@BlueRadley I agree, my friend got banned recent and he got a 817 for going AFK in a urgent mission but he has a kid to take care of so he thinks someone may have reported him for leeching for checking on his kid.

Yeah, I've read through the TOS multiple times over the last couple weeks, trying to find something I might have done that's against the rules. Their policy on the whole AFK/Leaving early during quests is broad. They pretty much don't care if it's a legitimate disconnect or any other reasons, it's against the TOS. So if someone reported him, that's probably what triggered it.

On the bright-side (for your friend), I've seen people say that an 817 isn't as serious as an 816, so it might be temporary.

@BlueRadley I don't know if they're going after AFKers as much as scooping up hackers and RMT accounts that show fraud transactions and chargebacks.

Yeah, I've crashed a couple times during EQ's and nothing like that happened to me, so I figure that's more of a repeat-offense type of thing. But then again, after this whole ordeal, things seem to be making less and less sense, so who knows? lol

@whatsanemailagain said in Error 816!?!?:

Update they finally reached out to me almost 3 weeks later and they said they cant do anything to help and that this process will take some time due to how complex it is. In other words if you have an 816 you are better off making a new account.

What's really keeping you guys from making new accounts? Be honest.

@BlueRadley said in Error 816!?!?:

I got the same email a couple days ago. I really don't see how this is complex. Purchase Made > Steam Restricted > PSO2 Banned > Steam Unrestricted > ???PSO2 Unbanned??? Surely the account history shows this. I don't think this is very complex if you have an actual customer service team.

Never seen a game company kick someone out for trying to give them money, before. But what do I know?

I don't think Steam and Sega customer service shake hands like this.

What's keeping me from making a new account? Between 1-2k hours on my NA account, and more money spent than I want to add up. Why would I want to start over after all of that? Even if that wasn't the case and I was a brand new player, "Just make a new account" isn't really a solution to getting banned for some unknown reason.

And if Steam restricting my account and PSO2 banning me at the exact same time isn't them shaking hands, then I'm at a loss for any other explanation. Maybe they both randomly drew my name out of a hat at the same time when I bought AC. The only difference is that Steam reversed it on their end almost immediately, and PSO2 waited 2 weeks to send an auto-reply about investigating the "complex situation" to those of us with this issue.

@BlueRadley What I mean is Steam flagged your account as a fraud, probably like millions of other actual fraud accounts. Steam stopped the money from going to Sega. Hence, your account was banned. But even if Steam was able to tell Sega that your one account maybe isn't fraud, Sega still probably has to look into all those fraud accounts, or maybe they won't.

You say it's an unknown reason but you have stated in another post that Steam placed a restriction on your account because you made a mistake.

... when I first went to purchase the AC, I accidentally added it to my cart twice, and cancelled it before adding the money to my Steam Wallet. The cancelled transaction showed up as a failed transaction in my history:

I get what you mean. Sega has to do an investigation of their own, and that makes sense. That "handshake" seems to only works one way where Steam detects something fishy, and poof, there goes both your accounts. If you want them back, you have to appeal to both companies because it's not like Steam is gonna say, "Hey, this guy is alright. We unbanned him, so you should, too."

And yes, I made a mistake when I added it to my cart twice, but that money wasn't at the point where it was going to PSO2, yet. I cancelled it before it even went to my Steam Wallet. And this wasn't even a refunded transaction, btw. I backed out and deleted the extra AC before even attempting the transaction.

So if that was the reason behind this whole mess, that shouldn't have had anything to do with PSO2 in the first place. It's an unknown reason because making a simple mistake on Steam isn't against the PSO2 TOS. If I made this mistake with another game, and my account got restricted because of that instead, would I still have gotten banned on PSO2? Probably, but there's no communication about the issue, so it's all speculation.

My gripe is that I've missed out on a lot of stuff over the past 2 weeks, and it's because Steam basically said, "That's weird... Oh nevermind, I see what happened," and it's taken 2 weeks for PSO2 to say that they're probably looking into it.

@FANtasyStarOnline said in Error 816!?!?:

What's really keeping you guys from making new accounts? Be honest.

He's literally spent over 1000 hours on his main character and spent hundreds of dollars on this game. Why would he start over, just like that?

Just out of curiosity, if your account got banned unjustly, would you want to just start over? Would you have enough faith in Sega to not accidentally ban your second account because of a hiccup when buying AC through Steam, too? It's obvious he's not the only one that this has happened to.

I hope you never have to go through this horrendous process of trying to fight for your account.

This is super frustrating and even though my account hasn't been affected, it's really killing my desire to even play this game knowing that my brother can't play with me.

@Sinow That's where you're wrong. Sega didn't accidentally ban these players. Steam withheld or reversed payment on behalf of these accounts and Sega intentionally removed these accounts from doing more fraud.

Additionally, I did have to make a new account after spending time and money. My Microsoft account didn't link to my Steam account and I had to start from scratch again. It sucked, but I'm an 56 Etoile now (newb, lol).

@BlueRadley said in Error 816!?!?:

I get what you mean. Sega has to do an investigation of their own, and that makes sense.

This is the shit of it all. Why does each individual account have to be investigated? If this is happening to a lot of Steam players, I might consider sticking to the Microsoft account again... oh god the leveling...

Honestly, I hate going through 3rd party distributors. I understand the appeal of having everything in one place/library, but this isn't the first time I've had issues because of Steam. I played a lot of Elder Scrolls Online before PSO2 came out, and I can't tell you how many times some update broke the login for Steam users ONLY. Everyone else was fine. I finally went through the steps to unlink my account from Steam and deal with Zenimax only.

If that was an option with PSO2 Global, I would have done that from the start and cut out the middle-man. Probably wouldn't be in the predicament that I'm in now, either.