Bioware Clears Up Recent Old Republic Bans
Recently, there have been posts on the forums for The Old Republic from people who have reportedly been temporarily banned from the game. What’s strange is that the people who have received the ban say that the reason given is that they were looting containers on Ilum at a low level. This caused a bit of a stir, since you can get to these containers at a low level, and it can be exciting to open a high level chest when you’re well below the required level. So what gives?
Bioware has been quick to respond to these posts, and they did confirm that the reason for the bans was due to the containers being looted by low level characters. However, they claim that the people complaining aren’t exactly innocent. Rather, the ones who have been reprimanded were not simply looting a few containers, but camping them. This not only allowed them to gain a considerable amount of credits that they should not have gotten, but also prevented many other players from looting the containers.
First, action was taken against a number of accounts for what’s commonly known as ‘gold farming’ – or in our case, credit farming. These accounts were found to be exploiting the game in a variety of ways to maximize their credits in order to sell them to other players. Our Terms of Service team took action against these accounts and removed them permanently from the game.
Second, a smaller number of accounts were warned or temporarily suspended for exploiting loot containers on Ilum. To be completely clear, while players may choose to travel to Ilum earlier than the recommended level (40+) and may loot containers if they can get to them, in the cases of those customers that were warned or temporarily suspended, they were systematically and repeatedly looting containers in very high numbers resulting in the game economy becoming unbalanced.
This is a bit of a touchy subject, as some people actually believe that there is nothing wrong with sitting by a container and waiting to loot it again. Most people, however, see this as exploiting, and want it to be stopped. I think what Bioware needs to do is to place a cap on how many times you can loot a container in a given period of time. This should be stated clearly, so that the community knows that there is a rule in place, and that if they camp containers, there will be consequences. The other option is to put a level restriction on the containers in question, but that takes some of the fun out of exploring when you’re a low level, and it only means that the campers will need to level up a bit before staking out a chest.
