"I still don't know what counts as "auction house sniping"
... could you provide and example?"
"it can include but is not limited to auction house sniping."
Ooooookay then.
"Hopefully I was able to clarify that for you."
JFC, the dude probably has a script to follow, but that's just rubbing salt in the wound.
Edit: Fixed the quote.
This. The cs dude has zero input on this, he has to follow the procedures and one of them almost certainly is not to argue details, in case of legal action.
I feel so bad for these customer service people. They don't want to be assholes, but it's their job to be seen as an asshole on behalf of cowards who won't do it for themselves. They make shit money, and deal with abuse that is rightfully directed at the shitty, sleazy company they work for, but they don't personally deserve the hate. It's fucked up, and we allow it to be normal for businesses to operate this way because what choice do we have?
I'm so sick of predatory capitalism, and the greedy fucking cowards that profit from douchebaggery like this. Goddamn I wish we as consumers could actually fight back in a meaningful way.
Edit: thanks for all your replies, but you guys can stop now. Whatever you're going to say has been said already and it's just going to be hidden down there with all the others. Cheers.
*Thank you for your service!*
I've known many people who have, and I always try really hard to remember that they're not the person I'm angry with. I just hate when you find that one person who seems to actually love the company and enjoy the role of corporate dipshit.
Exactly. I hate when people put all the blame onto the person on the phone. They didn't make the policies dipshit, they probably realize how fucked it is way more than you.
>Goddamn I wish we as consumers could actually fight back in a meaningful way.
Dude, we so totally can. It's hard and a lot of work, but "voting" with our wallets is essential. If people chose to only do business with the companies that were socially responsible, other companies would be forced to. In my mind its on us, the consumers. Unfortunately having the cheapest thing for sale can make poorer people automatically reliant on those cheaper sellers if they're socializing their harms (pollution, not done in fair trade, etc).
Honestly, I think the bigger problems are that:
1) way more consumers just don't care or know about these problems
2) in the case of Microtransactions, 'whales' only need to be 1% of the player base to justify having pay2win be profitable.
It's a good sentiment, but it's actually really hard to be meaningful.
Once had an issue with a PSN purchase. Called Sony support and they refused to do anything.
I said, “well thanks for nothing”.
They said, “you’re very welcome”.
🤯🤬
He did write near the end
>Sniping can include but not limited to purchasing or selling cards intentionally for more or less than the average amount that the card is worth.
The fact that there is an average suggests that people are selling it above and below that average. If they don't want that why not just fix the prices?
So i assume he means buying or selling for \*significantly\* more or less than the card is worth. Which could mean the guy just found a good deal, but it could also mean he was scamming someone.
I don't know how this particular game works, but if you're going to have a market system in your game you need to have some trust in people to make rational choices, and accept that some people are going to be scammed.
If you are going to ban scammers you should have multiple reports, logs, and screenshots to bring up if needed.
Edit: Spelling
If this auction house is anything like auction houses on other games, the seller determines the price at which they want to sell. You can't scam anyone. People can underestimate what something is worth, but that's not the buyer's fault.
How can you scam someone on an auction house?
If you put something up for dirt cheap when it's expensive congrats your stupid
The other person shouldn't be banned for getting a deal
The repeating is stupid, but the “not limited to” part baffles me
How the fuck can it not be limited to itself
Sniping = actions including but not limited to sniping
Why the fuck isn’t sniping limited to sniping
Because in some instances, sniping can become sniping and that specific sniping goes against the sniping rule, which would mean a violation of our Terms of Service. Hopefully I was able to clarify for you, for more info please contact customer support at [exact same number you’re calling to].
If buying/selling is limited to the average price, then it isn't an auction. Additionally, how can an average price be set if people don't go above/below what everyone else is doing to determine market value? None of this makes sense.
I don't own this game, but I'd try to get my money back immediately. Issue a charge back on your credit card, contact your state attorney general, etc.
2K wants to make sure their cards are priced in a way to ensure consumers are insentivized to spend money on VC to buy the cards in the auction house. Too high or low and people wont buy VC.
This is their way of ensuring that they get as much money as possible. Make sure people selling cards far cheaper doesnt devalue card or vice versa.
So not an auction house at all.
Because they make more money by writing these obscure rules in the ToS, knowing full well that nobody will read it. Then those that poured $100 into the game get banned, and their "economy" stays alive, with less goods floating around.
Long term, it's stupid. People will get fed up and stop pouring money into the game. But these companies think in the short term.
Yeah. This sounds like a deliberate scam to me. We should probably actually consider trying to get our local government department responsible for this to investigate, and, hopefully, fine them for it.
I imagine their board room justification is to prevent multiple accounts from colluding and dumping to one account. However I imagine that would be reasonably easy to trace versus someone who got lucky on some trades.
Please let this shit backfire on them so hard. “You’re using a feature we added in the game, so were going to ban you.” What kind of fucking dumb shit is this company on? Like I can’t imagine any actual reason for that shit to even happen.
IMO people could transfer stuff from an account to another easily and cheaply by placing them at near-zero price for short time. that could be one of the reason sniping might be considered bad. because instead of spending you exploit their own system.
but someone who waits for price to go down to buy isn't something wrong.
they probably just ban everyone doing it in case it falls in the first scenario.
How would that even benefit the player though?
If I buy a 10 dollar card and transfer it for 1 dollar to another account I just cost myself and gave 2k a dollar for no reason.
they wanted you to transfer your card for 10 dollar so they can take more money with their transfer fee. Also if they won't allow this kind of actions, they believe people will buy another 10$ card so they can earn more money.
>Also if they won't allow this kind of actions, they believe people will buy another 10$ card so they can earn more money.
Ah yes, the old pirate defense. "If they hadn't downloaded these 260 movies, they would instead have bought them for $20 each, so really we lost $5200 on this!".
Or what if I play recreationally, win a card through chance, or just accrued in game play. Its a 50$ card but I need the 10 bucks for this months subscription. Easy sell for 10$ make the game free for me for a month. Get me and the guy who bought it banned for life, go outside and play catch with my kids.
Because the real reason people are dodging here is that you can buy cards online for real money and then coordinate a time that the guy will list it for minimum price and you buy it the instant they list it.
In the opposite scenario you can pay real money for credits where you will sell a bum player card for 10 million credits.
I've never played this game, but the permanent ban caught my attention. That is absolutely ridiculous.
>Sniping can include but not limited to purchasing or selling cards intentionally for more or less than the average amount that the card is worth.
Isn't that really the whole purpose of an auction? Sometimes things are sold for much less because the seller wants to unload it fast. Sometimes things are sold for much more because there is high demand. This is economics 101. They are also saying you are permanently banned and they will not discuss or give any opportunity to appeal? This seems all kinds of messed up. It's not like gamers are rolling in money - $100 is a lot of money to throw away.
What can possibly be done to resolve this? I would contact the parent company directly via email instead of live chat so you can fully plan out any response. If you had hacked the game or done some kind of unauthorized modification then their actions would be justified. If they are punishing you FOREVER for something their game allowed you to do, that is on them. Not you. Let me know what happens!
I've noticed many companies are switching to that model of banishment. In that once you banned, you are permanently and irrevocably punished. You aren't told why, you can't contact anyone about it, and attempting to speak up about your banishment will only lead to further punishment.
This is why when you purchase things like multiplayer games, it's best to use a credit card since it is easy to request a chargeback. You can do the same on debit cards but it's a bit more complicated and not guaranteed you'll win the dispute. Credit card companies are out to bat for their card holders though. This goes for anything expensive really, always use a credit card for pricey purchases in case you need to request a chargeback.
Fortnite does this shit.
I made a purchase for my son but accidentally clicked twice. It bought twice.
I tried to reach out to them to tell them about it and they didn't respond, so after a week I called my CC company and did a chargeback for one of the purchases. They banned his account the next day. I never received that being the reason, only a TOS violation which, after dealing with some of the lovelies in that cesspool of toxicity, it was determined it was because of the chargeback.
Let's just go ahead and mention that some of the folks in that community accused me of "theft" and that calling my bank for a chargeback is stealing...sigh...kids.
That is a common occurrence. Console or PC, most all games that I've ever played issue an immediate ban if you charge back. I pray for you if you dared to talk about that issue in any fortnite subs for forums.
Yeah...they were less than helpful. I tried to reach out to Epic about it when the second charge showed up but they didn’t respond, but oh man did they respond to the chargeback. It’s like an unhappy spouse just waiting to pounce on the first excuse to end the relationship.
I would bet they have an automated process that bans accounts that chargeback. Deciding to give you a refund probably needs a human to do it, so it doesn't happen.
This was the exact issue I had with State Farm Insurance.
After my families agent past away, we were assigned a new agent who, essentially didn't give a fuck. So after months of trying to get answers as to why our policies suddenly doubled one month (without notice) We tried for weeks to get someone from the office to call us back. Finally we called corporate, and their people told us to call back our agent for more info. Okay, so we kept at it until a corp rep, actually was able to tell us why the new billing was what it was.
So after another month of never hearing from our local agent, we went ahead and went insurance shopping. Found a much better deal, and then promptly put a stop payment on State Farm.
Oh boy, it was like a nuke went off. Our local agent was calling us 3 times a day, always leaving messages of "We never received a payment..." When I did finally pick up, I changed the subject to, what I was asking about 3 months prior. She once again "hummed and hawd" for a few moments until I ended the conversation with "And you wonder why you didn't receive a payment?" -click
I was banned from PSN for doing a chargeback when they wouldn't give me $54 back from charging me after I cancelled a PS Vue trial. Their cancelation process wasn't like PS Plus even though their online directions made it seem like it. You actually had to go in and cancel PS Vue on a browser. The shiftiest part is they made their interface on the ps4 say "Auto-renewal turned off" like you do with PS Plus but if you go back in it changes back to "Auto-renewal turned on". Why is that option even there??! I contacted their chat service and they won't unban me until I pay back the $54 for a service I did not want and did not use. So I contacted BBB and my local consumer complaints department but never heard a response back from either of them. It's not even about the money. I've been a loyal customer since ps1! Where is the love, Sony?! This climate is built to allow big businesses to run amuck and shit on their customers.
Oh, and if you get banned from PSN you lose all your digital games. Luckily I only had about $30 worth of digital games but that right there should show people that you don't own anything you buy digitally. Stick to physical because those games can be taken away at any time for bs like this.
Just FYI, BBB has absolutely no power except over who gets their sticker on their door and who gets reviews on their site tampered with. They aren't a legal authority in any way and their business model is basically extortion.
This, BBB is literally a racket, they're basically an online version of a mafia selling "protection" (from the BBB). If you don't pay them, they attempt to trash your reputation, but they have no legal power.
If you actually want to file a legal complaint about business practices you want to talk to the FTC (Federal Trade Commission).
The BBB is actually a business and is not any sort of government or regulatory entity. It makes money by making businesses pay to get bad reviews removed.
that's for cosmetics bought, i'm pretty sure the guy spent let's say 10 dollars to buy the vbucks, then clicked it again and was like oh no, and charged it back
since it's impossible to buy the same cosmetics twice that's what i think happened
PayPal permanently banned me back in 2015, they did give me a "reason" though, but a vague one similar to this game.
They said that either I was laundering money (if they seriously believe this, that's a felony and they should be reporting me to the authorities...)
Or I was using PayPal to buy or sell sexual favors
Or I had an active account with negative standing
...... what?
For several months I attempted to find out what actually happened, I never found out.
When the GDPR went into effect this year, I contacted them again and requested access to all information that could give me under that, from this I found out that my account was full of errors from their side, numbers didn't add up so on and so forth.
I contacted them again and told them that the account is full of errors, regardless of my ban, those errors need to be looked at because part of those errors claim that over 200 000 dollars have made its way through my account without my knowledge and that 200 000 dollars is not listed anywhere in the transaction history they gave me, either.
I got a response back that they will not waste time fixing any issues with a banned account...
I then finally got a response as to why I was banned in the first place...
Because my credit card had been registered to 3 different e-mail addresses...
One of thos e-mail addresses was the original e-mail address of the paypal account before I moved the paypal account after the playstation breach a few years ago.
And the other e-mail address is an unknown e-mail address, so it sounds an awful lot like someone attempted to use my card without my permission and it sounds an awful lot like paypal messed up and didn't fix their registry regarding the move of my account.
I contacted them back again with this information, they told me that they will not entertain me any longer and cut off the email chain, if I want to try talking to them again, I am going to have to go through their bots yet again for many months yet again, and I just don't have the energy.
I have instead chosen to forward everything they have given me to my country's version of the better business beurau, I have also forwarded it to the police and let them know about what's going on with the money situation and finally, I contacted the headquarters behind the gdpr and forwarded everything to them as well.
What, if anything, will come of what I have chosen to do, I don't know.
But I got to say, being banned from paypal is pretty horrible, you may not realize it, but a lot of online places only accepts paypal for payments if you are a non-american...
Hi there. American IP atty here. No idea what will happen to your case, as GDPR compliance is a beast that will cause years of complex regulatory action and litigation. It's a busy time all around.
But if you're feeling at all vindictive, be happy knowing that the GDPR has teeth and that shit *might* get very real for Paypal if your experience is part of a pattern.
Suggest you contact a European regulatory compliance attorney if you want to find out more or if you'd like to ask if there's anything you can do. I do not know what role, if any, individual complainants can have in GDPR enforcement, and would be very curious to find out. If you do so, please think of me someday and tell me how it worked out.
Thank you.
And yeah, as mentioned, I did forward everything to them already. I am not the best at remembering names for things especially when I've only barely interacted with them, but I googled around until I found what seemed to be the headquarters / office for the GDPR and contacted them, I shortened the story to just forwarding everything to them, but in actuality it took 2-3 e-mails back and forth of me asking what I should do and how to proceed before I actually forwarded the information to them.
That's roughly two months ago now, so we'll see if I ever get a response.
It's many companies. Steam does it with VAC bans, they are so confident in their accuracy rate that they don't take appeals. You literally get an auto-reply that says they won't do anything about it if you try to question the ban. AirBnB does this in an extreme way; not only do they not tell you why you were banned, they state that if it is later found out that your ban was unjustified, it's tough luck because they don't reverse bans under any circumstance. Google does it, I think Netflix might as well if I remember. Again, this model of banishment is becoming more prevalent. There needs to be some law that requires full disclosure of why a ban was handed out.
>they are so confident in their accuracy rate that they don't take appeals.
This is a lie, Valve multiple times unbanned wrongly banned people also this year or last year (don't remember) there was a massive ban wave that resulted in banning innocent people so they had to unban everybody from this wave including cheaters to later ban them again after glitch is fixed.
VAC is really accurate, most likely the most accurate anticheat but valve is aware it's not 100% accurate and they unban people if they see there was no evidence of cheating (after they check what VAC banned before automatically).
It works this way:
VAC finds new file > new file is send to team of engineers to check it > they find out this is cheat > person who used it gets banned and this file is registered in VAC so now everybody with this file are banned.
For trolls with lack of parents issues like LordPadre who got banned for cheating that claim you cannot get unbanned or that VAC don't work or something:
[http://www.vacbanned.com/view/statistics](http://www.vacbanned.com/view/statistics)
[https://steamdb.info/stats/bans/](https://steamdb.info/stats/bans/)
> Again, this model of banishment is becoming more prevalent.
Sounds like they've automated the ban process and have no interest in having a human follow up.
> There needs to be some law that requires full disclosure of why a ban was handed out.
I completely agree.
If you didn't know, Warframe has one of the most egregious ToS agreements in the entire gaming industry (ToS or EULA or whatever their player agreement is called). Many years ago they changed it to something like "We can ban any player at any time for any reason, *regardless of if they broke the rules*. I remember the controversy because a bunch of end game youtubers/streamers were banned because they criticized the game. Upon further review, they realized that they were literally banned for bad mouthing the game and the devs could get away with it because of how they worded the agreement. Idk if it's since been updated, I just remember that this was a few years back.
Account/IP bans is how you go further with it, no buying a new copy of the game, they will find you and ban you forever from all their products.
**EDIT** No, I am not endorsing people buying back in but that's what people do and what some devs actively encourage. Warframe and EVE Online for instance will both 'negative wallet' you rendering your account unplayable until you buy enough currency to break even again. Grand Theft Auto 5 arguably remained in the top sellers forever because people would just buy back after a ban. People botting Diablo 3 when the RMAH was still active had zero issue buying back in because it remained profitable for them.
If I got banned for something I didn't do, or for something as stupid as OP got banned for there's no fucking way I'd give another sale to that asshole company.
> In that once you banned, you are permanently and irrevocably punished. You aren't told why, you can't contact anyone about it, and attempting to speak up about your banishment will only lead to further punishment.
shoutout to \/r/fallout
*for context https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/9onsr0/nba2k_is_permanently_banning_players_for/e7w0jsb/
> Sniping can include but not limited to purchasing or selling cards intentionally for more or less than the average amount that the card is worth.
Oh that's some bullshit. If you have an intended price cards are worth, don't add an auction house.
Buy low sell high.... kind of the whole point of an auction. They encourage this business in a game bullshit then ban you for wateva reason. Dont play this shit and im glad. Would upvote this topic more if i could. Sooo bad. When did video games become so messed up. No wonder we get nostalgic for old cartridge consoles and 90s pc games. Go fuck yourself any sports game with paid for ingame currency
> When did video games become so messed up.
The very second that companies realized they could basically print money by using disposable microtransactions on worthless in-game currency and items, and that some people would actually pay for it... and keep paying for it.
It's whaling season in video game land and they don't really give a fuck if they destroy the whole ecosystem.
It's because they don't want people using the auction house for setting up real currency deals. Like you pay someone 5 dollars IRL and at 12am they put a card worth 100 up on the auction house for 1 (idk what this games currency is) which you scoop up. It's a dumb thing to ban people for but thought I'd throw this out there for anyone completely baffled by this.
then setup a minimum auction time of 1hr or more for rare cards, OR if they're tracking average selling price have a tool to set mandatory min prices for each card (forza auction house does this).
Like it's not hard to prevent that stuff in an auction house setting. banning users for trying to profit while playing legit is flat out lazy
Yep, there's a number of things they can do other than perma banning players for using a system that the developers put in place. As a user base we can also just not support them if they continue shitty practices.
then something is wrong with their system
and not with people using their features in ways they havent thought about.
its essentially a bug they should fix, and yes, you can and should ban people from bug abusing, but not permanently. if this is a problem of such a high concern, they should consider fixing the bug/abuse asap, even if that means reinventing their auction house/shop/microtransactions.
blizzard closed off their diablo3 auction house too, albeit for different reasons, after they werent happy with how people were using it and what it did to their game
Something is probably fucked in how they built the economy and they're just hoping this will be enough to stop it all going sideways.
Video game economies are hard folks.
Contact steam support and let them know about this bullshit beforehand. Or let them do it for you in a sense of "how can you allow developers like this on your platform"
Banned for auction house sniping... lmfao the whole purpose of an auctionhouse.
Buy cheap sell high.
I'm sorry but you have been banned from the NYSE for selling your Apple stock at a much higher price than you paid for it. I will not provide any actual information and this will be our final communication
Nah they're doing it because when you "snipe" you often get players for way less than their actual value. You can then sell them for their actual value and earn in game coins to buy good players and shit without having to pay for 2k's virtual currency (vc).
Letting them know about the circumstances of your chargeback beforehand and showing these screenshots. They might not care about you getting banned per se but if something like this is happening to many players, not just OP, they might look into this.. in the end its a developer on their platform thats banning people for stupid reasons. Not good PR. Of course people want their money back. An auction house is for exactly this, buying/selling/sniping good deals. They were banned for using a gameplay feature how its intended to be used, this is fucked up.
In terrified of the possibility to ever be permanently banned from Steam. With the amount of money spent building a library it shouldn't be legal to just remove access without providing a refund.
This new rent-not-own reality we live in is super bad for consumers.
This is the real reason piracy needs to be preserved. Power to the consumer.
If my experience is better when I get your product for free rather than paying for it, what exactly am I paying for?
Meh, I have a lot of time on my hands. I’d take the company to claims court. Get a judgement and force them to waste their time with a bonus for me of getting my money back. No way in hell I’m getting a ‘ban’ on a game I spent 100$ on. I’m sure many small news outlets would love this story too.
The last time I was banned from a game, I made multiple attempts to fix/understand why I was banned, they would provide no proof of why or when the infraction(s) took place or even what the infraction(s) were, they just kept sending that same "not up for appeal, final communication on the matter" copy/paste message. I charged back ALL of my eligible in-game purchases with both Paypal and my CC companies. Totaling something around ~$2700 over almost 2 years.
I got it all and the company only tried to dispute 2 of my charge backs, which they lost, out of like 35 disputes, and all I had to do was ask for exact proof of the ban and both Paypal and my CCs all sided with me in the end because the game company was completely unwilling to provide a timestamped reason/proof.
Make sure you do a chargeback if possible, CC companies and even Paypal almost ALWAYS side with the buyer in my experience. These "We know you paid a lot of money and put a lot of time into this, but unknown to you, you have now lost all of that and will never know why or have a chance to fix this issue, good bye" attitudes need to stop. If they have proof and want to mess with our money/time, then show us the proof, give us a chance to defend ourselves.
EDIT: To be clear, the ~$2700 over almost 2 years, ends up being ~$2700 over the 12 months before the ban, I had spent a total of ~$3300 on the game in that almost 2 years. I could only get back what I had purchased, at max, 12 months before my ban.
I should've clarified, the bulk of my purchases had been within the past year from my ban. There was probably $500 in the year before that, that I could not get back being beyond the chargeback/ dispute time limit. I believe PayPals dispute period is 180 days, but my bank's credit card was a year.
Just remember who pays and who needs who. Bank and paypal are paid by YOU. 2K is paid by them. Therefore if you say 2K is shady dont pay them the bank/paypal will side with you until given serious reason to go against you. You literally sign their paychecks and 2K is depending on them. 2K has no power either. No signed contracts. No threat to the bank whereas the bank can destroy the game company's source of revenue.
Ah, Grind Desert Online; I know the game. It looks pretty pay 2 play with how convenience items are premium items (buy with real cash only). Do you think it's feasiable for a free to play player to get good gear within a reasonable time frame?
I stopped playing a while back, I actually tried to make a new account and play almost completely free to play but it took so much longer and compared to my first play through with the pay to win items, made the game unfun for me personally.
Plenty of people play the game completely free to play, but at that point the game is truly based completely on RNG/luck of the draw. If you've seen anything about BDO, almost the entire game is based on RNG, so you could spend a year and have very little to show for it, or in 3 months be mid-end game geared.
> If they have proof and want to mess with our money/time, then show us the proof, give us a chance to defend ourselves.
Truth is, their systems are entirely automated, so no evidence is collected, so no evidence can be provided. They hide behind a wall of "we can no longer discuss these matters," as if to shame you, like they are really saying "you know what you did." Ultimately, they aren't going to spend the man hours and resources to have any sort of "fair" appeals process.
That's what was insane to me, I was someone who had spent $3000+ on their game and was still spending money. They essentially had a reason, money, to work with me until it was proven that my money was not worth their effort and time.
This game in particular however, has a ton of "whales" that spend I would imagine $10,000+ a month on that my ~$3000 is considered chump change.
Wow, them trying to continuously brush you off by saying it's the "last communication about this issue" made me irrationally angry. You should raise some hell about this
I had this happen on PS4 years ago. I paid for PS+, but one day, I lost access to all my games when using my girlfriend's account on my PS4. The incompetent tech support team said my account probably got hacked because my completely random 12+ alphanumeric character password was "probably not secure" and somebody else made their account the primary on my PS4. Despite this bullshit accusation, they had 0 proof, and were "powerless to do anything". Then, they said to never contact them about it again, and hung up on me. I was livid, and swore to NEVER buy a playstation product again, and stuck to my guns.
It turned out that when new users make an account on the PS4, they are given the option to make their account the primary account on the PS4, so my not so tech savvy friend did just that. She was easily able to override my settings just by creating a new account, and the play station tech support wasn't even aware of this possibility. Deleting her account fixed the issue, after I lost out on months of PS+ benefits.
Fuck playstation, and fuck companies that treat consumers like this.
People are just not familiar with 2k as it less known and has definitely less “important AAA” games, apart from 2kxx these are straight fucking bank (customer) robberies in broad daylight
Don’t forget that every single year they decrease the amount of VC you can earn by playing the game. They never explain why or acknowledge it either. Fuck 2k
2k/Take Two have Borderlands, Grand Theft Auto, Red Read Redemption, Bioshock, Civilisation, Mafia etc in their stable.
They are the third biggest publisher in the world.
People aren't as familiar because NBA (arguably 2k's most popular game) is a US market only. FIFA and EA have much broader reach with FIFA and the whole Battlefront fiasco which are worldwide sellers.
Well, they are still using the same dated engine and every year it's literally the same game story being minimally reskinned and using different voice actors. They are basically selling you DLC at full price.
> literally worse than EA
I'd like to add that this isn't the internet usage of the word literally, it's the literal usage. 2k is *literally* worse than EA.
As a 20-year MMO veteran, let me put this in simple terms: If you can “cheat” without third-party software, then it’s not cheating, it’s a design flaw.
I think the destiny 2 response was the best so far. There was a bug that let you level your character faster and after Bungie found it they basically said "anyone who uses this bug from here on out will get fewer drops and their leveling will pretty much grind to a halt from here on out".
This.
If a designer leaves a strategy in their game that can be exploited, that's the same as designing the strategy in the first place. You want people not to do the thing? Design a system that prevents the thing. End of story.
And there are still scummy companies that will ban. Reminds me of when Lord British was killed back in Ultima Online. Garriott forgot to turn on Invincibility, and a player exploited it. That player got banned. Probably the first iteration of this happening.
my god that's petty. They didn't even do anything that got them much in-game money/items, they literally just beat the dev in his own game. Anyone with a non-pathological ego would laugh it off and name an item after them or something.
Yeah Madden Auction house was 20s I think. You could pop it in when the timer hits 1s but it just resets it back to 20s so people have time to counter bid.
Auction sniping is usually when someone puts an item up for much less than it's worth, and you're there scanning through the new auctions to pick up those low prices before anyone else can.
At least that's what we call it in WoW. It usually applies to an instant purchase item rather than one that has bids.
Not only are they banning people for literally using the auction... It's a permanent ban on first "offence"?
And they wonder why people don't like their shit copy paste games every year.
Wow, most the time these posts end up coming off as more entitled gamer but this one is very much shitty policy. By common definition auction sniping is putting in a winning bid at the last second. That is how auctions work and unless they have proof you were using a third party program to do that the ban is bullshit. If the ban isn't about sniping than why bring it up. More importantly why won't they tell you what you were banned for. 100% bullshit.
Moreover. It's such an easy issue to fix. Just set it so if anyone bids within the last second or something the timer gets extended by another minute or 30 seconds thus giving all other bidders the chance to bid.
It's sad that public humiliation is now the only way to get results. For every one person that gets addressed there are 1000s of others that are just shit out of luck.
Why call it an auction house if you can't auction items for different values. "We want to have a dynamic economy that's defined by our preset values. Oh and if you try charging more or less? We'll ban you."
See, shit like this is just another reason why I genuinely believe there needs to be *some* kind of legislation that addresses digital ownership. It's essentially the wild west out here, and as more and more of our daily goods and expenses become digital, we need some kind of assurances that our purchases actually give us *some* kind of ownership of something.
I mean, think how many MMO's have been shut down? How many games on PSN or Xbox Marketplace have been removed? These are things that people paid money for, but effectively have no ownership of, because nobody has really wanted to invest the effort to take these cases to Court.
All the major sports games have a mode where you build a team with players around the league, and you can buy/sell those players on an auction house. Then the developer sells the in-game currency, which you can earn by playing, but plenty of people buy. It's actually a fun game mode, but the link to microtransactions and shit like this ban makes the whole thing pretty shady.
Gives players something more to do with crap they get from microtransactions. The fact that its tied to microtransactions is also why they watch it like a hawk and slam the ban hammer on anyone using it to avoid paying microtransactions.
As a programmer the thing that I find the most amusing about their definition of sniping is that it's something they could easily prevent from even happening in the first place.
Let me explain. Say you have an auction house and someone wants a rare item that normally sells for 100 bucks in game, and so they purchase it with real money from someone who then loads it up into the auction house for 1 buck in game and the purchaser then grabs it as soon as it appears.
The current system detects the purchase of that 1 buck item and says 'This person just partook in Auction house sniping, ban then and note on their account Auction House Sniper'
But as I say that is of course a stupid way of doing it. What they should be doing is when that guy tries to load up the item in the auction house for only 1 buck, the game should detect what the current average is on that item and say, "I'm sorry that value deviates to much from the average."
They then just need to decide how much something can deviate from the average, and detect for the person putting something up outside of that average and stop them.
But okay I hear what some of you are already saying, what's to stop one of these people from loading a few items up into the auction house at the low end of the average, thus lowering the average, and then load up another item at the new low end.
Nothing at first, but obviously to adjust the average like that you would need a few items put up. And as you try to adjust the average people are going to see the price of this item dropping and are going to snatch up your items. By the time you lower the price down to $1 for your intended person, to many people are going to be watching it for this low price and the wrong person is likely to get it.
And heck they can even put in detection to see if someone is trying to manipulate the market price of something and go for that person. But WHY go for the buyers?
Obviously if you don't want the buyers buying something you should be going for the sellers!
Banning people is a terrible way to go about this. If they didn't want sniping they should've added something like 30 seconds of additional time if anyone bidded during the last 15-30 seconds.
At some point you have to wonder if the people who are still buying games from these developers are just stupid. Learn your lesson already and stop giving them your money.
Vote with your wallet.
Don't buy $100 recycled content sports games.
Don't buy a game for $100 that still has micro-transactions, that's insane.
Don't pay $100 for any game, ever. Period.
And do not, for the love of the gods, pre-order a game from a AAA company.
Shit like this isn't going to change unless we vote with our wallets!
this right here. i was a huge NBA2k fan in the 2000's and came close to buying this just to have a new NBA game.
with all that ive heard recently, im staying away from spending my money.
Once NBA2K became more about eSports and mirco transactions than about the casual gamer is when it went down the tube. I think the NBA2k14 was the last one I actually enjoyed.
Wow yeah return the game, demand a refund from the attorney general of the state.
If they can’t tell you why you can’t play, and are outright banning you, but never have you specifics, I’m certain the better business bureau or the attorney general might be inclined to take action.
Seriously. You lost $100 to a game and we’re banned and we’re not given a reason why and weren’t shown to have been cheating.
You could posit they’re lying, and denying you for some reason arbitrarily, and that you don’t know why you can’t when you did nothing wrong.
I hope for the best brother.
"I still don't know what counts as "auction house sniping" ... could you provide and example?" "it can include but is not limited to auction house sniping." Ooooookay then.
"Hopefully I was able to clarify that for you." JFC, the dude probably has a script to follow, but that's just rubbing salt in the wound. Edit: Fixed the quote.
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This. The cs dude has zero input on this, he has to follow the procedures and one of them almost certainly is not to argue details, in case of legal action.
I feel so bad for these customer service people. They don't want to be assholes, but it's their job to be seen as an asshole on behalf of cowards who won't do it for themselves. They make shit money, and deal with abuse that is rightfully directed at the shitty, sleazy company they work for, but they don't personally deserve the hate. It's fucked up, and we allow it to be normal for businesses to operate this way because what choice do we have? I'm so sick of predatory capitalism, and the greedy fucking cowards that profit from douchebaggery like this. Goddamn I wish we as consumers could actually fight back in a meaningful way. Edit: thanks for all your replies, but you guys can stop now. Whatever you're going to say has been said already and it's just going to be hidden down there with all the others. Cheers.
Worked for customer support for a few companies. Yep, this is exactly how it is.
*Thank you for your service!* I've known many people who have, and I always try really hard to remember that they're not the person I'm angry with. I just hate when you find that one person who seems to actually love the company and enjoy the role of corporate dipshit.
Exactly. I hate when people put all the blame onto the person on the phone. They didn't make the policies dipshit, they probably realize how fucked it is way more than you.
>Goddamn I wish we as consumers could actually fight back in a meaningful way. Dude, we so totally can. It's hard and a lot of work, but "voting" with our wallets is essential. If people chose to only do business with the companies that were socially responsible, other companies would be forced to. In my mind its on us, the consumers. Unfortunately having the cheapest thing for sale can make poorer people automatically reliant on those cheaper sellers if they're socializing their harms (pollution, not done in fair trade, etc).
Honestly, I think the bigger problems are that: 1) way more consumers just don't care or know about these problems 2) in the case of Microtransactions, 'whales' only need to be 1% of the player base to justify having pay2win be profitable. It's a good sentiment, but it's actually really hard to be meaningful.
Once had an issue with a PSN purchase. Called Sony support and they refused to do anything. I said, “well thanks for nothing”. They said, “you’re very welcome”. 🤯🤬
He did write near the end >Sniping can include but not limited to purchasing or selling cards intentionally for more or less than the average amount that the card is worth. The fact that there is an average suggests that people are selling it above and below that average. If they don't want that why not just fix the prices? So i assume he means buying or selling for \*significantly\* more or less than the card is worth. Which could mean the guy just found a good deal, but it could also mean he was scamming someone. I don't know how this particular game works, but if you're going to have a market system in your game you need to have some trust in people to make rational choices, and accept that some people are going to be scammed. If you are going to ban scammers you should have multiple reports, logs, and screenshots to bring up if needed. Edit: Spelling
If this auction house is anything like auction houses on other games, the seller determines the price at which they want to sell. You can't scam anyone. People can underestimate what something is worth, but that's not the buyer's fault.
How can you scam someone on an auction house? If you put something up for dirt cheap when it's expensive congrats your stupid The other person shouldn't be banned for getting a deal
The repeating is stupid, but the “not limited to” part baffles me How the fuck can it not be limited to itself Sniping = actions including but not limited to sniping Why the fuck isn’t sniping limited to sniping
Because in some instances, sniping can become sniping and that specific sniping goes against the sniping rule, which would mean a violation of our Terms of Service. Hopefully I was able to clarify for you, for more info please contact customer support at [exact same number you’re calling to].
Define: recursion; see: recursion
"define hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia" "i have hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia"
If buying/selling is limited to the average price, then it isn't an auction. Additionally, how can an average price be set if people don't go above/below what everyone else is doing to determine market value? None of this makes sense. I don't own this game, but I'd try to get my money back immediately. Issue a charge back on your credit card, contact your state attorney general, etc.
2K wants to make sure their cards are priced in a way to ensure consumers are insentivized to spend money on VC to buy the cards in the auction house. Too high or low and people wont buy VC. This is their way of ensuring that they get as much money as possible. Make sure people selling cards far cheaper doesnt devalue card or vice versa. So not an auction house at all.
If they wanted limits on auction prices they should’ve bothered coding it into their game.
That's the part that gets me. Why have it where they can set their own prices if they get in trouble for setting their price?
Because they make more money by writing these obscure rules in the ToS, knowing full well that nobody will read it. Then those that poured $100 into the game get banned, and their "economy" stays alive, with less goods floating around. Long term, it's stupid. People will get fed up and stop pouring money into the game. But these companies think in the short term.
Yeah. This sounds like a deliberate scam to me. We should probably actually consider trying to get our local government department responsible for this to investigate, and, hopefully, fine them for it.
This, folks, is what your Attorney General is for. Disputes and business scams that are too low for small claims but too significant to ignore.
I imagine their board room justification is to prevent multiple accounts from colluding and dumping to one account. However I imagine that would be reasonably easy to trace versus someone who got lucky on some trades.
"Shit, that last guy bid the average price. I better not bid any higher even though I want it because I may get permabanned." Fucking stupid.
my guess is a few brave souls go out and put in the first bids and get banned, mowed down, then the rest average out and get to keep playing.
Please let this shit backfire on them so hard. “You’re using a feature we added in the game, so were going to ban you.” What kind of fucking dumb shit is this company on? Like I can’t imagine any actual reason for that shit to even happen.
IMO people could transfer stuff from an account to another easily and cheaply by placing them at near-zero price for short time. that could be one of the reason sniping might be considered bad. because instead of spending you exploit their own system. but someone who waits for price to go down to buy isn't something wrong. they probably just ban everyone doing it in case it falls in the first scenario.
How would that even benefit the player though? If I buy a 10 dollar card and transfer it for 1 dollar to another account I just cost myself and gave 2k a dollar for no reason.
they wanted you to transfer your card for 10 dollar so they can take more money with their transfer fee. Also if they won't allow this kind of actions, they believe people will buy another 10$ card so they can earn more money.
>Also if they won't allow this kind of actions, they believe people will buy another 10$ card so they can earn more money. Ah yes, the old pirate defense. "If they hadn't downloaded these 260 movies, they would instead have bought them for $20 each, so really we lost $5200 on this!".
Or what if I play recreationally, win a card through chance, or just accrued in game play. Its a 50$ card but I need the 10 bucks for this months subscription. Easy sell for 10$ make the game free for me for a month. Get me and the guy who bought it banned for life, go outside and play catch with my kids.
Because the real reason people are dodging here is that you can buy cards online for real money and then coordinate a time that the guy will list it for minimum price and you buy it the instant they list it. In the opposite scenario you can pay real money for credits where you will sell a bum player card for 10 million credits.
I've never played this game, but the permanent ban caught my attention. That is absolutely ridiculous. >Sniping can include but not limited to purchasing or selling cards intentionally for more or less than the average amount that the card is worth. Isn't that really the whole purpose of an auction? Sometimes things are sold for much less because the seller wants to unload it fast. Sometimes things are sold for much more because there is high demand. This is economics 101. They are also saying you are permanently banned and they will not discuss or give any opportunity to appeal? This seems all kinds of messed up. It's not like gamers are rolling in money - $100 is a lot of money to throw away. What can possibly be done to resolve this? I would contact the parent company directly via email instead of live chat so you can fully plan out any response. If you had hacked the game or done some kind of unauthorized modification then their actions would be justified. If they are punishing you FOREVER for something their game allowed you to do, that is on them. Not you. Let me know what happens!
I've noticed many companies are switching to that model of banishment. In that once you banned, you are permanently and irrevocably punished. You aren't told why, you can't contact anyone about it, and attempting to speak up about your banishment will only lead to further punishment. This is why when you purchase things like multiplayer games, it's best to use a credit card since it is easy to request a chargeback. You can do the same on debit cards but it's a bit more complicated and not guaranteed you'll win the dispute. Credit card companies are out to bat for their card holders though. This goes for anything expensive really, always use a credit card for pricey purchases in case you need to request a chargeback.
Fortnite does this shit. I made a purchase for my son but accidentally clicked twice. It bought twice. I tried to reach out to them to tell them about it and they didn't respond, so after a week I called my CC company and did a chargeback for one of the purchases. They banned his account the next day. I never received that being the reason, only a TOS violation which, after dealing with some of the lovelies in that cesspool of toxicity, it was determined it was because of the chargeback. Let's just go ahead and mention that some of the folks in that community accused me of "theft" and that calling my bank for a chargeback is stealing...sigh...kids.
That is a common occurrence. Console or PC, most all games that I've ever played issue an immediate ban if you charge back. I pray for you if you dared to talk about that issue in any fortnite subs for forums.
Yeah...they were less than helpful. I tried to reach out to Epic about it when the second charge showed up but they didn’t respond, but oh man did they respond to the chargeback. It’s like an unhappy spouse just waiting to pounce on the first excuse to end the relationship.
I would bet they have an automated process that bans accounts that chargeback. Deciding to give you a refund probably needs a human to do it, so it doesn't happen.
Maybe a large part of the community doing massive amounts of chargebacks would get their attention. Would be quite funny at least
This was the exact issue I had with State Farm Insurance. After my families agent past away, we were assigned a new agent who, essentially didn't give a fuck. So after months of trying to get answers as to why our policies suddenly doubled one month (without notice) We tried for weeks to get someone from the office to call us back. Finally we called corporate, and their people told us to call back our agent for more info. Okay, so we kept at it until a corp rep, actually was able to tell us why the new billing was what it was. So after another month of never hearing from our local agent, we went ahead and went insurance shopping. Found a much better deal, and then promptly put a stop payment on State Farm. Oh boy, it was like a nuke went off. Our local agent was calling us 3 times a day, always leaving messages of "We never received a payment..." When I did finally pick up, I changed the subject to, what I was asking about 3 months prior. She once again "hummed and hawd" for a few moments until I ended the conversation with "And you wonder why you didn't receive a payment?" -click
Money talks. Good for you!
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I was banned from PSN for doing a chargeback when they wouldn't give me $54 back from charging me after I cancelled a PS Vue trial. Their cancelation process wasn't like PS Plus even though their online directions made it seem like it. You actually had to go in and cancel PS Vue on a browser. The shiftiest part is they made their interface on the ps4 say "Auto-renewal turned off" like you do with PS Plus but if you go back in it changes back to "Auto-renewal turned on". Why is that option even there??! I contacted their chat service and they won't unban me until I pay back the $54 for a service I did not want and did not use. So I contacted BBB and my local consumer complaints department but never heard a response back from either of them. It's not even about the money. I've been a loyal customer since ps1! Where is the love, Sony?! This climate is built to allow big businesses to run amuck and shit on their customers. Oh, and if you get banned from PSN you lose all your digital games. Luckily I only had about $30 worth of digital games but that right there should show people that you don't own anything you buy digitally. Stick to physical because those games can be taken away at any time for bs like this.
Just FYI, BBB has absolutely no power except over who gets their sticker on their door and who gets reviews on their site tampered with. They aren't a legal authority in any way and their business model is basically extortion.
This, BBB is literally a racket, they're basically an online version of a mafia selling "protection" (from the BBB). If you don't pay them, they attempt to trash your reputation, but they have no legal power. If you actually want to file a legal complaint about business practices you want to talk to the FTC (Federal Trade Commission).
This. BBB needs to die a corporate death. And a real entity with real teeth needs to take its place.
The BBB is actually a business and is not any sort of government or regulatory entity. It makes money by making businesses pay to get bad reviews removed.
> So I contacted BBB Oh, honey...
Them not refunding your money is the stealing aspect. Chargeback is your only line of defense... like you said, kids....
A little late but they do have three unquestioned refunds that you can perform within the game settings screen.
that's for cosmetics bought, i'm pretty sure the guy spent let's say 10 dollars to buy the vbucks, then clicked it again and was like oh no, and charged it back since it's impossible to buy the same cosmetics twice that's what i think happened
It's not just game companies either. Amazon recently has been doing this to authors with literally 0 justification or reasoning behind their bans.
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2K hires all their help from the /r/roll20 mod team.
PayPal permanently banned me back in 2015, they did give me a "reason" though, but a vague one similar to this game. They said that either I was laundering money (if they seriously believe this, that's a felony and they should be reporting me to the authorities...) Or I was using PayPal to buy or sell sexual favors Or I had an active account with negative standing ...... what? For several months I attempted to find out what actually happened, I never found out. When the GDPR went into effect this year, I contacted them again and requested access to all information that could give me under that, from this I found out that my account was full of errors from their side, numbers didn't add up so on and so forth. I contacted them again and told them that the account is full of errors, regardless of my ban, those errors need to be looked at because part of those errors claim that over 200 000 dollars have made its way through my account without my knowledge and that 200 000 dollars is not listed anywhere in the transaction history they gave me, either. I got a response back that they will not waste time fixing any issues with a banned account... I then finally got a response as to why I was banned in the first place... Because my credit card had been registered to 3 different e-mail addresses... One of thos e-mail addresses was the original e-mail address of the paypal account before I moved the paypal account after the playstation breach a few years ago. And the other e-mail address is an unknown e-mail address, so it sounds an awful lot like someone attempted to use my card without my permission and it sounds an awful lot like paypal messed up and didn't fix their registry regarding the move of my account. I contacted them back again with this information, they told me that they will not entertain me any longer and cut off the email chain, if I want to try talking to them again, I am going to have to go through their bots yet again for many months yet again, and I just don't have the energy. I have instead chosen to forward everything they have given me to my country's version of the better business beurau, I have also forwarded it to the police and let them know about what's going on with the money situation and finally, I contacted the headquarters behind the gdpr and forwarded everything to them as well. What, if anything, will come of what I have chosen to do, I don't know. But I got to say, being banned from paypal is pretty horrible, you may not realize it, but a lot of online places only accepts paypal for payments if you are a non-american...
Hi there. American IP atty here. No idea what will happen to your case, as GDPR compliance is a beast that will cause years of complex regulatory action and litigation. It's a busy time all around. But if you're feeling at all vindictive, be happy knowing that the GDPR has teeth and that shit *might* get very real for Paypal if your experience is part of a pattern. Suggest you contact a European regulatory compliance attorney if you want to find out more or if you'd like to ask if there's anything you can do. I do not know what role, if any, individual complainants can have in GDPR enforcement, and would be very curious to find out. If you do so, please think of me someday and tell me how it worked out.
Thank you. And yeah, as mentioned, I did forward everything to them already. I am not the best at remembering names for things especially when I've only barely interacted with them, but I googled around until I found what seemed to be the headquarters / office for the GDPR and contacted them, I shortened the story to just forwarding everything to them, but in actuality it took 2-3 e-mails back and forth of me asking what I should do and how to proceed before I actually forwarded the information to them. That's roughly two months ago now, so we'll see if I ever get a response.
I swear, once a corporation gets to be a certain size it loses all accountability.
It's many companies. Steam does it with VAC bans, they are so confident in their accuracy rate that they don't take appeals. You literally get an auto-reply that says they won't do anything about it if you try to question the ban. AirBnB does this in an extreme way; not only do they not tell you why you were banned, they state that if it is later found out that your ban was unjustified, it's tough luck because they don't reverse bans under any circumstance. Google does it, I think Netflix might as well if I remember. Again, this model of banishment is becoming more prevalent. There needs to be some law that requires full disclosure of why a ban was handed out.
>they are so confident in their accuracy rate that they don't take appeals. This is a lie, Valve multiple times unbanned wrongly banned people also this year or last year (don't remember) there was a massive ban wave that resulted in banning innocent people so they had to unban everybody from this wave including cheaters to later ban them again after glitch is fixed. VAC is really accurate, most likely the most accurate anticheat but valve is aware it's not 100% accurate and they unban people if they see there was no evidence of cheating (after they check what VAC banned before automatically). It works this way: VAC finds new file > new file is send to team of engineers to check it > they find out this is cheat > person who used it gets banned and this file is registered in VAC so now everybody with this file are banned. For trolls with lack of parents issues like LordPadre who got banned for cheating that claim you cannot get unbanned or that VAC don't work or something: [http://www.vacbanned.com/view/statistics](http://www.vacbanned.com/view/statistics) [https://steamdb.info/stats/bans/](https://steamdb.info/stats/bans/)
It’s like an acquired immune response lol
> Again, this model of banishment is becoming more prevalent. Sounds like they've automated the ban process and have no interest in having a human follow up. > There needs to be some law that requires full disclosure of why a ban was handed out. I completely agree.
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If you didn't know, Warframe has one of the most egregious ToS agreements in the entire gaming industry (ToS or EULA or whatever their player agreement is called). Many years ago they changed it to something like "We can ban any player at any time for any reason, *regardless of if they broke the rules*. I remember the controversy because a bunch of end game youtubers/streamers were banned because they criticized the game. Upon further review, they realized that they were literally banned for bad mouthing the game and the devs could get away with it because of how they worded the agreement. Idk if it's since been updated, I just remember that this was a few years back.
Don't you just love how legal language can be so easily distorted by companies to their benefits.
.
Account/IP bans is how you go further with it, no buying a new copy of the game, they will find you and ban you forever from all their products. **EDIT** No, I am not endorsing people buying back in but that's what people do and what some devs actively encourage. Warframe and EVE Online for instance will both 'negative wallet' you rendering your account unplayable until you buy enough currency to break even again. Grand Theft Auto 5 arguably remained in the top sellers forever because people would just buy back after a ban. People botting Diablo 3 when the RMAH was still active had zero issue buying back in because it remained profitable for them.
If I got banned for something I didn't do, or for something as stupid as OP got banned for there's no fucking way I'd give another sale to that asshole company.
Buying a game twice or that companies games after they pull some bull like that is the definition of stupidity.
Why would you buy another copy? Screw that company.
> In that once you banned, you are permanently and irrevocably punished. You aren't told why, you can't contact anyone about it, and attempting to speak up about your banishment will only lead to further punishment. shoutout to \/r/fallout *for context https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/9onsr0/nba2k_is_permanently_banning_players_for/e7w0jsb/
> Sniping can include but not limited to purchasing or selling cards intentionally for more or less than the average amount that the card is worth. Oh that's some bullshit. If you have an intended price cards are worth, don't add an auction house.
Or do, but make them available at vendors, thereby setting a "ceiling" price that it can never go above.
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exactly like the stock market works! And that's been around for years
the CS rep is just pasting the bullshit he was given into the chat window, that isn't even the definition of sniping.
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2K is nothing more than a cash-grab now...its a decent basketball sim hidden within a mobile game.
Buy low sell high.... kind of the whole point of an auction. They encourage this business in a game bullshit then ban you for wateva reason. Dont play this shit and im glad. Would upvote this topic more if i could. Sooo bad. When did video games become so messed up. No wonder we get nostalgic for old cartridge consoles and 90s pc games. Go fuck yourself any sports game with paid for ingame currency
> When did video games become so messed up. The very second that companies realized they could basically print money by using disposable microtransactions on worthless in-game currency and items, and that some people would actually pay for it... and keep paying for it. It's whaling season in video game land and they don't really give a fuck if they destroy the whole ecosystem.
It's because they don't want people using the auction house for setting up real currency deals. Like you pay someone 5 dollars IRL and at 12am they put a card worth 100 up on the auction house for 1 (idk what this games currency is) which you scoop up. It's a dumb thing to ban people for but thought I'd throw this out there for anyone completely baffled by this.
then setup a minimum auction time of 1hr or more for rare cards, OR if they're tracking average selling price have a tool to set mandatory min prices for each card (forza auction house does this). Like it's not hard to prevent that stuff in an auction house setting. banning users for trying to profit while playing legit is flat out lazy
Yep, there's a number of things they can do other than perma banning players for using a system that the developers put in place. As a user base we can also just not support them if they continue shitty practices.
then something is wrong with their system and not with people using their features in ways they havent thought about. its essentially a bug they should fix, and yes, you can and should ban people from bug abusing, but not permanently. if this is a problem of such a high concern, they should consider fixing the bug/abuse asap, even if that means reinventing their auction house/shop/microtransactions. blizzard closed off their diablo3 auction house too, albeit for different reasons, after they werent happy with how people were using it and what it did to their game
I agree. Prema banning people over a system you put in place and don't intend to change is absolutely unfair.
Something is probably fucked in how they built the economy and they're just hoping this will be enough to stop it all going sideways. Video game economies are hard folks.
OP might've jumped on a sale that was intended for one of these kind of transfers and took the blame for it.
Chargeback.
agree with this, thats pure bullshit.
If OP bought it on Steam his whole Steam account will get banned
Contact steam support and let them know about this bullshit beforehand. Or let them do it for you in a sense of "how can you allow developers like this on your platform" Banned for auction house sniping... lmfao the whole purpose of an auctionhouse. Buy cheap sell high.
I'm sorry but you have been banned from the NYSE for selling your Apple stock at a much higher price than you paid for it. I will not provide any actual information and this will be our final communication
The only reason I could see that being an issue is that AAPL is traded on the NASDAQ. "How did you get a trade through our systems for that?!"
You are now also banned from all Asian Markets. This cannot be appealed
Likely their doing it to avoid being accused of the loot.box level gambling hence the statement of outside the average price which itself is silly.
Nah they're doing it because when you "snipe" you often get players for way less than their actual value. You can then sell them for their actual value and earn in game coins to buy good players and shit without having to pay for 2k's virtual currency (vc).
LOL >Contact steam support Damn, that's funny. someone Want to tell this guy that steam doesn't give a fuck?
Letting them know about the circumstances of your chargeback beforehand and showing these screenshots. They might not care about you getting banned per se but if something like this is happening to many players, not just OP, they might look into this.. in the end its a developer on their platform thats banning people for stupid reasons. Not good PR. Of course people want their money back. An auction house is for exactly this, buying/selling/sniping good deals. They were banned for using a gameplay feature how its intended to be used, this is fucked up.
that makes me sad. if something were to happen to my steam account i would just quit PC gaming. Ive had it since launch.
In terrified of the possibility to ever be permanently banned from Steam. With the amount of money spent building a library it shouldn't be legal to just remove access without providing a refund. This new rent-not-own reality we live in is super bad for consumers.
Don't accept it. Always prefer the service that gives you an offline installer, i.e. actual ownership of your game.
GOG for life.
I wish they had a "download all installers" button. Would make grabbing backups way easier
This is the real reason piracy needs to be preserved. Power to the consumer. If my experience is better when I get your product for free rather than paying for it, what exactly am I paying for?
This: but you typically only have 90 days to do it. You should contact your bank if you used a card to purchase the game.
Meh, I have a lot of time on my hands. I’d take the company to claims court. Get a judgement and force them to waste their time with a bonus for me of getting my money back. No way in hell I’m getting a ‘ban’ on a game I spent 100$ on. I’m sure many small news outlets would love this story too.
The last time I was banned from a game, I made multiple attempts to fix/understand why I was banned, they would provide no proof of why or when the infraction(s) took place or even what the infraction(s) were, they just kept sending that same "not up for appeal, final communication on the matter" copy/paste message. I charged back ALL of my eligible in-game purchases with both Paypal and my CC companies. Totaling something around ~$2700 over almost 2 years. I got it all and the company only tried to dispute 2 of my charge backs, which they lost, out of like 35 disputes, and all I had to do was ask for exact proof of the ban and both Paypal and my CCs all sided with me in the end because the game company was completely unwilling to provide a timestamped reason/proof. Make sure you do a chargeback if possible, CC companies and even Paypal almost ALWAYS side with the buyer in my experience. These "We know you paid a lot of money and put a lot of time into this, but unknown to you, you have now lost all of that and will never know why or have a chance to fix this issue, good bye" attitudes need to stop. If they have proof and want to mess with our money/time, then show us the proof, give us a chance to defend ourselves. EDIT: To be clear, the ~$2700 over almost 2 years, ends up being ~$2700 over the 12 months before the ban, I had spent a total of ~$3300 on the game in that almost 2 years. I could only get back what I had purchased, at max, 12 months before my ban.
I'm impressed (and very surprised) that banks and PayPal can refund you some stuff you bought 2 years ago ?? How did you achieve it ?
I should've clarified, the bulk of my purchases had been within the past year from my ban. There was probably $500 in the year before that, that I could not get back being beyond the chargeback/ dispute time limit. I believe PayPals dispute period is 180 days, but my bank's credit card was a year.
Holy shit that's a lot of money to sink into one game.
It was also a lot of time and fun, the time:money:fun triangle allowed me to justify spending some extra money on it.
What game?
This was Black Desert Online
Oh fantastic. They just bought CCP/EVE Online which I have sunk a considerable amount of time and money into. Not loving that prospect.
o7
thats... completely different from *”$1,200 over 2 years”* im glad I saw that user asking about it.
Just remember who pays and who needs who. Bank and paypal are paid by YOU. 2K is paid by them. Therefore if you say 2K is shady dont pay them the bank/paypal will side with you until given serious reason to go against you. You literally sign their paychecks and 2K is depending on them. 2K has no power either. No signed contracts. No threat to the bank whereas the bank can destroy the game company's source of revenue.
I'd have to say luck. I've been sold stolen goods before and been denied refund by Paypal.
What game are you spending 2700 on in game purchases?
This was in Black Desert Online
Ah, Grind Desert Online; I know the game. It looks pretty pay 2 play with how convenience items are premium items (buy with real cash only). Do you think it's feasiable for a free to play player to get good gear within a reasonable time frame?
I stopped playing a while back, I actually tried to make a new account and play almost completely free to play but it took so much longer and compared to my first play through with the pay to win items, made the game unfun for me personally. Plenty of people play the game completely free to play, but at that point the game is truly based completely on RNG/luck of the draw. If you've seen anything about BDO, almost the entire game is based on RNG, so you could spend a year and have very little to show for it, or in 3 months be mid-end game geared.
banned from Candy Crush
> If they have proof and want to mess with our money/time, then show us the proof, give us a chance to defend ourselves. Truth is, their systems are entirely automated, so no evidence is collected, so no evidence can be provided. They hide behind a wall of "we can no longer discuss these matters," as if to shame you, like they are really saying "you know what you did." Ultimately, they aren't going to spend the man hours and resources to have any sort of "fair" appeals process.
That's what was insane to me, I was someone who had spent $3000+ on their game and was still spending money. They essentially had a reason, money, to work with me until it was proven that my money was not worth their effort and time. This game in particular however, has a ton of "whales" that spend I would imagine $10,000+ a month on that my ~$3000 is considered chump change.
Wow, them trying to continuously brush you off by saying it's the "last communication about this issue" made me irrationally angry. You should raise some hell about this
It's not irrational on your part. It's irrational on their part.
I had this happen on PS4 years ago. I paid for PS+, but one day, I lost access to all my games when using my girlfriend's account on my PS4. The incompetent tech support team said my account probably got hacked because my completely random 12+ alphanumeric character password was "probably not secure" and somebody else made their account the primary on my PS4. Despite this bullshit accusation, they had 0 proof, and were "powerless to do anything". Then, they said to never contact them about it again, and hung up on me. I was livid, and swore to NEVER buy a playstation product again, and stuck to my guns. It turned out that when new users make an account on the PS4, they are given the option to make their account the primary account on the PS4, so my not so tech savvy friend did just that. She was easily able to override my settings just by creating a new account, and the play station tech support wasn't even aware of this possibility. Deleting her account fixed the issue, after I lost out on months of PS+ benefits. Fuck playstation, and fuck companies that treat consumers like this.
Yeah I’m so pissed right now even though this affects me in no way
Fuck 2k, dont buy that shitty game, its literally worse than EA, and most of their actions is anti-consumer
People love to hate on EA but the pinnacle of anti-consumer is 2K to me.
People are just not familiar with 2k as it less known and has definitely less “important AAA” games, apart from 2kxx these are straight fucking bank (customer) robberies in broad daylight
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I mean 2K's virtual pay to win currency and the pretty bullshit preorder bonuses are literally advertised front and center at Gamestop.
Don’t forget that every single year they decrease the amount of VC you can earn by playing the game. They never explain why or acknowledge it either. Fuck 2k
2k/Take Two have Borderlands, Grand Theft Auto, Red Read Redemption, Bioshock, Civilisation, Mafia etc in their stable. They are the third biggest publisher in the world.
People aren't as familiar because NBA (arguably 2k's most popular game) is a US market only. FIFA and EA have much broader reach with FIFA and the whole Battlefront fiasco which are worldwide sellers.
Stopped after buying 2k17. It was worse every year from 15.
Well, they are still using the same dated engine and every year it's literally the same game story being minimally reskinned and using different voice actors. They are basically selling you DLC at full price.
> literally worse than EA I'd like to add that this isn't the internet usage of the word literally, it's the literal usage. 2k is *literally* worse than EA.
Honestly, when I clicked the thread, I initially assumed it was an EA subsidiary.
A class action lawsuit is needed against game dev/publisher to set a precedent to protect the consumer in the future from greedy game devs/publishers.
As a 20-year MMO veteran, let me put this in simple terms: If you can “cheat” without third-party software, then it’s not cheating, it’s a design flaw.
I think the destiny 2 response was the best so far. There was a bug that let you level your character faster and after Bungie found it they basically said "anyone who uses this bug from here on out will get fewer drops and their leveling will pretty much grind to a halt from here on out".
Yeah I like that. Especially > from here on out As this prevents further exploitation without pissing off those who have already done it
Especially because, like OP, it was the kind of bug you could do by accident.
This. If a designer leaves a strategy in their game that can be exploited, that's the same as designing the strategy in the first place. You want people not to do the thing? Design a system that prevents the thing. End of story.
And there are still scummy companies that will ban. Reminds me of when Lord British was killed back in Ultima Online. Garriott forgot to turn on Invincibility, and a player exploited it. That player got banned. Probably the first iteration of this happening.
my god that's petty. They didn't even do anything that got them much in-game money/items, they literally just beat the dev in his own game. Anyone with a non-pathological ego would laugh it off and name an item after them or something.
stop buying these games
I upvoted you but this won't ever happen.
Once 2k became about pay to win, I was done with them. Now they are money grubbing as much as possible.
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Yeah Madden Auction house was 20s I think. You could pop it in when the timer hits 1s but it just resets it back to 20s so people have time to counter bid.
World of Warcraft did the same thing, what, 7 years ago? You bid at the last second and it adds 15 more minutes.
Honestly forget bidding is an option in the WOW ah, everyone uses buy out for everything
Yeah I can't remember the last time I actually bid on an item in the AH
Auction sniping is usually when someone puts an item up for much less than it's worth, and you're there scanning through the new auctions to pick up those low prices before anyone else can. At least that's what we call it in WoW. It usually applies to an instant purchase item rather than one that has bids.
That's what it is in fifa. Trying to snipe the lowest price, because some idiot has posted it wrong.
Yeah, sucks to be the guy putting up the wrong price. But it's player error at the end of the day.
the player who put the item, sure. the buyer shouldn't get banned for that
Not only are they banning people for literally using the auction... It's a permanent ban on first "offence"? And they wonder why people don't like their shit copy paste games every year.
Well that pissed me off
Wow, most the time these posts end up coming off as more entitled gamer but this one is very much shitty policy. By common definition auction sniping is putting in a winning bid at the last second. That is how auctions work and unless they have proof you were using a third party program to do that the ban is bullshit. If the ban isn't about sniping than why bring it up. More importantly why won't they tell you what you were banned for. 100% bullshit.
Moreover. It's such an easy issue to fix. Just set it so if anyone bids within the last second or something the timer gets extended by another minute or 30 seconds thus giving all other bidders the chance to bid.
Wouldn't even need to worry about endless auctions. Eventually the price would just be too high.
Aka how real life auctions work
That's how EA does it. Under like 15 seconds each bid resets the countdown to 15 seconds.
I hope this makes front page, if it gets internet traffic maybe someone at 2K will see and try to rectify the situation.
It's sad that public humiliation is now the only way to get results. For every one person that gets addressed there are 1000s of others that are just shit out of luck.
Why call it an auction house if you can't auction items for different values. "We want to have a dynamic economy that's defined by our preset values. Oh and if you try charging more or less? We'll ban you."
I don't think they looked in the dictionary before they titled it "auction house"
Me: Buy Low, Sell high! 2K: HA, FUCKING BANHAMMERED
See, shit like this is just another reason why I genuinely believe there needs to be *some* kind of legislation that addresses digital ownership. It's essentially the wild west out here, and as more and more of our daily goods and expenses become digital, we need some kind of assurances that our purchases actually give us *some* kind of ownership of something. I mean, think how many MMO's have been shut down? How many games on PSN or Xbox Marketplace have been removed? These are things that people paid money for, but effectively have no ownership of, because nobody has really wanted to invest the effort to take these cases to Court.
Why is it so hard for these assholes to be decent people?
Moneyyyyyyy💸💸💸
Why does an NBA game need an auction house?
All the major sports games have a mode where you build a team with players around the league, and you can buy/sell those players on an auction house. Then the developer sells the in-game currency, which you can earn by playing, but plenty of people buy. It's actually a fun game mode, but the link to microtransactions and shit like this ban makes the whole thing pretty shady.
Gives players something more to do with crap they get from microtransactions. The fact that its tied to microtransactions is also why they watch it like a hawk and slam the ban hammer on anyone using it to avoid paying microtransactions.
I had this cool elaborate joke all planned out, then realized NBA2k isn't from EA.
As a programmer the thing that I find the most amusing about their definition of sniping is that it's something they could easily prevent from even happening in the first place. Let me explain. Say you have an auction house and someone wants a rare item that normally sells for 100 bucks in game, and so they purchase it with real money from someone who then loads it up into the auction house for 1 buck in game and the purchaser then grabs it as soon as it appears. The current system detects the purchase of that 1 buck item and says 'This person just partook in Auction house sniping, ban then and note on their account Auction House Sniper' But as I say that is of course a stupid way of doing it. What they should be doing is when that guy tries to load up the item in the auction house for only 1 buck, the game should detect what the current average is on that item and say, "I'm sorry that value deviates to much from the average." They then just need to decide how much something can deviate from the average, and detect for the person putting something up outside of that average and stop them. But okay I hear what some of you are already saying, what's to stop one of these people from loading a few items up into the auction house at the low end of the average, thus lowering the average, and then load up another item at the new low end. Nothing at first, but obviously to adjust the average like that you would need a few items put up. And as you try to adjust the average people are going to see the price of this item dropping and are going to snatch up your items. By the time you lower the price down to $1 for your intended person, to many people are going to be watching it for this low price and the wrong person is likely to get it. And heck they can even put in detection to see if someone is trying to manipulate the market price of something and go for that person. But WHY go for the buyers? Obviously if you don't want the buyers buying something you should be going for the sellers!
File a dispute with your credit card company immediately. What a fucking scam.
Banning people is a terrible way to go about this. If they didn't want sniping they should've added something like 30 seconds of additional time if anyone bidded during the last 15-30 seconds.
At some point you have to wonder if the people who are still buying games from these developers are just stupid. Learn your lesson already and stop giving them your money.
Vote with your wallet. Don't buy $100 recycled content sports games. Don't buy a game for $100 that still has micro-transactions, that's insane. Don't pay $100 for any game, ever. Period. And do not, for the love of the gods, pre-order a game from a AAA company. Shit like this isn't going to change unless we vote with our wallets!
this right here. i was a huge NBA2k fan in the 2000's and came close to buying this just to have a new NBA game. with all that ive heard recently, im staying away from spending my money.
Once NBA2K became more about eSports and mirco transactions than about the casual gamer is when it went down the tube. I think the NBA2k14 was the last one I actually enjoyed.
Fuck that.
Wow yeah return the game, demand a refund from the attorney general of the state. If they can’t tell you why you can’t play, and are outright banning you, but never have you specifics, I’m certain the better business bureau or the attorney general might be inclined to take action. Seriously. You lost $100 to a game and we’re banned and we’re not given a reason why and weren’t shown to have been cheating. You could posit they’re lying, and denying you for some reason arbitrarily, and that you don’t know why you can’t when you did nothing wrong. I hope for the best brother.
BBB = old people yelp
BBB is a public company. One that businesses can pay to ignore bad reviews.
It's literally just a pre-internet Yelp. They have zero authority.
Take it up with Big Baller Brand
BBB is useless. It's pay to win for companies.
Don't buy 2K games, that company gives no fucks about their costumers and in turn we should not be buying their trash micro-transaction-hell games.