AION 2 bans 12,586 accounts for botting, gold farming and RMT

AION 2 just swung the ban hammer at 12,586 accounts. The restrictions landed on October 23 at 17:00 PDT, or October 24 at 02:00 CEST, according to a notice posted on Steam.

The team says the accounts broke the game's Operation Policy. The listed reasons are gold farming and bot operations, use of unauthorized programs, and real-money trading.

In practice, that covers macros, bots and other unauthorized software, plus organized play patterns that look like gold farming or RMT. Abnormal trading patterns that disrupt the in-game economy were also targeted.

If you're the type who grinds for hours on end, you can relax. The notice says restrictions only happen after review, and that "Normal play, including long grinding sessions, is not affected."

There's a second, separate group of affected players. A small number of accounts were temporarily locked as a precaution after the team detected access from a device or connection that looked like a security risk, such as a possible account compromise.

Those locks aren't punishments. The team says "A security lock is not a penalty: it protects your account and your items until the situation can be verified." If that's you, the fix is to contact Customer Support to get back in.

The full rules are laid out in the AION 2 Operation Policy on the plaync site, which includes the sanctions table these bans were drawn from.