Recent Banning Issue

Patience explains some detail about the recent banning issue:

As soon as I have more news, I'll let you know. In the meantime I encourage those whose accounts were banned to again contact customer service, even if they received an email saying their situation had been reviewed and the ban upheld, as apparently it's an automated message and the bans actually are eligible for appeal.

We'll get this straightened out ASAP - it's the #1 priority for quite a few people here today.

Yeah, the part about the bans not being appealable is being removed, actually, and there's some talk about emailing all of those people again.

I'm back! After more than one meeting about this issue this morning. I'd add smilies, but this is pretty serious stuff, so...

Apparently, a bunch of players were scooped up in an anti-farming/power-leveling raid, as it were.

When data was pulled for accounts who fit a certain criteria which typically indicate a bot or account sharing, some players were included who probably aren't actually participating in behaviors that violate the TOS. We did a similar "sting" a couple of weeks ago in which over 200 accounts were banned - none of them appealed, because they actually were farmers. We widened the net a bit this second time and unfortunately scooped up some dolphins with our tuna (someone's going to hurt me for that analogy, I just know it..).

If your account was banned, please contact Customer Service to straighten it out. We've reviewed the criteria and are going to both narrow the net again (it would be better to catch less farmers than more players) and add some additional cross-checking to try to prevent this from happening again.

And on behalf of all of us, I'd like to apologize to anyone who was caught in the crossfire.

Hey guys!

Customer service has asked me to relay that people who want to appeal their bans should send in an email through http://support.turbine.com, since the people who answer the phones will send you that way anyway. The emails will go to the people in the billing department who are handing the situation, and will save you a phone call.

So if you received an email saying your account was banned, please visit http://support.turbine.com to submit an email for review of your account to have the banned removed.

Hats off to Turbine for their efforts in keeping gold farmers down and for quickly reacting to this issue.

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great efforts and step to appeal some stupid bans.

thanks Patience, u did a good job