Massive Account bans hit Age of Conan!!!

For those of you unaware Funcom has over the last two weeks banned 14% of it's player accounts!!
What has led to such drastic action you may say? well read on....
Since release of Rise of the Godslayer expansion Funcom has has numerous issues with game glitches in the new land of Khitai. Most of these glitches have been in the plentiful 6 person dungeons scattered around the expansion and these programming errors have been siezed upon by enterprising players looking to get ahead in the game.
This has resulted in a constant race between the exploiters and programmers with every week new ways of completing instances being found only to be patched up half heartedly by the programmers.
However this has all changed as Funcom has taken a new drastic approach to the enterprising players and introduced the 'Ban Bot'
For those of you unaware at how this works the bot is set to scan instances for reduced sized playing groups and groups the programmers consider inappropriate to complete the instance. Once these groups are found then all accounts involved are suspended.
So for those of you exploiting Coppice hard mode by running in circles or firing from a distance in the Abyss of Kun Whu to glitch the boss you better beware as the bot may be out to get you!!!
The bot however has had some unforseen actions however and many genuine players have now been banned for experimenting with new tactics. This has resulted in so many players being banned that most guilds have had to cancel weekly raids due to lack of numbers of players. Further to this enraged players are cancelling accounts at record numbers sending the already financially vunerable Funcom into a downward spiral.
What will happen over the next two weeks no one knows, but one thing is for sure the world of Hyboria sure did get a lot more interesting..........at least for those of us watching anyway.

 

AoC is still alive ?
I remember it being so hyped up before release and once it came out it was bashed big time, and it was of the fastest crashing releases I never gave the game a chance, wonder how it is right now.

 

Wow thats an interesting story.
Just wow.


Why dont they change the "ban bot" to a "major inconvenience bot"
Thats what I would do. I don't know how the game works but I can easily imagine that losing all of your items or getting you level halved would be more frustrating than being banned.

 

this is one thing i never really got about alot of MMO games. MMO's have a plethora of staff, or at least enough to EASILY regulate all this bs without having to introduce some half @ss banning system. GM's and admins do DIDDLY SQUAD all day long and get paid one way or another. how hard is it to have a few GM's and/or admins randomly check known problem spots? all it takes is a click of the mouse and their GM/admin powers will take them anywhere. they are all able to move around the game world while invisible. seriously...get off yur lazy butts!

these types of behaviors, and half @ss bandaid fixes, are completely ridiculous considering how much money they potentially gross from us players. me, personally, i could care less about any half @ss company, such as funcom, that doesn't prioritize gameplay experience and cater to the player-base.

 

Just move on .. there are better mmo-s out every month
AoC failed long time ago and on the downhill to be shut down .. just like aion ..

 

I thought Age of Conan was dead already. When I was blogging about it a while ago, the game was hardly breathing and the developers themselves were speaking about letting the fans down. At least I think...

 

I heard it actually got alot better. I think this is what happened with Anarchy Online too, they released it too early even though the game itself was good.

AoC apparently has/had a good base game, it was just lacking content. It's not like WAR, APB, or those other failed games.

This is just what I read though. I only played the trail for <1 hour. It seemed decent to me (though supposedly that's the best part of the game), I just didn't have the time to play.

 

I played when it was first released up till like level 30 or so...I got tired of getting raped by level 20 hunters with their bow n arrows and nothing I could do about it...I just said f' it and went back to WoW.

 

Hehe banning when they are losing player base? And banning when they themselves released an expansion with all these exploits?

 

Yeah, it's really a very poor way to run a business.

 

nice find,,,,

 

Yikes, this might be Funcom's swan song. Anarchy Online's already free to play, Age of Conan was a failure and now they're driving whatever revenue they had away, and they're making this new Dota-like game called bloodline champions, I tried a few games in beta, and imo it's pretty bad... they ripped out all the rpg elements, no leveling, no items, no creeps... Funcom's been making some poor decisions unfortunately

 

They don't seem to understand that they are not Blizzard, only Blizzard can ban players without explanations and not expect a backlash.

 

screw conan. bring me guild wars 2

 

I thought Conan was dead too.... but with the way Funcom is behaving I'm sure it will be now.