Yeah, I saw Qt Spy as well. I actually followed him and another ANet employee around named “Permapan”. The majority of the time, those two were also standing at the exit to Gendarran fields, not participating in the event.
I don’t know why some of the players here are jumping to ANet’s defense so quickly. This is clearly an abuse of power. One of these employees told me that they ban people based on a “three warning system”, where they will disconnect you from the game. If they disconnect you from the game, and you reconnect, and they disconnect you a second time, and you reconnect, then their third disconnect will be a ban.
I can testify, from personal experience, that my friend was disconnected. She tried to reconnect and figure out why she was being disconnected. She ran over to me to participate in the Black Lion Dolyak event, and then she’s disconnected again. She gets in again, and right after she joins she is kicked with an error along the lines of “someone else has logged into this account”. We go to her account on the forums to check the account security and see what IP logged on, and to see if we could disconnect it, because we thought she was being hacked. Nope, turned out to be a ban.
My conversation with an ‘anonymous’ ANet employee was less than satisfying at first. The employee in question tried to dodge as many questions as possible, and expressly said that they were not banning people for AFKing. After some more prodding though, he actually admitted to banning people for AFKing, because AFKing in an event like this is ‘degrading to the experience of others’ and constitutes ‘offensive behavior’.
This is nothing more than an abuse of power. You can’t go and ban your player base like this for utilizing mechanics that you, ANet, established. We’re playing the game as it exists. If there is a problem with it, then fix it, but let me inform you that banning people like this is a very good way to lose customers… I’ll be sorely disappointed if one of the following does not happen:
- An individual review for each case, and compensation awarded where warranted.
- Someone getting fired for this.
I’m not going to play a game where we have to fear the developer as if they are like Big Brother. If you don’t like the way players are playing, then revamp your EULA so that it is articulate and transparent [as opposed to broad, unspecific, and overreaching] and fix your actual game so that people can’t ‘degrade the experience of others’ like this. Overflows have always been a problem when it comes to big events like this… We told you this when Tequatl came out. That was back in September of 2013. You’ve had time to fix the overflow system since then, but you haven’t, so this is all on you.
TL;DR – Don’t punish the players for mistakes made by ANet.
