Community Manager Andrew "Tamat" Beegle just announced on the official Aion forums that 16,000 accounts have been banned today across all North American and European servers. "We'd like to reiterate that we've been listening to your concerns. We've been constantly adding to our Customer Service and Game Surveillance Unit. As we continue to move forward, you'll see more and more of these efforts," he said.

Tamat also posted a brief FAQ addressing players whose accounts were banned. It looks like NCsoft has been collecting evidence of botting and gold buying/selling for several weeks to help keep unwarranted banning to a minimum. "We are taking a very hard stance on this issue," Tamat said.

You can read Tamat's full post after the jump. Let us know if you notice a difference in the amount of bots and spam on your server.

As you probably noticed, we've completed a server wide reboot without much notice on a day that we typically don't perform maintenance. It's only fair that we keep you in the loop and make sure you know what's going on. Over the last week we've been working on a list, we've been checking it twice, and today we found out who was naughty or nice. Ban Hammer Claus just came to town. When the servers come back online, nearly 16,000 accounts will have been removed from the game. If your account was banned, please read the following FAQ.

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1. Why was I banned?

 

There could be many reasons your account was closed. If you did not receive notification of your violation via e-mail please create a support ticket and the violation will be explained to you.  Please note that if your account was closed for the use of 3^rd party software (botting) or participating in RMT (gold buying/selling) the evidence for the account closure was gathered over several weeks. It may be completely unrelated to what your character was doing right when your account was closed.

 

2. … but I wasn’t botting, buying Kinah or spamming advertisements! I’m innocent!

 

Any action that modifies the client or automates the same way a bot does could potentially flag an account as a violator. We do not use one specific instance to “flag” an account for botting or RMT. We use many instances to strengthen our conclusions. Please understand that it is not what “you” have done on your account, but what the account has done. If your account is shared, purchased, borrowed, or power leveled, it could be the actions of anyone who’s ever used the account.  

 

3. I’m aware of all of the above, but I have never done any of it. Who do I contact?

To request a review, please create a support ticket.

 

We are taking a very hard stance on this issue and do have sophisticated processes and procedures in place that help us keep unwarranted banning to a minimum. If you believe you’ve been wrongfully banned, you can email us at support@ncsoft.com, and we will review your account. Our goal is to ensure our legitimate players are having the best game experience possible. Please note that you don’t need to submit multiple tickets, as we will review a specific case only once. We obviously take these violations seriously, but also want to make sure that legitimate players aren’t banned unnecessarily.

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We'd like to reiterate that we've been listening to your concerns. We've been constantly adding to our Customer Service and Game Surveillance Unit. As we continue to move forward, you'll see more and more of these efforts. Thanks for your patience everyone, and have fun playing Aion!

personally for me its a bit too late.but its still a good thing i guess.

but i do noticed they did not publish the ban list unlike ffxi where square enix ban players all the time and show the list of names that was ban

You really want to see a list of 16000 accounts + all the others they already banned aswell?

they should post it.whether we read it or not is our choice :)

Shu wants them named and shamed lol

which probably isn't allowed by some US law lol

Considering the character technically belongs to NCsoft, there is no law stopping them for publishing their own property to the public.

NCsoft continues to drop the banhammer on confirmed bots in Aion. North American Community Manager Andrew "Tamat" Beegle announced today that more than 26,000 bots were removed this morning. NCsoft West Executive Producer Lance Stites confirmed in his November community address that more than 27,000 accounts last week, which brings the grand total to 53,000 banned accounts and counting.

53k accounts .. nice job NcSoft

Yeah, also notice that they have almost no room left for gold spamming, you can't even make a normal sentence in chat about gold and kinah especially if you say it more then once in a row it just won't show anymore.

And they ban the buyers and sellers so much that no one is buying that crap anymore lol. Pay $2 for a mil and get banned 95% of the time isn't worth it

if only they done it earlier ^^

so many high lvl and max lvl already benefited from buying gold so it wont make any serious impact to player base now if they stop buying

but still i admit its good they doing it now then never. :)

Ashura wrote:

so many high lvl and max lvl already benefited from buying gold so it wont make any serious impact to player base now if they stop buying

Rawr that's the funny thing ^_^
Was watching some top players on some servers, for example a guy that had some sick gear on Siel is all cleaned out now like vami
And another lvl 50 guy that farmed 250k ap in a week has his char cleaned too XD

So no I wouldn't say they profit XD they hit max lvl and now they getting owned

Snowy!

hehe snow

those are the stupid ones that got caught or keep on buying gold when they max lvl lolz

rawr nope, those guys bought gold to hit max lvl and got assraped now that those gold sellers got caught and tracked

ya the ones that are stupid and got caught or unlucky i should say heh.

most of the gold buyer avoid detection though,i check a few names and they should have their gears on them.and i think they skip most of the max lvl crafters as well who got to max early from gold buying(a lot of crafter didn lvl up and just craft).i checked some of them and they still have full gears as well etc,tot some may be legitimate players i agreed ^^

however if they keep backtracking the database and search for info i admit they may start get many of the people they miss hehe,tat is providing they really intent to do it which i really doubt.no point in banning players if they stop buying gold anymore.

and they didn really get perm ban anyway.just gear wipe and maybe 3-7 days ban ^^

wonder how many of those account is temp ban and how many is perm ban lolz

No, their is no longer any temp bans trust me...ALOT of the people i know got banned and they said sorry its permanent and we no longer give second chances. And they dont usually strip gear unless they are giving you a second chance. They just flat out ban you and noone will notice because you stay the same on the aion site.

oh they banning for buying gold in the past or present?

i dont see why they should ban player perm for gold they buy like 30
days ago.seems a bit rash if its perm.perm ban punishment should be for
buying gold like after they started mass ban.

still i guess this is good news for u guys who is playing med to long term.the prices of items in game should be cheaper now

i wish they took action earlier.i thinking a lot of players started
buying gold and botting after they see no action taken at the start by
ncsoft and gameguard being removed etc etc

u can say they were mislead to think they can get away with it by ncsoft ^^

I don't see how item going to get cheaper, i only see them go more expensive.

well kluna usually game market prices goes down after a while when there is less famers.since the gold buyer usually set price high to recover what they buy from gold seller to get ahead of the resr of the players.

on the other note.farmers now pricing the kinah higher atm what this article i read below heh



"Don't get any on ya." The definitive 'GMs blew up bots on my server' thread.

There's something so satisfying about watching a bot or goldseller explode into bits of digital gore and it really does a great job at bringing up the community morale. That said, here are a few of the videos people have taken of the GMs in action. Feel free to post your own screenshots, videos, and depictions as well.

Kinah prices have soared.

In the last few weeks, we've seen over 50,000 farmers, bots, and goldsellers banned from Aion and seen
here, here and here. But is it working? Well, the following image seems to say it is. Kinah prices have skyrocketed from $3 to $17 and what's better yet is what is seen in the live chat box. So where exactly is that "stock of 168m" that the spammers love to throw around? Gone, with their accounts, it would seem.

Afterall, everyone knows the only good bot is a dead bot and every one that is vaporized before our eyes brings us one step closer to the dream of a bot-free game. Enjoy the videos and please post your own!

Ha, glad to be able to see the effect of the recent bans. If NCSoft keeps it up, hopefully RMTraders will loose interest.

woot, i can smell the ashes from over here, such tasty boon fires these are.