Under the Banner

This is rather disturbing news. There are numerous reports on the forums tonight of players finding that their accounts have been suspended or banned. While it’s not unusual to come across a post where a player is publicly stating their innocence, what is very unusual in this case is the number of players reportedly involved.

A few players have reported logging in and being told their account has been suspended due to non payment. With the 24th of May being the first billing date, this clearly can’t be the case at this time.

I was playing lotro and got the message “You have been booted from the world”

When I tried to log back in, it claims my account is suspended due to non payment.

When players have contacted Turbine Support about this, they’re being told that they have been banned due to account sharing, macros, or purchasing gold. The email players have received seems to be the same for everyone.

Thank you for your inquiry. We have reviewed this account in detail. The account has been banned due to Terms of Service violations.

These violations include, but are not limited to, actions such as: Account Sharing (including Power Leveling services), Use of Unattended Combat Macros, and Involvement in the Purchasing or Sale of In-Game Currency.

These types of bans are permanent and not eligible for appeal. If you have additional questions or concerns, please respond via the below link.

Thank you,
The Turbine Customer Service Team

There’s a lot of speculation as to what’s going on right now. What I do know is that there are a lot of unhappy customers right now. Here are just a few of the threads that have appeared in the forums tonight:

Account Suspended…but still in free period.
Two of our own, Mistakenly banned
No Appeals for UNJUST bans?
Turbine is handing out unfounded bans
Getting banned in this game is ridiculous

Hopefully for everyone involved this gets resolved quickly.

[Update 1]
While dealing with server issues tonight, Patience had the following to say. Hopefully we’ll find out more tomorrow.

At 10:20PM, there’s not a thing I can do about it. They could try calling our billing department in case someone’s there, but I’m at home, as is most of Turbine right now. I was also out of the office from last Thursday afternoon until this afternoon so if there was a mass-banning of accounts for suspected TOS violations, I wasn’t informed. Sorry I don’t have more info! (Customer service and OCR are different departments under different umbrellas, so I can’t go look it up.)