AION 2: Korea bans 1,718 more accounts, 24,374 in twelve days — and NCSOFT has just reinstated some of them

NCSOFT published the 294th wave of sanctions for the Korean service of AION 2 on Sunday, September 6, 2026 at 1:00 a.m. UTC: 1,718 accounts restricted for a single reason, that of account farms and unauthorized programs. It took effect upon publication, 10:00 a.m. Seoul time, or 3:00 a.m. Paris time — our conversion, since NCSOFT only publishes the Korean time.

This is the eleventh wave in twelve days: eleven numbered notices from 284 to 294 since August 26, totaling 24,374 accounts. Only one day remained empty, September 5 — and for good reason: the evening before, NCSOFT had announced that it had lifted the restriction on some of the accounts hit on September 4.

One clarification governs everything that follows: NC writes nothing in French on this subject, nor in English. These notices exist only in Korean, and the wordings used here — "account farms," "unauthorized program," "temporary protection" — are descriptions of our own making, not official labels.

What the September 6 notice says, and the accompanying penalty scale

The notice fits into four lines: date and time of the sanction, number of accounts, reason, then two links — to the game's operating policy and to the list of accounts. The reason does not vary from one wave to the next: the section covering farming workshops and unauthorized programs.

This policy, published on the publisher's website, grades most offenses across four tiers: bug abuse is worth seven days, then thirty, then ninety, then permanent. The three lines that concern us here — workshop, use of an unauthorized program, creation of such a program — have only one box filled in, from the very first occurrence. No first warning.

The box carries an abbreviated mention that the legend associates with the permanent restriction of all of the publisher's games, not just AION 2 alone; the correspondence is likely but is not written anywhere in those exact terms, and we will not assert it. On the other hand, NCSOFT itself names its lists "영구 제재 검출 리스트," a permanent sanction detection list.

The notice describes two mechanisms that must be distinguished. The first targets repetitive, organized play, including macros, likely to be classified as workshop activity. The second is preventive: access signals deemed dangerous on a device or connection environment are enough to freeze the account in order to protect it. Players wrongly affected go through support.

We compared the notices from August 26 and September 6 word for word: only the date and the number change. The paragraph on preventive freezes is therefore not a novelty, contrary to what a standalone reading might suggest.

Eleven waves in twelve days, 24,374 accounts

Here is the complete sequence, recorded notice by notice. Korea is seven hours ahead of Paris during this period: the 289th wave therefore fell at 1:46 p.m. French time, according to our conversion.

That's an average of 2,031 accounts per day. Detail verified across eleven notices: the publication time matches the announced ban time down to the second. NCSOFT doesn't warn, it reports after the fact.

The lists are public and verifiable — except one

Each notice links to a public spreadsheet, exported from Excel as a web page, listing the masked usernames of affected accounts, in the form we****. We counted them cell by cell: 1,718 names for 1,718 announced accounts in the 294th wave, and the count also checks out for the 293rd, 292nd, 291st and 289th.

Except for the 286th. Its notice announces 2,506 accounts, but its verification link serves a file with 1,711 names — the total for the following wave: this file is byte-for-byte identical to the 287th's, and its internal filename identifies it as the 287th wave's list. As far as we know, the 2,506 accounts from August 28 have never been published. The error was still there on September 6, 2026.

On September 4, NCSOFT reinstated some accounts

On September 4 at 3:08 PM UTC — 5:08 PM in Paris, and less than six hours after the 293rd wave — the publisher issued a separate notice: a re-examination had reportedly turned up "elements requiring further verification on certain accounts, whose restriction has been lifted." Our translation from Korean, the only language in which this text exists.

Two caveats. NCSOFT gives no figures: no number of reinstated accounts, no proportion. And it's not a pardon: the same text warns that the review is ongoing and that the ban could be reapplied.

One question of timing remains, framed as conditional since it rests on reading clues. The spreadsheets are served under an address prefixed with a number that reads like an upload timestamp: for seven of the eleven waves, it falls less than six minutes before publication. For the 294th, it would correspond to September 4 at 9:18 AM UTC, nine minutes after the 293rd wave's file and nearly forty hours before it went online — the spreadsheet's style identifier, moreover, still bears the number of the 293rd.

Such batch preparation would be nothing new, and that's precisely what keeps us from reading it as a maneuver: the spreadsheet covering waves 286 through 288 is named by NCSOFT as covering the period from August 28 to 30. A single detection campaign, split across three daily notices — except that, this time, a walk-back slipped in between the upload and the publication.

What this sequence doesn't say about the Western launch

Everything above describes the Korean service, which opened on November 19, 2025. It bears repeating, since the schedule invites confusion: the Western pre-launch test opens in eleven days, general opening in twenty-nine.

NC America has published nothing about the anti-cheat system for the Western build. Checked on September 6, 2026: no mention of a protection system on the French Steam page, no Steam announcement on the subject, and nothing in NCSOFT's press room, whose last communication about AION 2 dates back to July 1, 2026.

The only public document describing the arsenal is Korean and is eight months old. The January 28, 2026 press release announced, in English: "Measures include blocking specific overseas VPN connections, enhancing the in-game reporting system, and implementing hardware-based restrictions." It is this hardware component that sheds light on the preventive freezes described above: a block tied to the machine, not just the account.

As for the Western schedule, it hasn't moved: test on September 17 and 18, "Open to all: no key, invitation, or registration required"; early access on September 30 for Founder Packs; release date listed as October 5, 2026 on the French Steam page.

What to take away

A pattern with no progressive tiers, lists the publisher itself calls permanent sanction lists: on substance, Korea is perfectly legible. The pace, however, tells a different story: eleven notices in twelve days, a half-retraction without a single figure, a list prepared forty hours in advance, and another that doesn't match its own notice.

For those waiting for September 30, the conclusion is frustrating: the only documented anti-bot policy for AION 2 belongs to a service they won't have access to. Until NC America communicates, there is nothing to conclude about the European servers, either way.