First of all, I would like to apologize for any potentially imprecise phrasing or errors in the text, as I am using machine translation tools.
Greetings, Capsuleers. Today, I would like to share with you some incidents that have caused me considerable concern. I should state upfront that, for the sake of confidentiality, I will not be disclosing any character names, nor will I be sharing direct quotes from the official support site or private correspondence. Instead, I will likely provide only a brief summary of the substance of their responses.
Background:
Recently, a new player joined our corporation—a complete novice who, despite having logged into the game ages ago, had never actually managed to get the hang of it. We gave him a warm welcome and began teaching him the basics, guiding him toward corporate activities so that he wouldn’t be left sitting idle, but could instead socialize and gain some engaging in-game experience.
He was quick to pick up information on the fly and attended most of the corporate events; however, at a certain point, he encountered a barrier: the pace of skill acquisition.
As you all know, skills in the game are—to put it mildly—not acquired particularly quickly. While there are tools available to accelerate this process, they all come at a cost—something we, naturally, made sure to inform him about.
Since this player—let’s call him Alex—was not short on funds, he decided to invest money into the game to unlock a significant portion of its content right away. As Alex resides in a country where direct payments to CCP are not possible, he opted to use well-known third-party services—ones that are widely recognized and enjoy a solid reputation among users. Although CCP considers these services unacceptable, Alex didn’t look into the matter too deeply; he paid a substantial sum for the service, using the money to purchase SP injectors, and by his second week of playing, his account boasted over 70,000,000 Skill Points.
CCP noticed this sudden surge in the account’s growth; upon investigation, they discovered that the user had purchased currency from prohibited trading platforms. Consequently, they issued a warning and confiscated 80 billion ISK. Our Alex attempted to explain the situation to customer support, presenting his arguments, but the support team upheld their original decision.
Anyone reading up to this point might justifiably ask: “So why are you telling us this story? They did the right thing—they banned him to stop him from engaging in RMT. After all, he really did violate the game’s rules.”
And I would completely agree with you—but things went a bit further than that…
A Second Chance:
Our friend Alex consulted with customer support, spoke with a number of players more experienced than himself, and discovered that many people play the game using multiple windows simultaneously. I recall our conversation back then, during which I argued that it is entirely possible to play with two or three windows open and remain highly effective—running missions, engaging in PvP within Faction Warfare zones, and conducting raids on peaceful players—whether in high-security space (a practice known as “suiciding”) or in low-security sectors, all with the aim of amassing wealth.
Consequently, Alex decided to create a new character in an attempt to “cleanse” his existing one—which currently had a negative balance in its wallet. The truth is, he felt reluctant to abandon that character; after all, its Omega status had been paid for a couple of years in advance, and he had invested in the very best +12 XP boosters. However, since playing that character had become impossible, he ultimately settled on this specific solution—even though no one had warned him of the potential consequences.
So, what happened next?
He restored a long-forgotten character—one that was several years old and possessed somewhere between 5 and 10 million SP—and decided to start with a clean slate. He availed himself of the services of an official CCP partner known as Gamazavr. A few days later, he found himself with that same 70 million SP, now allocated to skills finely tuned to his specific needs.
Yet, whenever he glanced at his original character, he felt a sense of burden—a weight he no longer wished to carry. After some time, he decided to simply delete it, erasing it from his history as a mistake. “That won’t happen again,” he thought, and continued playing, day after day.
Some time later, upon logging into the game, his gaze froze on a banner displayed on the screen: his character had been banned for seven days for engaging in RMT activities. His astonishment knew no bounds, as our Alex had done nothing of the sort with his new character. He contacted customer support to get some answers. We in our corporation didn’t sit idly by, either; we verified his purchase history using a service called SEAT to confirm his innocence, and subsequently decided to reach out to customer support as well.
As is often the case with large companies, one can end up waiting a very long time for a response to certain inquiries. We decided to seek assistance from CCP’s partners—those who promote the game through media channels such as YouTube videos and Twitch streams. Yet, with a single exception, none of them were willing to delve into the details; they simply maintained that since the developers had issued the ban, it must be deserved, and therefore they would not intervene. However, that one individual—who found our arguments compelling—promised to expedite the processing of our support ticket; and, sure enough, a response was received shortly thereafter.
The Fight for the Future:
If anyone thought that the response would be well-reasoned—or that our Alex would be presented with logs demonstrating his RMT activities—they were mistaken. As in previous instances, Customer Support responded with boilerplate templates, essentially stating: “We are right, and you are wrong.” They confirmed that the ban would remain in effect, and that the character would be subjected to operational restrictions and assigned a negative balance of -120 billion ISK.
When he subsequently contacted customer support, he was informed that the ban on his new character was imposed because it constituted—in their view—a circumvention of their restrictions; specifically, they considered the act of deleting an old character and playing on a new one to be a means of bypassing a ban, despite the fact that the new character had committed no violations whatsoever. To us, this appeared to be a flagrant instance of injustice: being punished not for one’s current actions, but for what one did in the past. The previous character had been deleted—effectively erased from history—yet the sanctions continued to apply. At the same time, this raises some logical questions: “Why did the negative balance increase? Why did you not warn the player in advance that taking such action would result in punishment?”
And the most critical question is this: “Why is such an action not explicitly stipulated in their own license agreement!?”
The rules of the game constitute their law; however, these rules do not carry the force of law within the territory of the country where they conduct their operations. Furthermore—and this is a principle followed by all states because it is fundamentally axiomatic—everything that is not expressly prohibited is permitted; yet, for CCP, this rule apparently does not apply.
Consequently, Alex decided to file an appeal to challenge this unjust punishment; however, as of the time this post was published, he has yet to receive a response—despite the fact that his request has been pending for over seven days.
Interaction with Support:
As I mentioned previously, several of my associates and I decided to contact support with questions regarding this incident. They are still awaiting a response; however, I was more fortunate than the others, as I at least received a reply. Yet, these responses only served to heighten my frustration, as for the most part, they consisted of nothing more than standard boilerplate replies—such as “we cannot discuss this with third parties,” “we do not make decisions,” “please contact the CSM,” “submit a formal complaint to our legal department,” and so on.
After Alex finally regained access to his account and assessed the full extent of the damage, he read a message from the administration. It was entirely unremarkable—save for one detail: at the very end, the author wrote something to the effect of, “We hope you will soon be able to restore the balance on your account.” This felt like nothing short of mockery. Let me reiterate: the account currently sits at a deficit of 120 billion ISK—a sum that, by rough estimates, would require anywhere from 46,000 to 48,000 PLEX to restore. Upon reading that letter, the underlying message came through loud and clear: “Pay us even more money just to keep playing—otherwise, you’ll be left in the past forever.”
An Outside Perspective:
CCP regularly releases updates touting how magnificently they are combating RMT, botters, and other issues plaguing the game. And when these problems don’t affect you directly, you might be inclined to think that the developers are doing a great job—really putting in the effort. However, when you witness what is actually happening—watching it unfold from the front row—the facade behind which this “battle” is supposedly being waged takes on a rather different complexion. And this inevitably raises a number of questions: “Were any actual investigations conducted before these characters were banned?” “Are they truly RMT traders, or simply players who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?” “And could this end up affecting me if someone in my corporation decides to engage in RMT?”
And this is not an unfounded concern, as we have examples within the RU player community where players were banned without justification—and without any prior investigation. One such instance involves a player who was banned solely on the basis of numerous unsubstantiated complaints filed by multiboxers—let’s call this individual [F12] BigDaddy. Another example is the banning of an entire corporation residing in a wormhole; within that group, literally only one or two individuals were engaged in RMT, while the others were simply community members who had no involvement in those illicit activities.
Conclusion:
CCP is actively promoting their game right now—their advertising is very common—banners on various websites, ads on videos, they’ve released a new region specifically for newcomers, and they’re improving the tutorial. And it looks like they’ll be happy if you, as a new player, stay in their project. On the other hand, CCP is putting a spoke in their own wheel by banning solvent players who are willing to invest not only time, emotion, but also money into the game. The company’s ban policy seems highly destructive to itself and, at the same time, extremely arrogant. One of their EULA clauses explicitly states, “As with account sharing, we always see the illegitimacy of the transaction, no matter the claims, and we are always familiar with both sides of the story.”
In other words: “No matter what we do, we will always be right in every respect—and you won’t.”
If you have read this all the way to the end, it is a sign that you care about this issue and that it could potentially affect you as well. And so, I would like to ask you a few questions.
Questions for you:
- How would you have acted if you were in Alex’s shoes?
- Do you believe the punishment meted out to Alex is proportionate to his infraction?
- If you were a newcomer, would you invest your own money knowing about potential risks like these?
- Do you think the policy regarding player punishments for such infractions should be reviewed?
Thank you for your attention!
