Gamers were quite upset to discover that their Star Wars: The Old Republic Accounts were accidentally banned recently by Bioware. The developer mistakenly banned about 150 player accounts for one week.
The cause of the bans was a recently introduced game update for the MMO. Game update 2.1 saw the introduction of a new in-game feature called Collections. The feature allows gamers to share items with other characters through the MMO's Legacy system. Cheaters eventually discovered a loophole in the feature that caused Bioware to hand down week long bans.
Along the way the company accidentally punished players who were not using the exploit. Those that unfairly got banned took to Bioware's forums to complain about the mistake. About 37 pages later, Bioware apologized for its mistaken bans.
"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," writes Bioware Community Manager Eric Musco in a forum post.
"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."
Bioware fixed the problem relatively fast but many gamers were quite enraged by the mistake. Many of those who got banned threatened to unsubscribe to the MMO. Star Wars: The Old Republic has had its share of troubles since launching over a year ago. The game went free-to-play after suffering from struggling sales. After going free-to-play the game garnered 100 million subscribers in three days.
The game is a follow-up to the renowned Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic games. Recent rumors have the original game in the series headed to the iPad later this year,
