Yeah I have already disputed it, and of course all I got back was a cookie cutter no info response saying that I broke TOS, even though I can literally prove that I did not break TOS. I gave a very detailed breakdown of the TOS and how I did not break it:
"Engage or assist in cheating or other anticompetitive behaviour (such as boosting, collusion, and match or matchmaking manipulation)"
I will break down each of those terms and be able to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that I did not engage in anything that would break this rule.
Assisting in any way
This is an easy one, I was not partied up with any of these players or ever have been and had I not been in that game I would have almost certainly been replaced by another bot, which means that the game would have played out in the exact same way, a 30 minute draw. No other player in the lobby received any benefit from my action and that is very clear.
Engaging in cheating
Not easy to completely disprove, but I am positive that there was no software of any kind detected by anyone at EA/Respawn. If evidence were to come out that disproves this, I would happily accept the punishment as deserved.
Engaging in boosting
In all mixtape gamemodes, stats do not count towards your profile. Kills do not count, deaths do not count, damage does not count.
You cannot earn badges of any kind in Mixtape and your trackers are not affected in any way by your performance in this game mode. Boosting is almost universally defined as artificially inflating your stats, or unlocking challenges/badges by colluding with other players in order to 'farm kills or damage or ranked points'. As this was a mixtape game it is a provable fact that I was not boosting, as you will have seen from my season stats earlier which was taken the day of making this post, after the ban, than none of those kills or damage counted towards my stats.
I did however receive ~9700XP towards my character level, which for a 30 minute game is not beyond a realistic possibility. I also did receive some weapon XP from this game which was more than what you would get from normal gameplay no doubt but nothing that was gamebreaking, especially for it happening once. I would have accepted if these two values were reversed as part of a warning, but to have your entire account permanently banned over half a player level and a couple of Charge Rifle/Havoc weapon XP levels is absolutely insane.
The Terms of Service themselves later state that: "If you or someone using your EA Account violates these rules and fails to remedy this violation after a warning, EA may take action against you, including revoking access to certain or all EA Services, Content or Entitlements, or terminating your EA Account as described in Section 8. In case of severe violations, EA may take these actions without issuing a prior warning. Some examples of severe violations include, but are not limited to: promoting, encouraging or engaging in hacking, selling EA accounts or entitlements (including virtual currencies and items) without EA’s permission, extreme harassment, or threatening illegal activities."
There is no way any real human would look at the small benefit I received from this game and determine that it was a "Severe violation" worthy of taking such a drastic action without any prior warning. Again I would have accepted a warning for this.
Engaging in Collusion
Again, very easy to prove as I have never been friends, lobbied up, or had any interaction with any of the other accounts in that game. I'm positive that if any real person looked at those accounts they would notice they are in game 24/7 sitting AFK farming XP, and I had no contact with any of those players both in game or out of game to organise anything that occurred.
Engaging in Match Manipulation
This is an extremely loose term that is open to interpretation, and opens a very slippery slope of what you can start banning players for. I did not attempt to play the objective in control, but does that really count for breaking the TOS and manipulating a match?? Every single control game that is played I am positive you could find a player that spends zero time on a point and is just playing for kills, again, because it is a game mode where stats do not count, losses are meaningless and people play for their own fun. It is therefore impossible to say that I manipulated the result of the match simply by playing for kills, since if there was a single real player in the game as there should be, the game would have ended very quickly. This rule should be limited to deliberately throwing games linked to the above rule, when collusion is involved as again, it is a very slippery slope to start banning people who - without any collusion with the enemy - prolong games in order to get their last 500 damage for a badge or to get some extra weapon XP. Here is just one example (https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1910670358?t=1h0m3s) of a well-known streamer letting the game go longer than it should in order to get more weapon XP. Therefore, what I did cannot be considered bannable, again a warning may be appropriate.
Engaging in Matchmaking Manipulation
This whole situation is 'evidence' as you might, that skill based matchmaking has recently become active in Mixtape (as if anyone who plays frequently hasn’t already realised). Anyone who plays mixtape frequently on Asian servers will know, during last season, a couple of AFK players were in almost every single game. I couldn't give you an exact timeframe of when I noticed this change but at the very least from the start of this season I realised that I never got matched with these bots anymore, and that the games were extremely competitive and almost no player was much worse than another. While some might think that respawn solved the botting issue, this is clearly not the case. As for me actually breaking this rule, I was queueing my home server (Sydney) with no other players ever joining/leaving my lobby, or me doing any tricks to manipulate my way into this 'bot' lobby. This should be very obvious again to someone who can actually look at the data from my games that night as I was constantly in queue the entire time, I did not leave a single game early, or do anything that purposely affected my MMR so that I would be placed in a 'lower skill' lobby.
THE ENTIRE REASON THIS LOBBY EVEN EXISTS IS BECAUSE RESPAWN IS NOT BANNING THESE ACCOUNTS WHO ARE ACTUALLY BREAKING THE TOS
All I was doing was queueing mixtape on my home server at a less populated time, it is not my fault in any way that I was placed in this lobby and therefore I cannot be guilty of Matchmaking Manipulation in any way.
Community Manager
