Did ArenaNet Just Bone Me? 2024-03-14

Guild Wars is a video game. It was made by NCSoft and is hosted or managed by ArenaNet. I have been playing Guild Wars for close to 20 years. Most of the friends I had in the game have long since gone away and a few of them even gave me their accounts when they left because they had no intentions of playing anymore. I kept the extra accounts around in hopes that I could talk other people in to playing the game (though that hasn't produced much gameplay). Anyways, today I went to log in to the account I usually play and saw this shit

I call dingo.

I quick search turned up lots of people saying that ArenaNet does "security sweeps" and that a 3023 error means your account or your IP address got caught up in one of the security sweeps. I tried a couple of my other accounts and got similar shit. I then remembered that a couple days ago I got a verification step when I logged in and was expected to provide a TFA number that was emailed to me. Well all of the accounts I have are well out past a decade old and I do not have access to all the email addresses for them.

Side note: if you are the type of jackass who thinks I'm somehow depriving ArenaNet of their duly deserved income then you should fuck off ass-cop.

Anyways, it isn't the first time ArenaNet did something stupid. Some years back they banned one of my accounts because one of the characters had the name God in it and that is somehow offensive. It isn't offensive that the game revolves around various gods, but it is when I use the term. ArenaNet also doesn't seem bothered by various accounts spamming about web sites selling in-game goods for real-world money, because those accounts spam that shit on and on and on. ArenaNet likes to brag about banning huge piles (literally thousands) of accounts at a time, but it sucks when lots of those accounts have done nothing wrong.

Over the years I have looked for a replacement game, and the best I could come up with was Minetest v4. My requirements were a game that was open source and permitted me to run my own server (so the game can't be taken away from me) and that I could get at least 15 years worth of play out of. Sadly at some point Minetest v5 was released and had no backwards compatibility. I tried the upgrade to v5 but a couple of the best mods were never ported to v5, making it unplayable for me. So, if anyone has any ideas on a game I can play for many years without having to worry about ArenaNet sweeping me up in a "security scan" or shutting the game down completely, I'd happy take a break from playing Minetest v4 to hear about it.