Marathon was recently released. The game is not sold in Russia, but gamers have still found a way to get the Steam version and play from Russia.
However, one community member, MaSsS, was soon banned:
At release, I played with friends for about 3 hours, enjoyed it, everyone liked the game BUT... the next day I get a "notification for the account" in Steam where I am completely blocked from playing Marathon -_- what? how? why? unclear. And now a black screen appears in the game "not so fast" you have been blocked.
Some speculated that it was because he was "identified," but it turned out differently.
After receiving the ban, MaSsS sent an appeal to Bungie and received a response — he was temporarily banned from Marathon due to network issues:
According to support request #445323, you are contacting us regarding a restriction imposed due to a network connection issue. After careful review, we have decided that the remaining time of your temporary restriction will remain unchanged.
Bungie recommended that the player spend the remaining time improving their internet connection.
According to MaSsS, the Marathon protection system saw malicious intent in his connection problems:
They didn't like my network connection. The system took my network problems as intentionally increasing ping and benefiting from it -_- although I played stably for all 5 hours (packet loss flashed a couple of times and threw me back, which greatly hindered me at the moment).
