Update 5/26: It appears that there is now a customer service team that actually looks into these issues. At some point (between February and now), my account got unbanned.

This doesn't really change my rating, since my experience really killed the game for me. But it's still a really fun game, and I'd still be playing it if my account didn't get banned back in November for nothing to do with PSO2's ToS.

More than anything, I'm glad that they've started looking into the issues and doing some actual investigations into accounts. Hopefully this means people that want to return to the game will be able to and still enjoy it. Just in time for NGS, eh?

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I’ve been a fan of Phantasy Star since Sega Genesis, and this version is a fun and unique addition to the series.

Unfortunately, being free-to-play means that this game has a serious issue with gold-sellers and credit card theft. The global version of this game has little to no customer support, so their answer to these issues is to put a system in place to detect when Steam freezes an account for investigation, then automatically and permanently bans the account. It doesn’t matter if the freeze is a false-positive, if Steam unfreezes the account, or if the issue is even related to PSO2 at all. Sega is content with letting Steam do their work for them to cleave as many RMT bots as possible, even if it means banning people who don’t deserve it.

Reaching customer service is impossible, and tickets are replied to using copy+paste responses with no information about the issue. From what I’ve read, the customer support is just an outsourced middle-man company that relays tickets back to Sega of Japan, and that they have no real power to actually look into these issues.

I lost over 1k hours of progress on the Global server (around 800 since switching to Steam from the MS Store), and the money I’ve spent on the game.