This Friday evening and most of Saturday NCSoft’s GM teams have been banning massive amounts of accounts that were promoting Kinah selling or other services that broke the game’s Terms and Conditions. Gold spamming in game has reduced severely, but some players have been affected by the banhammer as well and we are waiting to see to what extent has this affected the legitimate players out there. What is also noticeable is that queues on all servers are almost non existant. Whether this is something related to removing bots and goldspammers from the game or has the initial rush finally slowed down remains to be seen. I seriously doubt that it was the bots/goldspammers alone though, because that would mean that 10-20% of the game’s population were gold sellers (that’s how big the queues were). There are also reports that players that were in contact with gold sellers have also been banned and that you wil not be able to connect to the game if you are using a proxy service.

A great image displaying GMs at work has been posted @ Aionic Thoughts and you can read their post about the issue as well here.

Prior to the massive banning 10 NA servers have had their character creation temporarily disabled. The official news is here and the servers are:

[Oceanic] Nezekan
[East] Marchutan
[West] Ariel
[East] Israphel
[East] Lumiel
[West] Siel
[East] Zikel
[East] Azphel
[East] Triniel
[West] Vaizel

You must have noticed that today both NA and EU servers were down. During this maintenance some tweaks and updates have been applied.

If you are interested in the latest Patch Notes continue reading

One of the major Aion problems are gold spammers. A small feature that can help you in cleaning your chat channels is Block User. All you need to do is to right-click on a user’s name and choose to block that user. Using Block User will also helps Aion Game Masters to identify spammers much more quickly.

While Executive Producer Lance Stites took time to address some of the most prominent issues raised in the Aion community last week, we want to specifically address another issue that is a top priority for the team here at NCsoft: in-game real money trading (RMT) advertisement, sometimes referred to as “gold spamming.” These activities are something we’re actively combating right now. They are also something you can help us with, and something that we are committed to addressing continually in the future.

We currently have Game Masters monitoring all our servers. They track chat channels closely and have been banning thousands of spammers every day. This form of active monitoring is a part of a much larger network of tools and sensors that we’re currently utilizing to help create a better game experience for the Aion community across the board.

If you’re experiencing chat spam, there is a way for you to address this immediately on your own and help us create a better gameplay experience for everyone. You can use the Block User feature. All you need to do is to right-click on a user’s name and choose to block that user. While this doesn’t eliminate the problem, it is one small step you can actively make to improve your game experience. Using Block User also helps us identify spammers much more quickly.

We are considering a number of methods to address this chat spam that have been implemented in previous games, as well exploring new technologies and what they may have to offer to improve your game experience. One upcoming feature for Aion will be an improved chat filter to help reduce the overall chat spam. This filter, along with new tracking and monitoring methods, is the first of many steps that we’ll be taking to help resolve the issue of gold spamming.

We appreciate all the feedback and ideas you have been giving us so far. We will continue to scour the communities out there for other ideas as we go. We absolutely recognize how important this is to you and a good game experience in Aion, and we reiterate that we are currently addressing it. Thank you for your patience and for all of your input.

[Source]