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Crime and Punishment
by , 2011-05-17 at 04:39 AM (4532 Views)
A 3 weeks ago, I received a 14 day ban on all of my accounts for allegedly botting. Like anyone else, I petitioned this ban, received a response saying "Sorry, we say you were botting, so it still stands." Whatever, only one more week, I thought. I found out that some guy, Anthie, a member of my alliance that I had never interacted with before, had petitioned one of my characters after he had killed and podded it. Fast forward to the end of my ban, two days ago. I excitedly log into my accounts, to update skill queues and do my other duties as TEST's military director. I was actually pretty excited to play eve.
I logged in my main. Hovered over my wallet, expecting to see the money that I left on the character, or at the worst a zero balance. Nope. Negative 6.9 BILLION ISK. At least all my assets were there. Today, I logged into another alt that I was training towards a Leviathan. It's balance was at negative 5B isk and all of my assets were removed. I had activated that account using the 4 hour activation for unsubbed account as my subscription lapsed during the ban, expecting to plex my character with one of the PLEX I thought I had stored on that account. NOPE. All of my assets were removed. I had 3 shield mods, the drake I was in space with, and an Ibis. Now CCP had not only banned me for two weeks, but had removed between 11 and 16 billion isk from my accounts. Two of my accounts are unusable, as with a negative balance a player cannot:
Upgrade a clone.
Purchase insurance.
Create a contract.
Receive a contract.
Participate in a station trade.
Essentially, they removed my ability to play the game. I could try manually ratting up that isk in sanctums, averaging 40 million isk an hour, but that would take me 172.5 hours, or 4.3 regular 40 hour work-weeks of nonstop ratting. Just to free one character from the shackles of a secondary punishment I received AFTER the ban.
Apparently this isn't the first time to happen. CCP Loki, the GM to apply the punishment to my accounts has apparently done this before (http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard...1250211&page=1). I've received several reports from anonymous CCP sources that I am being made an example of, since I post often and am very visible within the DecCo / Clusterfuck community. If this is the case, CCP's behavior is both unprofessional and vindictive. CCP has a record of notoriously bad customer service, which lends to the argument that this it is OK to allow GMs to punish users as they see fit.
Lastly, I feel like this "example" they are making of me is falling on to deaf ears. Sure, it will punish the shit out of me, perhaps even make me, an enthusiastic EVE player and supporter (I've been playing under 2 years and am not 100% :bittervet: yet), quit. Is this going to help the bigger problem in EVE, the problem of large-scale RMT? I feel like banning and punishing a small time crook is ignoring the bigger problem of massive RMT empires sponsored by the largest alliances in the game. [Disclaimer: I feel like both parties in the current DRF v. NC conflict could find parties guilty of systematic and business-like RMT at different levels of leadership.]
I realize that there are many parties in EVE that probably support CCP's actions in ruining my game experience, because I allegedly violated the EULA. I realize this. I just question if its a good thing for the EVE community as a whole to have a customer service department that specializes in vindictive, heavy-handed punishment. Maybe CCP's ire and efforts would be better off addressing the massive RMT businesses operating within EVE at corporation and alliance members instead of ruining my game experience without even responding to my tickets.
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