NCSoft is taking a stand against Chinese gold farmers and sellers by blocking Chinese IP addresses from all aspects of the Lineage 2 client, website, and account creation process. Incidentally, Aion shares the account creation page with Lineage 2.
NCSoft claims this to be the first step in the process of snuffing out RMT (real money transactions) in Lineage 2, stating that they will be monitoring the effects over the next few days to see if the IP block will be as effective as they hope. They will also be looking for other regional IP address ranges that could be a problem, and blocking proxies that are known for RMT behavior.
This is pretty great news for legitimate Lineage 2 players. NCSoft does not take action often, and when they do it tends to be a bit ineffective. Hopefully this will put an actual dent in gold farming and spammers once the block is expanded upon.
No New Chinese Players for Aion
As Aion and Lineage 2 share the same account creation page (this one), Chinese players will no longer be able to sign up for the North American Aion server.
The post on the official site states that this is the only anti-RMT action they will be taking on the game for the time being. Chinese players who already have an account will still be able to login and play Aion. Let’s hope that they are account banning (as opposed to character banning) in the rare instances that NCSoft actually takes action against bots and gold spammers.
