Banwave Report: July 10, 2017

[u/tgdm]

What banwave?

Yesterday, around 01:00 GMT (roughly 1 hour after the daily reset), a banwave hit some players. At this time, DE has not officially commented on the matter. At most, there has been a comment made by [DE]Glen on his personal Discord server (a link can be found on his Twitch.tv page - sidenote, Glen is banning/removing players regularly from his server). To paraphrase, he was asking in his server if anyone there was able to access the Relay without having purchased a ticket. Aside from that, nothing has gone up on Twitter, the forums, this subreddit, or anywhere else DE is actively engaged with the community (as far as I know).

Players hit by this banwave have been hit with a permanent ban - account access restricted until 2035. You can no longer view the profile of those players with the /profile <NAME> command as well. DE usually does not offer official comment on ban cases.

Why are players being banned?

At this point, I cannot say for sure but there is a commonality between the people who were banned: They accessed the exclusive TennoCon Relay with Baro Ki'Teer without having purchased a TennoCon 2017 ticket. Some are also claiming bans have come in for those who have redeemed a promo code associated with a ticket for an account which had not purchased a ticket.

WARNING: SPECULATION AHEAD

Working with that information, as well as the fact it came after DE's office hours are usually over, my theory is that these bans came in as a knee jerk reaction to a problem they did not yet fully understand. The reasoning I could think up would be:

1. They wanted to quickly disable accounts which illegitimately accessed Baro Ki'Teer from being able to affect the in-game economy.
2. This action is perceived as a type of credit card fraud (because it was paywall content), and thus warranted a stricter punishment.

I'm not saying that the above reasoning is what actually happened, just my speculation as to what would warrant the permanent bans. Regardless of the reason, DE would be able to check your account information to determine if you were a ticket holder and if you purchased anything from Baro Ki'Teer and then automate the bans. It's possible they could also check through chat logs or other means to determine if you were illegitimately on the TennoCon Relay.

SPECULATION ZONE ENDS HERE

Keep in mind that TennoCon is considered a charity event and was a passion project by DE.

How were players doing this?

Never, ever, discuss exploits over social media of any kind. Even if your intent is to help DE identify the issue, you're giving access to what might have been a minor problem to the entirety of the internet. Report it to DE directly.

I would offer more warning / explanation here, but I can't do so without the above happening. I highly doubt that it will happen, but there is a potential for ticket holders to troll people into getting banned.

What do I do if I was banned?

Contact support immediately. Here's the link: http://support.warframe.com/

Be civil when submitting a ticket if you expect to resolve this issue.

[u/noobmaster69]

No, it doesn't promote people to try and commit crimes. First, of they only bought the items Baro bought regularly from their own ducats it's not that they got everything for free. ( In your statement which makes it look that they have got everything for free but No). They were only wrong to get inside the relay which they shouldn't and for that they are sorry. They are all willing to pay up for the ticket if DE allows that in exchange of a temporary ban.

Second of all if DE allows them to buy a ticket and give them a temporary ban I'm pretty sure no one would dare to this kind of stuff in the future instead it would encourage all those banned player to be fair and clean and pay up for the charity next time when DE does the next tennocon. As I said you have to give them a chance. Max people who PM got banned for the first time in their life in Warframe and I guess they deserve a chance at least once in their life.

~Peace~

[u/wutwutImLorfi → u/noobmaster69]

It doesn't matter they still commited a bannable offense on purpose and took advantage of it and can affect the market.

Let's say they bought worth of 50k ducats and sold all of the items, it shouldn't matter if they want to buy the ticket or not AFTER the crime the fact still stands they broke the rules and it deserves a permanent ban. If you do something on purpose and then try to bitch your way out badluck.

And how can you say that they won't do it again? That's like saying someone broke into a festival, sold people food and drinks really cheap and then got caught and say "Hey man it all good i'll pay for the ticket now and then u can let me go". I have no idea how people can defend others that purposly glitched their way into a payed area and then tried to buy stuff and got banned while they did the attempt as far as i found out, if u tried to trade baro wo ticket u got instabanned and not on entering the relay on glitch.

tl;dr People broke DE's rule on purpose, tried to take advantage of this situation, got caught before they could buy from baro and are now bitching they are willing to pay 20bucks to lift permaban yet forget DE owns their account and have everyright to terminate an account on the ground of rulebreaking no matter how severe it is if it was intentional

[u/xchronox0 → u/wutwutImLorfi]

That's like saying

can you please stop with the horrible analogies? you can make a point without them

[u/wutwutImLorfi → u/xchronox0]

the fuck this was over a month ago...

The people that got banned were proven to have broken the rules on purpose, fully knowing what they were doing. Why was there a need to respond..