Tag: Ban

Chinese Government Reviews 20 Games, Passes None of Them


This month marks the establishment of the Chinese Online Ethics Review Committee, a government organization tasked with reviewing online games and determining if they are fit for sale in China in guidance with the country’s ethical rules. Confirmed by Tencent in August, China instituted an approval freeze around March of this year for games being sold within the country until the government can establish newer guidelines on approving or banning certain titles.

Of 20 popular titles to be reviewed, none of them passed muster. Judging from the list of games and the reasons for their refusal, most of the problem stem from blood and gore, vulgar content, overly revealing female characters, and ‘inharmonious chat.’ Incidentally, titles like Diablo and Chu Liu Xiang were also refused for “missions including fraud.” Of the twenty titles, eleven were held for corrective action while nine were prohibited outright and are presumably banned. PUBG, Fortnite, H1Z1, and Paladins are in the list of titles prohibited under these new guidelines.

These guidelines are hardly new, as in 2017 PUBG faced a ban over deviating from socialist core values. Tencent has seen a hit to its net worth as China due to the crackdown, and Ubisoft took a lot of heat last month after it attempted to globally censor and remove content from Rainbow Six: Siege in preparation for a Chinese launch.

Z1 Battle Royale: We Ban By Hardware ID, and Hardware ID Scramblers


Z1 Battle Royale has been on a warpath since being taken over by NantG Mobile, and Jace Hall wants everyone to know that the company is taking cheating very seriously. In a post on Twitter, Hall noted that over 800 accounts were banned on December 7 alone with plenty more to come.

In response to another user’s question about cheaters coming back, Anthony Castoro responded that the company implements hardware ID bans as well as bans on HWID scramblers.

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Source: Twitter

Steam Cleaning: Valve Has Banned More Than 150 Games This Month


Who says Valve doesn’t clean up their trash? Other than everyone.

Back when Valve issued a new directive that the company would no longer be curating titles with the exception of illegal games and troll titles, opting instead to merely allow its algorithm to bury lower quality titles in the furthest depths of the Steam store where nobody will see them anyway. More recently, the company has been on a bit of a ban spree, seemingly taking out developers releasing shovelware and asset flip titles.

According to Steam Tracker, Valve has banned more than 150 titles this month alone. Most of the titles appear to fall into categories of asset flips, obvious troll titles, and low quality flash-looking games. We were unable to ascertain how many developers this list spreads across, but Valve often deletes a developer’s entire catalog when one title is banned. Many of the titles had initially released as far back as January/February, but some others hadn’t even hit the market yet.

Bad Press: Saudi Arabia Did Not Ban 47 Games Over Child Suicides


If you’ve been reading the news this week, you may have come across a story that the Saudi General Commission for Audio-Visual Media has banned a list of 47 video games following the suicide deaths of a 13-year old girl and 12-year old boy. You might be more confused by the fact that the two were playing the “Blue Whale” social media game and not a video game at all, let alone one on the list of banned titles. The news piece caught me by surprise as I was fairly certain that I had read about games like Yo Kai Watch and Okami being banned in Saudi Arabia years ago.

Your confusion would be well founded, because much like the Blue Whale game itself, this appears to be a case of fake news with patient zero as none other than the Associated Press. Other than the AP’s claim that the ban list was associated with the Blue Whale Game, there has been no confirmation and the AP article even admits that the agency did not specify a connection. If you try to check local Saudi news on a new video game ban wave, you won’t find anything.

Thankfully the crack investigative team at MMO Fallout was able to get their hands on a list of prohibited games dating back to June 2017, showing that not only is the AP report incorrect, but that the conclusion it leads to is rather easily fact checked. Through the power of the Web Archive (please excuse the slow servers), you can view the list of prohibited titles published in June 2017. The list includes numerous titles that are on the current list: Grand Theft Auto, Resident Evil 5, Resident Evil 6, Yo Kai Watch, God of War, Assassin’s Creed, etc.

Unfortunately the web archive only goes back to 2017 for the Saudi website, but it is evidence enough that the AP’s report on the General Commission is inaccurate. MMO Fallout is not the first to bring this to light, as Ubisoft’s head of communications and localization for the Middle East took to Twitter to call out the Associated Press and request a retraction on the article. The AP report is still up as of this publishing, as are most of the websites that source their news stories from the AP.

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Among the press that carried this coverage, Nick Santangelo over at IGN pointed out that there are no secondary sources for the AP’s claim. Games Industry has fully retracted their article. None of the other press websites at this time appear to have altered or retracted their coverage.

RuneScape Slams Clue Scroll Exploiters With Banhammer


Jagex has dropped the banhammer hard on six accounts found to be exploiting a bug in this past week’s clue scroll overhaul. Jagex posted on the RuneScape Subreddit to note that while six accounts were banned for utilizing the exploit, more than 50 other accounts were banned for attempting to trade said exploited goods for real money. The exploit involved a very specific set of circumstances and led to rewards being duplicated and then distributed around the economy.

In the post, Mod Infinity noted that Jagex is confident that most of the items have been swept up, that the impact on the economy would be negligible, and that items that were sold to other players will be removed with the gold reimbursed to the buyer.

It was indeed much harder to reproduce than just having a full inventory, that just sends excess loot to the bank. This required you to have a specific inventory set-up, a specific final clue step, and a specific final clue challenge. Those exact circumstances sadly did not manifest in testing.

(Source: Reddit #1, Reddit #2)

Bungie’s Statement in Regards to Destiny 2 Bans


Bungie has released a statement regarding the Destiny 2 bans that MMO Fallout reported on last night. For the sake of clarity, we are posting the statement in its entirety.

We have seen lots of questions about bans being issued in the PC version of Destiny 2. To provide some information, we would like to share some facts.
The following is true:
  • Destiny 2 cannot automatically ban you, only Bungie can ban a player after a manual investigation
  • Yesterday, we banned approximately 400 players on PC
  • Bans were applied to players who were using tools that pose a threat to the shared ecosystem of the game
  • We did not (and will not) issue any bans for the use of overlays or performance tools, including Discord, Xsplit, OBS, RTSS, etc.
  • Information on using third-party applications can be found here: https://www.bungie.net/en/Help/Article/46101 
  • We are overturning 4 of the bans that were issued during the PC Beta
We are committed to providing an experience that is fun and fair for the millions of players who have joined us in this community.

*URGENT PSA* Recording/Overlay Software Is Causing Permanent Destiny 2 Bans


(Update: Bungie’s PC Project Lead has called this “Internet BS.”)

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It looks like certain recording software is triggering permanent bans in Destiny 2 on PC.

Head on over to the Bungie forums and you’ll find tons of posts from players reporting that they’ve been banned within hours, some within minutes of booting up Destiny 2 for the first time, some before even making it into the game. According to an FAQ on the official website, software with “overlay” features is incompatible with Destiny 2 due to security features programmed into the game to stop how certain cheats are injected into the game code. While the website uses the term “incompatible,” it doesn’t actually state that using said software regardless might be a bannable offense.

Well it is. Permanently.

The list of “incompatible” programs includes the Nvidia Geforce Experience, Fraps, Discord, Mumble, Afterburner, and more. Virtually any program with some sort of overlay feature is incompatible to some extent with the game. And to top it off, according to numerous users affected by these bans for game overlays, Bungie support is doing absolutely nothing to help. According to Bungie’s support, they will not review bans under any circumstance:

There are NO options to dispute or overturn account restrictions or bans. Permanent account bans are only implemented with rigorous checking to ensure that the innocent are not punished alongside the guilty. Bungie does not comment on or discuss individual account restriction or bans.

If players are getting immediately banned for overlay software, that makes Bungie’s claim of “rigorous checking” a complete lie. Bungie might want to check their policy at the door in this case, because they are looking at a PR disaster and very likely some litigation if the issue is as widespread as it appears.

As of yet, none of Bungie’s social media accounts have acknowledged the bans, nor have any staff posted on the forums. MMO Fallout is attempting to get in touch with Bungie/Activision for contact and will follow up once we have more information. Please note that this is technically unconfirmed on our end, but the sheer number of people claiming bans for the same issue has led us to issue this warning.

Blizzard Again Promises Tough Punishment For Overwatch Trolls


If you could formulate a plan to effectively punish, and get rid of, toxic players in your community, you might just become the richest person in the gaming industry. Until then, we’ll need to sit back and watch as developers continue to commit to punishing toxic community members and hope that everything works out for the best.

For Blizzard, the ongoing discussion of toxicity has come back up after director Jeff Kaplan posted on the official forums regarding an account that had miraculously accrued more than two thousand complaints, been silenced for more than a year’s worth of time, and has been suspended three times.

"That account has a total of 2247 complaints filed against it — making it one of the worst offending accounts we’ve seen. The account has also been silenced for a total of 9216 hours. There are 3 gameplay suspensions on the account as well as 7 silences against this account (these are for abusive chat and/or spam). There is also a manual GM account suspension for "massive griefing" levied."

Blizzard’s plans to alleviate grief include removing silencing altogether and utilizing suspensions/bans more. For competitive, Kaplan stated that the company is in the process of handing out bans/suspensions for players who boosted in Season 5 of competitive mode, also adding that players will be permanently banned from competitive if they are found to be abusing it repeatedly.

"We will do this as it is our responsibility but we’d like to spend more time rewarding good players rather than having to focus on poor sportsmanship and unacceptable bad behavior so much. Like it or not, this is an "us, the OW community problem" and not just an "OW team problem". For better or for worse, we’re in this together."

Long term plans involve promoting positive behavior. Toxic behavior is a problem that MMO Fallout has reported endlessly on, with various developers flexing their muscles and threatening harsher punishments and longer bans. For developers, especially those with large competitive communities, the fight against toxicity is a constant uphill battle.

Valve Drops 40,000 Accounts In Mass Ban


It may not surprise you to learn that Valve bans thousands of Steam accounts every day for cheating, between two to four thousand VAC bans and just as many game bans on a daily basis. A website that tracks and estimates inventory value determined that a total of $7,387 in items were taken out of the market along with the banned accounts. This makes for the highest ban day in Steam history, by a long shot.

In case you were wondering about timing, the bans were laid down right after the end of the latest Steam summer sale. VAC bans will extend to all accounts that share the same phone number and will ban that phone number from being reused for three months. In addition, players will be unable to move items from VAC banned accounts, meaning those expensive weapon skins are now permanently stuck to a tainted account.

(Source: VAC Database)

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