The Finals

Thought I found my new permanent game, put almost 250 hours in and dumped a ton of cash on DLC and microtransactions since it's free and I wanted to show support for something I was having a great time with. Then out of nowhere, a permaban with no warning or explanation, repeatedly tried to get someone to review the ticket and there are no live humans in their support system, only chatbots that automatically close the ticket. My steam account is old enough to drink and I've never used cheats or exploits of any kind. I was hoping to get through to someone so we can troubleshoot and ID the cause to whitelist whatever might have flagged to avoid others getting falsely banned but all I was met with were AI responses. Then they put out patch notes revealing their cheat detection ALSO being a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ AI with no human supervison, which explains everything. I don't understand why valve doesn't warn about this before letting people spend money, since this is a whole new level of potential trouble for people to deal with. TL/DR They don't just use AI for voice acting, but also for handing out bans and support tickets. BEWARE. A taped together machine learning model decides your ability to access something you spent money on with no appeal process.

If you want to get banned for no reason after 500 hours of play and $300 in donations, this game is for you, along with Arc Raiders. And if you want to feel like ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Joseph K. from Kafka's "The Trial", contact Embark support to find out the reason for the ban. Embark Studios are Swedish ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ (ex EA guys). P.S. This is the first and only game where I've ever been permanently banned. And definitely the last game from Embarks.

I truly did enjoy this game. It felt great to play and was an engaging experience. The reason why I cannot recommend this though is because I was falsely banned and given vague reasons on why this occurred. I understand that false positive happen and that giving information to hackers is not ideal, but it was still disheartening to get such a copy paste response for my appeal. Hopefully Embark can improve their anticheat system in the future to avoid these kind of situations. This is a fun game, but if it prevents fair players from enjoying this experience then you are getting rid of the community that helps make this game so impactful.