Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures Interview

Ten Ton Hammer questions FunCom's senior customer service & QA manager Mathis about a spate of recent player bans.
Ten Ton Hammer: Recently several accounts have been banned due to suspicious activity. Can you elaborate on this as to why these accounts were banned?

Mathis: We can't go into details on exactly what was done by the offenders but as we have said in public, some members of the community found a weakness in the game; an exploit that they decided to abuse to gain extra money in the game. It wasn't directly a money exploit, but by using the exploit itself they got access to more money. Our experience tells us that we need to be pro-active and react when serious issues like this arise. Most people don't like that there are possibilities for cheating in any game, and therefore we have zero tolerance for exploits. We don't want to sit on the fence and watch a small group of players ruin the game experience for the rest of the community.

The downside with it all is that sometimes other people get dragged into it. If we see some suspicious behavior we might have to close accounts temporarily for investigation. It's a way to do damage control to make sure things don't get out of hand until we have control over the situation.

This is a somewhat touchy topic as we can't reveal too many details about how we do this - that would give away our procedures and help people get away with it next time they find an exploit. No matter how much we work to cover everything, sooner or later there will be new exploits born in Hyboria. That's just the way MMOs work. However, our goal is to minimize the damage, and obviously do our best to ensure that it won't happen again.
Spotted on Blue's News.