Guild Wars 2

In light of the recent Snowflake Bans, I came up with a way to better handle the situation should another exploit like this appear. It took a developer two days to confirm this was an exploit: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/How-to-make-1-glob-of-ectoplasm-into-stacks/page/2#post1037389

In addition to posting on the forums, the developers should use the in-game mail client to inform the players that something is an exploit. Such a message should be phrased in a way that players who know what the exploit is realize they’ll get banned for it, but not too specific lest other players try it and get banned.

Example:
“There’s an exploit going around that involves salvaging a snowflake recipe to generate more high-level materials than were needed to create it initially. If you continue to use this exploit after the time of this post, you will be banned.”

100% of players will see it and have no grounds on which to complain that they “didn’t know.” Players who used the exploit more than a certain number of times before the message should be banned regardless, but for the average player who only used it a few times should be given a clear warning.

I find the lack of communication to the players about this incident to be atrocious. There isn’t a single forum post by a staffer explaining the situation and how it will be resolved. Own up to the mistake. Also, mass bans of players who aren’t botters, hackers, or gold sellers look really shady and should be explained as well, like the karma weapons exploit.

ArenaNet has the right to handle bans in any way they please, and, whether or not they change their methods, I will continue to play Guild Wars 2 regardless.

Thanks for reading.

Sure, that works. But usually by the time Anet realizes there is an exploit there are already a handful of players who have abused the exploit.

Additionally, from the time they find out about the exploit, it only takes a little longer to implement a quick fix than it does to formulate an official in-game mail letter.

I’m not one of those who did this nor did I know anyone who did but I’m all for rollbacks rather then bans honestly. WoW hasn’t gotten 10.1 million subs and kept 8 million of them for years like this by banning large numbers of players for this kind of behavior. If it’s one thing that the gaming community as a whole doesn’t respond well to it’s a police state.

Warnings usually don’t work. What I saw in other games was a sudden drop on the server going down, a rollback while they posted on the forums that they were correcting a potentially game breaking bug, then when the servers came back up the items that were in question were gone and the auction house of the game was cleared out of that particular item. What would happen is all those people who made these things would have lost alot of gold and left the game and the accounts with too many of a particular item say above 120 ectos would be investigated for this type of behavior and then banned instead of how it was handled and then getting backlash about it from the community. That’s what I would imagine would have kept so many people from complaining.

But I also would imagine that people wouldn’t be doing these exploits if the drop rate problem was addressed properly.

tigirius.9014:

I’m not one of those who did this nor did I know anyone who did but I’m all for rollbacks rather then bans honestly. WoW hasn’t gotten 10.1 million subs and kept 8 million of them for years like this by banning large numbers of players for this kind of behavior. If it’s one thing that the gaming community as a whole doesn’t respond well to it’s a police state.

Warnings usually don’t work. What I saw in other games was a sudden drop on the server going down, a rollback while they posted on the forums that they were correcting a potentially game breaking bug, then when the servers came back up the items that were in question were gone and the auction house of the game was cleared out of that particular item. What would happen is all those people who made these things would have lost alot of gold and left the game and the accounts with too many of a particular item say above 120 ectos would be investigated for this type of behavior and then banned instead of how it was handled and then getting backlash about it from the community. That’s what I would imagine would have kept so many people from complaining.

But I also would imagine that people wouldn’t be doing these exploits if the drop rate problem was addressed properly.

nah rollbacks are crap. Why should people have their work undone that they did legit to combat exploitors. You may think differently but to me those people who were just out n about doing their daily playing shouldnt have their game effected cos of a few selfish greedy people.

And the drop rate thing has ZERO effect on weather people exploit or not. These sort will exploit because they are just greedy. Its nothing complicated.

Also i feel a post on the forums about it isnt enough. What if someone thought this was legit and did it a few times after the warning went out on the forums? Should they be punished cos they wanted to the play the game over checking forums. I dont think they should. They can hotfix stuff into the game so a global warning to players isnt beyond reason if they are going to threaten with ban hammers.

Instead of announcing the existence of the exploit to the entire forum community, why don’t you report it like good players do?

A good game developer never goes announcing about bugs until after they are fixed.
This is so that the amount of players abusing it is kept to a minimum.