BioWare issued a formal apology today for accidentally banning between 100 and 150 Star Wars: The Old Republic players. The ban notice went out yesterday, notifying several players that they would be barred from the game for a week due to violations of the game’s terms of service agreement. The incident, according to Community Manager Eric Musco, was due to a glitch in the violation detection system.
“What occurred, and what you folks reported, is that there was a small subset of players who were incorrectly caught in this tracking and subsequently actioned. Just to give you a bit of perspective, there were less than 150 people in total who were incorrectly actioned as a part of what happened yesterday. If you were one of those players who had not been exploiting and were wrongly flagged, you should have already been contacted by CS as of reading this message. If this is what occurred to you I cannot express how sorry we are. We are going through great lengths internally to avoid situations like this happening in the future.”
Recently, developers added a feature that allows players to create duplicate items that can then be shared with other characters on their account. Supposedly, the bans were generated by players who were falsely flagged for abusing this system. Just how and why players are being falsely flagged is still unclear.
Any player who has been wrongfully suspended can contact [email protected] in order to appeal the decision.
Source: Polygon