Stephen Reid Clarifies Disciplinary Action On Ilum, Credit Farmers

If you’ve been following the community buzz over recent days, you may have heard about some players claiming that their accounts were banned. They explained the banning was a result of taking low-level character to Ilum, which is a high level zone. We even did a Blue Milk & Cereal on it this morning, and as we stated there, we hand’t yet herd BioWare’s side of the story. Now we have.

Senior Community Manager Stephen Reid took to the official forums earlier this afternoon to clarify the recent actions that had been taken on some accounts. Reid explained there were 2 chief causes: credit farmers and Ilum loot exploit that was causing imbalance in the economy. Here’s a snippet:

None of these accounts were banned for their actions and no accounts have been banned for travelling to Ilum while still relatively low level. By comparison, the number of accounts that were warned or temporarily suspended was considerably lower than the number of accounts banned for ‘credit farming’.

In summary, our Terms of Service team took action against a number of accounts that were ‘credit farming’ to remove them permanently from the game. They also warned and temporarily suspended – but did not ban – a smaller number of accounts for activities on Ilum that were decided to be game exploits.

While it’s nice to hear about the swift action of credit farmers, of particular interest of course is the Ilum suspensions. The clarification that there were no players banned for this is a welcome one, because in some sense this is a subjective issue. How is the exploit defined? Is it clear to players? Permanently banning legitimate players based on creative use of game mechanics is a slippery slope, so it’s good to see that wasn’t the case here.

Head on over to the forums for Stephen’s full comments, and get involved in the discussion.