Top 10 Insane Reasons Online Gamers Got Banned

When “Club Penguin” first burst onto the scene in 2005, the MMO was first targeted towards kids. So, if there was "inappropriate language", the player would be swiftly banned. To be honest, some of the memes and stories of being banned were hilarious. But when those kids grew up, and Disney announced they were closing the game, fans decided to have one last hurrah with a twist. Who could get banned the quickest? Speedrunners swarmed onto “Club Penguin” and rushed to annoy the moderators and programs with plenty of cursing. One early speedrunner, ButtonWalls, managed to showcase their run by getting banned in one minute and 54 seconds. From there, people began creating their own runs and smashing that record.

When Ubisoft’s “For Honor” came out, gamers were excited to enjoy some historical battling. But then, many of them had that taken away randomly. As it turns out, Ubisoft had an anti-cheat program installed that was meant to…well, stop people from cheating with the software. However, like when their other game, “Assassin's Creed Unity”, was released, the program was very buggy. Some users looked into it and thought there was a relation between the bans and gamers using an Xpadder controller. But then, others who weren’t using that were still finding themselves banned. Ubisoft released a hotfix, but that didn’t solve the problem completely. People were still getting banned for seemingly no reason.

Back in 2015, while waiting in the lobby for “Grand Theft Auto Online”, gamer The 7th Taco was relaxing and preparing for the mayhem. However, another user decided to go with complete carnage. Using a cheat, they obliterated all the other players by making them explode spectacularly. To make it worse, like a cunning supervillain, the hacker did all the slaying in The 7th Taco’s name. And instead of Rockstar looking at the evidence, clearly seeing the hacker wreaking havoc, then banning them, they fell for the bait and blamed the explosion spree on The 7th Taco. So, they were banned instead, even though they were nothing more than an innocent bystander.

In 2016, Muhammad Zakir Khan wanted to take part in the beta test for “Paragon.” So, he went to create an account with developers Epic Games. Instead, he was blocked from doing so because his name matched a “Specially Designated Nationals list." Essentially, they thought Kahn had been financing international violence. Founder and CEO of Epic, Tim Sweeny, responded to the problem on Twitter. It turns out the restriction was accidentally left in when Epic used Unreal Engine 4. It’s not the only time this has happened. After enjoying the PlayStation Network for six years, Jihad Al-Mofadda. was suddenly kicked off for his in-game name, “iJihaD." He was able to change his ID, but there were syncing issues.

Everyone remembers the panic and fear of Xbox’s Red Ring of Death. But in 2012, Josh Hinkle ended up in a new realm of pain. His Xbox Live account was first stolen by hackers. After contacting Microsoft support and waiting months for them to sort it, he got his account back. But he was immediately banned. Apparently, the hackers had been breaking a load of rules when using Hinkle’s account. Who knew hackers were unethical? It turns out that when Hinkle got rid of his Red Ringed Xbox, someone managed to Frankenstein it back to life and immediately used it to steal other people’s accounts. After months of calls and emails with Microsoft and the Better Business Bureau, Hinkle eventually got his account back.

Seemingly, being good at collecting items in video games can also get booted from it. Reddit user Glorf12 was enjoying “Fallout 76” with around 900 hours of gameplay. During which they grinded hard to accumulate a load of ammo. They even wrote guides to help gamers farm for plenty of ammunition by using the nifty Bandolier perk card, which reduces ammo weight by 90 percent. They then began trading their excess ammo to other gamers. Well, it's speculated that some people grew suspicious and tattled on Glorf12 to publishers Bethesda. They then promptly sent an email to Glorf12, banning their account indefinitely until they’ve released a patch to stop his exploit.

One day in 2011, popular “World of Warcraft” streamer, Swifty, was playing the iconic MMORPG. All was well, until between 4000 to 5000 gamers watching the stream decided to log into the same server to play alongside him. As you can imagine, the server began to struggle. Especially with one gamer spamming an emote over 30,000 times! Soon, it completely crashed. Uh-oh. Several gamers present were then banned by publishers Blizzard, including Swiftly, who’d made a name for himself in that community. With the fan backlash to the stream of bans, Blizzard started to reexamine the cases. While some stayed in place, others, like Swifty, were reinstated and could continue enjoying the game legendary Leeroy Jenkins loved.

When “Pokémon Go” was released, fans tried their best to get around its mechanics to hoard goodies. Some strapped their phones to ceiling fans to make it look like they were walking, while Jimmy Derocher found a loophole to bring in one million XP throughout a weekend, all to prove other Go-ers wrong. Creating a unique walking route filled with lures within a 0.2-mile loop, Derocher soon began receiving a lot of XP as he streamed his project. But by the thirteenth hour, the game got…weird. Pokémon began running away constantly. Derocher had inadvertently triggered Niantic Labs’s anti-cheat system for scooping up mountains of XP and getting himself a 24-hour soft ban. Whoops.

Gamers can be a weird bunch sometimes. After beating “Elden Ring”, some modders decide to spice things up a bit. They hacked into the Lands Between and made the character of Fia’s underwear turn into an equipable item. However, some of these hackers decided to use the power of the undies for evil. In multiplayer, they would drop the lingerie named Deathbed Smalls where an unsuspecting gamer would find it and pick them up. After this, their fate was sealed, as they were promptly banned for their fabric interests. Ok-Communication7125 stated they had clocked in 220 hours of gameplay, picked up the smalls, and were booted off for their troubles. Who knew picking up strange underwear from the floor could be bad?

When “Dark Souls II” was released in 2014, there was a big problem with gamers being banned for little reason. As it turns out, some were using DS2fix, a fan-made patch. This addition helped stabilize the game that featured the really annoying durability bug after its release. Developers From Software eventually patched it, but in the early days, fans decided to take matters into their own hands and fix it themselves. Which From Software didn’t like at all. Even other mods like a graphic enhancement or video capture would trigger being exiled. Since the developers saw no difference between using a mod for enhancing or keeping the game working and cheating, all mod-using gamers were sent to the Shadow Realm.