So a about a month ago came home from work and sat down at my computer only to be met with a message on steam saying I had been banned from Destiny 2 permanently.
This caught me completely of guard and made an already bad day A LOT worse. Not only did I not have the slightest clue what I may have done to deserve this. But a friend I often play with messaged me at around the same time and told me he was banned as well.
It was BEYOND frustrating not even knowing WHY we got banned. The amount of frustration and powerlessness I felt was mindnumbing. We both immediatly sent in an appeal but the overall feeling you get from posts on steam and on this forum is that the appeal system is rarely responded to by bungie and unbans are even rarer. So I thought we we're both pretty much screwed.
The overall feeling you get from the community is that you're always guilty and that there are no such thing as false bans. So it's not even worth writing about it. All you can do is send in an appeal and wait, which we did. Fast forward to now now, almost a month later and we both finally got a reply:
[quote]
Your Destiny 2 account has been unbanned effective immediately, and within a week we will grant you 5,000 Silver to use in the Eververse. We sincerely apologize for what must have been a frustrating experience.
Along with a small number of other players, your account was inadvertently flagged as having tampered with game client functionality. While the overwhelming majority of these detections are accurate, we discovered that in extremely rare cases this detection may be triggered through no fault of the player. This error was determined as part of our auditing process and we acted as quickly as possible to validate the issue and rescind the small number of inadvertent flags.
[/quote]
The feeling when I recieved this was mixed to say the least. Of course I'm grateful that I got my account back. I seriously thought my destiny days were over weeks ago. But spending some of those weeks trying to remember or get to the bottom of what the heck I might have done wrong. Was it some app i had installed on my computer? Was I hacked? or did I inadvertently use an exploit? As well as the general feeling of powerlessness and whatever the feeling you get when you're falsely judged/accused did take it's toll.
Due to this whole ordeal I've now got some trust issues not only with Bungie (even though they DID fix their mistake). But with the entire Game as a service deal (GaaS). Because I'm now rather weary of spending my cash and above all my time on a game that might be taken away from at a moments notice through no fault of my own. Either due to some human pushing a button for whatever reason or becuase of some automated system giving out false positives or some other human error. And there is NOTHING you as a consumer can do about it.
Because somehow consumer laws doesn't seem to cover GaaS yet. Even though with GaaS a customer has the potential to throw a near limitless amount of money at the game. And yet the customer is somehow at the complete mercy of the company providing the service? That can't be right, right?
From what I can gather Bungie has now had 3 ban waves only this year that have all contained false positive bans. So Bungie, you REALLY need to do BETTER. Getting falsely banned from a game, and not even getting a general reason as to why. Then also realizing that it's mostly down to luck if you get unbanned at all (by your own wording when you're about to write an appeal) is horrible. Because it means all that time and money that you've spent on the game has been for naught. And If you keep this up not only are you risking more of your players trust, you might even risk hurting the industry at large, at least the GaaS part.
I'm grateful I got unbanned but if you insist on perma-banning players please make VERY VERY sure they actually deserve it and please for the love of all that is holy PROVIDE a reason, not even getting a hint as what might have gone wrong or what you as a player might have done wrong was painful. Also don't let it take a month to realize your mistake.
Then there is this: How do I know that this won't happen again? Just because they've fixed this problem now with whatever software or human error caused it. Doesn't mean there won't be new issues further down the line that leads to the same outcome..
Edit: Screenshots so that maybe more of you realize that this is in fact a problem and it's quite unacceptable for bungie to do this. Since it's now been happening too frequently over the past 8-10 months.
Unban message from steam:
https://imgur.com/a/tsForLI
Zoomed out screenshot of my mailbox
https://imgur.com/HHjitpl
Zoomed in one:
https://imgur.com/a/2s7ygwh
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If that happened to me, I would gladly flush my time and never come back. Just to send a message. That's absolutely unacceptable.