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TL;DR: Without notice or inquiry, GGG banned several players, including me, for financial discrepancies — some from three or more years ago — many of which ultimately proved to be Steam’s fault. The bans were implemented mere hours before the launch of Betrayal (3.5), meaning GGG has been overwhelmed with other support requests and we have had to wait several days just to even begin the process of sorting out what had happened, and we continue to wait in silence for our accounts to be restored.
CRUCIAL TL;DR UPDATE: Chris has replied, explaining that as many as 200 accounts may have been incorrectly banned and will be immediately restored, pending further investigation. Thank you for your response to this situation! I can confirm my account is once again active.
[A note to moderators: While this is a post about bans, it is not a post litigating the reasons for anyone’s ban. It's a post about how GGG treats its players.]
I’ve been an avid Path of Exile player for over five years, relishing both the thoughtful complexity of the game and transparent reputation of the company. I honestly thought GGG could do no wrong. But what I and several other players have experienced this week has showed me not only that GGG is fallible, but that it is actually quite capable of greatly disrespecting its customers.
The bans
As many of you in the subreddit perhaps noticed, there have been a bunch of threads (at least 6 and counting) since the launch of Betrayal regarding players suddenly being banned for reasons they could not understand. I was one of those players. Betrayal went live at 2 PM for me here in the eastern U.S., so I got home from work early that Friday afternoon, patched, and launched the game — only to receive a message that I had been banned by an administrator.
The POE website informed me that I had been banned at 1:16:17 AM that morning (12/7/18), just over 12 hours before the 3.5 launch (when I was very much asleep). The reason stated on the Path of Exile website? “Banned due to issuing unauthorised Steam refund.”
Now, I have been a long-time supporter of POE, spending hundreds of dollars over my years of play, and never in that time had I ever asked for a refund. In fact, I’ve made arrangements with GGG in the past to gift even more support to my friends who play. I had no evidence of a Steam refund that I could see, let alone any evidence of suspicious behavior on my account. Plus, the last purchase I had made was for the new supporter packs several weeks prior, and I bought them through POE’s website/Xsolla, not Steam. I was very confused and very concerned.
I saw that several other players were trying to post about having identical experiences being banned on Reddit, but r/pathofexile has a rule prohibiting discussions about bans, so moderators were shutting down these threads. I think this rule exists for good reasons, but I was concerned to see so many posts by similarly gobsmacked players, so I reached out to the moderators, explained my own experience, and pleaded with them that it seemed like there was something seriously wrong. Thanks and kudos to u/MultiplicityPOE, who agreed to make an exception and allowed us to share our concerns and connect over what was happening to us.
My initial email to GGG had been met with an automated response (https://imgur.com/a/hijB0HG) indicating a wait of 3-7 days (with a warning not to create a new account in the meantime). I pinged Bex on Twitter about all these threads popping up and my own panicked concerns. She put me in touch with a specific GGG support person, who replied at 10:16 PM my time Friday night, telling me only, “This is not an error and the ban was applied to your account appropriately.” (https://imgur.com/a/jF8fAGk) This was not a helpful nor comforting answer.
I sent a support request to Steam asking if they could figure out what was happening on my account, then went to bed restless that I had been unceremoniously dumped by my favorite game after weeks of hype for its newest content.
My investigation
In my dayjob, I’m a journalist, and given I now had at least 3-7 days of not playing Path of Exile ahead of me, I went to work Saturday investigating what happened. Across the various Reddit threads, I identified 16 or so other players who had experienced the exact same “unauthorized Steam refund” ban (and quite a few more since then), all of whom learned of their ban just as they were sitting down to play Betrayal. I reached out to each of them and invited them to share with me some specific details about their own bans. Ultimately, 10 of them agreed to do so, for which I am most grateful.
Here is what I learned:
- All of us had been banned within the same 5-minute window, about 12 hours and 45 minutes before 3.5 went live.
- None of us had ever asked for a POE-related refund through Steam.
- Of the few of us who had ever requested a refund from GGG at all, those requests were not made through Steam.
- None of us saw any suspicious activity or restrictions on our Steam accounts.
Because none of us could make sense of our bans, this seemed like either a significant error on GGG’s part or even a potential security vulnerability. I sent GGG an email Sunday morning (my time) explaining what I had learned and also, with their permission, sharing the POE account names of those who had spoken with me in hopes GGG could conduct a swift investigation first thing Monday morning in New Zealand.
Late Sunday afternoon (my time), I heard back from the GGG support person I’d been in touch with two days prior (https://imgur.com/a/ptMJqqb), who disregarded the concerns I’d mentioned in my investigation but finally informed me of the specifics of my ban. I had an unauthorized refund on an Ascendant Supporter Pack, which I had purchased in — get this — November of 2015. (Note: As of this posting, that was the last time I heard from GGG.)
I dug back through my Steam transaction history, and sure enough, there it was: a $440 refund I had never asked for. Indeed, the refund had been issued by Steam within a day of when I placed the purchase, and upon reviewing my past statements, I confirmed that the charge never appeared on my credit card at all. (Given it was the holidays and I was doing a lot of other spending, I clearly never noticed the discrepancy.) But I definitely had intended to purchase that pack — one of the biggest single POE purchases I’ve ever made — and I was very happy with the MTXs, t-shirt, and signed concept art that came with it!
I couldn’t fathom why Steam had issued that refund, and I dreaded the thought that I might have inadvertently deprived GGG of money I owed it. I did notice in my email records that I had made a support request to Steam around the time of the refund, but because Steam has since abandoned its old separate Steam Support account system, I couldn’t access the ticket to see what I had asked about. (I knew it wasn’t for a refund though!)
Instead, I updated my new Steam support request, asking for specific details about that refund, and sent a desperate email back to GGG asking if there was a way I could compensate them for the money I’d apparently never spent. I also informed the other players I’d been in touch with — many of whom had not yet heard back even once from a real person at GGG — that they might want to dig back much farther on Steam to see if they could find similar discrepancies.
A Blast from the Past
Monday afternoon, around 1 PM my time, I finally received a message back from Steam support (https://imgur.com/a/vC90n4D). “Back in 2015 we accidentally and improperly refunded your Ascendant Pack,” the message read. “This was an error in our fraud protection system.” Steam apologized and promised to reach out to GGG “to explain that the mistake was on our part.”
I shared this news with the other affected players — some of whom still had not heard back from GGG other than an automated message — and encouraged them to contact Steam if they hadn’t done so already. Even if they didn’t yet know the specifics of what prompted GGG’s ban, they could at least flag that they’d been banned from POE and request Steam’s assistance in identifying the problem and hopefully rectifying it.
Sure enough, many of the other players also found weird random things in their Steam accounts that they were not aware of. Theirs, like mine, were from three or four years ago. Soon, many of them would likewise confirm that Steam was also responsible for the errors on their account. Some, like me, had been given erroneous refunds because of Steam’s “fraud protection system,” while others had received refunds for the wrong game, and others had issues with gift cards being improperly applied.
Steam was not responsible in all cases, and some players are still trying to talk to their banks and credit card companies to find explanations for their chargebacks. If GGG allows it, they may, in the end, have to pay out of their own pocket to reconcile their accounts, even if they were not personally responsible for the refunds and chargebacks they face. But in most of the cases, it seemed, we players had done nothing wrong — certainly nothing intentionally nefarious — but we were being punished for Steam’s mistakes and other complications beyond our control.
Now, I want to be clear that I respect GGG’s imperative to protect its financial assets. This post is not to dispute its fundamental rationale for taking action against players with financial discrepancies. Indeed, before this all went down, I was rather unfamiliar with the concept of chargebacks, and I quickly came to appreciate how damaging they can be to a company and its financial reputation. But for reasons I describe in more detail below, GGG’s decision to impose these automatic bans hurt their player base and arguably were not in their business interests.
Since Steam has since gone to bat for us, but the process has remained very slow. One player informed that he did have his account restored, but he remains the exception. When I pointed out to my Steam support contact on Tuesday that 24 hours had passed since they verified that they were at fault, he acknowledged that he too was also struggling to establish communication with GGG (https://imgur.com/a/DncKcKC and https://imgur.com/a/bkkA0Tk). This is despite the fact that I’d immediately contacted the support person I’d been in touch with at GGG to share Steam’s admission and let them know they should expect to hear from Steam regarding my account.
I’d originally planned to wait until my account was restored before posting this, but seeing as how we’re approaching nearly a full week of lost game play and so many other players are exasperated, I’m pulling the trigger now in hopes it can do some good. Even with Steam’s intervention on my behalf, I haven’t heard from GGG in five days, so I feel it necessary to really shine a light on what’s been happening.
I have no way of knowing just how many players were actually caught in this sweep, how many of those bans also proved to be Steam’s fault, or how many of those players will ultimately prevail in restoring access to their POE accounts. Still, these bans speak to systemic problems at GGG in terms of customer service and player respect that need to be addressed.
So many questions
I’m still super eager to start playing Betrayal (Winter Orb CwC Arctic Breath Hierophant is my first plan), but I’m also incredibly soured by GGG’s handling of this entire situation. GGG Support informed me in its last email to me Sunday that “this matter was thoroughly investigated before this ban was applied.” Considering I was punished for something I was not responsible for and had never been contacted about, that was clearly not the case.
Given these bans were implemented all in one wave, I’m left to assume that GGG must have conducted some sort of audit of its finances, identified the discrepancies on our various accounts, and banned us en masse. I certainly understand GGG’s need to be paid what it’s owed, but I have many questions about the decisions it has made when identifying these discrepancies and about its general practices when it comes to interacting with its customers.
Let’s start here, I guess:
If the issue was with Steam-related refunds or chargebacks, why was contacting Steam not part of the investigation?
I’m no businessman, but if my company were partnering with a third-party vendor and we had money missing from that vendor, I’d try to figure out what was going on with that vendor. My interactions with Steam suggest that GGG’s refund concerns were not on their radar at all; in fact, my Steam support contact expressed surprise to learn that I had been banned in 2018 for something on my account from 2015. So many of us found discrepancies that were Steam’s fault, and I have to imagine that if GGG had attempted to work these issues out with Steam directly, they might have been resolved without us players even being aware of it — let alone being deprived of playing at the launch of a league.
What kind of investigation doesn’t include contacting the player?
Because of how little information GGG provided, there was certainly a point when I worried that I was somehow responsible for stealing money from GGG. What a crappy way to feel about a company I adore! How differently would things have played out if GGG had sent me an email simply asking me about the discrepancy? I could have easily resolved this issue with Steam without being banned from the game, and likewise other players could have taken steps with their other financial institutions to get to the bottom of the refunds and chargebacks.
Moreover, this lack of outreach speaks to GGG’s unwillingness to give players the benefit of the doubt: Did GGG think so little of us that they automatically concluded we were thieves? We had all spent far more on POE over the years than what we had received in these refunds, so it shouldn’t be so unreasonable to think that we’d be loyal enough to take the steps necessary to get our accounts in order — even if we were personally to blame instead of Steam. Had that contact happened, I never would have had to feel like I was guilty of something I never did. Likewise, a suspension (as opposed to an outright ban) could have softened the blow and better motivated players to take action, but honestly that still strikes me as an overwrought reaction.
It’s one thing for your character to RIP to a lag spike playing hardcore, because that’s the risk you take. It’s quite another for your account to RIP in real life due to someone else’s error.
Why are players not provided with any notification that they were banned?
This question similarly speaks to a disappointing lack of communication on GGG’s part. I had to find out about my ban by attempting to log in to play the game, as did many others. The only information I could access about my ban was a four-word description — “issuing unauthorised Steam refund” — with no specifics about what happened. When I first heard from a real person at GGG, they still provided no specific information about the details of my ban. It was more than 48 hours after my original support request that I first learned exactly what I was being punished for, and it has been far longer for others. Even then, GGG made no attempt to assist me in addressing the issue. This made me feel totally helpless and disrespected as a customer.
Why is there no established process for how to appeal bans?
At no point in the process did GGG ever communicate to us players any information about what process they follow to review these bans. It was almost as if the ban meant the relationship was over before we could even begin a conversation about what was happening. Before Steam confirmed that they were responsible for the mistake on my account, I had sent an email to GGG begging to let me pay the money it appeared I owed. But I still wasn’t sure if such a process actually existed! The only clue that there was a way out of a ban was the initial automated message’s warning that we were “not permitted to create a new Path of Exile account until this matter has been resolved.”
If GGG has an internal procedure for review and restitution, they apparently do not communicate it to players. The current practice appears to be: “Ban first, ask no questions later.” I completely understand that there may be bans for which GGG would want to have a no-exceptions policy (such as for hacking/cheating or real-money trading), but it seems like quite a bad business strategy to not provide loyal customers with any opportunity to rectify financial discrepancies.
Why were we allowed to continue making purchases if our accounts were flagged for bans?
Though I was no longer playing the Delve league, I had bought the new Betrayal support packs and was ready to try out my new MTXs in the new league. Being banned with no notice just a few weeks after that purchase (over a refund from three years ago) left me feeling like GGG was the one stealing from me.
This speaks again to my first question about the relationship between GGG and Steam, as I am very confused about how long it took GGG to realize it had not received the payment for my 2015 Ascendant Pack purchase. Surely it had to have been at least by the end of that fiscal year, which was at least two years (and many more leagues and support packs) ago. If that refund was grounds for banning my account, I would think that would call into question the sincerity of any transactions GGG accepted from me after my account was flagged — to the tune of hundreds of dollars.
Why was the day of a launch selected to implement the bans?
GGG support informed me during one of my inquiries over the weekend that they were handling “thousands” of support requests, so I really wanted to be sympathetic to how slowly they were responding to concerns. Certainly, my circumstances were not directly caused by the specific individuals trying to assist me, and I appreciate the hard work they all do. Nevertheless, it’s hard to be sympathetic to GGG writ large — especially days of silence later — because the timing couldn’t have been worse. Surely GGG could anticipate that banned users would seek review and appeal of our bans immediately (whether they have such a process or not!).
By implementing the bans just 12 hours before the patch went live, GGG set up a situation where it would be the least equipped to offer the necessary support. Not only was it a weekend, but the game was set to hit gameplay records, ensuring support staff would be spread incredibly thin. (POE did break those records, so congrats by the way!) This also resulted in these unwarranted bans hitting us players at the most punishing moment possible. For competitive players and streamers, this may have been particularly detrimental, possibly even resulting in lost income.
User u/Biscosmademedoit is one of the other players who has been vocal about his ban this week. He shared yesterday that Chris had emailed him to tell him that there were “1400 people waiting for various questions” and that he was even contemplating hiring more staff to accommodate the load. One is left to wonder just how many of those requests were related to bans from this sweep.
Had we been contacted in the weeks prior — or, you know, years ago when these refunds and chargebacks actually transpired — we could have resolved these issues with our accounts when support staff were more available to assist us. How genuinely sad it would be if GGG ended up losing money hiring supplemental support staff to handle the perfect storm it had created for itself by caring more about money issues than the customer experience in the first place.
Final Thoughts
I’ve been following the new content vicariously through Reddit and Twitch and it all looks as engaging and impressive as ever. But as much as I might eventually enjoy it, that doesn’t mean my relationship with GGG will automatically heal. Whereas in the past I wouldn’t think twice about immediately buying a support pack, I’m not so sure how quick I’ll be to open my wallet as new supporter packs come around. I was one of an untold number of players who have been deprived of nearly a week of prime league playtime (and who knows how much longer) for something that wasn’t our fault.
It’s also not clear that GGG will be offering players any compensation for this undue punishment. If any other company treated customers this way, they would try to make amends. Just last month, Amazon gave me a $10 credit after a package was delayed by three days without notice. It’s not much, but it’s something, and made me feel like they valued me as a customer. All I’m saying is: A couple Fairgraves Mystery Boxes costs you nothing, GGG, and is frankly the least you can do after this debacle.
I know that account issues and ban issues constitute the one area of GGG’s business where it tends not to be so transparent, and I don’t necessarily fault them for that. I likewise don’t expect any specific responses to the questions I’ve posed here. I do, however, hope GGG seriously considers reevaluating some of the mechanisms by which it interacts with customers when issues come up. I still have great admiration for POE and I will still encourage others to play it. But I also want to be able to guarantee they’ll have a good experience as a consumer, and I don’t feel like I can provide such assurances anymore.
A banned player spends no money, and this entire process has painted a picture of a company that isn’t committed to retaining players — not even longtime players who have invested hundreds of dollars into the game. That can’t be a decision that is ultimately good for its business. Loyalty needs to be a two-way street, or it’s meaningless. (If President Trump can be credited for teaching the world anything, it’s that.)
GGG has given me every reason over the years to expect better from them, and frankly, we deserve better.
UPDATE: Per a request in the comments, I've added screenshots of the communications I received from GGG and Steam. I've blacked out support people's names because I don't want them to be dumped on.
UPDATE: Shortly after I posted this, I did hear back from Steam one more time (https://imgur.com/a/6fZA1yK). They have been updating GGG daily but are still waiting to hear back.
CRUCIAL UPDATE: Chris has replied, explaining that as many as 200 accounts may have been incorrectly banned and will be immediately restored, pending further investigation. Thank you for your response to this situation!
Upon seeing reports from other players that they have been unbanned, I can confirm that my account has been unbanned as well.
On Friday November 7 (NZT), we discovered a lot of fraud related to Steam transactions in Path of Exile. People were purchasing supporter packs on Steam and then performing chargebacks to get the money back. Unfortunately, we did not have a system in place to respond to Steam chargebacks so the accounts were not being banned like they normally should be. The users then onsold these accounts with supporter packs for much less than the cost of the supporter packs.
In response for this, we ran a query to find all the cases where Steam transactions had been reversed, and then banned all of those accounts. This prevents fraud because the accounts are no longer able to resold.
Unfortunately, the implementation of this process did not distinguish between chargebacks and refunds. This means that we banned some users who had performed legitimate Steam refunds on purchases. Around 200 users wrote in saying this was the case for them.
This problem was compounded by the fact that it happened to be close to the recent launch, which mean that our support department was then very slow to reply due to a significant backlog of customer support tickets. It also didn't help that chargeback emails are deprioritised as policy because they are almost always fraud. As management, we thought that this issue was a chargeback/fraud issue and okayed the prioritisation of regular customer support issues over dealing with the assumed fraudsters.
We will immediately unban all accounts that were affected, and will then go through them on a case-by-case basis to determine which are actually fraud and which are regular users. This is something we should have done from the start. Also going forward, we will have correctly implemented the Steam API to process refunds as refunds (so the purchases are cleanly removed) and to process chargebacks as fraud (which results in an account ban until the chargeback is reversed, as per our regular policy with chargebacks).
We are extremely sorry that some legitimate users were caught up in this. It is very unfair that you missed out on the Betrayal launch and we profusely apologise for the inconvenience caused. It is unacceptable that we took a week to realise there was a problem and to fix it. You can and should expect better from us and we will make sure to more carefully consider the impact of mass bans in the future when trying to stop fraud.