ArenaNet Suspends Digital Sales of Guild Wars 2 233
kungfugleek writes "Throughout the launch of subscription-free MMO Guild Wars 2, ArenaNet has stated that the player-experience is their top priority and, if necessary, they would suspend digital sales to protect their servers from crushing loads. While the launch has been considerably more stable than most big-budget MMO's in recent months, some players, especially those in Europe, have experienced trouble logging in and getting booted from servers. So yesterday, ArenaNet held true to their word, and temporarily suspended digital sales from their website. Personally, I think this is an incredible show of customer-centered focus. To turn down purchases, especially first-party purchases, where the seller gets a higher percentage of the sale, during a major title's first week of sales, would be inconceivable by other companies. Is this a bad move for ArenaNet? Will there be enough of a long-term payout to make up for the lost sales? And does this put pressure on other major studios to follow suit in the face of overwhelming customer response?"
New submitter charlieman writes with related news: "Yesterday ArenaNet banned players for exploiting an error in their new game Guild Wars 2. The so called exploit was in fact an error on ArenaNet's side, leaving weapons at a low price from some vendors. Players saw this and started making profits buying and selling the items.
Should players be penalized for errors committed by the game developers? Taking in account that the game is fairly new, the economy hasn't stabilized yet and most don't know the value of things. Today they've given these players a 'second chance', but shouldn't they be apologizing instead?"
Apologies? Nah... (Score:4, Insightful)
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This presumes that the buyer knew it was "wrong". I've played lots of games where certain markets were selling items below cost, and that gave the gamer a chance to be a trader (buy low; sell high). Had I been playing this ArenaNet game I would have thought that was the case.
Re:Apologies? Nah... (Score:5, Insightful)
Had I been playing this ArenaNet game I would have thought that was the case.
Uh. No. This is not Wing Commander privateer where iron is bought low on a mining asteroid and generates a modest profit when resold at a refinery world.
This is more on par with buying iron low at the mining asteroid, selling it for a modest profit at the refinery, then noticing the refiner is listing the raw iron you just sold it for half what you paid at the asteroid. So you buy it all back, and then notice the refinery will pay you their original purchase price to buy it all back... so you sell it back to them at enourmous profit without any travel or risk at all.
Then you see they are again selling it a fraction of the price you just sold it to them... so you stand there and repeat until you are wealthy enough to buy the refining world outright. Meanwhile telling yourself that there was nothing wrong with this because buying low and selling high and being a trader is a legitimate mechanic.
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Re:Apologies? Nah... (Score:5, Informative)
First, they only banned people who did it many, many times. The minimum for a ban (3-day, not even permanent) was over 100 times.
Second, the items were seriously discounted. It would be like buying a car for the price of a soda. You'd have to have totally ignored the pricing on all other items to not notice it was wrong. Also, this was mid-level items, so you'd have to have ignored the prices on the low-level items vendor standing next to the mid-level vendor to not notice.
Either the people banned were deliberately exploiting an obvious bug, or they were complete blithering morons.
Virtual Reality mirrors Reality (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Virtual Reality mirrors Reality (Score:4, Insightful)
Though i agree the game is rigged against the common trader, that's not what happened in the recent case where misconfigured HFT algo blew $440 million in 45 minutes. They had to eat their losses.
Re:Virtual Reality mirrors Reality (Score:5, Insightful)
This is more akin to a bug in an ATM causing it to give you free money. It may be the fault of the bank but it's theft for you to exploit it and if you do get caught then you will be punished.
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Except that in this case the ATM could spit out an infinite amount of money if you just stood there and kept hitting the same 2 button combination over and over.
In game, buying once and reselling is technically an exploit, but it's also possible it was a legitimate buy, and a legitimate sell.
Standing around for hours buying and selling to produce infinite money is obviously an exploit. Acquisition of money should be either rate limited, or entail risk. This was sort of rate limited by how fast you can cli
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As I understand it, you couldn't actually get an infinite amount of free money this way. All you could do was exchange one in-game currency for another in-game currency at a much better price than ArenaNet intended. Since there was no path back in the opposite direction, the amount you could actually make this way was limited by the amount of the first currency you could get via other means.
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All you could do was exchange one in-game currency for another in-game currency at a much better price than ArenaNet intended.
Actually, you went from Karma->Gold, then from Gold->Gems, the latter currently has a real-money value of $10/800.
Exploiting errors (Score:5, Insightful)
As a general statement, of course not. But these players *should* be penalized for knowingly exploiting those errors for profit - that goes against the spirit of the game, and lowers the general quality of play, things that should be greatly frowned upon when done intentionally.
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It was Areanet's mistake. Of course people took advantage of it, and you really can't punish them for it.
Re:Exploiting errors (Score:4, Insightful)
What planet do you live on? You'll be waiting a long time if you think you're ever going to live in a world where people will just do the right thing out of principle.
It was Areanet's mistake. Of course people took advantage of it, and you really can't punish them for it.
Obviously, you can.
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What planet do you live on? You'll be waiting a long time if you think you're ever going to live in a world where people will just do the right thing out of principle.
It was Areanet's mistake. Of course people took advantage of it, and you really can't punish them for it.
Obviously, you can.
It does make me wonder if people who got banned this way who bought the game using a credit card can file a chargeback against ArenaNet and successfully win it.
Re:Exploiting errors (Score:4, Insightful)
Why not? It's their server. They can do what they like. Should they allow their game to be ruined by the actions of stupid players. It's happened so many times in other games. If exploiters get banned early and often then that discourages other exploiters and keeps the game fair and the economy healthy.
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How do I know? Well, because I have a grasp of the English language that you apparently lack?
You might want to invest in a dictionary... Or just, y'know, Google it [google.com], perhaps?
"Paid" functions as an adjective, "payed" as a verb.
Fuckwit.
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can you punish someone for taking advantage of an unlocked window?
Yes, yes you can.
And yes, this was obviously an exploit. Yes you can punish them for abusing it. Just like you can ban people for rude behavior.
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It used to happen all the time not so very long ago. There would be considerable social pressure to do so and a good bit of shaming if you didn't.
Then, faceless corporations started freely ripping people off and they had to do the same just to break even.
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I was walking through the bakery department of my local supermarket one day when I heard an employee (some form of manager) loudly rebuking a another employee, saying "I told you to reduce all the bread BY 10p to not TO 10p!!".
At which point most of the people within hearing range headed over as quickly as they could to scoop up as many 10p bread bargains as they could.
People are terrible.
So, what you're saying is that people are terrible for wanting to get a great deal on some bread?
Who do you think you are, Scrooge McDuck?
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No, they are terrible for taking advantage of a known mistake. Just like the cashier would be if they knew the item was ringing up at a higher than marked price and just quietly pocketed the difference if the customer didn't notice.
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No, they are terrible for taking advantage of a known mistake. Just like the cashier would be if they knew the item was ringing up at a higher than marked price and just quietly pocketed the difference if the customer didn't notice.
Welcome to capitalism.
Now get the hell off my lawn.
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I certainly understand the law, too many businesses were posting the 'wrong' price 'accidentally on purpose'. That doesn't mean the customers who KNOW it's an actual mistake aren't morally questionable for taking advantage, but they are within their legal rights to do so if they choose.
It looks like they ultimately did offer to make the bans 72 hour rather than forever, so it's a step in the right direction. Now if I could just find enough brain cycles for a game and the job that pays for it...
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>>>10p bread bargains as they could. People are terrible.
Reminds me of a Motel 6 I stayed. They had a "click 6" rate online that is 10% off the regular price. Since I knew I was staying at the motel every week til the end of the year, I reserved my room at that 10% rate.
The first few weeks went just fine, but then about the 25th week of so, the motel manager responded by saying, "I'm no longer honoring that rate." I called the central office and they overruled him: He must honor the website's r
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That is quite different, 10% off is not that unusual a deal so you had no reason to believe it was an error at all.
Re:Exploiting errors (Score:5, Insightful)
Arenanet.
As I understand it, you had to buy "a significant number" of these things before you got banned. I'm not sure what it was, but it was established that if you bought 50 (which goes far beyond the normal use case of maybe 5, if you got one of each weapon type for your class) you got a 3-day suspension.
Apparently people were buying thousands, vendor trashing them, and using the gold to buy Gems (Real-Money credits). Personally, that's why I think Anet is being as harsh as they are. They're screwing with the Real Money shop.
Some timing... (Score:2)
Payday for a lot of people (including myself), go onto site to buy it and oh look... Not sure I can be bothered waiting for amazon copy to arrive, being weekend and all...
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You can always buy it from a local store or get a download copy from Gamestop. Amazon and other sites are listing the download version as out of stock.
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Can someone explain the "GameStop App" to me? Is it just a service for downloading the game or does it try to be Steam acting as some sort of management software? If possible, I'd like to download the game and forget I ever bought it at GameStop. Definitely not interested in another persistent application. Steam is enough in that regard.
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Would you rather pay and download it and then not be able to use it?
I know this concept seems to be getting lost, but..
Set the money aside and save it. It will become available again.
"Banned for exploiting" isn't a good reason? (Score:5, Insightful)
And I suppose being arrested for receiving stolen goods after taking advantage of a shady boot sale is also terribly unfair?
There's this little voice in your head that says "this is too good to be legal," and you're supposed to listen to it.
If you're a gamer and you found a way to make the game do something it clearly shouldn't let you do (i.e., teleport across the battlefield, buy high-end gear at unreasonably low prices, disconnect other players, etc.), you're exploiting. Period. And if you keep doing it, you're knowingly and intentionally exploiting. And a lifetime ban is simply the kindest thing you deserve.
Contrary to popular opinion, "whatever you can get away with" is not a valid ethical choice, and if you get busted, whining about it just looks douchbaggish and immature.
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Sometimes I never know if these "exploits" are intended, and interact with features not yet revealed. For example, getting a super-cheap but overly powerful sword may endear you to a band of unsavory characters that tarnishes reputation and makes it difficult to do other things, or by performing what now seems to be an "exploit" is actually a feature that the game makes up for later by making something incredibly difficult.
Put this another way: If you bought a blender and later found out it makes a better f
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You don't have the right to decide what is a valid ethical choice or not. If you think it's not valid, that merely means that it doesn't pass muster under your ethics.
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You are confusing ethics with morals. Ethics aren't relative to an individual.
See the following [stackexchange.com].
Ethics relates to a generalized concept of fairness and honesty, and you would be hard pressed to say that it is remotely honest to take advantage of an obvious bug hundreds if not thousands of times to make yourself rich. It is possible, it may very well be legal, and depending upon your upbringing and religion, it may even be moral to do so, but it is clearly unethical.
Very common with geeks though (Score:2)
You see it with regards to breaking in to systems all the time. There's this attitude that it is 100% the responsibility of the user to secure their system and if they don't have perfect security, it is fair game to break in. That is not the law, of course, but geeks will argue the point continually. They think if you can do it in the electronic realm, that means it should be ok to do.
Of course it always amuses me that none of them feel the same way about the physical world, they'd all be very mad if you br
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>>>And I suppose being arrested for receiving stolen goods after taking advantage of a shady boot sale is also terribly unfair?
Nice analogy but not really how it works. The store I used to work for was caught selling items higher than the tagged price. For example $49.99 Rockport shoes for $99.99. The store argued these were obvious clerical errors and the customers should not expect to get shoes for half price, therefore they had no right to demand 50 dollar refunds. The Texas Government argue
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The computer game has a retail economy. Many people are making the argument that players should have known that the price was too good to be true and therefore should not have purchased the items.
In the real world, if goods are priced incorrectly, the merchant has to sell it for what the price tag says. The same logic carries over into the virtual world. The price on a good is the price the good sells for. If another merchant buys the good for more than it costs to buy it, a profit can be realized.
To us
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THough in theory I agree with you on customer protections, there is a limit when buying and selling of these can effectively be used as arbitrage.
So simply, when the products are bought in sufficient quantity as to be purchased for resale, then sold, it's more like a financial transaction than a purchase... and at that point the buyer loses the "customer protections".
Note in this case ArenaNet only suspended those who traded excessive quantities that wouldn't indicate personal use. I say, good for ArenaNet
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Uhh. What? ArenaNet should be fined by their local state government entity because some in-game items in a video game purchased with pretend video game money earned in a video game was marked as cheaper than the intended price?
What?
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There's this little voice in your head that says "this is too good to be legal," and you're supposed to listen to it.
You roll Lawful Good characters, don't you?
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Diablo 3 had all kinds of "too easy" farming holes at launch that could never have been caught in testing. One that I used a few times (although I was too low level for it to be actually valuable) was a magic chest hidden in act 2. You could set your checkpoint to the first checkpoint past the test and then keep restarting. The chest was there like 80% of the
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There was no finding something "extremely clever" here - Some high end items were mistakenly listed at such a drastically low price people were buying hundreds to thousands of them and reselling them. I find it incredibly hard to believe that anyone putting so much effort into buying these items thought what they were doing was legitimate. Not everyone who bought and resold the items were banned. Only the heaviest offenders were; the ones who had to know something was wrong with the prices in comparison to
Seriously? (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry, no sympathy. The people who got banned bought *thousands* of weapons. That falls *squarely* in the realm of exploiting game mechanics, it doesn't matter where the fault lies. This comment on Reddit says it best:
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So they got banned for gaming a game.
Exploiters should be banned (Score:2)
It's not at all unreasonable to ban players for exploiting.
Why is it ArenaNet's fault? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've heard this shit several times that if the developer doesn't produce magical bug-free code then dickheads have every right to exploit the shit out of the bug and ruin the game for everyone else as it's the 'fault of the devs' for 'letting them do it'. I've seen other MMO economies trashed by such stupidity on the part of the players and so at the very least temp bans should be handed out to discourage such retards from wrecking other people's enjoyment.
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an easy fix for this for ArenaNet
1 dupe the exploited weapons and make some sort of small edit to the copies (just enough so you can tell a pre exploit copy from a post exploit copy)
2 in a couple weeks create some sort of Uber Creature (Like the Dresden Files He Who Walks Behind or a Doom II Cyberdemon) and have this creature spawn and stalk anyone using a pre exploit version.
3 sit back and watch the problem solve itself
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I like the way you think :)
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I'm thinking something along Oblivion's Annoying Fan [wikia.com] might do the job, and have a chance to fit in.
Slashdot vs reddit reactions (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Slashdot vs reddit reactions (Score:5, Insightful)
Being an avid reader of both Slashdot and Reddit, I find that it's a maturity thing. There are some immature people here, but the average maturity level of Reddit I'd place far lower than here. People here would be quicker to point out how exploiting the cost of an item could be detrimental and can follow the path of consequence better than Reddit.
Also, Reddit is more easily gamed. The perception that Reddit is not happy with something can easily be just one person with an army of followers (human or programmatic) that are not happy. It's harder to influence mood here because not everyone gets mod points at the same time. It happens a bit, but trolls (in this case, people looking for validation) quickly move on to other forums where it's easier to game the system.
Some important missing details (Score:5, Insightful)
About sales: the game is still available in box form from game stores and online (such as Amazon). The digital sale stop was not meant to completely stop incoming player population, just to slow it down.
Furthermore on this topic, ArenaNet has been trying to keep the number of servers low so they don't end up with a lot of empty servers when the initial hype dies down. Though, due to player and guild names being globally unique, doing server merges are much easier compared to other games.
About bans: ArenaNet is banning for exploiting because they want to send a very clear message that exploiting design errors will not be tolerated. If something seems too good to be true, it probably is and shouldn't be taken advantage of. There was an item for that that was selling for a fraction of its expected cost, so some people bought hundreds (or thousands) of that item to be used for other purposes (crafting and mystic forge). ArenaNet banned those player. People that did around 50-100 purchases just got a 3 day suspension.
To add, people that were banned are being given the option to submit a customer service ticket and have their account unbanned and converted to a 72-hour suspension instead. They must also promise to delete any items or money they gained through the exploit. This was done as it was the first exploit found in the game.
ArenaNet is doing all this to send a very clear message on how they expect their players to behave, and I'm happy they are.
Re:Some important missing details (Score:5, Insightful)
Reading what ArenaNet have done has made me very pleased that I bought the game. I've seen MMOs destroyed because exploiters and cheats were allowed free reign. The devs didn't seem to understand that if you tolerate the dickhead players then decent players leave. This then leaves a game full of arseholes that no-one new would ever stick around in. When the arseholes get bored and head off to destroy another game, the original game dies. ArenaNet clearly don't want this to happen and I personally think it's great.
Shipping new boxes to stores? (Score:2)
About sales: the game is still available in box form from game stores and online (such as Amazon). The digital sale stop was not meant to completely stop incoming player population, just to slow it down.
But are they shipping new boxes to stores? They can't do much about what stores already have in inventory.
All it takes is a Phone call (Score:2)
and then a Memo is put out requesting that the boxes be placed on Hold (the DM will see this in moments and he will then light up the phone tree to get this to the stores).
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About bans: ArenaNet is banning for exploiting because they want to send a very clear message that exploiting design errors will not be tolerated. If something seems too good to be true, it probably is and shouldn't be taken advantage of.
To me, the legitimacy of the bans falls on the answer to one question: did ArenaNet make all players aware that the exploit existed, or did they just ban the people who found it incidentally?
If the former, than I totally understand the ban; "Hey guys, there's a problem with this particular game mechanic, don't exploit it or we'll ban your ass." == fair enough.
If the latter, than it's utter bullshit. It's not the gamer's fault that the game had such a major flaw, and if ArenaNet never told them "hey, t
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If you want to follow the whole thing yourself, ArenaNet has been very public about all of this, posting on Reddit with the information (they aren't posting on their own blog as they don't want to do anything else that will hammer their infrastructure with more traffic):
Initial posting announcing the bans [reddit.com]
Follow-up posting that will let people undo the ban and make it a suspension [reddit.com]
A lot of people agree with you on this topic. I think the only reason they are letting people undo the bans is because of the bad
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Actually a better analogy would be if Wal-Mart accidentally marked the price of Avatar to $1, but the customer service/return desk still saw it priced at $10. So a bunch of people went and bought a thousand copies of Avatar for $1 each and immediately returned it to the return desk for $10 each. While Wal Mart isn't going to prosecute anyone who did it a few times, you can bet they will press charges against someone who did it a thousand times..
Press charges? For what? It's not theft, since Wal-Mart is the one who set the pricing, so what crime could they possible charge someone with?
They could, perhaps, sue the individuals playing the buy-return-buy game, but the question there is, what would be the legal basis of Wal-Mart's case?
If the best they have is "Your Honor, we mispriced one of our products and people took advantage of it!" I would presume a (US) judge fluent in economics would likely reply, "Welcome to capitalism, now get the hell ou
Game mechanics / real-life (Score:2)
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exploit means someone abusing what is an obvious bug to the layman.
Granted sometimes that can be hard, but not in this case.
Don't compare it to real life. If the owner of the store was buying soda for 2 bucks a six pack, and the it rang up for a dollar, it would be pretty obvious a mistake. Now, should the one person get it at the wrong price? sure, but the merchant can fix it on the spot so it doesn't happens again.
Generalization (Score:3)
"Just because you can, doesn't mean you should."
There are people out there that forget this, or flat out don't believe in that line of thinking. Cheating is cheating, whether in a game or in real life. Unfortunately, my nephews were brought up believing it is perfectly fine to use public aid as much as you possibly can regardless if you actually need it or not. The problem is, their yardstick for measuring what needs are is broken compared to what hardworking folk would think. Most people will file these things under desires or even luxuries, but seldom are they actually needs. For my nephews, that line of thinking easily crosses over into computer games. They think that because they found a way to "beat the system" means they should do it as often as possible before it gets changed. Their morality compass is skewed by how they were brought up to think. They honestly find nothing wrong with it. Their normal mode of thinking is selfish, and they never think about how their actions will affect others in the same group.
This is just my nephews, who unfortunately, were brought up this way. I know of many more people, some personally, some through friends, that have this same type of default mode of thinking. I will even go as far to generalize that this type of thinking can be very generational - as in it is passed down generation through generation.
Kudos for ArenaNet for towing the line and banning people who are obviously exploiting game inconsistencies or bugs. With a system this complex, nobody can expect everything to be 100% correct all the time.
For a different example, I was watching a YT vid of a GW2 raid. The leader of the raid was actively telling the other people how to use positional exploits to avoid damage so they could get through content without much danger. That kind of thing pisses me off. For almost exactly the same reasons. It almost makes me wish there was a community reward program for reporting players like this. Unfortunately, I fear there is more room for abuse then what good it would do.
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Example? the game is designed so you can hid behind and move around items. I don't know if that was the case in your circumstance.
BTW, that's a two way street.
IT's not generational, there have always been people who think that way.
IN the case of computer games, sometimes it can be hard to determine a bug and a feature. Not in the case, it's pretty obvious that a merchant wouldn't buy things for more then they would sell them for... unless the developer intended the player to be able to get the merchant drun
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This person was hiding inside world geometry to avoid taking damage. There was nothing subtle about it. I agree with you that there are valid battle tactics that are positional. Hiding behind pillars during certain attacks for example. Regarding your second example, if killing the centaurs in that method presents little or no danger to your character, and you're are able to kill thousands of them for some greater than average benefit (quest items, trade materials, gold), then you should bring it up to the
Knowingly taking advantage (Score:2)
of an obvious bug is an exploit. Right or wrong, it's just rude.
Just because you don't chain up your bike, doesn't mean it's ok is someone takes it.
The developer side of things need to be done internally.
Frankly. I hope they were able to take the money they made away from the people who did it more then once.
.
Unexpected boon (Score:5, Insightful)
I know I didn't anticipate it, but one of the unforseen benefits of a "no monthly fee" game is that they can do this - flat-out BAN players who exploit the game, or who ignore repeated warnings.
Anet has made a significant effort to warn people about names like Penishead or FloppyTitLover as inappropriate, giving them 72 hours to think about it when they don't change.
And they've aggressively suspended accounts for people shouting 'faggot' over general chat.
Now they flat-out ban people that are obviously exploiting the game.
I don't care if it's dull as checkers, I'm going to buy their next expansion just to show me support for this behavior.
What I find particularly pathetic is that people are having so much trouble over this. "But there's no stated POLICY that I couldn't name my toon 'D1cksm0ker'!" and
"They didn't rez me, so I got angry and called them a faggot on chat, so what, free speech!"
If you sincerely have trouble understanding appropriate conduct and inappropriate conduct in these obvious circumstances, either your parents failed or you're starting to believe the internet libertarian lawyer brigade who assert that if it isn't specifically prohibited, it's practically mandatory.
Personally, I prefer a world in which there ARE social norms like saying please and thank you, and not calling someone a "cocksucker" just because they play better than I do in pvp. I don't find the behavior boundaries that hard to conform to, nor do most people.
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But Microsoft have thrown away billions on the Xbox, whereas most game developers actually want to make money.
Logic (Score:2)
You have a gap in your logic there. Players were not punished for the error, but for EXPLOITING the bug.
Open window? Your problem. Me climbing in? Breaking and entering. It really is that simple
And people will thank them... (Score:2)
...by pirating. Because information wants to be free, maaan, and you have no right to keep it from us.
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Let's not start with the reddit meme all over again. In comparison to every other MMO arenanet punishes players instead of focusing on fixing problems.
Re:busted... (Score:4, Insightful)
no they fix problems and punish people who abuse an obvious flaw.
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No slicing still gives free money, it's supposed to. It's just supposed to be rate limited, and the rate was too high initially. This would be like finding an instant respawn that infinitely re spawned slicing container that always produced a significant amount of credits. Looting it once is legitimate. Looting it twice is understandable. Looting it for hours over and over is clearly an exploit.
When they *didn't* ban people after having had the one day huge honour exploit on ilum they screwed up PVP fo
Re:busted... (Score:4, Insightful)
So if I exploit bank software and take all you money, it's legal?
How about exploiting a flaw in your router and moving all your data to my machines, is that legal?(Note I said mv not cp)
No, abusing obvious exploits is rude, and it's wrong. Note everything need to be codified into a strict rule book. Welcome to a society, watch you manners and have fun.
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Buying from an in-game merchant that is there to sell stuff and selling to an in-game merchant who is there to buy stuff (usually the same merchant) has never been an exploit in any game I've ever played. I guess GW2 has strange rules.
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I remember something similar in Everquest where one NPC was selling items vastly cheaper than they should. There was a rollback and I believe a handful of people were banned for seriously exploiting it.
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WTF is with these "economies" in video games? People can't even set up a properly working, stable economy in the real world due to greed, corruption, and outright stupidity. If thieves like Goldman Sachs are allowed to cheat and get away with it to the tune of billions of "real" dollars, who the fuck cares if someone makes a few extra gold coins in a fucking video game?
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Dude, I didn't roll a lawful/good character. Deal with my chaotic/evil ways. :P
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In the case of the specific currency trading (karma to gold), most of the bans from what I've read are temporary ones.
The second link in the article actually indicates that they were permanent bans, but ArenaNet are letting users jump through hoops to convert it into a 72-hour ban. Seems fairly extreme, especially since one of the hoops is "you will delete any items/currency that you gained from the exploit"... which if they can't reverse it themselves, means they probably can't accurately verify how much profit a user should be deleting.
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Player A exploits loophole to illegitimately gain 1 million gold
Player A buys 100k weapon from Player B-1, 100k chest-armor from Player B-2, and 100k ring from Player B-3
Player B-1 uses that 100k that he got from a legitimate sale of a legitimately [farmed/crafted/bought] item, and buys 50k worth of consumables
Player B-2 uses that 100
Re: (Score:3)
Oh don't worry. I'm not saying it's easy (I'm in the industry, so I understand tracking and deleting at this point is tricky)), just that... it'll be hard for anyone from ArenaNet to verify that the profiteers actually deleted "enough".
If I had 33k before the exploit, and I ended up with 100k (not counting anything bought in the mean time), how would ArenaNet know what I should have been at before I started using the exploit? Unless they have very specific and thorough save data journaling (unlikely, consid
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Was it obviously a bug?
The only way I could think this would be the case is if they bought/sold from the same vendor...
Otherwise I personally would have thought it was intentional on the developers' parts.
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The person that did it said he noticed a very lucrative way to convert one asset to another and no other methods to do it netted such a profit, then he shared it with thousands of others instead of submitting a bug to let the developers know that the numbers were off. The reason for the ban wasn't that he found and used the exploit for the most part. It's that he shared it with all his friends and told them the how to do it.
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It is a game. If you choose to spend your hours in the game right clicking on a weapon in one vendor menu and then turning left 90 degrees and right clicking on the same weapon to sell it to another vendor, that's your choice. I personally choose to spend my hours in the game chasing monsters and following the storylines.
If you really want to make money clicking between two screens, I can help find you a job doing data capture. It will equally boring and will give you the same carpal
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Someone doing it thousands of times either wrote a bot or spent so much buying and selling that I question their sanity...maybe a 3-day break from the game would be good for their mental health.
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Blowing things out of proportion is something people tend to be good at, I suppose.
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Funny how this MMO doesn't have monthly fees...
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Don't you have it backward?
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The issue with the article and everything linked is that NONE OF THEM go into detail about what the exploit was, other than stating there was one.
So by default I'm skeptical of everything. Thanks for clearing that up!
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As I understand it, players bought the underpriced item from one vendor with one form of in-game currency and could then sell it in return for a different in-game currency (or maybe not even that). There was no direct exchange rate from one currency to the other.
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Don't forget the second half...
The vendor will buy it back from you for $15.
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Buy a $20 shirt for $0.02 then sell it back for $15 : the vendor vendor loses $14.98 ( +$0.02 cash, -$15.00 cash, gets to keep the shirt ).
So, you see, by selling the shirt back you're actually doing the vendor a favor!
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That's a good way to get flooded with so many reports that the real bugs can't get fixed. Most of the time, price variations between merchants in a game are, in fact, deliberate. Unless you can prove that these people cannot possibly have been unaware that the pricing was in error (e.g. a negative or zero price), your argument makes no sense.
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Most of the time, price variations between merchants in a game are, in fact, deliberate. Unless you can prove that these people cannot possibly have been unaware that the pricing was in error (e.g. a negative or zero price), your argument makes no sense.
Since in this case, apparently the buyback price was higher than the sell price (at the same vendor, not between different vendors), then anyone who encountered this should have definitely known something was amiss, and that this was an exploitable bug.
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Clearly, if this cost them a sale, then you have a problem with exploiters being punished.
I'm pretty sure the GW2 community won't miss you. Enjoy Rift.