Punishments

Often when players do anything that is against the Terms of Rights, they are punished. The severity of the punishments depends on the severity of the rules broken. There is a list of banned and suspended players on the official website known as the Wall of Shame . One can also be punished on the forums for breaking the rules there.

IP Ban

Although used in other online games, IP Bans occur rarely in Combat Arms. An IP Banned person will not be able to play the game unless the IP address is changed. IP bans are not very efficient due to several factors. First of all it's easy to change one's IP. Some network providers gives dynamic IP's which means the IP will automatically change after a while. Also if an innocent player would happen to retrieve a banned IP from their provider they would not be able to play the game.

Hardware Ban

This is a more efficient ban that has recently started being applied to certain hackers in CA EU (for instance anyone using the famous Gordon public hack now receives a hardware ban). A hardware banned player cannot play the game regardless of if they make new accounts or change IP since the hardware in their computer is being used as identification. Since the hardware's MAC, or Media Access Control address, is being used to identify the person who has been banned, the only way around it would be either to spoof the MAC address, which is technically impossible, or to buy entirely new hardware.

Ban

Once banned, the person will not be able to play the game on the banned account anymore. However, one could still create another account to keep playing the game. Most commonly used on hackers and ad spammers.

Suspension

Once suspended, the person will not be able to play on the suspended account for a certain period of time. Most commonly used for abusing glitches, harrassing players, and benefiting from hackers. Suspension terms range from 3 days to 90 days.

Demotion

Upon demotion the player's rank would be lowered to Trainee , but in some cases Staff Sergeant. This form of punishment is mostly for powerlevelers and hackers who have been banned once before. Accounts which are demoted to Trainee are also issued a permanent ban. This means the account ban will not be lifted, even if the user sends in a support ticket.

Trivia

• All early bans used to be issued ingame by GMs, hence most were labeled under "Ingame GM Action".
• As of February 3, 2011, there have been roughly 100,450 bans issued to Combat Arms accounts.
• An average of 118 bans are issued every day at 1 ban every 12 minutes.
• Demotions are not used in CA EU, however regular bans and suspensions are.
• The number of banned players in CA EU is not known but it is likely to be a lot higher than in NA. This is due to Nexon keeping a very strict policy with massbans each week based on gamelogs (which detect high hs ratio, illegal programs running etc). Usually at least 3000-4000 players are banned for gamelogs each week, with an average of 40-50 players of those holding a rank of MAJ 1 or higher.