PWE Adds Another Weird Ban to Their Resume
When dealing with Neverwinter and PWE you quickly learn that unjustified bans are something you need to get accustomed to. Last week the publisher extended their resume with another questionable action against Xbox player xakaya, who posted a complaint on the official forum and subreddit on Thursday.
The user was banned over suspiciously high attribute values that were caused by kicking the training balls you can buy from the vendor at the Summer Festival for copper tickets. We suppose the bug was fixed with the training ball farm.
[su_quote cite=”Translated PWE Support Ticket”]We identified suspiciously high attribute values on your character that hint at manipulation. The account has been banned permanently. We do not allow players to use exploits to gain an advantage in the game.[/su_quote]
We have seen pictures that proof xakaya wasn’t the only one affected. So it can’t be ruled out that some players actually used the training balls to artificially boost their attributes. It’s really hard however to proof and it’s more likely that most inadvertently profited from the bug.
Attribute values have been exploited once and therefore it’s a sensitive topic. But PWE either didn’t know where the high attributes were coming from or did ban xakaya without proper proof that the user exploited purposely. Therefore the ban should have never happened in the first place.
Gladly the incident created enough noise for Community Manager Strumslinger to step in and the user has been released yesterday. It’s still annoying to see that the presumption of innocence is not exerted. Instead PWE rather acts and lets support deal with the aftermath.
The example shows once more that in case of doubt, the players have to proof they’ve done nothing wrong.
“hint at manipulation” = permaban
That’s asinine.