Disclaimer: I enjoyed the game and Jux seems like a geniune person, so if this will be the only post of this kind you will see I may just be an unlucky case of a false positiv.
How did I start ?
I have been playing Rising Star for 6 month or so. Been grinding, optimising my missions, even outsourcing my roomates or whoever was around to absolutly maximise my profits.
For the most part those were super little because I didnt spend much money on buying cards and I figured that it will be more efficient to level up to lvl 50 to get my millionair card for a guaranteed 10k starbits a day.
(On a sidenote the best way to get there is to spam Illegal Busking until level 15, that way you get some good amount of starbits without having to buy cards [normally spamming a mission is bad because you will stack permanent ego but this will only start after reaching level 15 or 1k fans] and then you do the skill mission up until lvl 50 buy 1 million starbits and ask for the card.
After reaching lvl 50 and being able to spam the milionair mission I started maxing out the Fanclub mission. This way I could do the mission that gets you the Fa1 - Fa3 cards ( forgot the name of the mission - stoner life ). Things went well I was able to max out all Fanclub missions up until 1025. This was my first big investment because each mission costs 0,024 Starpro summing up to about 25 Starpro which is roughly 125 Hive at current price. Overall that sums up to rougly 200-300 dollar for me since I bought some of the starpro when prices of hive and starpro was higher.
How did I get banned ?
RS has become part of my daily routine grinding the 30min missions. First time I started collecting cards which was a great feeling and made me actually enjoy RS for the first time as well. In the past I more or less just saw it as potential blue chip game,but now seeing those FA cards coming in , increasing my fans I wanted to become more succesfull in terms of fans and collected cards and not only grind for starbits. I actually started to like the RS-metaverse and decided to buy my own packs.
After roughly 800$ worth of packs, 3 legendarys, 150 thousand new fans I saw myselfe climbing the ladder of top players.
Seeing myselfe reaching the top 500 players after beeing somewhere in the thousands for most of my rs-life made me feel good.
So I started to complete my collection, buying up almost all normal fan cards, most normal instruments and even about a hundred rare fancards.
My collection started to look awesome. I found myselfe in the top 150 of players, almost hitting the reward zone were u get daily rewards from rs. I was sitting on roughly 400 unqiue cards and a few thousand in total.
With that many fans I also needed to change my mission scedule since the normal mission started to be much more profitable than the Fanclub ones.
I was able to make about 50k starbits a day, but when I wanted to withdraw them to get some cards of the juicy new drop I couldnt.
The withdraw feature was disabled , just a blanc screen.
Not thinking of much i reached out to Julie :
Aparently I used pizza slices without doing missions. I didnt know what she was refering to but could allready tell that there were some accusations in the room but she didnt respond to me for a week.
I kept doing my missions raking up 200k starbits waiting to be invested into my collection.
After waiting a week I asked in allchat what this was about, but only some other players answered me that they had the same issues at times that rs was buggy or missions not starting.
He accused me of being/using a bot and sent me this log as part of his proof. A list of roughly 18 Pizza slizes used. I assume its from one day and maybe also with the issue that I didnt start a mission after using those.
A day later I finally got in touch with jux through the #support channel were he asked me the same question , why I used pizza slizes but didnt start a mission.
As I told Julie before I dont remember doing that, told him about the bugs of the game itselfe and tried to come up with an explanation which is obviously hard if you dont remember doing it. I tried with logicial things if it is an error on their end or mine but could have been thousands of other reasons, could have been one of my friends, me being drunk or just some fictional explenation that he finds to be more reasonable than what I told him because he didnt believe me and decided to ban my account.
Facts is I didnt use a bot and its unjust but thats the dilemma I am in. He is the judge and he doesnt care what I know.
What now ?
Since its just been a few hours since I got noticed of my ban I dont know what to do next. It stinks a lot though.
Money is not that important in life though the roughly 1k$ I invested is more than I make in a month and with the thousands of hours I invested I will need some time to get over it.
I am sitting on a lot of cards that I probably will be able to sell for maybe 20% loss ( not adjusting for the loss in $ through hive price changes). The 1025 hours and all Fanclub cards will be lost forever though since no one will buy them if they cant use them.
What should you do?
RS is a great game and I think Jux is convinced he is doing the right thing so I can 100% recommend you to try at least the free to play version.
Every investment has a risk. Normally you would think of the game dying or the value of the crypto currency its traded in sinking. But I guess having some black swan event like mine is also part of the risk.
If you got scared by this post , maybe start out by playing for free or be extra careful to use your pizza slizes or whatever item in the game.
Also there are plenty of other great games in the Hive metaverse such as Hashking( my second favorite) so try to diversify as good as you can :)
On sidenote if someone knows how to actually write a bot hit me up, Im missing out on mad profits in hashkings cause manually planting and harvesting 50+ landplots is to much of a pain in the ass :D!