It was on the 29th of April, 2016. I was on vacation in the white beaches of Boracay. I promised myself to unplug on my online games, but I got a E-Mail that drained the blood out of my face.

I received a message from my online game Priston Tale that my character has been permanently banned for possession of duplicated items. I hastily tried to log in my account and I received a window error that said my account was blocked.

I don't know why I was still surprised. I knew that I would be banned eventually for buying hacked items for real cash. The first item I purchased was on February 2015. Then more items for cash kept coming in. I've always kept a low profile on my character so I was never worried that I would be detected. But maybe it's really because the GM was getting tired of this and decided to start a purge.

It wasn't just me that got banned. A lot of high profile characters was getting the same punishment. I'm guessing maybe 10% of the community was banned. Priston Tale is a 2001 MMORPG game that's just chock-full of bugs and unbalanced characters. Why I still play this game? Because it was my first and probably my last.

I realized that I've been playing so long that I've met and lost friends along the way. Some have moved on to other games, and some have quit completely. This was the kind of closure that I needed. Some of my accounts survived the ban hammer. But I considered it all banned. I cleaned out my folders, made sure to save the account passwords, and made a backup of all the screenshots. It's time to focus on my Playstation 3 games!