OK, SO *THIS* IS THE LAST WORD ON HAMMERFALL [Author: wirehead]
Someone who was investigated by OSI and vindicated of wrong doing sent me the two letters he was sent. Sheds a bit of life on what they’re doing.
On December 16th your account was suspended due on confirmation of it being associated with one or more accounts of verified exploiters. On further review into the case, we have determined that the action related to the account in question had little to no bearing on the actual exploits or the results of the exploits. As such your account will be immediately reactivated.
As the nature of the exploits resulted in the termination of scores of accounts, I do hope that you can understand our position and why we were forced to suspend the account. Neither Origin Systems nor Electronic Arts have any desire to do business with those who continually break the Terms of Service and Rules of Conduct. The terminated accounts were removed from the service because of multiple infractions, and to ensure the integrity of the Ultima Online service, this was a necessary act.
I ask that you please be careful in any future dealings with suspect individuals or accounts. You are a constructive member of the UO community with no prior incidents, and I have to say that I am pleased to see that the account was cleared. However, please know that had any additional incidents turned up, this account likely would not have been reactivated.
Moving forward, your houses on the Chesapeake shard have been transferred to an OSI character. To regain ownership of the houses, please enter the game at your convenience and page a Game Master with each respective house owner to have it transferred back to you.
I apologize for any inconveniences caused by this, but am also glad that we have been able to resolve this matter. Should any problem arise with this, please let me know. It is now our desire that you be able to resume your UO activities as soon as possible.
Thank you for your time and patience,
(name of individual deleted to spare his mailbox)
Ultima Online Player Relations
Origin Systems, Inc.
And this letter, in response to inquiring after someone else who only logged on to refresh houses:
We are reviewing each case as it is requested. However please know that we are not terminating any accounts whatsoever without a cause. In each case that we are forced to close an account, there is very good reason to do so. If the account is clean, or on review it is found that there were no
problems with it, then by all means we reinstate them. Regarding the accounts you mention below, they also will be reviewed in depth again to make sure no mistakes were made.
As for the warning about associating with others, it is vital to
understand that if you are found to have access to someone’s account which is clearly violating the Terms of Service, you can be and most likely will be also held responsible. As a service, it is impossible to attempt to determine which individuals might be innocent and which might be guilty on an account that is in breach of the TOS. As such we must terminate those accounts in order to protect the service. Thusly it is highly recommended that you log in on your accounts only and not allow others to access your account.
I am glad that we were able to do this for you. We will continue the
review process for the other accounts as soon as possible. Thank you for your time,
(name of individual deleted to spare his mailbox)
Ultima Online Player Relations
Origin Systems, Inc.
And, the person who sent me these letters has this to say about the subject:
I should also point out to all the OSI haters that I sent this mail about noon on Sunday, and reveived a reply only an hour or two later. On a broader note, this whole episode sure has brought out the worst in human nature on both sides of the fence, as has been evident to anyone CoB discussions or on kTalk. Obviously some innocents were drawn into this, who knows how many when it’s all said and done. The fact that this fellow answered my letter on a Sunday tells me that OSI IS working, overtime no less, to get innocents back into the game. I’m not thrilled about the way OSI went about things, but it would seem that they are trying to make the game better due to a mess caused by a small group of players. I’m not a big fan of guilt by association. I can tell you from being on the receiving end that it’s not a pleasant experience. Somewhere between “GMs must witness an offense to take action against a player” and “OSI will mass ban many based on the actions of a few” is a desirable level of customer service and TOS enforcement. Hopefully OSI will find it one day soon.
Considering that UO2 is coming out soon, we’d hope so.