tl;dr This is a PSA about Nexon’s lack of professionalism towards Player Support and to show that anyone can be unfairly punished without recourse. This is NOT a ban appeal but a message towards the community to express how nonsensical Nexon is treating loyal customers.

A guildmate of mine saw the spam from gold sellers and was confused about the random numbers, letters, and symbols in the messages. Out of curiosity, he sent a whisper to the guild leader “Polly” containing an uncensored version of their website.

In under 30 seconds, he promptly got banned for 32 years.

Him getting banned for this isn't the biggest problem. The real issue lies in the abysmal customer support and complete lack of communication from GMs or any Nexon employees responsible for overseeing this game.

He has put in two tickets about this incident. After nearly a week, their response to the first ticket is that they have done "intensive investigation" to arrive at their decision. Upon said investigation, they found "evidence of illegal advertisement spamming" on his account.

They then said that after identifying his actions, they made the decision to place the sanction on his account, and that the decision will be final. He got banned in less than a minute after sending the whispers. It seems to me that they didn't investigate at all, and that it was just an auto-banning system.

In response to the second ticket, they responded that his account was "thoroughly investigated by multiple GMs" and that his account will stay banned.

It's painfully clear that a single human hasn't actually looked at chat logs or the screenshot above that was provided to them.

Upon further inspection, it seems like my guildmate wasn’t even the first person hit by the automated banning system nor does this even seem like an isolated incident. Historically there have been at least 3 cases of false bans by this system, how many more are there unaccounted for?

This event highlights a greater issue with Nexon and the way they are handling their community.

Inconsistent UGC citations, players names being changed with no warning or communication, the lack of consistency with which these rules are applied, these are issues that can’t be ignored.

There is no standard. There is no clarity here for players; nothing to use as a guideline. I feel like we need to constantly be walking on eggshells because we have no real idea of what is going to get us citations or get our accounts permanently banned.

In a recent blog post, they said that their policy is to be transparent with the community, but I am honestly not seeing that right now. These issues are insane and potentially affecting a huge amount of players.

Nexon needs to be held accountable for these things and the community needs to band together and make their displeasure very apparent for them to actually do anything about it before it gets out of hand.

We have also created a forum post on the Official MapleStory2 forums here: http://forums.maplestory2.nexon.net/discussion/41778/nexon-s-player-support-system-is-broken?new=1

If you or anyone you know has had a similar incident happen to them, please share your story so we can continue to bring awareness of Nexon’s shortcomings.

We want to see this game succeed but punishing loyal players who have no ill intent is not the way to do it.

Update:

I honestly did not expect this thread to get as big as it did but I want to thank everyone for their support and sharing their own experiences. My guildmate was contacted by Supervisor GM Cheezpuff and was thankfully unbanned but I want to reiterate that I did not intend for this to become a ban appeal thread.

The goal was and still is to raise awareness of the way Nexon's Customer Service team treats their constituents and hopefully have them re-evaluate the way they give support. Two GMs stated that his ban was final and it took a huge public outcry before a Supervisor stepped in and took a look at the ticket personally but how many other false positives has there been with the automated banning system? How many other people have been unjustly punished for mistakes or for no reason? That is what I want this post to highlight and I sincerely hope Nexon continues to improve like they have shown with other community criticisms such as Fair Fight, PvP, and Dungeon Limits. I still encourage everyone who has a bad experience with the support system to share their story so the community can know the full scope of situation.

My personal message to Nexon, Jungsoo Lee, and GM Cheezpuff, I love MapleStory 2 and I love Nexon for bringing this game over to the West. My friends, my guild, and other peers that I have met in game have had an insane amount of fun that we haven't experienced since we were children playing MapleStory 1 and we really want to support this game to the best of our ability.

Please keep striving to be the best and support us, the players, and we will do all we can to support you in turn.