Today I noticed that my badges aren't updating, despite the fact i bought Endless Space 2 recently. So, with quick searching for reasons for that I decided to relogin. Imagine my surprise when the site said me I can't do that!

As I realised in some time, I cannot try to login as someone else too or even register a new account to write about that on forums. The site always shows such messages (like "You can't register a new account"). That's why I first thought about the possibility that I'm banned here. Which is extremely weird, because I didn't even post anything that could potentially break any rules (you can check, it's my first forum post here). I checked my mail, but there was nothing from Amplitude Studios there (yes, I checked spam folder too).

Okay, happily I'm a tech savvy person, so I used a VPN service to login and it worked (yay!). Basically, that's why I can write this post at all. All that proccess was quite long (I spent around 20 minutes trying to log in and that was extremely frustrating).

Which leads to couple of questions to the moderators/administrators:

1) If I was IP banned, why? I don't see any clear reason why that could happen, so please, explain me why it happened at all. I neither broke any forum rules nor intended to.

2) Please, make the message on a screenshot above more clear. "You are not allowed to login" should be "You're banned from using this platform" or something like that.

3) Please, when you ban people, send them an email with an information that they are banned and a reason for that. That would ensure such frustrating expierence will never happen to anybody else.

Hello Raychimera,

to my knowledge you have not been banned in any form.

However, we have experienced some problems with the bot detection refusing legitimate users as bots recently, with exactly this "You are not allowed to log in" message. I believe you may have encountered this problem as well.

I will pass this along to the webteam.

Hi @raychimera 

You are indeed not banned in any way from the platform. We were under a huge bot attack creating a tone of accounts over the night so I had to up the captcha level for the time being. It sometimes prevent legitimate user to login also, we are working on a different way to prevent this from happening. From what I see, you logged with a vpn just after I rolled back this level. You should be allowed to login with your current IP.

Okay, thanks for clarification! I'm glad it's a technical problem tbh)

(and sorry about my original post if it sounded a bit rude, I was very frustrated)

Anyway, I think the idea of making an error message a bit less vague is a good one, so, if possible, could you pass it to the web devs team too?

P.S. Also, not sure where to write about that, but I still didn't get Endless Space 2 badges etc. Got them after re-linking my Steam profile. Thank youi about help, I think the thread can now be safely closed.