12
votes
Lost Ark is being review bombed after incorrectly issuing permanent bans to inactive players, which leaves a mark on their Steam profiles
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- Title
- Lost Ark Is Banning Players for Inactivity
- Published
- Jan 14 2023
- Word count
- 457 words
Official response on the Lost Ark forums acknowledging the fuck up:
False Bans Following January Bot Ban Waves
New addition to the forum post:
Another:
At least they cleaned it up quickly. Still pretty bad that it happened at all.
Like I sorta understand why they might have done it. I've had this happen with Guild Wars 2. Hadn't played in over a year, so my account was locked. But they stated that it was a security measure and provided instructions on how to contact support and what to provide to unlock the account. Within 24hrs, my account was unlocked. A little annoying since I had to provide information that I wasn't sure I still had: receipt, last 4 of credit card (is that card still active?), character name (I have various names I use), last mailing address provided. But at least it wasn't a simple ban like this and there was a clear path forward.
I would think think there are better ways to do inactive account security, other than bans/locks though.
I think you might be a bit confused. It's very unlikely they did this intentionally, and its very unlikely it was done for inactive account security purposes either. Lost Ark has a huge bot problem, and by the sounds of it (based on this and other articles I have read on the situation) their new, much vaunted, "highly-effective" bot detection code actually had a serious bug in it which they failed to notice in QA before going live with it. And this bug is what caused it to not only scan long-time inactive users, but also incorrectly flag a significant amount of them as being bots. That's why all this happened during their latest bot ban wave, and why they were so quick to admit the mistake and work to reverse it.
I was basing it off stuff I heard on reddit. People wouldn't lie on the Internet, surely...
This is a monumental fuck-up and one that I hope both Amazon and Valve face legal action for if they don't immediately put things right.
EDIT: Okay, I misunderstood the seriousness of this ban. It does leave a negative mark on your Steam account, but lacks the negative ramifications of being unable to join Valve Anti-Cheat enabled servers that a VAC ban would otherwise leave you. It is still quite defamatory to be labelled a cheater in a situation like this.
Not sure about DOTA, but the CSGO Rulebook says “The TO [Tournament Organizer] will not qualify, nor allow in any qualifying event, any player who has been "Valve Anti-Cheat" banned ("VAC Banned") in CS:GO.”, i.e. VAC bans for Lost Ark would not affect CS:GO major tournaments.
But the ban isn't a VAC ban: It's a Game ban, which, as far as I know, any developer can use.
Yeah, according to PCGamer they were just regular 'game bans', which still show up on your Steam profile as a form of public shaming, but unlike VAC bans don't actually prevent you from playing any other Steam games, or on VAC protected servers. So it's still a pretty embarrassing fuck up, but not as monumental as @Bullmaestro thinks it is.
https://www.pcgamer.com/lost-ark-players-with-inactive-accounts-caught-by-wave-of-bot-bans/
That's my misunderstanding of Valve's system.
No worries. Truth be told I wasn't entirely clear on the distinctions between the ban types before this either. And I had absolutely no idea that regular game bans could show up on your profile page. I had always assumed those ban labels on people's profile pages referred to VAC bans.