Happy New Year everyone! I hope you celebrated, but not by dancing in the Star Wars MMO, as that got a lot of people banned. Doing the "group dance" command by typing /getdown apparently messes up enemies targeting you. You get to be basically invulnerable.
It's kind of mindblowing that a developer would ban people for an exploit like this. I thought we've been around the block over and over and over and over on such things. Fix the problem, and don't BAN people for taking advantage of advantageous properties in the game. I mean really. BioWare has instituted this squishy rule: "dancing is currently not permitted outside of special Dance Zones." Sounds kind of like living in a dictatorship, which I guess it is, but that's just really eerie. What are the special Dance Zones? I think it means "dont' do this in combat," but I honestly don't know. How about a hard coded rule that doesn't make me guess if I'm doing ban-worthy dancing?
If fixing the problem is some hard thing, then remove dancing entirely for a brief time, or disable the /getdown command. I'm disappointed that banning players was the response here.
UPDATE: BioWare says that the e-mails telling people they were banned were fake e-mails. If so, the fake e-mails skirt dangerously close to what seems standard practice in MMOs, but maybe BioWare is off the hook, if they just fix the dancing thing.