I agree that what Snail did with the accounts was very dumb and irresponsible. Hundreds of people, including several of my in-game friends, got hit by this. Several people I know quit the game for stuff like Darkfall and Neverwinter just because of this move by Snail that made them feel as if the company could not be trusted. Also recently, and I assume this has to do with many people making claims, the company that does Snails billing lost its ability to use paypal as a payment option. This will severely limit those that can pay for gold/VIP. I am still debating whether I will be trusting this company with my CC info when my VIP runs out on the 17th.
It's quite obvious that Snail is more interested in putting effort into stopping those that would go around their method of buying money by purchasing from third party sites, than punish those that actually do the botting and gold spamming. Although, Snail recently did implement a report function so that you can report spammers and it has worked pretty well so far. It doesn't stop it completely, but it's not so much anymore (at least during the hours that support staff are available ). They still haven't introduced a solution for the botters.
Other issues include incredibly bad ping. I am getting 400 or so ping nearly constantly. It makes me wonder if this server is even hosted in NA. This is 20 days after the server has been released and it's still an issue. They either need to upgrade their hosting hardware, or open a new server again (which my guild and I would actually like, as we would like a chance to use what we learned to start up properly). It's just unacceptable at this point and a lot of people are getting tired of it. I've got to wonder if Snail just doesn't care, or if they do and they just cannot do anything about it.
Well I could've told you guys that Snail is awful, they banned my account after my old guild leader and everyone in my old guild reported me for hacking after I more or less got on their nerves with the open PvP and camped the shit out of them.
I feel that I should let people know that there's a high probability of them getting banned for no reason playing this game. There are so many people banned this reason. For 1 thing I'm sure of, that is I'm innocent. Having the capability of earning in-game currency and not being able to trade it within the game (because you might get banned), is a bad idea.
I'm not sure if other companies will give a proper investigation, but from what I've seen, for Snail Games, it seems to be a sloppy copy and paste generic reply, which doesn't tell you any investigation, whichever transactions done violated the rules.
Also, there were people that submitted the tickets at a later date, and got unfrozen earlier (1 of them bought lots of gold from snail, unfrozen within 1 day).
I played this game from the start of the server, already crafting Jade equipments and at 3rd inner level 26 (before freeze).
Just very upset that so much effort spent is wasted because the poor company management or staffs. Yeah, I'm pissed. If you spent lots of effort in a game, then you get banned for something you have not done, would you not be angry and pissed? It just felt like they accused you of murder, come up with some false "evidence" that you don't even see, then gives you a death sentence. Nothing much we can do but complain probably?
Now I've moved on to Neverwinter Online already, just a heads-up for everyone.
I'm not sure if this was mentioned in the Age of Wushu thread, but there's a serious issue with the game's account security.
If you visit the Age of Wushu forums, you may be able to find a few threads made by people claiming to have been hacked. These threads pop up every week or so, and I happen to be one of those unfortunate people. The game uses the email that you signed up with as the account name, so I have no clue how my information was leaked. I do not share my account information with anyone, and I do not have any real life friends who play the game. This happened to me a few weeks ago and I still play, but I'm not as active as I was prior to the account breach.
I didn't lose much in terms of in-game monetary value, but it took me many hours and many dungeon runs to acquire the items that were stolen/deleted from my character. What I lost was a significant amount of time that I had invested in the game to improve my character. Normally, these things can happen due to personal neglect or blunder--say misclicking a button and deleting your own items--but this was the game provider's fault. My request for answers and compensation was met with a GM's withdrawal of liability and denial of responsibility. Apparently it was my fault because there must have been some kind of security breach on my end.
Typically, a game publisher or provider would force-reset the password on every account when they acknowledge a security breach. However, Snail Games seems to adopting the policy of ignorance to avoid a potential loss of player base--I guess those who had their accounts breached are considered acceptable losses. I'm still very much in love with the game, but I've lost faith in Snail Games.
So to anyone looking to play Age of Wushu, I would highly recommend waiting for more reputable publisher to pick up the game unless you want to:
1. experience horrible lag
2. be banned for making in-game trades/sales
3. have your account breached
4. deal with poor customer service