If there's one thing I know about ban waves, it's that what you hear about isn't the whole story. The "wtf I got banned?" thread on the Aion forums went 81 pages before it got locked in favor of a post from NCSoft with nearly as many pages. And the response from the community is overwhelmingly "haha you got banned, you must be a cheater".

NCSoft isn't going to say that they banned people who weren't violating the User Agreement, they want you to believe that they made a surgical strike. But it looks like they didn't -- they had to have their customer service working on the weekend (which apparently they don't normally do) to handle the problem. We'll never know the actual number of accounts banned vs the number of those that deserved the ban. They will avoid making that information public. But what if they banned twice as many good players as the bad ones? Ten times as many? What is actually acceptable?

This happened with WoW multiple times as well, but not 2 weeks after the game's release. Blizzard inadvertently banned Linux users in November 2006 and ended up restoring those accounts and giving them free subscription time. They also inadvertently banned WinEQ 2 users, and did the same thing for those accounts. I'm sure there were countless others when they did ban waves. As long as there's tons of people willing to accept the company's PR spin over the word of any other player, the company wins!

Also, the response from Ayase that simply renaming the game's executable may be grounds for a ban is a little off-putting. At least Blizzard gives you the chance to not get banned by preventing you from logging in if they identify something dumb like that.

I'm not defending anyone who actually deserved to get banned, but I think the community is a bit quick to judge.