts on these forums and GWO over the past couple of years (with the username 'TideSwayer'), so there's no way I'd have done all that if I was just going to throw away my in-game access by doing something stupid. Now there's a chance it was all wasted time (if ANet doesn't believe they made a mistake here).

It really sucks. I wish there was a quicker way to get this cleared up.

I doubt I'd be much help on this one (or any other for that matter ), but them not providing evidence is pretty poor customer service. Since my mistaken ban 2 days ago I have asked more than once for some reason why this happened in the first place so as to avoid it in the future, and have gotten no reply.

Tide, I had trouble with that PlayNC site also, and it took me some time to make sure they were aware of my situation. Here's some tips, hope they help:

Make sure you have a PlayNC account in the first place, and if you don't you must create one. Once you submit your question, it sends you to a "create new account" page. Toward the bottom you will enter your account name/password, and the e-mail associated with your GW account (if you already have a PlayNC account enter it at bottom, if not start at the top). If you do not enter an account (PlayNC), your question will not submit. You will know when they have received your question as they will send you a confirmation e-mail almost immediately.

If your mistake is the same as mine, they may ask for the following info, so you might want to just send it in the original question to save time:

ALL Character names on your account
E-mail associated with account
Exact wording (including code) of the error message you receive when attempting to log on.

I really hope this helps & you get your account back, I know how bad this sucks.

Thanks for the help and suggestions. Yeah, I got to that second page of 'Ask A Question' and thought I didn't need to fill that info out. It seemed to me that the first page took all the info that was necessary. The 'Submit Question' button is on the first page, after all. I guess I'll have to resend the support email then.

HOLY MESS!
Man thats wierd.
We need a mod to pm ppl to find bots.Maybe you got mistaken for a bot.
Do you have a guild?

to me it sounds more like this.

they should give your character a new tunic that says

"I was wrongfully banned for 18 hours and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt."

0-AL of course

Hey, I just want to give an update on my situation. I sent an email to support and got my account returned to me today. w00t. Apparently it was the XP farming I was doing out of Bergen Hot Springs (farming the mob of 5 Skeletal Rangers over and over again with a blue Hunter's Insight scroll to get the Legendary Survivor title) that got me "suspected". However, part of the reply I got certainly has me wary of playing this game now:

I hope the "if you display bot-like activities...." part was just a disclaimer to warn against my account actually being that of a real bot getting reinstated or something. I'm not a bot, but I do like to farm when there's nothing else going on in my guild. Doesn't farming, even by innocent players, require "bot-like activities"? You're always going to do repetitive mob killing and have a tendency to follow the same pattern of skill-casting and travelling out of town/to the mob, etc. It's just something you don't think about while doing it. I'm worried that my account is being red-flagged for any sort of these "bot-like activities" now that are basically unpreventable if I actually want to farm. I'm not going out of my way to do laps around town or something moronic like that before I leave just to throw off suspicion. I wasn't even farming for gold when I got caught in the bot sweep. I was farming XP! I was using a 300g blue XP scroll to farm a mob of 5 rangers continuously and more often than not didn't even get the cost of the scroll back in drops. (That's a terrible 'bot' if you ask me.) If anyone wants to see the Legendary Survivor title I was working towards on my monk, Pwnan Teh Lolbarian, then PM me in-game and I'll show you.

I'm simply worried that I'm going to get caught again, because I can't help but farm out of areas that are popular farm spots. It's something I like to do. If I'm not going to be allowed to farm out of these popular areas as a non-bot player, without fear of getting banned, then I don't know if I should be playing this game at all.

Please alleviate my fears and concerns here and tell me that was just a disclaimer message.

Also, thanks to ANet for giving me my account back.

"mistaken bun"??? heh-heh
I have never gave credit for spammers.
Just my 2 cents.

"If you display bot-like activities" What the heck is that garbage? This is what has me very concerned.

A-net: "We don't have any problem with real players farming and never have, our concern is the bots"

Yet Tide gets banned for farming..er...bot-like activity, and I was banned for a still unknown reason that PlayNC flat out refuses to explain. If there is some new automated banning system for perceived infractions (bot-like behavior, spamming local chat, etc.-btw, I'm all for the local chat spam bans, just using as an example), then the system obviously needs some huge improvements. If not, then it's a human mod who need only PM the suspect to see if they are "live or memorex". I'm 100% in favor of getting the bots out of the game, but if this system regularly bans innocents for simply playing the game, then the system is broken. Hopefully we can get some explanation as to how this works, although I really don't know if we will.

Glad you got your account back though Tide.