By the power of Banhammer. BIOWARE HAS THE POOOWEEERRR!!! Although they’re using it quite wrong dear readers, quite wrong indeed. Apparently low level players in the game are exploiting the fact that you can travel to higher level areas and loot chests for big bucks. Bioware claims that this act is disrupting the game. Seriously? People take advantage of things like this in video games all the time. I myself have done so in Morrowind with the stacking intelligence cheat. It’s legit as long as you don’t get your intelligence too high, then the game breaks.

These users are simply doing what your game allows them to do Bioware. In the end, if you don’t want the players using SWTOR this way then make changes to the game. Don’t ban users for playing the game the right way. If anything you should commend these players for not using hacks or anything that would be actually detrimental to the game.

UPDATE

So apparently, as usual, there are two sides to every story. It seems as though most of these bans were actually gold farmers exploiting the game in ways that went against the ToS. A.K.A. they hacked the game. The people who have been looting chests, a lot, on Ilum have only been issued a warning, according to a post on swtor.com.

…a smaller number of accounts were warned or temporarily suspended for exploiting loot containers on Ilum. To be completely clear, while players may choose to travel to Ilum earlier than the recommended level (40+) and may loot containers if they can get to them, in the cases of those customers that were warned or temporarily suspended, they were systematically and repeatedly looting containers in very high numbers resulting in the game economy becoming unbalanced.

I still say that they shouldn’t have been suspended because the game allows you to do it. You don’t have to hack or anything to loot these chests on this planet. It is good that Bioware is going to remedy the situation but unfortunate for you guys who wanted to loot high level chests for big bucks though.