Over the last 24 hours, people mining in Alienworlds have had very different experiences. I was lucky, and rather than my usual mines of 2-3 TLM, instead mined more than 15 TLM in one go, shocked to use the /lastmine command on discord and see this message:

On the other hand, I know of many people who have been unable to mine at all, instead getting this message:

The result of many people getting this message is naturally that the pools are a lot less spread and hence each mine can take out a bigger chunk than normal.

As you might be able to guess, the AW team has done a huge review of mining accounts and flagged many of them. While this has undoubtedly stopped many bots, many legitimate players have also been caught in the crossfire, hence resulting in the error message above notifying them that they have been flagged. For the first few hours after the flagging mines were more than 5x better for many people, before dropping to 3x after an hour and remained at 2x for the next few hours. Now, almost 21 hours after the initial incident, mines are about the same as they were before, with some oddly worse than the average mine before (may just be due to pool fluctuations). Clearly many players (and sadly many bots too) have been unflagged and are back to mining. Whether this is due to a major fix or simply lots of individual appeals being recognized and resulting in unflagging is not known.

While this flagging of bots is undoubtedly a good thing in the long run (people who were unfairly flagged won't be seeing it as a good thing right now), the return of mines back down to their regular sizes is a clear indication that there is still a lot of work to be done, with bots still draining the pools. However, the fact that the team is working towards eliminating their bot problem is definitely something positive to focus on. 

To everyone who didn't get flagged, I hope you enjoyed your juicy mines yesterday and to those of you that were flagged... I feel your pain after being flagged for months last year. I hope if you were unfairly flagged you have appealed it already, and if not please head to https://aw-warder.yeomen.ai/tower/appeals in order to appeal this flagging. 

I hope this was somewhat informative and happy mining everyone!