Funcom Banning Guild Leaders who manually collected too much gold from members

[Hades-LotD]

http://forums.ageofconan.com/showpos...95&postcount=1

In case they delete it:

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I'm hearing from other leaders I know that they have been banned, and apparently all they did was collect and store gold that their members turned into them to use their city. This has me especially worried because we've been doing the same thing to collect money from our members.

Unless you turn on the ability for us to tax the membership, then manual collection or email collection are going to result in a few guild leaders having a lot of gold. Heck, no one I know even knows how to turn on the guild tax system (if its even in).

Please clarify if you intend to ban guild leaders for having large amounts of money, even though it came from collections from their membership.

Upon further review, Funcom has wiped 19Gold off of our chapter leaders account. That gold was pooled from 100 members playing around the clock the first week of release along with previous donations. Please correct your policy decisions, or just get rid of guilds in game if we're going to be penalized like this.
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Guildmaster
Lords of the Dead
www.lotd.org
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Greetings,

All account related questions must be taken up with customer support as we cannot address any of those issues in the public. You can reach customer support at support@ageofconan.com

Thank you,
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Glen 'Famine' Swan
Community Manager (US) - Age of Conan
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Ok guild banks just got patched in yesterday. By default the game only lets the 2 highest ranks even access the bank. So large guilds have to manually round up all the member donations, and then get it deposited.

So Funcom in all their wisdom has suspended or banned anyone with over 10 gold, and is investigating each case individually I suppose.

Is it right to punish guilds for trying to compensate for them launching with a lack of tools we need to coordinate and pool resources to build our cities? Is it right to ban entire leadership structures while they take their time to "look into it"?

Apparently this has had a large impact on a lot of large and organized guilds, because naturally their leaders would be walking around with a lot of gold on hand as they collect from their membership.

This has nothing to do with exploiting, but simply doing manual coordination and collection of resources for larger guilds. Its a shame Funcom is laying waste to guilds that were just trying to be organized.

We lost 19 gold off of one of our leaders last night. We're in better shape than a lot of other guilds I know.

[KILLERCOD]

THAT is not right...Great way to gank a MMO launch though. I understand the problems and controversy with gold farmers...but damn!

[Hades-LotD]

We're doing an inventory of guilds we know that got nailed for efficient coordination. They got sinister, PFB, and others. We're all in our 60's so we make a fair amount of money each day.

http://www.afraidyet.net/forums/showthread.php?t=44556

bonedancer-sin
Last night my account was suspended in Age of Conan along with hundreads of others acrosss the realms. Like the others I received an email saying that it is suspended pending an investigation. A review of their tech support or general forums (which are now constantly being 'managed') you can quickly see they went after ANYONE who spent large sums of money in the last week. Sadly, that just happens to be every Architect/GM in the game that has been in the Arms race of city building. I take on average 2-5 gold from each member, each day and that number has been getting bigger each day as people level. Two days ago my daily high collection was in the teens and I suspect as people learn quests = fat cash it would have kept climbing. However, in the mean time I'm flagged as a gold farmer or some type of cash manipulator and have to wait for them to answer me petition requests. I've filed 3, all have been ignored save a ticket number auto response. In todays day of MMO expecations this is really amature bull****.

I always say there is nothing new under the sun this is no exception. Many moons ago in a game called UO there arose a problem between the players and the development team of the game. The short version of the story is players started doing things with their game that they didnt expect the GM's started banning or removing players for doing these things. Further as the game developers wanted to protect their reputation they started banning players from forums, deleting threads, and numerous other graconian steps to put their sheep back in line.

In the vacume of customer service spawned Dr Twister. This guy basically single handidly blasted the Ultima Online development community repeatedly until they actually started doing REAL customer support, you know like answering inquires, addressing complaints, and meeting expectations. He did such a good job at riding roughshod on them that the company created a new type of position called 'Community Manager'. Later Dr Twister changed his name and was hired by DAOC and did a magnificent job for that game doing the best he could. Often times the answer is 'I just dont know but I'll keep asking' but frankly thats all it really takes to make any of us happy... someone to at least act like they care.

Putting on my Mr Twister hat for a moment allow me to give you my spin on whats going on. Funcom has targetted people who are outpacing their plan for the games release. Specifically, this is about their endgame not being finished (i.e. city building, city warfare). Rank II buildings dont work and I doubt tey will be ready in the next week. Our keep (which is about 60% complete) has gigantic ****ing holes you can walk through the walls, a gate that is transparant... ya thats right you can walk through it and not one of the buildings does anything useful for anyone; no banker, no aura talents...nothing. Finally, if you need more proof click on any Rank I Keep and click 'use' then read the filler latin text commenly associated with development platforms and text boxes that have not been coded yet ie. 'lorem ipsum...' So since the players are moving to fast and since they cant react quickly enough their recourse is to slow the growth and the best way to do that is target anyone and everyone with the players and money necessary to grow.

This game is fun, I was prepared for the bugs, I was prepared for slow responses, I wasnt prepared for an indiscriminate reaction to players that really are playing by the rules but just doing so faster than the developers wanted.


Bone Dancer

[Sensational]

Sounds like Jodou will be having Tabula Rasa flashbacks =P

[h4ngedm4n]

Wow... 2-5 gold each day from members! 19 gold gone from a member! It is terrible that Funcom is banning players for being organized and pooling their resources, thus outpacing their expected progression. Did they really not expect the guild bank and trade function to be used for that purpose?

[Radek125]

Pretty much bullshit, they should have investigated before suspending anyone.

[RedQ]

Too hard to believe.

[Hagan]

It suprises me, it realy does... asside from a frew first day worries, feedback on the game has been very positive.

More worryingly, I would have thought someone should have spotted this during the BETA. As long as all the guild who've taken a hit complain in the correct place, they'll have to pull the finger out and sort it sharpish.

Unless they've done it to cover up another problem they're denying you access to by doing this (and yes, I know it sounds like a conspirecy theory... x-files reruns are on so I do apologise).

[Drevnar]

Rising Arms lost 16G off one of our leaders and the person we were pooling most of our money too (because he can build for our guild) got his account banned. It really sucks because otherwise our city would already be level 2.

Well, technically we already have the resources to reach level 2 but don't want to risk using resources and having them swiped.

[Sefus]

This is pretty ridiculous. I know most launches don't go smoothly but eh... usually a tech problem, not idiot GMs or whoever. Someone is an idiot!

In the mean time just use /guild bank add $$