Bungie Resets Legitimate Users Credits in Witchhunt

Cheaters, exploiters, hackers. As far as gamers are generally concerned, they are the scourge of the known universe... gaining unfair advantage in multiplayer games to make other users hard work seem completely inferior. Bungie are fighting back however, by giving credit resets and 1 day bans to people they see as having abused a glitch within their systems... but in doing so have targetted people who have unintentionally benefited from a bug on their end.

Unfair Bannings?
I am the sort of person who personally despises all forms of exploits in games. I am very well known as the sort of guy who would hunt "Boosters" (people working together to gain achievements outside of the intended use) down and exterminate them with extreme persecution - regularly following them after they had left the server to continue to thwart their attempts. I will team kill people attempting to get into the rock glitch in Modern Warfare 2, and send messages to the entire enemy team telling them that they are hiding in the rock. That's right, I hate them that much.

So when I woke up and saw that my credits had been reset in Halo: Reach, as well as a ban message explaining my actions, I figured that a bug of some description had hit me. However the truth was far, far worse. You see, according to Bungie I had been exploiting a bug to do the exact same thing that irritates me about many players in the community, even though I had not. I spent a long time looking at peoples posts and getting in contact with others who swore they had been unfairly reset, and the realisation of precisely what caused me to be banned, dawned.

You see, I live in Australia, home of some of the worst internet stability in the world. During my gaming I regularly experience dropouts and disconnections, in fact on my 360 I have to run a connection test before it will even register that it has access to the internet... Loading any game on the 360 disconnects me for a moment and reconnects me, much like average users get when a new update needs to be applied. So when I saw that the way of exploiting this 'bug' lied around being disconnected at certain moments, it all became clear.

And talking to others, not even mentioning that this was my theory, led me to a truth... many of these people had very similar stories to my own, living in horrible neighborhoods where the net is bad, or having strict firewall settings that would disconnect them when a game was attempting to send too much data. Other stories are very spotty, and are quite probably from people trying to claim they are innocent when they aren't. Ultimately the truth is that when some of the worst exploiters in a game are banned, there are bound to be casualties from the legitimate side.

What Should Bungie Do Next?
Honestly, I do not know. Perhaps noticing on their logs if the players mentioning being unfairly reset/banned had a history of disconnects that weren't when challenges were received (like myself) and reinstating their account with credits... and then making sure their automatic measures keep that in mind when putting resets on people. Perhaps also sending a warning message to accounts that are behaving badly and are at risk of being credit reset, making sure that users realise that what they are doing is actually wrong. Because lets face it, when a young kid hears from another young kid that he can get easy credits, they are both going to indulge.

Either way, massive Kudo's have to be sent Bungies way for having the balls to man up and do something about exploitation of their glitches in game. I'm looking forward to Treyarch doing the exact same thing when Black Ops comes out November 9th. So keep up the good work Bungie, but please, try to deter players first and foremost. I can't believe the amount of times in my history of tracking down and exterminating boosters that I would get messages from people who honestly didn't know the impact it had on other players... and thought that what they were doing was perfectly fine.