April 10, 2012

Forgiveness

22,000 accounts banned in the last 24 hours

Yesterday, the #1 complaint with AQWorlds was "Botters are ruining the game." Today, the #1 complaint is "I was banned for Botting in AQWorlds!"

What is a "Bot"?

A bot or "autoer" is a program built by someone else that plays the game for you. ALL massively multiplayer games have a problem with them, and they are, and always have been against the rules. It is easy to understand why -- it is unfair to legit players who put the time and effort into the game, it takes time away from building the game to deal with botting/cheating/hacking issues, and... these programs are dangerous! Many stolen accounts are the result of people entering their login information into these programs or the websites claiming to provide them. If you download and use these programs, they can execute malicious code that can do ANYTHING a virus or trojan can do, harming YOUR computer... including stealing your personal data. Do not use bots. In addition to the dangers above, using them will get your account banned from AQWorlds!

Forgiveness

We love all of our players, so when 22,000 of you were banned yesterday for botting, it was both shocking and saddening. As you know, our goal is to keep our game fair, safe and fun  - not to ban players. We are all human, we all make mistakes. I certainly have, and you have forgiven me. (Although this was not one of them.) Therefore after 24 hours of being banned, players who were caught using bots will have their accounts restored. Please know, this will be the only warning. We know new versions of the bots will come quickly, and we WILL be able to detect them and update the server to ban those who foolishly use them. The next time you are banned it will be permanent with no way to get your account back  -- all of your hard work lost forever. From this moment on, we hope and encourage EVERYONE, whether you have used bots in the past or not, to help us keep the servers fair, safe and fun. Thank you to all of the players who have always been doing this.... Battle on!

Friday the 13th

.... is this Friday.