Guild Wars 2

Hellkaiser.6025:

… but there was faults and bad behavior on BOTH sides …

A-net could have certainly handled the situation better. And their communication is not up to a good enough standard. At all.

But if you’re asking whether or not something is an exploit, you know yourself that there is definitely a possibility that it IS an exploit. Even when nobody responds, be reasonable and just don’t do it anyway. Is in-game gold and items really worth that much? Those who continued to do this after asking if it was an exploit were actually saying they knew it could be wrong, but went on doing it anyway.

Perma ban is harsh, and I don’t necessarily think it was a reasonable punishment at all. But a punishment of some kind had to be handed out. I think a better approach would have been a temp ban and deletion of gold/items obtained from exploitation. But maybe that isn’t possible once it’s been circulating through the economy for that long? :/

Would it be possible to request for a full refund? Or is this feature only available to those who successfully used the exploit? I don’t really care about the people who did the so-called cheating but I do think its unfair that people are allowed to have full refunds for the in-game purchases/game and others do not. And yes I know requesting a full refund would mean the account would be removed completely. What qualifies someone to be granted a full refund? May I have this question answered by someone like Gaile or the staff team?

The people who exploited this feature didn’t hack the game. They didn’t use any weird add-ons to make the software behave in ways that weren’t intended. They didn’t buy gold, gems, or other in-game advantages from goldfarmers or any unauthorized group. They just found a certain item in the game that was relatively cheap and easy to make legitimately, and which legitimately salvaged some other very valuable item. ArenaNet programmed the game, and they set the all the item and salvage data. It is literally, factually ArenaNet’s fault that this happened, and there is no possible way you can skew or spin the issue to make that untrue.

Yes, the effects of the exploit were severe and had potentially calamitous impact on the game’s economy. This speaks to the seriousness of ANet’s error and an immediate need to correct the flaw, not to punish those who happened to find it. The game and its economy needed to be protected from the effects of the flaw — they did not need protecting from the players.

I recall a bug in Final Fantasy VII, whereby you could actually make infinite duplicates of any item you wanted. You didn’t need to hack the game to do this, it was just a flaw in the programming that the programmers didn’t catch. Consider whose fault it is, that this happened. Should the people who made FFVII track down the people who exploited this bug and forcibly take back their copies of the game? Why, or why not? If you’re going to tell me that FFVII isn’t an online game, and that your actions don’t affect other players, you’re not justifying the punishment — you’re only describing that the programming bug happens to have been particularly unfortunate.

What the exploiters did was stupid, careless, selfish — but not immoral, illegal, or directly harmful to anyone. They didn’t make the game, they were merely using what ArenaNet made. Should they expect ArenaNet to fix the flaw in the system, and even take away their gains from the incident? Yes. Should they expect to be banned? I’m not certain I’ve heard a convincing argument for that yet. Even so, there are such things as temporary bans, right? Would that not send a strong enough message?

It’s kind of funny reading these posts, some many of the people calling exploit clearly havent salvaged high level crafted rares in mass because that generates a mass of ecto’s and profit STILL if you’re capable of using a tiny bit of math. But hurray for the outraged ignorant!

It’s funny you know. I’m not a TP Day Trader, Night Trader or any kind of Trader. I do not have the head for the kind of mass trading that goes on and charts and statistics and market trends just confuse the heck out of me. I spend my day playing the game, grinding here and there and selling what I come up with for a few coins now and then. I can probably count on 10 gold in my bank at any one time and the most I have ever seen was 40 gold after saving diligently for several weeks.

I rarely if ever craft anything. I find crafting to be expensive and frankly boring. I do not like the idea of farming for mats to make things that people will never buy, and aside from Jewelcrafting, I find no use for any other crafting skill in the game. I have 400 Jewelcrafting because I know that when I make a new toon, I cam make myself jewelry. I do not learn new recipes and I have no desire to find and/or learn holiday recipes as they provide no bonus to any of the level 80 characters I have already.

I SAW the posts on the forums and on Reddit about the Snowflake stuff. I looked into it, read up on it and thought about it. I eventually decided that I wasn’t going to try to do it. NOT because I thought it was an exploit. In fact…the thought that it was an exploit had not EVER crossed my mind. I decided not to do it because it required me to craft and use the Mystic Forge and the Trading Post. All of which confuse me to no end and I would rather be playing the game then standing in front of a vendor for any significant amount of time.

HAD I decided to do the whole Snowflake thing…it seems to me now…that I probably would have been banned and I would have been extremely angry at ANet. I would also have been called an exploiter by the community. I would have had my account taken from me for doing something that Anet decided after the fact was an exploit that I would have had not even the slightest inclination that it was.

So…whats funny to me about this entire situation is because I’m ‘dumb’ when it comes to the economy of GW2, ‘dumb’ when it comes to market trends, ‘dumb’ because Trading confuses the heck out of me, and ‘dumb’ because I abhor crafting, I saved myself from being banned for doing something that I had no idea would have been an exploit.

So…what about all of the players out there who are like me? Average Joe player who is poor most of the time, doesn’t play the market or can’t but greatly enjoys the game? We see something that could make us some cash and decide that we could use some extra money. We do not have the where-withal to even think that what we are doing is an exploit, but never-the-less, in the end, we are banned?

Perhaps for once in my life, my own stupidity saved me. Go figure.

Ok so here what you do to make lots of gold. Buy two accounts, exploit on one make thousands of gold and then send it to you other account. Once you get banned for exploting then ask for a refund get it and now you have thousands of gold and you only paid for one account. Don’t want to exploit too bad you have no choice.

This reminds me of a story from the police blotter where a woman pulled over a cop to report that she had just bought some crack, but in fact had gotten soap chips, and wanted the cop to get her money back.

Osculim.2983:

This is how i see it altho the recipy was wrong making 500 ectos sure as hell is exploiting and you deserve nothing less than to get banned for it.

So…if I buy 300 shoulderpads with dungeon tokens, salvage them and get 500 ectos, I should be banned? Interesting theory.

Topher.1684:

I wish I could get refunds on other things in life when I used them wrong and broke them (how many pots have I destroyed boiling water and forgetting about them for like an hour)…

You should try next time. I dropped my laptop, the hd broke, got a refund for it.

Kaizer.7135:

Faction.4013:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/167irk/post_snowflake_ban_full_refund/

Seems more than a few are getting refunds.

What the?…

He’s spent SO much money on gems holy crap, I haven’t even spent a dime but this guy…. lmfao, is this how people get their Legendaries?

Yea and as long as there are a few people out there that spend that kind of money, they don’t have to care about the opinions of the enormous number of people who either don’t buy gems, or just buy a few on occasion.

And, given that almost every Fractal group I get into has someone with a Legendary nowadays, I’m pretty sure that people are just buying them, and not actually earning them.

As long as Legendaries can be bought, I’m not getting one. For all anyone knows, I just dumped real-life money into it. My sets of Obsidian Armor in GW1 were a matter of pride, because whenever you see someone wearing it, you know they put in the work. Not so with GW2 Legendaries.

I’m losing my taste for this game more and more. And it’s all to do with they way they are running that cash shop.

Paul.4081:

PowerCat.5738:

There’s been several reports of players being given a full refund for the game and the gems they purchased as a result of being banned for the snowflake exploit.

Is everyone banned from this eligible for a refund or only certain people?

Cat look at it this way, players who didn’t attend the one time event got a chest. You could probably get a full refund if you told those in charge that you like cheese. Be sure to volley logic out the window!

And people like me, who attended and disconnected when the giant karka died thus losing the reward at the end, didn’t get their chest even after petitioning for it.

Anything that creates a loop and yields extras is considered an exploit.

I really hope they are smarter about creating such things and then not telling people when they ask about it in the future. Seriously… they should have seen this before they implemented the item and also told the players after they asked about it.

Them giving a refund is the best thing they could have done given the circumstances and legal issues.

Fyrebrand.4859:

The people who exploited this feature didn’t hack the game. They didn’t use any weird add-ons to make the software behave in ways that weren’t intended. They didn’t buy gold, gems, or other in-game advantages from goldfarmers or any unauthorized group.

1. They salvaged it in hundreds of thousands. People that salvaged in for themselves, or sold a few hundred did not get banned. These people recognized that it was an exploit, logged on different characters and mass produced it as fast as possible.
2. Some of them were massing such sums as 15 000 gold daily and most of them were planning to mass sell it to a gold selling site.
3. They crippled the economy beyond repair in 19 servers.

Why are you even defending them?

Horheristo.3607:

You wanna know something?
Who gives a kitten???

I’d rather take a shortcut and risk my kitten in this game than sit with a thumb up my kitten and pretend that playing by the rules will get me anywhere.
If I ever find a shortcut, count on me to be the first to use it, this game is unplayable without fast gold making, just not.

I’ll gladly accept a ban if the day comes, and get this game done and over with as long as I could create 10 hours of pure fun compared to 200 hours of misery farming like an idiot.

If a player wants to risk the game by doing such misdeed, fine by me as long as he behaves as an adult and assume he’s misdoings if caught. However in this forums offenders are kittening around trowing the fault into ANet when the fault are their own! Also, of what i’ve read so far:

It’s OK to exploit until ANet states it’s an exploit…
Whatever the cause may be for the exploit to exist (Anet poor testing or simply an overlook), an exploit is always an exploit. Don’t you have brains to judge if the thing you are doing is wrong? If it was good enough to be legal (hence the questions if it was an exploit or not to the devs), then it probably was illegal…

It’s OK to ask a refund for something you deliberately wrecked…
Unless they are forced by law to issue refunds, they should never give refunds for people who exploited. More, those players should never be accepted again in any ANet/Ncsoft game.

Mirta.5029:

1. They salvaged it in hundreds of thousands. People that salvaged in for themselves, or sold a few hundred did not get banned. These people recognized that it was an exploit, logged on different characters and mass produced it as fast as possible.

Looking at reddit posts on this issue, people were banned who only salvaged it for themselves and did not trade it. There is some speculation as to how little was needed to get banned some some are saying as low as 100 ecto return got banned.

2. Some of them were massing such sums as 15 000 gold daily and most of them were planning to mass sell it to a gold selling site.

I am sure some gold farmers saw $$$ when they found out about this but 15,000gold daily is well over the total amounts also mentions in reddit.

3. They crippled the economy beyond repair in 19 servers.
Why are you even defending them?

While ectos took a little dive the price is recovering and is close to pre Wintersday price. The price of ori and mithril went up initially but has since come back down. Since the trading post is global, not one single server suffered more than any other.

When I 1st heard about this bug I knew something was wrong and did not try it, others saw free money and got caught exploiting it. While we can debate whether it is ethical to re-emburse cheaters, I think the move on ArenaNets part is a sign of good faith. Those people can go get themselves another copy of GW2 and spend the money that was given back on that account, and hopefully learn from their mistakes.

….anet; just wow

Mirta.5029:

Fyrebrand.4859:

The people who exploited this feature didn’t hack the game. They didn’t use any weird add-ons to make the software behave in ways that weren’t intended. They didn’t buy gold, gems, or other in-game advantages from goldfarmers or any unauthorized group.

1. They salvaged it in hundreds of thousands. People that salvaged in for themselves, or sold a few hundred did not get banned. These people recognized that it was an exploit, logged on different characters and mass produced it as fast as possible.
2. Some of them were massing such sums as 15 000 gold daily and most of them were planning to mass sell it to a gold selling site.
3. They crippled the economy beyond repair in 19 servers.

Why are you even defending them?

This type of post is why its so hard to have a reasonable discussion about things on this forum. Completely untrue tbh and backed by no fact.

So your saying that the people “exploiting” and getting banned made 15k gold each daily ( so made about 60,000 ectos each daily so 180,000 !!over the 3 days this was live ), and why would they log in diff chars for it what would that achieve. The fact is most of the people who i know that got banned made 50-100g out of this , and one person who crafted virtually all the time this recipe was live made 750gold which i would say was near the upper end of the amount of gold which prob could be made from this .It takes time to craft and salvage.

Again not one person of the 20ish i know who got banned ( or the other 30 or so who did not go over arenanets “limit” and did not get banned ) was planning to selll this to a gold seller . So assigning this motivation to people is just a joke.

An finally it ruined the economy on 19 servers , well it didnt make gold from nothing as people think, nor was it infinite loop.In fact if you look at how it actually worked instead of just making inflammatory statements all it ended up doing was re-distrubuting wealth.
People who were selling mithril / orichalcum ore and snowflakes made a fortune as prices rose, and others buying Ectoplasms got them much cheaper. Oh and the market due to being a open economy had adjusted to make this pretty much unprofitable before they even patched . Yeh i dont deny people made money out of it just like any other tp craft /salavage scheme ( returns was better on this but point being it still can be done).

Maybe go back and read the 280 views /10k view thread about this , which outlines why people didnt think this was a exploit and how it worked and other details before posting what seems to be just infomation that comes across ac complete hyperbole.

look at the bright side!
poor people can sell mithril for a much higher price now.
the price of mithril quadrupled while it has little to no significant value as a crafting material! $.$
profit!!

TheVirtualFrog.8714:

The economy in this game has been crippled beyond repair since day one. It has gotten to a point where as an average player I actually cheer on bots because I know that their actions will devalue materials so I actually stand a chance of buying them from the TP and leveling up crafting without being an exploiter or gem hoarder.

I’m able to make 5 – 7 gold a day. If there was no botting and mat prices went back up an average player could make more money in return. Gather yourself while leveling alts, salvage even level 80 blues, because that with journeyman’s salvage kit tends to drop orri and gossamer (I keep it for crafting) or mithril (50 copper a piece, lots of profit to be had there)

wildcode.5403:

Looking at reddit posts on this issue, people were banned who only salvaged it for themselves and did not trade it. There is some speculation as to how little was needed to get banned some some are saying as low as 100 ecto return got banned.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Economy-Statistics/page/2#post1189083

Also those that got questionable bans got refunded, however they were known to exploit before this issue and were likely to do it again as well.

TWMagimay.9057:

Osculim.2983:

This is how i see it altho the recipy was wrong making 500 ectos sure as hell is exploiting and you deserve nothing less than to get banned for it.

So…if I buy 300 shoulderpads with dungeon tokens, salvage them and get 500 ectos, I should be banned? Interesting theory.

If they accidentally make it so that the shoulderpads only cost 1 token each, then heck yea. Otherwise, obviously not since you don’t get 300 shoulderpads worth of dungeon tokens in less than a minute by simply wandering up the the marketplace.

Mirta.5029:

I’m able to make 5 – 7 gold a day. If there was no botting and mat prices went back up an average player could make more money in return. Gather yourself while leveling alts, salvage even level 80 blues, because that with journeyman’s salvage kit tends to drop orri and gossamer (I keep it for crafting) or mithril (50 copper a piece, lots of profit to be had there)

1 mithril for 50 copper – cost of kit, that’s far less than what you get selling it to the vendor. Even if you get lucky and get 2 mithril you’re still losing money.

Yaki.9563:

Mirta.5029:

I’m able to make 5 – 7 gold a day. If there was no botting and mat prices went back up an average player could make more money in return. Gather yourself while leveling alts, salvage even level 80 blues, because that with journeyman’s salvage kit tends to drop orri and gossamer (I keep it for crafting) or mithril (50 copper a piece, lots of profit to be had there)

1 mithril for 50 copper – cost of kit, that’s far less than what you get selling it to the vendor. Even if you get lucky and get 2 mithril you’re still losing money.

8 silver, 15 uses, 2 mithril a salvage or an ori. If you want to drop the chance of an ori and farm mithil buy and use the crude ones.

Maybe it’s to show they care less about peoples money and more about the type of people they want playing their game.

My suggestion:

Dear GW2 Player,

An error has recently come to our attention regarding the grievously disproportionate profitability of salvaging certain Wintersday items. This flaw allowed a loophole in which mass quantities of Globs of Ectoplasm could be accumulated at an inappropriately low cost. It is understandable that this may have seemed like an effective method to gain items and profit, or seemed “too good to be true.” In fact, this incident was the product of a temporary oversight by our development team, and was not functioning as intended.

In the interest of protecting the economy and maintaining a fair balance of materials for all in the GW2 community, we have had to regretfully roll back certain players who took extreme advantage of this brief window of opportunity. We will be restoring your gold and relevant materials back to their original levels before the incident took place.

ArenaNet is committed to providing a level playing field for all its players, and regrets the error. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused, but please use your best judgment in future and resist the urge to offset the balance of fair play. We are immensely proud of our community, and are grateful for any players who bring matters like these to our attention. Don’t be afraid to speak up and help us make the game better for everyone!

Sincerely,
The GW2 Team
————————————————————————————————————————————-

There. Would that have been so hard? If ANet had just sent out a mail like this to all the exploiters, and set the items back to how they were, this whole issue would be resolved and overwith. No one would still be talking about it, and it would barely register so much as a footnote in the history of the game. It would be utterly mundane and trivial, like any other bug that gets quashed.

It would also send a message to would-be abusers/exploiters that when these kinds of errors pop up from time to time, there will be no lasting profit in it. Any unscrupulous profit you worked for would be merely a waste of time. Yes, I know that won’t necessarily stop the worst of them from doing the same in future, but frankly, nothing will. Besides, people who buy the game after this passes won’t have any memories of this incident anyhow.

When word of bans starts flying around the internet, it becomes news — in a way, this is currently the most important and interesting topic of the moment. Everyone has an opinion, and a lot of players feel injustice has been done, regardless of who’s “side” they are on. Either you’ve been too lenient, or too harsh — when really, all you had to do was just fix the mistake. Bans? Refunds? Why did this even enter the equation?

This incident has provided you with tons of leads for who to check out more thoroughly, and who to watch in future. Maybe that actually led to some of the bans, for separate reasons, I don’t know.

In some vain attempt to justify the bans, I see some posters merely tossing around the word “exploit” as if that said it all. What’s an exploit? Tell us, ArenaNet, seriously. If you are going to ban players for “exploiting” the game, please provide clear criteria you use to judge what is and isn’t a violation. Honestly, from what I gather, an “exploit” just describes any behaviour in the game, done repeatedly, to achieve easy profit of some kind.

I mean, where does it end? I could be exploiting right now, by using a D/D Elementalist who some people are claiming is unfairly overpowered. Maybe I have a common path that I take in Queensdale to rack up a quick “kill variety” daily achievement. Maybe there are people who spend lots of time doing the same dynamic events, and farming gathering nodes for profit.

I know that the people who took part in the snowflake exploit took it to extreme degrees. However, if that’s where the crime lies — not in the kind of offense, but the degree — then you need to set a number for us. Where is the threshold? Don’t be content to have an invisible line, where a player might get banned, if their methods become popular enough.

“The number of accounts terminated as a result of this exploitative activity is actually very small—fewer than 200. However, these people are the very worst offenders, and engaged in this exploit to egregious levels—hundreds and even thousands of times. They knew exactly what they were doing and they knew that their activities would damage the economy.” ~~Mark Kirstein

So, it’s alright to exploit, but not over-exploit?

[General] LF1M for Dev team, need Logic!!

Faction.4013:

“The number of accounts terminated as a result of this exploitative activity is actually very small—fewer than 200. However, these people are the very worst offenders, and engaged in this exploit to egregious levels—hundreds and even thousands of times. They knew exactly what they were doing and they knew that their activities would damage the economy.” ~~Mark Kirstein

So, it’s alright to exploit, but not over-exploit?

[General] LF1M for Dev team, need Logic!!

1. People that did it only a few times might not have know that it’s an exploit
2. People that did it only for themselves in small numbers did not break the economy
3. People that did it in hundreds of thousands and sold it knew that it was an exploit, tried to make easy quick profit and broke the economy.

Fyrebrand.4859:

My suggestion:

---

Dear GW2 Player,

An error has recently come to our attention regarding the grievously disproportionate profitability of salvaging certain Wintersday items. This flaw allowed a loophole in which mass quantities of Globs of Ectoplasm could be accumulated at an inappropriately low cost. It is understandable that this may have seemed like an effective method to gain items and profit, or seemed “too good to be true.” In fact, this incident was the product of a temporary oversight by our development team, and was not functioning as intended.

In the interest of protecting the economy and maintaining a fair balance of materials for all in the GW2 community, we have had to regretfully roll back certain players who took extreme advantage of this brief window of opportunity. We will be restoring your gold and relevant materials back to their original levels before the incident took place.

ArenaNet is committed to providing a level playing field for all its players, and regrets the error. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused, but please use your best judgment in future and resist the urge to offset the balance of fair play. We are immensely proud of our community, and are grateful for any players who bring matters like these to our attention. Don’t be afraid to speak up and help us make the game better for everyone!

Sincerely,
The GW2 Team
————————————————————————————————————————————-

I absolutely would have loved such a reaction from Anet.

This was simply a case of bad PR and management in the part of Anet. The line between legitimacy and exploitative has been further blurred and a atrociously harmful precedent has been set.

Fyrebrand.4859:

My suggestion:

---

Dear GW2 Player,

An error has recently come to our attention regarding the grievously disproportionate profitability of salvaging certain Wintersday items. This flaw allowed a loophole in which mass quantities of Globs of Ectoplasm could be accumulated at an inappropriately low cost. It is understandable that this may have seemed like an effective method to gain items and profit, or seemed “too good to be true.” In fact, this incident was the product of a temporary oversight by our development team, and was not functioning as intended.

In the interest of protecting the economy and maintaining a fair balance of materials for all in the GW2 community, we have had to regretfully roll back certain players who took extreme advantage of this brief window of opportunity. We will be restoring your gold and relevant materials back to their original levels before the incident took place.

ArenaNet is committed to providing a level playing field for all its players, and regrets the error. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused, but please use your best judgment in future and resist the urge to offset the balance of fair play. We are immensely proud of our community, and are grateful for any players who bring matters like these to our attention. Don’t be afraid to speak up and help us make the game better for everyone!

Sincerely,
The GW2 Team
————————————————————————————————————————————-

There. Would that have been so hard? If ANet had just sent out a mail like this to all the exploiters, and set the items back to how they were, this whole issue would be resolved and overwith. No one would still be talking about it, and it would barely register so much as a footnote in the history of the game. It would be utterly mundane and trivial, like any other bug that gets quashed.

It would also send a message to would-be abusers/exploiters that when these kinds of errors pop up from time to time, there will be no lasting profit in it. Any unscrupulous profit you worked for would be merely a waste of time. Yes, I know that won’t necessarily stop the worst of them from doing the same in future, but frankly, nothing will. Besides, people who buy the game after this passes won’t have any memories of this incident anyhow.

When word of bans starts flying around the internet, it becomes news — in a way, this is currently the most important and interesting topic of the moment. Everyone has an opinion, and a lot of players feel injustice has been done, regardless of who’s “side” they are on. Either you’ve been too lenient, or too harsh — when really, all you had to do was just fix the mistake. Bans? Refunds? Why did this even enter the equation?

This incident has provided you with tons of leads for who to check out more thoroughly, and who to watch in future. Maybe that actually led to some of the bans, for separate reasons, I don’t know.

In some vain attempt to justify the bans, I see some posters merely tossing around the word “exploit” as if that said it all. What’s an exploit? Tell us, ArenaNet, seriously. If you are going to ban players for “exploiting” the game, please provide clear criteria you use to judge what is and isn’t a violation. Honestly, from what I gather, an “exploit” just describes any behaviour in the game, done repeatedly, to achieve easy profit of some kind.

I mean, where does it end? I could be exploiting right now, by using a D/D Elementalist who some people are claiming is unfairly overpowered. Maybe I have a common path that I take in Queensdale to rack up a quick “kill variety” daily achievement. Maybe there are people who spend lots of time doing the same dynamic events, and farming gathering nodes for profit.

I know that the people who took part in the snowflake exploit took it to extreme degrees. However, if that’s where the crime lies — not in the kind of offense, but the degree — then you need to set a number for us. Where is the threshold? Don’t be content to have an invisible line, where a player might get banned, if their methods become popular enough.

This ^

…how easily the situation could have been fixed, no bad PR, fewer unhappy players, no paranoia about future events/bugs/etc.

Basically, the rule of thumb seems to be this. If it’s an EASY way to make money? Don’t do it, it’s probably an exploit. Farming AC to get 500 tokens, converting them to Exotic items, and then salvaging them for Ectos? That’s fine, because the amount of time needed to do that is reasonable for the return.

Hitting upon a recipe that gives you 1 – 3 Ecto under a minute that just requires you to have a large stack of materials in the bank? That’s definitely an exploit.

John Smith posted in the BLTP forum that the 200 people who were banned, between themselves, created over 275,000 Ecto. That’s something that had serious potential to gravely affect the GW2 economy, so ANet had to take action.

Fyrebrand.4859:

There. Would that have been so hard? If ANet had just sent out a mail like this to all the exploiters, and set the items back to how they were, this whole issue would be resolved and overwith. No one would still be talking about it, and it would barely register so much as a footnote in the history of the game. It would be utterly mundane and trivial, like any other bug that gets quashed.

It would also send a message to would-be abusers/exploiters that when these kinds of errors pop up from time to time, there will be no lasting profit in it. Any unscrupulous profit you worked for would be merely a waste of time. Yes, I know that won’t necessarily stop the worst of them from doing the same in future, but frankly, nothing will. Besides, people who buy the game after this passes won’t have any memories of this incident anyhow.

When word of bans starts flying around the internet, it becomes news — in a way, this is currently the most important and interesting topic of the moment. Everyone has an opinion, and a lot of players feel injustice has been done, regardless of who’s “side” they are on. Either you’ve been too lenient, or too harsh — when really, all you had to do was just fix the mistake. Bans? Refunds? Why did this even enter the equation?

This incident has provided you with tons of leads for who to check out more thoroughly, and who to watch in future. Maybe that actually led to some of the bans, for separate reasons, I don’t know.

In some vain attempt to justify the bans, I see some posters merely tossing around the word “exploit” as if that said it all. What’s an exploit? Tell us, ArenaNet, seriously. If you are going to ban players for “exploiting” the game, please provide clear criteria you use to judge what is and isn’t a violation. Honestly, from what I gather, an “exploit” just describes any behaviour in the game, done repeatedly, to achieve easy profit of some kind.

I mean, where does it end? I could be exploiting right now, by using a D/D Elementalist who some people are claiming is unfairly overpowered. Maybe I have a common path that I take in Queensdale to rack up a quick “kill variety” daily achievement. Maybe there are people who spend lots of time doing the same dynamic events, and farming gathering nodes for profit.

I know that the people who took part in the snowflake exploit took it to extreme degrees. However, if that’s where the crime lies — not in the kind of offense, but the degree — then you need to set a number for us. Where is the threshold? Don’t be content to have an invisible line, where a player might get banned, if their methods become popular enough.

I think this is definitely the right approach here. I have a (former, now) guildmate who caught wind of the so-called “snowflake exploit” and used it to upgrade his FotM back item. According to him, he didn’t sell a single glob of ectoplasm obtained through this method, instead using them only to craft Mystic Forge recipes which use full stacks of ecto at a time. He certainly didn’t break the economy with behavior like this, and he produced hundreds of ectoplasm.

The point is, in this scenario ANet seems to have reacted with shocking prejudice. While there will of course be players who used the exploit to bomb the trading post with ecto, there are also players who knew better than to trash the economy. ANet demonstrated that they can inspect activity logs in great detail, telling the banned players the precise number of times that they used the exploit and the exact number of ectos they created. It’s not too much to ask that they use this information and act with scaled, appropriate responses to the varying player actions.

I’m disappointed to say that, even having been refunded, my guildmate no longer has any interest in Guild Wars 2 as a game, nor ANet as a developer. While the number of players banned in this incident is small compared to GW2’s population as a whole, this kind of reaction certainly doesn’t engender customer satisfaction.

Zaxares.5419:

John Smith posted in the BLTP forum that the 200 people who were banned, between themselves, created over 275,000 Ecto. That’s something that had serious potential to gravely affect the GW2 economy, so ANet had to take action.

It had potential…in theory. And theory can only be thought of by smb who has no idea how a dynamic market works. If anything, that recipe had the potential to return the game to the cost-gain balance prior to ascended gear.

Black Frog.9274:

OP spreads rumors with no basis in fact. Please respond…

NCSoft policy is to give full refunds up to 6 months after transaction, however a refund like that permanently removed associated keys from your account.
If you refund the game, this means your account is locked until you add a new key.
If you refund any Gem purchases, your account is locked forever (to my knowledge, did not explore any further possibilities of that with Support).

So yes, it is entirely possible the OP got full refunds on all purchases made in the last 6 months.
Let me use this occasion to point out to a sad fact that this meant players fro pre-purchased early and decided to leave with FotM, were not eligible for the refund anymore.
But exploiters and hackers – yes, they are eligible for refunds of payments they issued in the last 6 months.

Looks like they handle this the same way they moderate the forums. Heavy-handed and unless the situation turns out to be praising the game they just delete it.

They ban people loyal to the game even though an exploit is technically their own fault (yes some ppl exploit but some ppl could actually think its game mechanics its only an exploit when they officially acknowledge it and the pattern is ANet doesnt seem to acknowledge anything that makes them look bad) but meanwhile my inbox is full of gold spam messages that they cant seem to stop. Make a post thats not gushing praise on the game and you get an infraction.

And if you are going to infract this post please give me my money back too.

cherrie.8907:

But exploiters and hackers – yes, they are eligible for refunds of payments they issued in the last 6 months.

Source on hackers getting refunds? Or are you sensationalizing and demonizing players who got banned for something nobody knew was an exploit?

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Is-this-intended-with-the-snowflakes/

See people there asking?

See ANet replying/informing?

oflow.2157:

Looks like they handle this the same way they moderate the forums. Heavy-handed and unless the situation turns out to be praising the game they just delete it.

They ban people loyal to the game even though an exploit is technically their own fault (yes some ppl exploit but some ppl could actually think its game mechanics its only an exploit when they officially acknowledge it and the pattern is ANet doesnt seem to acknowledge anything that makes them look bad) but meanwhile my inbox is full of gold spam messages that they cant seem to stop. Make a post thats not gushing praise on the game and you get an infraction.

And if you are going to infract this post please give me my money back too.

Precisely. It’s that way too on other sites as well.

http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/01/03/arenanet-bans-exploiters-in-nefarious-snowflake-incident/

Scroll down to see Martin Kirstein arguing with somebody, somebody who politely makes valid points, all the while recieving negitive comments from others, and the AUTHOR OF THE ARTICLE LIKING EVERY COMMENT THAT IS POSITIVE towards GW2. Even those that criticize others! You wonder who the kitten is writing these pieces. The bias there is unfathomable.

Really is pathetic and sad. And you’re right, it’ll only be a matter of time before this thread is shut down as well.

It is sad and bias but that is how it is. They dont have a direction with the game and they dont know what to do. That is obvious. And although they (threads)get shut down a lot of the ascend gear people are still flaming away on the fan forums and here as well. So dont worry this will continue to haunt them as SWG did/does to TOR.

Each day they lose more and more players because of inability to act and a productive and concise manner. They never mean what they say and anything they say is always “taken out of context” or misinterpreted. The people I know simply dont believe anything they say at all.
It is really sad to see a once great developer go right down the drain so fast with bad decisions. This has been a bad year 2 top houses are now mud Anet and Bioware.

I truly hope ncsoft or nexon come in and tutor/replace those who are making the decisions with someone who has a vision and will develop that vision with the community and stay on target and communicate with the players. That is the only way I see this game making it anywhere because it is right on track with Tor.

Narkosys.5173:

It is sad and bias but that is how it is. They dont have a direction with the game and they dont know what to do. That is obvious. And although they (threads)get shut down a lot of the ascend gear people are still flaming away on the fan forums and here as well. So dont worry this will continue to haunt them as SWG did/does to TOR.

Each day they lose more and more players because of inability to act and a productive and concise manner. They never mean what they say and anything they say is always “taken out of context” or misinterpreted. The people I know simply dont believe anything they say at all.
It is really sad to see a once great developer go right down the drain so fast with bad decisions. This has been a bad year 2 top houses are now mud Anet and Bioware.

I truly hope ncsoft or nexon come in and tutor/replace those who are making the decisions with someone who has a vision and will develop that vision with the community and stay on target and communicate with the players. That is the only way I see this game making it anywhere because it is right on track with Tor.

You’re are the only person I have seen who blames Anet not Ncsoft or Nexcon.

So, that means we should avoid users stationed in Italy because they could continuely screw everyone over and nothing would come of it?

Fuz.5621:

Danno.5269:

I disagree. They should not have gotten a refund. They paid for the services, exploited those services, and were banned per the ToS. If they were smart enough to print ectos by the hundreds/thousands, they would be smart enough to know it shouldn’t be happening and stop.

This also happened over the holidays when i am sure a lot of their staff were not around to fix this issue.

It’s not that easy.
First, ToS are just plainly illegal in many states. Any signed ToS or EULA is completely void, for example, in Italy.
Second, any arbitrary difinitive service interruption would ask for a refund in many states.
Third, the service interruption (ban) was not based on clearly stated rules so, even in states where the ToS is completely legal it can still be appealed in court.
Basically, Anet would risk a lawsuit and a lot of bad advertising from it. It’s way safer and cheaper for them to just refund the banned players.

Narkosys.5173:

I truly hope ncsoft or nexon come in and tutor/replace those who are making the decisions with someone who has a vision and will develop that vision with the community and stay on target and communicate with the players. That is the only way I see this game making it anywhere because it is right on track with Tor.

This is funny, its most probably because of ncsoft/nexon influence that the game is in the state its in.

Zeivu.3615:

So, that means we should avoid users stationed in Italy because they could continuely screw everyone over and nothing would come of it?

More like the whole EU :o

Danno.5269:

I disagree. They should not have gotten a refund. They paid for the services, exploited those services, and were banned per the ToS. If they were smart enough to print ectos by the hundreds/thousands, they would be smart enough to know it shouldn’t be happening and stop.

This also happened over the holidays when i am sure a lot of their staff were not around to fix this issue.

I think that’s why they refunded them. Their ToS was so open, that people could argue the fact that it wasn’t an exploit, but something designed in the game. It didn’t help the company either that one of their staff was spitting out calculations saying it wasn’t truly an exploit, either.

As a person on the side-lines, I still believe what they did was not truly exploiting as they had to buy BL salvage kits with either Gems or real money to even get the ectos.