The time I got banned from a mobile video game

Introduction

No, this isn’t about Pokemon Go... it’s about another game.  However, let’s talk about Pokemon really fast.  If you haven’t heard, the developers have made changes to the game that have made people angry with the game.  It went from a 4.5 rating on iTunes to a 1 and a lot of people have asked for refunds (myself included.)  The game isn’t as fun anymore and its popularity is dropping as fast as it was rising a few weeks ago.

Because the game became more difficult to catch Pokemon, which I see is a money grab for people to use real money to buy Pokeballs, I decided to cheat.  Yes, you can cheat in the game.  I was against cheating in the game, but I rationalized it by saying I would only be doing it to collect Pokeballs and that it’d be no different if I worked in a place with a Pokestop.  Anyway, a reader told me about the cheat, and he said, “Next on MPD… being banned from Pokemon.”  Well, while I haven’t been banned… yet (and I’d be okay with it if they did axe me,) I did however get banned a few years back from another video game.

Guardian Cross

A few years ago, a buddy of mine told me to download this card game called Guardian Cross so he could get some extra items for referring me.  So I installed it, played it for 10 minutes so he could get his goods, and next thing you know, I’m also addicted to the game.  I then got my wife to play it.  I then installed it on my iPad.  Long story short, let’s just say I was VERY addicted to the game!

The premise of the game was that you would ‘hunt’ for these cards.  Then you would battle in the coliseum each week using your cards, and the top players would get ‘stones.’  The stones were sort of power-ups for your cards and meant to be consumed yourself.  However, as you can expect, when a game allows for in-game trading, then an online internet forum would emerge, which one did.

Online Forum

Using the online forums, you could trade cards with people as well as trade stones for cards.  Then of course a currency exchange was created whereby someone would say it should cost 10 stones for character X and 20 stones for character Y.  I think half of the fun (probably 75% of the fun) was in the trading aspect of the game.  When I started to play, the game was already out 6+ months.  I was a lowly beginner (maybe ranked 100,000) going up against people who are in the Top 50 IN THE WORLD.  If you only played the game, you would never be able to rise up that high.  You’d have to either spend a lot of money in the game or you’d have to trade your way to the top.  Since I’m cheap, I never put any money in the game.  Instead, I traded my way to the top.  Within 2 months, I had traded my way up to the top 200 players in the world.

Ban Hammer

One day, I tried to sign into my account and got an error saying my account was disabled.  I had no idea why.  I filled out a support ticket with the developer and got nowhere.  I turned to the forums and it turned out that there were people out there who hacked the game and created fake “stones” and cards.  These cards were then traded around in the forum like a hot potato.  Well, it just so happened that my account had one of these fake cards and that’s why the developer banned my account.

After the ban, I gave up on the game and the forums and went back to real life.  And that people, is how yours truly got banned from a video game.  But this time, it wasn’t directly my fault!  I’ll let you know when Pokemon Go bans me…