NCSoft sets the bar a little higher in douchebaggery.

I understand that a company, no matter what product they are involved in, wants to make money as its number one priority. Customers are nothing more than tools to that money, and I get that - I really do. But customers aren't animals, we don't belong in cages and on the plates of fat board members - well, some of us do.

I've said it before, I'm a nerd. I play video games, I enjoy video games, and it would be a difficult choice between a turkey sandwich and a video game I really enjoy. Come to think of it the sandwich would probably win on account of I haven't eaten turkey in over a year.

Now I'm hungry, but that can wait.

NCSoft is a company which has brought us some decent games in the past. They've also gotten quite a sour reputation by many of their former customers. A sub-par customer support setup mixed with a lack of active communication with the community has left many people feeling disconnected from the NCSoft world.

Companies like CCP (Eve Online) and Blizzard (World of Warcraft) really gave players a chance to feel that they were interacting and helping shape the game they loved. In the case of World of Warcraft this resulted in a really good game turning into a pile of shit and rotten baby food but Eve Online has managed to take players' concerns and turn them into features (or at least explain why the players are wrong). NCSoft chooses the path of total silence with their own official forums except in the form of official announcements about how awesome their Christmas event is (which is still going on, awesome).

But the event that did me in occured approximately two weeks ago. I'd been playing Aion since about the beginning of December. I had taken a break from Champions Online due to connectivity issues and my friend Dan had been playing Aion since it launched. I decided to give it a chance and we setup my account. I enjoyed the game, I got two characters into the mid-20s. Then one morning I woke up to be greeted by a message I'd never seen: You can't connect from this IP. I thought that's strange, I didn't do anything to deserve being banned from the game. I tried to check my account in their account page but I was greeted by a very large ACCESS DENIED screen when I tried to enter. I hadn't even logged into my account yet so I knew this wasn't aimed at my account but rather aimed at the fact that I have a Chinese IP address. I broke the EULA and asked Dan to check my account details and verify that I had not been banned for anything, my account was clean. We almost cancelled that moment, but we were enjoying the game and so we ended up discovering that a tunneling service such as Gamepath would allow me access to the game. We were enjoying it, so why quit? We continued to play.

NCSoft never posted anything about this change on the Aion website, nor did they post in their forums. What they'd done is blocked all foreign traffic to their regional games. If you live in North America or Australia you HAVE to play on the NA/AUS server. If you live in Europe you must play on the Europe server. China is the Chinese server, etc. But here's the hitch, I'm Canadian - I'm not Chinese. I don't speak Chinese, and I don't want to play the inferior Chinese client which is several patch cycles behind the North American client (which itself is behind the Korean client, but I don't speak Korean so I didn't really care).

Then I started to read about people having their accounts banned for cross-region playing. I decided to open a petition and discover if I was at risk of being banned. After all, I don't want to play a game if my account is going to get nuked in the next pass of massive bannings. I posted a petition on December 24th, as I knew my account would cycle on December 30th and I wanted an answer before I got charged a monthly fee. December 30th came and went and I didn't get a reply until January 4th.

On January 4th, NCSoft informed me that by playing from China I was, in fact, breaking the rules and that if I connected via proxy service I was at risk of having my account permanently banned. I read the EULA and found nothing about playing across realms, nor did I find any details on the IP ban on China. I also checked the rules section and found no mention of not being allowed to play across regions.

Well obviously I'm not going to play a game where the company could choose to ban me simply because of the region I play from. So when I got this response I cancelled my account (as soon as my friend, who could actually access the account section got online to do it for me), but NCSoft still has my subscription fee from 4 days ago. I submitted a petition about the status of my account six days before the account cycle went through, and it took them ten days to reply. Their website said the development team was taking a vacation but they also stated Customer Service would be up and running throughout the holidays. Still, I went 10 days without a response and was stuck in limbo over my account. In hindsight I should have cancelled the account before I got the response, but I never expected it would take ten days and I still wanted to play the game.

Now I have a petition in place for a refund for my $15, but the EULA states they don't give refunds for any reason whatsoever, so I'm not holding my breath.

I guarantee it'll be the last $15 NCSoft ever gets from me. It's unfortunate because Aion is a good game, but it's been ruined by a shit company. Don't support NCSoft.