Therumancer said:
Boy, where the hell were you a year ago when Nexon
arbitrarily banned 2,700 of its users? I kind of feel like I'm beating a dead horse because I bring this up every now and then, but I think this was a pretty big deal. The blurb on Wikipedia doesn't really do the whole thing justice.
Basically, there was this glitch inherent in the game (that was said to have been a problem in the overseas versions of the game, but hadn't been coded out when they brought it to North America) that allowed people to duplicate gold. Supposedly, knowledge of the glitch slowly spread throughout one of the the NA servers and it was allowed to be exploited to the point that the economy of that entire server was all but ruined. I can't attest to that, personally, or even tell you for sure that that's how it all started, but what I can tell you is that one player was apparently pissed off enough at the mods' inaction that he made a post about it on the game's forums.
He explained the situation with his server's economy, the fact that he and many other people had reported the glitch, but nothing was done about it and that, as a last resort, he had decided to force Nexon's hand by letting everyone else on the other two servers in on how to dupe gold. Well, after that, the whole thing kind of blew up. For the next day or so, people started printing money like they were employed at Enron or something. Eventually, the mods got off their asses, patched the glitch and then randomly banned a couple thousand people.
Wikipedia says that some people who were banned "complained", but I can tell you with certainty that many of the people banned were, in fact, innocent. To even use the glitch in the first place, you needed to own property in the game. To do that, you had to have been signed up for Mabinogi's premium service. Many of the people banned, however, were not paying players. In addition to that, I knew quite a few people that participated in the duping and none of them were banned. In fact, the two people I knew that
did have their accounts frozen weren't even logged on between the times when the original forum post went up and when the mods got around to fixing the exploit.
For the next couple of weeks, the forums were flooded with posts to the effect of "I did nothing wrong, why was I banned?" and "This is bullshit, I'm quitting for good" on account of the fact that there was really no better way to get into contact with Nexon outside of the "file a ticket" system, which was usually only used for reporting bugs and abuses of the ToS, and almost never got a response, anyway.
I stopped playing shortly after all of this (for unrelated reasons), but last I heard, the accounts that were later found to be innocent were only unbanned after a whole month and many of the ones that were banned in the first place were never unbanned or even told what exactly they did to get their accounts seized to begin with. It's also worth it to note that, while Mabinogi is technically a "free to play" game, it does come with a cash shop and many of the regular players that had their accounts wrongfully frozen lost thousands of dollars and all of the time they'd poured into their characters over the previous year.
Edit: Oh yeah and I forgot to mention the fact that, a week later, another duping glitch (again, abusing flaws inherent in the housing system) was announced on the forums by another user. This time, though, the post came after Nexon's employees had gone home for the weekend (you heard me right, they had no one modding their games on the weekends), so players with houses were free to duplicate gold for a full 48 hours before anything was done about it. Funny part is that, after they fixed the second glitch, they didn't ban anyone else. I guess they figured they'd already hit their quota for the month.
Can't deny that)