In continued efforts to suppress the massive spam-bot community that has been invading Aion: Tower of Eternity since launch, NCSoft has announced that they've taken the banhammer to a large number of accounts. After a quick server reboot, 16,000 accounts have been banned this morning. In case you're wondering, that's a lot of accounts. Like, a serious amount. Seeing as one of the largest complaints most have had against the MMO has been the unusable chat channels due to constant "BUY GOLD!" spam, this is actually a huge deal. 

On their website today, they posted the following message, as well as tips on how to get your account un-banned if you were mistaken for a bot:

As you probably noticed, we've completed a server wide reboot without much notice on a day that we typically don't perform maintenance. It's only fair that we keep you in the loop and make sure you know what's going on. Over the last week we've been working on a list, we've been checking it twice, and today we found out who was naughty or nice. Ban Hammer Claus just came to town. When the servers come back online, nearly 16,000 accounts will have been removed from the game. If your account was banned, please read the following FAQ.

If you do the math, that's around $800,000 worth of game sales alone, meaning NCSoft made out like bandits on spammers buying their game. Hopefully, that number isn't rebuffed by the many gamers who have likely fled due to the negative effect the bots had on the servers, rendering the chat channels essentially unusable for the first month of play. Then again, if this works, they might come back, further padding NCSoft's pockets. I know I will, see you there!