WARNING: Play it safe – until they fix it [their site says there’s only a skeleton staff working over the holidays] – DO NOT GET THE KRIS KRINKLE TROOP!!!
So I’ve been checking the GoW official forums… It looks like there’s an absolutely huge mass of users banned automatically for no real reason… The one thing we all seem to have in common is that we’ve been using the new Kris Krinkle troop on our teams after saving up enough Crystals to earn it in the Krinklemass event
I bought the troop, but haven’t used him yet.
Ty for the warning!
This is stupid. Now, I’ll get banned for using a troop the way it was intended? No this isn’t stupid this is a huge stock pile of 
. I knew it, I knew some 
will happen. Fix this because I’m not getting banned for just playing the game. 
The problem may be related to Krinkle’s spell – I can only contribute wild speculation, but this is the only spell in the game with a greater than 20% chance of acquiring a Treasure Map (in terms of “maps per cast”, it’s technically 200%) which means that if there’s an anti-cheat rule like “treasure maps <= spellcasts” then THAT is the bug – but fortunately, that implies it can be fixed serverside with basically no delay (compared to patching something on the game client).
Which makes it all the more frustrating that this wasn’t caught in alpha.
Just a few minutes ago Tacet got banned on live stream and it did not involve Kris, unless the game reported him for using it yesterday.
[(⚔️ Gems of War, Campaign 12 Week 6 Day 6 | Happy Christmas Eve! And Ban Eve⚔️ - YouTube]
Originally it was mainly players using Kris Krinkle getting banned… since then, it appears to be spreading everywhere [which could mean their programming blunder is now affecting many other variables and accounts, or triggering random flagging]
What may have happened is that they set up something automated for the time they’re away and since there is no one reviewing it, the bot goes rogue if people play too much.
But everything is just speculation.
I hope they switch off the auto-ban already.
This should not be happening anymore, especially not with them claiming every ban gets reviewed by two people first.
Bots aren’t people (in case someone at IP2 forgot 
).
But what makes this the first such incident in some time? It does seem suspiciously correlated to the new Kringle troop, that is all we know so far.
most likely, not with the new squad, but with the filling of the pockets of players in the treasure maps, on which the bot, left in charge, unscrewed the slider to the maximum
I remember there was something with the points on the GW when the developers were also out of reach, and something bad was going on
That was my suspicion as well but it seems people get banned who haven’t used him.
Something is definitely going on.
Maybe the bot normally alerts devs to review and auto-bans after a certain amount of time if no one stops it.
But we all can only guess.
I’m not using Krinkle, not doing PvP, explore… Only playing minimum until we know what’s going on and when it’s safe again.
I have collected one Krinkle but have not put him on any teams, and have nothing unusual to report from my end. Doing 6 event battles a day to grind out for that Orb of Power.