It is a time of strife and unrest in the Elder Scrolls Online community, as players—all of whom exploited the item duplication bug that made the rounds these past few weeks—are getting banned en masse in a move by Zenimax Online Studios to purge the game of cheaters and exploiters.
"Yesterday, we identified an item duping bug in ESO that some players chose to exploit," ZeniMax said on the ESO forums. "We acted quickly, and have since fixed the issue. We have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to abusing exploitable bugs, and those who were found doing so have has their game account permanently banned."
However, with that being said, not everyone being slammed with the banhammer is guilty of exploiting the game. Zenimax has admitted that in its sweep to rid the game of exploiters, a few innocent players were caught up in the mix and have been urged to appeal their bans, all of which will be investigated.
"After several players appealed, we were able to investigate the matter further and discovered some legitimate accounts got caught up in the sweep," wrote the studio in a separate announcement. "We unbanned accounts last night, and have email responses going out for those affected from our support group. It is never our intention for legitimate players to be harmed as we work to keep your game free of cheaters, and we sincerely apologize for the mistake."
If you were banned by mistake, you should appeal directly to their support staff here.
One of the game’s known duplication bugs has since been patched out. Version 1.0.5 was also released today.
