163 accounts banned in one month. That's 19% of the population according to Steam Charts.
Thats just unplayable imo.
No quite, that would be based on amount of players online at any given point. It does not account for actual unique log ins over the month.
It is still an alarmingly high number that seems to be increasing if you follow it over the last few months.
You need to dissect this to really understand the underlaying problems;
57 accounts were banned for exploiting - I presume this is using in game mechanics in a way in which they were not designed to gain advantage over other players. This comes down to bug/exploit prioritisation within patches to resolve the issues which allow this. Unfortunately some exploitable content has been in the game since before release. People SHOULD NOT exploit but leaving the temptation in there will always result in people doing it, wasting GM time in unpicking the mess afterwards.
105 Accounts banned for hacking - This is the more concerning figure. It suggests that Easy Anti Cheat really is not doing enough to tackle the problem. It is not quite as bad as it was in beta days but there is an obvious flaw here. EAC can not plug all of the holes but much of this can be prevented with proper investment. I assume all of these accounts were permanently banned as the comment does not mention this? I understand the strike system but if someone is actually hacking as opposed to exploiting then they are not really straddling the line anymore and are going well out of their way to cheat.
There are two big issues that come from such a high number;
GM time spent resolving these. Let's say each of these takes an hour to resolve (Some will probably be quite cut and dry but others will take a LOT longer). That is 163 hours of GM time spent managing this, rather than supporting players.
Economy - Since release, 1000's of player accounts have been banned. We know that not all of the materials that they gain during this time period have been removed, considering we see items on the broker from these players being spread across the community, gold changes hands quickly, gets dumped into materials or assets and basically is laundered through the system. The current state of the economy is insanely poor. The inflation on gold is 100 x worse than it was ever in MO1. This would be fine if it was done naturally however due to it being artificially inflated by hacking/exploiting it leaves new players or people who did not partake in this lunacy in a very bad place.
