Is Bioware Really Banning Old Republic Players?

We’ve been keeping a close eye on an issue that concerns many players of The Old Republic. After waiting for years to play a Star Wars MMO that isn’t broken (since pre-cu Galaxies) people are starting to wonder if Bioware is getting a bit to liberal with their ban hammer.

It started with the loot containers on Ilum, which were being camped by low-level characters. Bioware first warned players, and suspended some who didn’t comply. However, since this, there have been a lot of people claiming to have been banned from the game. Yesterday we showed you an email that was supposedly sent to a player for exploiting a bug involving /getdown. As predicted, this email was a fake. Instead of banning users, the company is rolling out a patch that fixes the bug. You can see the patch notes here.

The company has even set out to point out some people on the official forums who are complaining of unwarranted bans. As you can see here, one of the Community Managers called out a player who had not been banned at all, yet was making complaints to the contrary. The real question is why this is happening. Sure, the whole Ilum loot container issue might have been dealt with in a better fashion, but is this really the best way to get things fixed? There were nine pages of comments before someone from Bioware stepped in to clear the air. Just imagine the amount of time that’s been wasted tracking down posts such as these, and cross-checking the accounts to see if they were even banned at all.