(Long time reader, but created a new account for this post.)

First the preface.  I've been playing Age of Conan since the game was released and only took a couple month break in the fall to try out other games and just because I needed a break. 

Approximately a month and a half ago my account was suspended.  I received no email or indication as to why I had been suspended, only that I could not log in.  I actually had to send in a customer support request before even finding out what was going on.  Their response was that I had obtained and sold items in game illegally.  With some further digging I come to learn that they were accusing me of duplicating items.  What news this was to me!  According to their support I had somehow figured out a way to duplicate items magically.  As cool as it would be to be able to duplicate and have a hundred blades of black bile, to this day I haven't a clue or knowledge of what they are talking about.  They told me the items that I was supposedly "duping".  My only conclusion is that farming the same mobs for hours on end and selling glass sapphires and obsidian eggs to the trader is classified as "duping" items.  Seriously?  What a freaking joke.

After trading emails with Funcom's worthless customer support staff for a week they stopped responding.  So I tried the forums.  My thread was shut down and Yakomo advised me to send him a private message.  I did so and have yet to receive a response from him to this day.  Next I composed a long message (maximum pm size) that I sent to Craig Morrison, Famine, and Yakomo explaining the whole situation and that I had been wrongly banned.  Basically a plea for help from someone other than the customer support team.  Craig Morrison responded shortly which gave me a flicker of hope and he said that I was correct in contacting Famine and Yakomo as they would be able to help me but that he couldn't be involved with customer support cases.  So I waited... and waited...  then sent another message to Famine.. and waited... Finally I got a response from Famine saying that I would need to contact customer support.  You'd think if he had read my message that he would realize that I had exhausted my resources with customer support.

I tried contacting customer support again and it was the same story with the same copy and paste responses from William/Baenne something along the lines of "I assure you, we have researched this and it appears you were duplicating items".  He informed me that my suspension was permanent.  Once again, customer support responses stopped (I was the last one to reply).

My main had nearly a full set of T2 gear with several hundred gold.  I had several alts with inventories full of blues and gems.  I've invested months into this game and contributed to Funcom's ailing game with my subscription fees and this is the way I'm repaid.  If their database teams aren't competent enough to verify my claims and prove my innocence then they should all be fired.  The truth is, there has been plenty of people exploiting in Age of Conan (speed hacking, buff stacking, mage shield stacking, siege blocking, flying) and Funcom decides to target the innocent guy.  Yet all those people exploiting are still playing to this day while I enjoy a permaban.

Feel free to laugh and joke at my misfortune or accuse me of the same things that Funcom did.  Nothing will change the truth that I was wrongly accused and that Funcom took many months of investment into a game and flushed it down the toilet with bogus charges and piss poor customer support.  Just know that if this happened to someone that has been playing the game since release then it can happen to anyone.  Be prepared for frabricated accusations by Funcom's customer support (or lack thereof) and your account being permabanned for doing absolutely nothing wrong. To summarize, Funcom can basically crap on whomever they want whenever they want with absolutely no rythme or reason.

Funcom will forever leave a bitter taste in my mouth and I will never recommend a Funcom title again. (I had previously convinced about 6 friends to buy AoC.)

Good luck, everyone.

Holy shit. Sorry to hear that man. Only good thing about this situation is that maybe now you can drop that damn MMO addiction we all have, but would be much better without.

If that happened to me, I would probably fly to Oslo and burn their HQ down.

 Personally I think you have to do something very serious that you are permanently banned. I know people that use exploit and get only money wipe and two weeks BAN (as it was first case and common public known exploit).

I am glad that they dont waste time an resources with cheaters and exploiters. On the other hand if you are really innocent, its probably difficult to sort it out. Famine sometimes reads these forums, so he maybe can push CS a little. 

I seem to remember reading on the official AOC forums that the AOC CS team had no specific way of 100% detecting anyone actually "Duping" ingame. All the CS team can do is speculate due to uncommon practices by a player. Is farming particular items, then hoarding those items in your bank until you have a HUGE amount to turn in/sell is considered uncommon. Most players who farm will get a sizable amount of items and then go sell. It will take a very large amount of items to make CS suspicious. Only way to prove a player is "Duping" is to actually have a CS member phyically watching a player doing the hack. Catching a Duping player is very time intensive so most time the CS team will just make an educated guess based on the Duping profile. Sometimes they catch a Duping player and other times they just ban an innocent player.

Any chance that you were the victim of a keylogger or something? I had a similar situation with World of Warcraft, in which my long-dormant accounts were suddenly terminated due to my allegedly "exploiting the economy." We got it all sorted out and I made sure I cleaned out both my systems...  but I'm still nervous as hell now.

That does suck.   I believe you didnt dupe gold.   I heard once that games check the amount of cash attached to mail.  If you hoarded items and mass sold, then mass withdrew  and mass deposited all in one time.... maybe lazy CS thought that was duping.    I dont know.  

This stuff did happen to a friend of mine in EQ2.   No matter how quick the ban was it cost soe an account.  Im sure Funcom made the same mistake here.

Also if you bought gold and got caught... doh

Sadly OP this is not the first time we have heard a story exactly like yours here on these forums. Even more shameful is this is classic FunCom customer service, they have been doing things like this in their other MMO for YEARS.

Only silver lining to this cloud is ithat it happened to you sooner than later, and you can stop sending money to the sloppiest MMO company to ever launch a game. Stay away from their products, warn your friends, and find a better game to play.

My Sincerest Condolences.

P.S. ignore the the local FC Sycophants, they will live in denial till it happens to them.

I have never had a bad customer support experience of funcom. They have always been extremely polite and they get stuff done quickly. Hell they ever gave me my 60 days back after i could use them with a bit of persuasion. 

One comment I would like to make that seems to have been left out was the horrendous customer service. I actually had no help from their customer service department with all the technical problems I was having and took the issue to the forums. A forum moderator actually responded with the comment that if the game worked fine on ONE SYSTEM, then the game was not bugged and all the other systems with errors, no matter how many tens of thousands, must be due to inept users or shoddy computers.

Originally posted by Battlekruse

One comment I would like to make that seems to have been left out was the horrendous customer service. I actually had no help from their customer service department with all the technical problems I was having and took the issue to the forums. A forum moderator actually responded with the comment that if the game worked fine on ONE SYSTEM, then the game was not bugged and all the other systems with errors, no matter how many tens of thousands, must be due to inept users or shoddy computers.

Please link that......

Originally posted by Battlekruse

One comment I would like to make that seems to have been left out was the horrendous customer service. I actually had no help from their customer service department with all the technical problems I was having and took the issue to the forums. A forum moderator actually responded with the comment that if the game worked fine on ONE SYSTEM, then the game was not bugged and all the other systems with errors, no matter how many tens of thousands, must be due to inept users or shoddy computers.

Haha, like when Gaute ( or maybe it was Craig, don't remember ) blamed people not being able to playAO on "the internet is down" years ago. Not the servers or the ISP, but the whole internet was to blame. LOL it's still a running joke with old timers in AO.

Originally posted by WisebutCruel

Originally posted by Battlekruse

One comment I would like to make that seems to have been left out was the horrendous customer service. I actually had no help from their customer service department with all the technical problems I was having and took the issue to the forums. A forum moderator actually responded with the comment that if the game worked fine on ONE SYSTEM, then the game was not bugged and all the other systems with errors, no matter how many tens of thousands, must be due to inept users or shoddy computers.

 

Haha, like when Gaute ( or maybe it was Craig, don't remember ) blamed people not being able to playAO on "the internet is down" years ago. Not the servers or the ISP, but the whole internet was to blame. LOL it's still a running joke with old timers in AO.

Gaute Godager got sacked, fired, pink slipped. It was he who was responsible for the bad release and broken promises. The board of directors just got tired of him…

Originally posted by Battlekruse

Originally posted by WisebutCruel

Originally posted by Battlekruse

One comment I would like to make that seems to have been left out was the horrendous customer service. I actually had no help from their customer service department with all the technical problems I was having and took the issue to the forums. A forum moderator actually responded with the comment that if the game worked fine on ONE SYSTEM, then the game was not bugged and all the other systems with errors, no matter how many tens of thousands, must be due to inept users or shoddy computers.

 

Haha, like when Gaute ( or maybe it was Craig, don't remember ) blamed people not being able to playAO on "the internet is down" years ago. Not the servers or the ISP, but the whole internet was to blame. LOL it's still a running joke with old timers in AO.

 

Gaute Godager got sacked, fired, pink slipped. It was he who was responsible for the bad release and broken promises. The board of directors just got tired of him…

No, no, no. He "resigned", remember? LOL
 

What's funny is both Gaute Godager and the CEO Sandes both "resigned and moved to different industries". lol

Funcom can't even be creative with cover-ups.

Originally posted by orlac

Originally posted by Battlekruse

One comment I would like to make that seems to have been left out was the horrendous customer service. I actually had no help from their customer service department with all the technical problems I was having and took the issue to the forums. A forum moderator actually responded with the comment that if the game worked fine on ONE SYSTEM, then the game was not bugged and all the other systems with errors, no matter how many tens of thousands, must be due to inept users or shoddy computers.

Please link that......

It is an awesome read!

 Sadly that is funcoms customer support in all honesty it is some of the rudest,slowest supprt of any mmog I have EVER played they make SOE look like blizzard in handling there customers thats how bad it is.Perfect example a few years ago in Anarchy Online Clan and Omni where fighting constant for Tara that was the main raid content a org called The Council(omni org) was pretty much owning it.Well at the time the dragon chests were unique but you could still stack them in your bank so the council was doing this it was on test to be changed the next patch to make them not unique so it was pretty much just a odd bug that was to be fixed as soon as patch came out.

   Well long story short they banned the leader of the Council for having more than 1 dragon chest in there bank even though it was a bug and on test fixed they perma banned em and would not unban them period.That is typical funcom logic.Not to mention the guy who runs Auno.org proved via records more than once that funcom employees were accesses his website look-ups inider a members only area of a clan org called storm.And was proven after that one of the game devs played clan and used that to there advantage.

   Thats funcom  pretty much dirty gm./devs and horrible,rude customer service anyone who has ever had to deal with them on a serious basis knows this

Sorry to hear that. As one poster said maybe someone had hacked your account and did something offensive with your account. It does seem they were a tad harsh on your account....

I wish this were as easy as a hacked account to point the blame on.  Sadly, this isn't the case.  The truth is that they simply can't distinguish between farming drops and selling them and someone supposedly duplicating items.  Whatever happened when I sold drops apparently triggered a flag somewhere.  Once they decided I was guilty there was no helping it.

To be honest, I've heard nothing but bad things about "Baenne/William" dating back to the AO days but I expected more from Famine than to just ignore my issue and brush it off.

I had been thinking of coming back but just stumbled across this issue that is still not fixed, to me such a simple thing being ignored shows that Funcom still doesn't even come close to getting it.  Customer service is impossible when you simply have no clue about your customer.  Sure, in the grand scheme of things with AoC that are broken hard coded mouse buttons (all but right and left click coded to autorun) is not a major one, but when a developer misses something so little it really shows they are totally clueless about how people play games and there is just no way you can make a game that is anything but a major failure like AoC if you are that clueless.

I will pass on AoC seeing that this small issue, something they clearly know about, is still not fixed.  I don't care what things they have fixed it is obvious they still have no clue and their customer service remains total crap.

wow man thats really sucks bad yeah they pretty much ban people with out proof i dont beleave you most of you guys think this is a joke >.> its not i feel for him he just lost tons of game time working hard man that really blows age of conan out the water

Whats really sad is no matter where you go you are going to find this same piss poor service.  It's become a trend with big businesses to treat customers as though they are expendable.  Their ideology is that, they can continue with business as usual; regardless if they loose a few customers here and there.  They are still going to be swimming in tons of money from other suckers who are willing to cough up a profit to their dirty businesses.

I have had to confront CS with just about every MMORPG I have played and over the years the service has gone off a cliff side.  The only game I have played recently that still has remotely decent service is Blizzard, they at least were prompt about fixing most of my problems; but, even they managed to drive me up the wall occasionally with nonsense.

I think some of the funniest arguments I had gotten into with CS on a game was with SOE.  It was never ending with those morons.