This last week I was banned from MTGO. Sound Familiar? Well that’s because this is the second article on the subject to be publishedby this wonderful home of crapulence, GasMTG.com in a fortnight!

The first one came from the wonderful Cameron Maitland, and is mainly an exploration of how shitty of a system it is to ban people rather than communicate with them (Spoiler Alert! It’s really shitty). You can check it out HERE.

For the purposes of this article I’m going to assume that you have read it. You can go right on ahead and assume that our experiences are identical, because well… they were. We got banned on the same day, for the same reason. We talked about it at the time because Maitland and I are frequent communicators, especially about Magic. Our responses to the ban are also almost identical – the main difference being that mine likely involved more swearing and angry flailing arms.

I’m writing this article to highlight the differences in our treatment. For Maitland, he had a reasonable time of it. He got banned, emailed the company that banned him, and then wrote an article while they were getting back to him. I got banned, emailed the company that banned me, tweeted a bunch at the company that banned me, and then waited for them to get back to me. The reason I didn’t write an article about it is simple: because Maitland wanted to. Had he not wanted to write an article, I probably would have. There really isn’t any need to write two articles about what is essentially the same experience, so I decided to forgo, at least initially.

I got my ban on Thursday the 19th of March. I found out as soon as I woke up, there was this lovely pro-formed email waiting for me:

Now, I don’t think that it’s too much to ask for a personalised response somewhere in here. Given he works with customer complaints on MTGO, “Matthew Account-Specialist” is probably a very busy man. All the same, surely there’s time to write a one or two sentence explanation of what you are banned for specifically. Or at least to copy and paste the words “large number of requests” into the document. Anyway, all you get is a form-letter about abusing the reimbursement policy, which is not something that I have ever knowingly done. To me, I think that if a company is going to put me in the naughty corner, it’s in my interest to know what they don’t want me doing. Hell, it’s in their interest to tell me, too – especially if they don’t want me doing it again. I’m really not interested in screwing wizards around in regards to reimbursement, honestly it’s really just not a high value way to commit fraud, and I’m all about high value when it comes to committing crimes.

I got really angry about this for about twenty minutes – and, after eating breakfast, I returned to it to re-read and see how I could find more information. That’s when I fully took in these lines of text.

That’s about when I started to get nervous about the whole thing. There is someone on the MTGO team who I have never met and who has never communicated with me before, that decided to take it upon himself to revoke my account privileges. That person has offered me no explanation, and the company that he works for doesn’t require him to. On top of that, they don’t have to respond to any requests for an explanation, and there is no means of appeal for the decision, other than contacting them, which, again, they are not required in any way to respond to. Wizards have a customer line, but predictably enough it’s an international phone number, so calling them is also a financially unrealistic proposition.

Now, imagine that you have hundreds or even thousands of dollars in that account. It’s basically the same as keeping your trade folder down at the local store where you have a heap of store credit. You turn up one day and are refused entry for a reason they don’t explain, and every time you try to ask they shut the door without saying a word. That’s what was happening to me, and it really caused me to drop a lot of confidence in my online collection.

After Maitland posted his article, he got a lot of responses. Some positive, some doubtful that his story was 100% true (even though it was), some others who thought that they must have banned him for a good reason (a natural and calming assumption, which is unfortunately incorrect) and some others which were in no way tied to rational thought (LOLCALEBDURWOODLOL). The best response though, came a couple of days later in the form of an email from WOTC. They removed his ban, explained why it had happened (a high number of reimbursement requests), and sighted that in light of his article they thought it was unlikely that he was actually trying to cheat the system. They went on to offer him additional customer support because of his geographically remote location (that’s by world standards, not Australian standards) and confided that they did not have the same confidence in the same level of MTGO’s performance in our neck of the woods as they did for a lot of the rest of the world. They encouraged him to stay in contact, and give them more feedback so they could work on that. That is an absolutely excellent response for a customer service team to make, and I think they really stood up here and really showed that they have similar thoughts about the service that we receive to us.

The issue is that I didn’t receive it. Only Maitland did. In fact, I didn’t receive anything. My ban is over as of a couple of days ago, and at no point has the MTGO team actually respond to my request for an explanation, or actually communicated with me in any way. Well that’s a lie actually, there was ONE response.

I agree Worth, that DOES seem like it shouldn’t happen.

Where does that leave us? Well there are a couple of different explanations for the way things went down. The first is that Maitland and my bans were actually for different things. I personally highly doubt that, but at this point I still haven’t received an explanation for my banning, so it remains possible. The second, and much more likely scenario, is that they saw the bad publicity of the article and decided to act. In this case, I’m pretty sure that’s what happened. Yes, they probably found Maitland’s experience to be a genuine one. Yes, they operated very well once they actually engaged with what had happened. No, they didn’t do the same for me. No, they did not engage with me, a customer, human being or unusually intelligent ape. Yes, they just ignored me completely.

What do we take away from this? First of all, you should probably create two different accounts on MTGO. One for your collection so that you don’t lose value on not having access to trading, should you get banned – and another on which to play your matches, and make your inevitable reimbursement requests. Secondly, if you DO get banned, they’re probably not going to respond to you unless you write an article that gets a heap of hits. That’s obviously not a realistic possibility for the majority of the MTGO population, so you have two choices: either, cap your reimbursement requests at a certain level, rather than making them whenever you actually need, or you can just live with the expectation that you’ll get banned at random intervals for no real reason.

As it stands, this ban actually wasted several more hours of my life than the ban was worth – as it denied me the opportunity to achieve the 35 QPs I was aiming for (I had 26 when I got banned). I wonder if they’ll ban me again if I have the gall to make a reimbursement request for that?

Comments