16,000 cheaters, gold farmers, and botters banned from NCSoft's Aion

NCSoft has banned a wholelotta (around 16,000) accounts in North America and Europe from its recently released game, Aion (good work, Scott). NCSoft still seems to be able identify problem players without using GameGuard (which is interesting in its own right).

NCSoft is apparently including botters and gold buyers / sellers, and spammers in the ban (banning gold buyers is a bit unusual).

It is hard to tell how significant the ban is as there haven't been any official subscriber numbers released for Aion that I've seen yet (early sales of the game were in the several hundred thousand category).

Once can guess that the population of the game is between 300,000 (pre-sales estimates) and 800,000 (if the ban rate was at Eve Online's recent figure of 2 percent) or between 2 and 5 percent of the game's population.

As this is early in the game's life, neither the troublemakers nor the NCSoft staff are likely very sophisticated. Also, the gold frauding problem (using stolen credit cards for gold farming accounts) is probably not very large yet. It is also likely that power-leveling and viruses and phishing sites that target the game are not very mature.... after all, the more successful your game, the bigger and more lucrative the target.

It will be interesting to see what type of approach NCSoft takes to banning - whether they will be as overt and public as CCP Games with Eve Online or Square Enix with Final Fantasy XI or quieter as most Sony games and Blizzard is.

"Massive Ban Across All NA/EU Servers", http://na.aiononline.com/forums/general/view?articleID=9140

via

K. Horner (2009), "NCsoft bans 16,000 Aion accounts", http://www.massively.com/2009/11/23/ncsoft-bans-16-000-aion-accounts/