Is the Info on Banned Accts Really "between Mythic Entertainment & the account holder

[MYUO]

I have seen a couple of thread regarding the banned accounts get locked because it is "between Mythic Entertainment and the account holders", according to the Stratics Mode.

Let's put aside the questions about the justification and fairness of the ban, and just talk about the right for general players to talk about the banned account on this forum.

The ban was not targeted to players who spoke a few silly words or advertise rl gold selling in game. Rather, the ban was to stop massive duping and distributing high end items that totally throw off game balance and economy, and make most of players' in game effort worthless. IMO, the info on the banned accounts can't be more public than anything else. Even in rl, the case of high profile criminals are well publized. Even a traffic violation of an average Joe is also public info. Why? because that info affects the general public. As matter of fact, the char names of the banned accounts should made public since those names also belong to EA/Mystics according to what many people's belief.

I assume Stratics locks those threads because of the pressure coming from EA/Mythic. So this thread is not just targetting stratics, but EA/Mytic as well. I think Jeremy may not have the authority to make these kind of decisions. It may have to go to her boss or her boss's boss.

We, as players and paying customers, have the right to know.

 

[~Antzy~Pantz~]

What is it that you people need to know about it? They did their research and banned the accounts for a reason. They can not just ban to ban, they have to have a reason, which they did and resulted in several so called "innocent" players having to deal with the consequenses... their own faults!

 

[Dicimiie]

Mythic Entertainment is not a government entity, and is under no obligation to divulge any information on to whom they refuse service. It would be no different than you hosting a website (which this game pretty much is), charging a monthly fee for access to the site, finding out someone with a subscription has been hacking into the system, and blocking their account from further use. You would not have to tell the other subscribers what happened. You could if you chose to do so, but there is nothing saying it's mandatory.

 

[Wenchkin]

Well it is between the players and EA - unless EA change their policy. Even if the policy was changed and EA may then say "you were banned because you griefed a group of players, here's a screenshot and log" this kind of ban can't be handed in such a way.

The difficulty is, if anyone from EA started explaining what exactly got players banned, anyone who was rightly banned could tell their duping friends how to avoid being banned too. We have enough cheats without making it easier for them to evade bans more than usual.

I don't see any benefit to naming chars who are now banned.

Wenchy

 

[MYUO]

What is it that you people need to know about it? They did their research and banned the accounts for a reason. They can not just ban to ban, they have to have a reason, which they did and resulted in several so called "innocent" players having to deal with the consequenses... their own faults!

I would like to know out of ~150 accounts that are banned, how many banned players were unbanned. Why the other accounts of the banned players were not banned? Why there are still suspeciously large supplies of high end items (e.g. valorite runic hammers, etc.) still on vendors of every shard? Was the ban only target the runics? If not, what other items were used to justify the ban?

 

[~Antzy~Pantz~]

I can see where you are going with this now. It is fair to want to protect yourself and others against this happening again but I believe Jeremy already stated the facts. Don't buy items in bulk. If a val hammer "unduped" sells for 45+ mil and you find on a vendor for 10 and buy up 20 then expect to be caught. People don't just sell things dirt cheap for no reason, they made the money and the buyers got in trouble. I do agree with other posters tho too... the original "dupers" should be stopped but whats that going to take? Who knows!

 

[MYUO]

Mythic Entertainment is not a government entity, and is under no obligation to divulge any information on to whom they refuse service. It would be no different than you hosting a website (which this game pretty much is), charging a monthly fee for access to the site, finding out someone with a subscription has been hacking into the system, and blocking their account from further use. You would not have to tell the other subscribers what happened. You could if you chose to do so, but there is nothing saying it's mandatory.

I think even private entities should have obligation to inform their customers if the violation affected the general public. In your example, if the hacker stole senstive customer info (e.g. credit card #) from the hosting site and use the info to profit and cost damage to the customers, should the customers be informed?
Yes, this may not be mandatory. But it is at least a courtesy from a decent company.

 

[MYUO]

The difficulty is, if anyone from EA started explaining what exactly got players banned, anyone who was rightly banned could tell their duping friends how to avoid being banned too. We have enough cheats without making it easier for them to evade bans more than usual.

I don't see the tips that the duping friends from the banned player can help him avoid the ban. Without the tip, the duping friend is not caught anyway. The effectiveness of concealing info to the public on stopping duping/exploiting has been proved minimal.

I don't see any benefit to naming chars who are now banned.

Wenchy

The general public will know the guy/gal they played with over the years is banned instead of quit because of "UO sucks". Revealing the char names basically puts the "reputation" of the player on the line and also a warning to the dupe wanna bes.
Obviously, this is a huge step for EA/Mythic to take and frankly I don't expect they will take it. Neverthless, I think it will be helpful to make the game cleaner.

 

[MYUO]

I can see where you are going with this now. It is fair to want to protect yourself and others against this happening again but I believe Jeremy already stated the facts. Don't buy items in bulk. If a val hammer "unduped" sells for 45+ mil and you find on a vendor for 10 and buy up 20 then expect to be caught. People don't just sell things dirt cheap for no reason, they made the money and the buyers got in trouble. I do agree with other posters tho too... the original "dupers" should be stopped but whats that going to take? Who knows!

During the banning outcry, many people complained about not being able to tell whether the item is duped or not. I think that is a genuine point. Relying on the prices of player vendors to tell the good from bad is very subjective. what if that item is sold for 30mil? 35mil? where do you draw the line? As matter of fact, I suspect that the first batch of duped valorite runic hammers was indeed sold at 40-50mil range.

It is the dev's job to tell wheter the items in the game is generated by their own code according to design.

 

[Setnaffa]

We, as players and paying customers, have the right to know.

No we don't. EA is a corporation not a country. We have no right to know anything about EA's interactions with any customer other than ourselves. This has more to do with our individual right to privacy than anything else.

You need to get over it. EA can terminate any subscription they want and don't even have to have a good reason. That is true with any company dealing with any customer.

Now if one of their customers wants to publicize the fact their subscription has been terminated, that's fine. Of course they could be lying about the facts and you'd never know. This all changes if a customer sues EA (or EA sues a customer). Then it will be part of the public record.

 

[kelmo]

I assume Stratics locks those threads because of the pressure coming from EA/Mythic. So this thread is not just targetting stratics, but EA/Mytic as well. I think Jeremy may not have the authority to make these kind of decisions. It may have to go to her boss or her boss's boss.

We, as players and paying customers, have the right to know.

Your assumption is incorrect. If you feel I am in error, please contact the administrative staff here at Stratics. There is a handy link right below my sig.