Guild Wars 2

Erasculio.2914:

If he had not known this had a better profit margin than his usual approach, he would have kept his usual approach instead of making 50 jewels in order to get easy gold. The fact someone who understood the crafting system, and so knew exactly what he was doing, was so eager to change how he crafted items in order to quickly use a new recipe with higher returns than the old recipes in the game, by making a high quantity of those new items and salvaging them for ectos, is proof that he knew he was trying to “play smart”.

When I was lvl 70, I was farming mithril ores and selling them for 50c each. Then I got to 80, discovered ori ores and, what do you know, those were selling for 3s each. Same effort, same time, slightly different investment and 6 times better profit. Should I have automatically assumed that I’m exploiting just because this new resource of income was suddenly so much better than the old one?

Vayra.3290:

There is a difference between common mats (silk/mithril etc) and fine/rare mats (claws/bloods/ectos etc).

Yes, but to someone sitting in Lion’s Arch buying the materials and selling the output, that difference is wholly the price.

My biggest problem with this, is that it was hard to see that it is an exploit. The reason being, and I haven’t seen this brought up yet, is that salvaging jewelry has a very high chance of giving the gem used to craft the item back. Go test it yourself. Buy 10 rares of any crafted piece of jewelry and salvage it, even with a Master’s kits. 8-9/10 times you’ll get the gem back. Because the recipe only took 1 gem (rather than 5, like the other recipes) it automatically gave profit due to 90% of the time getting that gem back.

Is it fair to say that the player should have realized this? Hard to say. You’d think ANet would have a more intimate knowledge of their own crafting profession (that it’s going to give back the gem, a large portion of the time, while requiring a SINGLE gem). There were posts asking about this, whether it was an oversight or not, and yet no response was ever given. This goes back to ANet’s lack of communication with the playerbase, and it’s hard to place blame given how often they seem to shy away from communicating anything with the playerbase.

In the end, it is their playground, so I wouldn’t paint the picture quite so dark, Asglarek.

I had heard about making ectos this way before the winter event, and I heard the details of how people were doing it during the event, and I said nothing to them about it because I didn’t see the difference. That’s what concerns me—that when you break it down to what a market-player sees items as (price points and opportunity costs) this looked like completely normal activity. I didn’t do this, but only because I was doing other things at the time. It could have been me.

Although, if that isn’t the way you see the game—if you see items as items instead of as components to a sub-game, I could definitely see this as being either justice (if you agree) or capriciousness (if you disagree). For those of us who genuinely enjoy the economy as its own sub-game and see it through those eyes, though, this is as baffling as it is harrowing.

It wasn’t me…but it could be next time, and I still won’t understand why.

Strifey.7215:

Valmarius.4150:

Edit: You know what, forget it. ANet have posted saying that the amount of money made was huge, and I have no reason to doubt them. No point me chiming in when we have no actual data.

I haven’t seen anything that said the amount of money was huge, I did see them say they banned the people who crafted the most which is completely different.

Again, I know someone who made hundreds of gold that was banned, and I know someone who made ~10g from 200 crafts near the end when it wasn’t very profitable.

Please post where they actually measured the gold amount and not the amount of recipes crafted. Because there are plenty of people posting on reddit who had a couple hundred crafts but didn’t make a couple hundred gold.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/account/Bans-for-Snowflake-Jewelry-are-unfair/first#post1132023

Bottom post of the thread. Especially relevant:

“I’m talking a lot of ill-gotten gains that posed a significant potential impact on the economy.”

Valmarius.4150:

Strifey.7215:

Valmarius.4150:

Edit: You know what, forget it. ANet have posted saying that the amount of money made was huge, and I have no reason to doubt them. No point me chiming in when we have no actual data.

I haven’t seen anything that said the amount of money was huge, I did see them say they banned the people who crafted the most which is completely different.

Again, I know someone who made hundreds of gold that was banned, and I know someone who made ~10g from 200 crafts near the end when it wasn’t very profitable.

Please post where they actually measured the gold amount and not the amount of recipes crafted. Because there are plenty of people posting on reddit who had a couple hundred crafts but didn’t make a couple hundred gold.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/account/Bans-for-Snowflake-Jewelry-are-unfair/first#post1132023

Bottom post of the thread. Especially relevant:

“I’m talking a lot of ill-gotten gains that posed a significant potential impact on the economy.”

Yes I’ve read that, has nothing to do with money. It references the number of times someone crafted i.e. ectos being created, which are priced by the market.

The recipe didn’t create any gold, it removed gold from the economy.

The amount of gold you made depending on if you crafted 200 times on day 1 or 200 times on day 4. One of those made you a good amount of money, the other hardly made you any money at all, except Anet banned people based on the amount of crafts, not the amount of money they made on the market.

The market corrected itself far before yesterday when they banned accounts because all profit was generated between a market disparity between ectos and mithril/snowflakes. If they would have either fixed the recipe earlier or posted something when tons of people were asking about it, they would have helped notify the community to mitigate the impact of wrongful bans. They handled it poorly, for something that wasn’t a clear exploit, but was taking advantage of market rates. If they would have just adjusted the recipe just like the many other mistakes they created regarding recipes (godskull, glacial cores) then everything would have been fine. As you can see, ectos and mithril/snowflakes stabilized almost immediately after they fixed the recipe. The banning was uncalled for and sets a terrible precedence for the future.

The Arena net company has hundreds of years of experience in dealing with these situations. I really do not see why everyone is complaining, on either side of the fence. End sarcasm.

Myself, just my opinion, what would i have done? First the team responsible would have been dealt with. The devs that made these mistakes would have had performance counseling performed and then punitive counseling performed, these are then tracked to ensure the same people do not make the same mistakes in programming again, failing that, and creating the same mistakes resulting in the same or similar player actions the devs are terminated.

Dealing with the players. Those that knew “something was up” should indeed report it. Those that did not and continued to perform a questionable act should be dealt with SILENTLY. Thats right, when people make mistakes large or small in real life as only an example, they are pulled to the side and things are explained to them.

All Anet had to do SILENTLY, and this is just my opinion, is take the gold and mats back, simply done, unless of course the fine programming work does not allow for detailed tracking data in a reliable way. Another option is to take everything back and place the character at level one, forcing them to start over, not maps and such or what they have for armor/weps, but simply taking the profits made, the mats made, and putting their character back to level 1 status, and all the privleges that go with it, like not being able to use anything that isnt appropriate level.

People would have complained regardless but you have the fine forum moderators to handle that. Plus petitions can be evaluated during this punitive action.

That would have been enough of a punishment, kept people ingame and been amusing. But gosh, what do i know?

Can I ask something to all those who are saying it wasn’t an exploit or ‘it can be done with other recipes’ then why this one recipe? Why was this recipe the one that everyone flocked to? If you can do it with other recipes then why weren’t you until THAT specific one?

Well see, that’s the thing…they did. You just didn’t hear an uproar about it because nobody got banned before this. Until this point crafting to salvage for ectos is where the ecto price softcap came from. That’s why market enthusiasts are so concerned right now, even those of us who aren’t banned.

Strifey.7215:

Yes I’ve read that, has nothing to do with money. It references the number of times someone crafted i.e. ectos being created, which are priced by the market.

Ok, first show me how you arrive at the conclusion that “ill-gotten gains” refers only to ectos and not money.

Then, let’s assume you are correct, and that people ended up with a large amount of ectoplasm instead of a large amount of gold. That’s much better. I’m sure they didn’t sell any of those ectos, and had no plans to do so.

Hell, you’re probably right. Some posters on reddit are a much more reliable source than someone from ANet, I’m sure.

Shifted.3697:

Valmarius.4150:

Hell, you’re probably right. Some posters on reddit are a much more reliable source than someone from ANet, I’m sure.

Well with the amount of info we receive from the dev team, this is somewhat of an ironic statement as the answer seems quite obvious.

Not when an ANet employee makes a post that is a statement, surely. Or is the issue that people do not believe what ANet are saying?

Kiserai.3957:

Well see, that’s the thing…they did. You just didn’t hear an uproar about it because nobody got banned before this. Until this point crafting to salvage for ectos is where the ecto price softcap came from. That’s why market enthusiasts are so concerned right now, even those of us who aren’t banned.

There is no other recipe that could create an infinite amount of ectos from only a single ecto and basic crafting materials. All other ways either requires ectos or fine crafting materials that are always lost in the craft. No other recipes give you back the rare crafting materials required to make it + ectos.

Erasculio.2914:

Infernia.9847:

Sure people making a ton of profit off a recipe should ask themselves if it’s legit. On the other hand a company that lets a recipe slip through testing and is not completely obvious (like a 21 Karma cost for a T3 cultural weapon<—screams of exploit)should ban offenders but a permanent ban? I just don’t know.

Someone made a guide about using this exploit here, stating in bolded letters “This is a great way to get storage space, and gold!”. The fact it was so proftable to deserve its own guide already screams of exploit.

must make everything else in this game a exploit or a scam amirite?

When I was leveling jeweler on my thief, and even after this while making/salvaging gear for leveling characters, I freqently re-used the gem/upgrade items. I had an 80% chance to retrieve them, so I got them back quite often.

The ONLY difference between what I did, and the snowflake recipe is the amount of ecto put in vs the amount to possibly get back. The mechanics are exactly the same, so why on earth is this considered an exploit while the other is not? The other example given by the OP doesn’t even take ecto at all, but produces ecto.

If you want to ban people for “damaging the economy”, you might as well start banning every player that buys and resells items for profit. Especially the ones buying up the whole supply of high-end items (like precursors) and re-listing them at higher prices.

If the line between legit and exploit gets any muddier people are going to prevent themselves from crossing it by simply not playing this game anymore. Maybe we need an offical post on what amount of gold earned per hour is considered acceptable. :\

mrstealth.6701:

If the line between legit and exploit gets any muddier people are going to prevent themselves from crossing it by simply not playing this game anymore. Maybe we need an offical post on what amount of gold earned per hour is considered acceptable. :\

I know someone, who has since been banned, that made over 4,000 gold in less than four hours from the snowflake recipe. Now tell me if you consider over a 1,000 gold an hour from a novelty recipe to be acceptable or legit.

Edit: I thought I had a screencap but I couldn’t find it. The number was somewhere along the lines of 4,195.

Esrever.8613:

must make everything else in this game a exploit or a scam amirite?

Well, as a matter of fact, yes. I don’t think most people realise the implication of these bans. The definition of an exploit depends, above all, on the intentions of the developers. At any given moment they can say “we didn’t intend for you to gather passiflora with a gathering booster on, it’s an exploit and everybody who did it xxx times is banned”. They can literally apply it to every single aspect of the game because their policy is flawed. Most games do not consider exploits bannable until they are officially recognised as such. Gain might be removed(if that is possible), but accounts are rarely banned, because most game companies don’t assume their players are mind readers and thus have reliable knowledge of what members of their team were thinking when creating the content.

AcidicVision.5498:

mrstealth.6701:

If the line between legit and exploit gets any muddier people are going to prevent themselves from crossing it by simply not playing this game anymore. Maybe we need an offical post on what amount of gold earned per hour is considered acceptable. :\

I know someone, who has since been banned, that made over 4,000 gold in less than four hours from the snowflake recipe. Now tell me if you consider over a 1,000 gold an hour from a novelty recipe to be acceptable or legit.

Edit: I thought I had a screencap but I couldn’t find it. The number was somewhere along the lines of 4,195.

Those are crazy numbers. I’d take 100 gold an hour to be an obvious exploit, never mind 1,000.

Valmarius.4150:

Shifted.3697:

Well with all the ambiguous statements they make regarding legitimate concerns about the game, or the disregarding of questions entirely, you tell me.

I believe them, personally. Show me a large scale, quality mmo that doesn’t have forum posters complaining about lack of communication, ignoring ‘legitimate’ concerns etc, and you can have an internet cookie.

considering getting banned for something that has been an issue for a number of day, if not weeks (since WinterFest started), i’d say it’s actually a legitimate concern and not and arbitrary concern like “When can I switch races?”

Valmarius.4150:

AcidicVision.5498:

mrstealth.6701:

If the line between legit and exploit gets any muddier people are going to prevent themselves from crossing it by simply not playing this game anymore. Maybe we need an offical post on what amount of gold earned per hour is considered acceptable. :\

I know someone, who has since been banned, that made over 4,000 gold in less than four hours from the snowflake recipe. Now tell me if you consider over a 1,000 gold an hour from a novelty recipe to be acceptable or legit.

Edit: I thought I had a screencap but I couldn’t find it. The number was somewhere along the lines of 4,195.

Those are crazy numbers. I’d take 100 gold an hour to be an obvious exploit, never mind 1,000.

yeah, thats where people are generally kittening up. They seem to think this was just a few gold and that you could get comparable results other ways and that the people banned may not have known that it wasn’t intended.

We aren’t talking about the people that might have turned 100g or only done the recipe 5-10 times before realizing something was up. We are talking about people that crafted and salvaged for hours straight earning in the thousands. Enough to casually buy precursors and legendaries to try to flip.

They were in the process of crashing the market for one of the rarest materials in the game. That is not a small scale issue caused by typical crafting. For that type of change to happen in two days on a supply from 24+ collective servers, there was some serious exploitation occurring. I’d like to see ectos drop over 10s in price in less than 48 hours from people crafting/salvaging pauldrons. It would never happen.

Shifted.3697:

considering getting banned for something that has been an issue for a number of day, if not weeks (since WinterFest started), i’d say it’s actually a legitimate concern and not and arbitrary concern like “When can I switch races?”

People said the same kinda things about the karma exploit, and then it was revealed that just a couple of dozen players had bought them in the thousands.

AcidicVision.5498:

mrstealth.6701:

If the line between legit and exploit gets any muddier people are going to prevent themselves from crossing it by simply not playing this game anymore. Maybe we need an offical post on what amount of gold earned per hour is considered acceptable. :\

I know someone, who has since been banned, that made over 4,000 gold in less than four hours from the snowflake recipe. Now tell me if you consider over a 1,000 gold an hour from a novelty recipe to be acceptable or legit.

Edit: I thought I had a screencap but I couldn’t find it. The number was somewhere along the lines of 4,195.

It’s a ridiculous amount of money, but can the same end result not be achieved with the other recipe listed in the first post? The only difference is getting the snowflake back 80% of the time versus running out of crafting materials faster with the shoulder armor. With the shoulders you’re still getting back more money (in ecto) than you are putting in, so you can just buy more materials and keep going. The snowflake ring is just more efficient at it. Is doing the exact same thing faster an exploit?

Valmarius.4150:

Shifted.3697:

considering getting banned for something that has been an issue for a number of day, if not weeks (since WinterFest started), i’d say it’s actually a legitimate concern and not and arbitrary concern like “When can I switch races?”

People said the same kinda things about the karma exploit, and then it was revealed that just a couple of dozen players had bought them in the thousands.

I do agree a punishment is warranted for those “top exploiters”, but banning seems over the top when no statement, response, or even a rollback of the exploiters occurs.

AcidicVision.5498:

yeah, thats where people are generally kittening up. They seem to think this was just a few gold and that you could get comparable results other ways and that the people banned may not have known that it wasn’t intended.

We aren’t talking about the people that might have turned 100g or only done the recipe 5-10 times before realizing something was up. We are talking about people that crafted and salvaged for hours straight earning in the thousands. Enough to casually buy precursors and legendaries to try to flip.

They were in the process of crashing the market for one of the rarest materials in the game. That is not a small scale issue caused by typical crafting. For that type of change to happen in two days on a supply from 24+ collective servers, there was some serious exploitation occurring. I’d like to see ectos drop over 10s in price in less than 48 hours from people crafting/salvaging pauldrons. It would never happen.

As someone who routinely produces 100g an hour playing the TP, and I’m well aware gross income levels from manipulation, I simply don’t believe your friend made 4.2k gold in 4 hours.

Mathematically, he would have had to drilled out between 15-16,000 ectos to come out with that much money. Not only was it physically (in-game) impossible to do that in that amount of time, but he and others like him would have fulfilled the supply of ectos so high, that the current buy orders for them would have been in the 1.2g a piece range (even much higher than that). They never went above 29s during the entire holiday event.

Your story = false.

Valmarius.4150:

Strifey.7215:

Yes I’ve read that, has nothing to do with money. It references the number of times someone crafted i.e. ectos being created, which are priced by the market.

Ok, first show me how you arrive at the conclusion that “ill-gotten gains” refers only to ectos and not money.

Then, let’s assume you are correct, and that people ended up with a large amount of ectoplasm instead of a large amount of gold. That’s much better. I’m sure they didn’t sell any of those ectos, and had no plans to do so.

Hell, you’re probably right. Some posters on reddit are a much more reliable source than someone from ANet, I’m sure.

The conclusion is because the recipe created no money, it created ectos. And the fact that they banned people based the how many times they crafted the recipe, now how much they made on the TP.

I already assumed that people sold the ectos for money, as I already stated depending on which day you made the recipe results in how much money you made. The recipe was mainstream by day 3, yet Anet failed to do anything and some of the people who were banned were banned when the profit margins were low and people were asking if it was an exploit with no response. At that point, many people figured it was okay and just another recipe that was reaching equilibrium.

Obviously if you made and sold ectos when they were selling for 37s and the mat costs was 5s, it was significantly different then when ectos sold for 25s and the mat cost was 20s.

It would be completely different if Anet didn’t wait so long, there weren’t huge threads on these forums and reddit, and if the market didn’t already reach an equilibrium. All that blame is on Anet for taking forever (in game terms) to react and then banning people because of it whether they crafted on day 1 or day 4.

I admit I am anxious now. I get that paying 21 karma instead of 21,000 karma for a T3 cultural weapon is an exploit. You pay 1000 times less than you should.

But I honestly would have never recognized that the snowflake recipe is an exploit. I am no market player and have no real understanding about the mechanisms; I rely on my guildies for that part of the game. Consequently I did not discover that the snowflake recipe had the potential to make me rich and did not use it.

My point is: Unknowing and stupid (market-wise at least) as I am, how can I try to play the market now? If I discover something profitable, how do I know if it is an exploit or a legit way to make money?

1:1000 as in the karma exploit, that I can understand. 1:2 as the snowflake exploit (profit rate compared to the silk rare shoulder thingy, when I interpret the numbers correctly given here and in other threads about the subject), that I cannot understand. I simply don’t know what is an appropriate profit and the profit made with the snowflake recipe did not strike me as that great. Especially compared to the usual profits the great market players make when a patch comes.

I really would love to get an official statement by ArenaNet. I am not interested in the number of accounts banned. I am interested in a clear rule. A rule for dummies. Like in “more than 10% profit is an exploit”. And please do not retreat to “from case to case” judgement; I cannot handle that.

For the time being I am afraid to try out to play the market.

Vayra.3290:

Kiserai.3957:

Well see, that’s the thing…they did. You just didn’t hear an uproar about it because nobody got banned before this. Until this point crafting to salvage for ectos is where the ecto price softcap came from. That’s why market enthusiasts are so concerned right now, even those of us who aren’t banned.

There is no other recipe that could create an infinite amount of ectos from only a single ecto and basic crafting materials. All other ways either requires ectos or fine crafting materials that are always lost in the craft. No other recipes give you back the rare crafting materials required to make it + ectos.

Technically that’s correct, since some recipes used no ectos at all to create ectos, but the bigger issue is what I explained earlier about mat quality. The people who are confused here—myself included—are people who view items as commodities with a monetary value rather than as distinct items. Clearly you do not do that, which is why nothing seems unusual to you.

AcidicVision.5498:

I know someone, who has since been banned, that made over 4,000 gold in less than four hours from the snowflake recipe. Now tell me if you consider over a 1,000 gold an hour from a novelty recipe to be acceptable or legit.

That is literally 10-100x more profit than the (banned) people I heard from made in significantly more time. When others were doing this, it was more like 5-10g an hour…

evo.8640:

As someone who routinely produces 100g an hour playing the TP, and I’m well aware gross income levels from manipulation, I simply don’t believe your friend made 4.2k gold in 4 hours.

Mathematically, he would have had to drilled out between 15-16,000 ectos to come out with that much money. Not only was it physically (in-game) impossible to do that in that amount of time, but he and others like him would have fulfilled the supply of ectos so high, that the current buy orders for them would have been in the 1.2g a piece range. They never went above 29s during the entire holiday event.

Your story = false.

Never said it was my friend. Just a player I knew, have done fractals with a few times and talk to casually in LA /m.

And you are talking about just ecto. You aren’t accounting for generating a stack of ectos for virtually free, selling them on the tp for 100% profit, buying a stack or more of rares and playing the mf for precursors to sell back. Or Unidentified dyes. Or any of another dozen or so possibilities.

Also, flooding the market with ectos to flip lowers, not raises the price because the crafters were undercutting each other. Ecto were over 35s, I believe, before the event. Because the recipe generated more of the material than it used.

But it’s not my place to prove or disprove it. You and others will think what you want to. The guy was a filthy exploiter, so he could well have been lying. but since the interaction started with him wondering whether or not he should go until he could buy Twilight, I doubt it.

Actually I am accounting for that. As I stated, it was physically impossible to create 15-16,000 ectos in that window of time.

Not only that, but ecto prices would have gone well past the 1.2g per. Seeing as how there is only roughly 3,000 all under 1g. Prices never went above 29s per.

So I don’t care what you’re trying to point out. The fact is, your story about this person you knew never happened.

Extra tidbit: there are buy orders still sitting at the same price than there was almost 4 weeks ago that have gone unfilled. The ecto wall was never breached.

AcidicVision.5498:

mrstealth.6701:

If the line between legit and exploit gets any muddier people are going to prevent themselves from crossing it by simply not playing this game anymore. Maybe we need an offical post on what amount of gold earned per hour is considered acceptable. :\

I know someone, who has since been banned, that made over 4,000 gold in less than four hours from the snowflake recipe. Now tell me if you consider over a 1,000 gold an hour from a novelty recipe to be acceptable or legit.

Edit: I thought I had a screencap but I couldn’t find it. The number was somewhere along the lines of 4,195.

I’m calling BS unless he exaggerated the 4 hours.
Could I see someone making 4k gold over the course of the 4 days if they got in immediatly after the patch? yes.
Could I see them getting it only 4 hours? pretty much impossible.

Under the near best market conditions which certainly wouldn’t last when dumping that many ectos in 4 hours, (37s ectos, 1s snowflakes, 40c mithril) it would take ~4500 ectos an hour to produce 1000 gold an hour after TP fees and expenses.

I’m almost certain it’s physically impossible to craft and salvage 4500 ectos per hour.

Expected Value of one salvage is .9 ectos. Let’s just say it’s 1 for this example. Even if you could salvage one item per second with the confirmation window, it would still take 125 minutes to just salvage the items, not including crafting time.

Realistically, it would obviously take much longer then 125 minutes and the profit margin wouldn’t stay steady. There is literally no scenario based on the prices at the time of the Wintersday patch and the time it takes to craft/salvage/tp that someone could make 4k in 4 hrs.

AcidicVision.5498:

Never said it was my friend. Just a player I knew, have done fractals with a few times and talk to casually in LA /m.

And, obviously, random players always tell the truth, the whole truth and only the truth right? This is such a “friend of a friend of a friend”-story…

And you are talking about just ecto. You aren’t accounting for generating a stack of ectos for virtually free, selling them on the tp for 100% profit, buying a stack or more of rares and playing the mf for precursors to sell back. Or Unidentified dyes. Or any of another dozen or so possibilities.

That’d be because you said he made 4000g in 4h from that recipe. Which is so very different from “He made 100g from that recipe and then used his superior market knowledge to multiply his gold”. He did not exploit 4000g in 4h because that’s simply impossible.

Strifey.7215:

The conclusion is because the recipe created no money, it created ectos.

I already assumed that people sold the ectos for money, as I already stated depending on which day you made the recipe results in how much money you made.

Obviously if you made and sold ectos when they were selling for 37s and the mat costs was 5s was significantly different then when ectos sold for 25s and the mat cost was 20s.

We should probably put aside the issue of the amount of money people made, because it’s obvious we will make no headway there with no concrete data. I believe it to be a large amount, you seem to believe it to be less, but neither of us can prove it either way.

I do think, aside from making those people very rich, you may be underestimating the effect those ectos were/could have, though. The entire ecomomy is set to ecto prices. Exotics take the costs of ectos in to account. Rares are mostly priced to be less than ectos, T5 mats go on the price of rares, and so it goes on.

A quick look at the TP now (and the current ecto price is about 28 silver) shows me that 10,000 ecto orders would have to be filled to get down to 25 silver. How many would have to have been filled to get it there from 37 silver? Want to hazard a reasonable guess? Now take that number and divide it by less than 200…

evo.8640:

Actually I am accounting for that. As I stated, it was physically impossible to create 15-16,000 ectos in that window of time.

Not only that, but ecto prices would have gone well past the 1.2g per. Seeing as how there is only roughly 3,000 all under 1g. Prices never went above 29s per.

So I don’t care what you’re trying to point out. The fact is, your story about this person you knew never happened.

Extra tidbit: there are buy orders still sitting at the same price than there was almost 4 weeks ago that have gone unfilled. The ecto wall was never breached.

Sorry, but can you explain your logic? When you flood the market with an item, prices do not rise. They fall. For prices to go over 1gold, people would have to have been putting them up at that price…you’re making no sense.

Strifey.7215:

I’m calling BS unless he exaggerated the 4 hours.
Could I see someone making 4k gold over the course of the 4 days if they got in immediatly after the patch? yes.
Could I see them getting it only 4 hours? pretty much impossible.

Yeah, I know he didn’t get that much that fast from only using this recipe. Everyone that did this would have made that amount of this were the case. Probably someone that already had a lot of money and was playing the high-end market. I don’t doubt that doing this assisted him, but it was not that effective at doing it.

evo.8640:

Not only that, but ecto prices would have gone well past the 1.2g per. Seeing as how there is only roughly 3,000 all under 1g. Prices never went above 29s per.

Barring the fact I already admitted the dude may have been lying and there is no way I can prove otherwise even though I personally think he wasn’t since all this guy did was fractals or sit in front of the TP for 13 hours a day, I think its more likely he knew something you dont…

I’m curious at how you think an increase in ecto in the market would have made the price increase? The supply was increasing, sellers were undercutting each other to quickly turn a profit on the materials they essentially got for free. So the price drops. Which it did.

There was no reason for the exploiters to buy up ecto. They could propagate it. Now i’m not an economics major, but I cant get where you are getting the idea that supply would drop and prices would rise because of an influx of the material.

Valmarius.4150:

Strifey.7215:

The conclusion is because the recipe created no money, it created ectos.

I already assumed that people sold the ectos for money, as I already stated depending on which day you made the recipe results in how much money you made.

Obviously if you made and sold ectos when they were selling for 37s and the mat costs was 5s was significantly different then when ectos sold for 25s and the mat cost was 20s.

We should probably put aside the issue of the amount of money people made, because it’s obvious we will make no headway there with no concrete data. I believe it to be a large amount, you seem to believe it to be less, but neither of us can prove it either way.

I do think, aside from making those people very rich, you may be underestimating the effect those ectos were/could have, though. The entire ecomomy is set to ecto prices. Exotics take the costs of ectos in to account. Rares are mostly priced to be less than ectos, T5 mats go on the price of rares, and so it goes on.

A quick look at the TP now (and the current ecto price is about 28 silver) shows me that 10,000 ecto orders would have to be filled to get down to 25 silver. How many would have to have been filled to get it there from 37 silver? Want to hazard a reasonable guess? Now take that number and divide it by less than 200…

Yes and it was easily corrected by fixing the recipe, which was done like 2 weeks ago. My issue isn’t with them eventually correcting the recipe, it’s with banning people due to Anet’s poor handling on all levels of the situation, from releasing the recipe, letting it go for 4 days, and ignoring all the threads that popped up which caused some of the people who were banned to get banned.

I don’t believe everyone made small amounts of money, I know some people made a bunch, but I also know for a fact from people I play with everyday who are in my guild ventrillo that some people also made very small amounts of money. Again, people who made a bunch of money made it through the market, not out of thin air. I don’t consider it any different then people who made thousands on many of the other market fluctuations that were created by Anet introducing new recipes.

The problem is it’s not a clear line when it’s a recipe that was introduced by anet, during a time when people were complaining about ectos rising from 25s to 37s because of ascended gear, that they ignored for 4 days even with countless threads, and that was corrected which naturally caused the economy to slowly adjust itself.

Ultimately I think it’s a poor decision/scenario for a permaban, which can be seen by the outcry on forums.

I’m confused. I thought you said money was not the issue, but producing ectos was. Did their (relatively) smaller profit margin make a difference to the amount of ectos they produced?

And, just to check, are you saying the people who were concerned enough about this to post a thread asking about it, should get a free pass because it wasn’t replied to in time for them -not to grind out something they already thought was an exploit?- Seems to me that if you’re going to post and ask if something is wrong, then chances are it is.

Valmarius.4150:

I’m confused. I thought you said money was not the issue, but producing ectos was. Did their (relatively) smaller profit margin make a difference to the amount of ectos they produced?

And, just to check, are you saying the people who were concerned enough about this to post a thread asking about it, should get a free pass because it wasn’t replied to in time for them -not to grind out something they already thought was an exploit?- Seems to me that if you’re going to post and ask if something is wrong, then chances are it is.

Sure it made a difference, if someone crafted 200 ectos on day 4 and found the profit wasn’t worth their time then they would have stopped producing ectos. That’s exactly what happened to some people, myself included. Luckily I only did about 50 crafts since I only used 10 snowflakes to test the profits.

And I’m saying when someone creates a thread that thousands of people see on day 3, with no response from devs, a portion of those thousands of people who saw the thread will probably try to craft it because it’s not a clear cut exploit. I’m not talking about the single person who created the thread, I’m talking about all the people who heard about it, you know the internet and news and information and all that…

Valmarius.4150:

And, just to check, are you saying the people who were concerned enough about this to post a thread asking about it, should get a free pass because it wasn’t replied to in time for them -not to grind out something they already thought was an exploit?- Seems to me that if you’re going to post and ask if something is wrong, then chances are it is.

Here’s the thing…. You find this issue and you ask the official team. You wait 1 day. 2 days. You can see people cashing in on it, prices rising(thus reducing the potential profit) and nobody is answering you. From my experience, publishers jump on potential exploits like rabbits on a carrot. As in, in any other game I ever played that topic would’ve gotten a moderator/CM/GM reply within 2h of posting it to inform us that “yes, it is an exploit” or “we are looking into it, I suggest you withhold on doing it for now”. Because that’s “customer care”, you want to warn your players about potential problems. In addition to that, there is the screenshot of the Anet guy refusing to say anything about it. Any player who’s used to experiencing “customer care” would take that as “yeah, feel free to do it, it’s ok”.

Strifey.7215:

Sure it made a difference, if someone crafted 200 ectos on day 4 and found the profit wasn’t worth their time then they would have stopped producing ectos. That’s exactly what happened to some people, myself included. Luckily I only did about 50 crafts since I only used 10 snowflakes to test the profits.

And I’m saying when someone creates a thread that thousands of people see on day 3, with no response from devs, a portion of those thousands of people who saw the thread will probably try to craft it because it’s not a clear cut exploit. I’m not talking about the single person who created the thread, I’m talking about all the people who heard about it, you know the internet and news and information and all that…

Those are good points, actually, and I can agree with them. But, it was not thousands of people who got banned, it was less than 200. ANet obviously did draw a line on what kind of number they considered taking it too far. You were under it, and the people you know who got banned were above it. I’d assume by a large margin. I’d be really interested to know what that exact line was, but I doubt we’ll ever get told.

Anyway, this is my last post as it’s getting late, and I doubt this thread will be open tomorrow. Thanks for the discussion.

Valmarius.4150:

Sorry, but can you explain your logic? When you flood the market with an item, prices do not rise. They fall. For prices to go over 1gold, people would have to have been putting them up at that price…you’re making no sense.

Key words were “buy order”. The wall for listings has consistently held at 29s and below for weeks. While buy orders never dropped below 24s for the same period of time.

If you know anything about ectos, then you know that this item doesn’t follow regular laws of supply and demand. And quite the reverse has been true. Ectos have had huge supply with huge prices. They’ve also had lower supply with lower prices (like right now).

You’d also know they’ve been the effective “2nd currency” for some time among TP barons – even the main currency. If the market had been flooded by just a single individual who had produced on the order of what was alleged, they would have been bought up long before any part of the ordinary player would have tapped into them, with so many TP barons looking to score them at lower prices than they are now – at the same moment in time.

Prices of ectos would very well have gone up if such a supply had hit for no other reason than that. If you’re not aware of the inner workings of that, then I’d understand why you’d be confused.

evo.8640:

Valmarius.4150:

Sorry, but can you explain your logic? When you flood the market with an item, prices do not rise. They fall. For prices to go over 1gold, people would have to have been putting them up at that price…you’re making no sense.

Key words were “buy order”. The wall for listings has consistently held at 29s and below for weeks. While buy orders never dropped below 24s for the same period of time.

If you know anything about ectos, then you know that this item doesn’t follow regular laws of supply and demand. And quite the reverse has been true. Ectos have had huge supply with huge prices. They’ve also had lower supply with lower prices (like right now).

You’d also know they’ve been the effective “2nd currency” for some time among TP barons – even the main currency. If the market had been flooded by just a single individual who had produced on the order of what was alleged, they would have been bought up long before any part of the ordinary player would have tapped into them, with so many TP barons looking to score them at lower prices than they are now – at the same moment in time.

Prices of ectos would very well have gone up if such a supply had hit for no other reason than that. If you’re not aware of the inner workings of that, then I’d understand why you’d be confused.

No, sorry, again you’re making no sense. Let me try and work through this.

You’re saying that, if the market had been flooded with thousands upon thousands of cheap ectos (which it was) the price would not have dropped (which it did) but that people would have bought up all of those tens of thousands of ectos, THEN bought up all the ones priced higher than those, and then started relisting them at one gold a piece?

Erasculio.2914:

Dao Jones.6720:

Absolutely. When I was trying to gather ectos for my legendary, I would regularly buy the cheapest T6 mats (or guildies sent them to me) and make either rare level 80 daggers, or rare level 80 warhorns, which I could then grind and hope to get ectos from.

Which means you knew how the salvaging system works – how when salvaging those daggers and warhorns you would get mithril back and maybe an ecto, while when salvaging the snowflake jewels you actually got mithril, maybe an ecto, and also the snowflake jewel, which was enough for making a new piece of jewelry.

The fact it had such a higher return than the other recipes you admittedly knew about, and that it was different enough that you actually tried crafting a rare jewel instead of your usual options (daggers and warhorns) shows how you understood it was not the same thing. In other words, how it was something in a different order of magnitude from other recipes in the game, which you quickly tried to make a profit from, even if you failed.

In other words, how it was an exploit you tried to abuse.

arjeidi.2690:

Where did ANet say this was an exploit?

It was obviously an exploit. Saying it wasn’t obivious is the same as claiming that stealing isn’t a crime unless there’s a sign in each store saying so.

Yet again – YOU do not get to determine what is obvious for the entire community. ANet placed this recipe into the game. It was openly questioned on THEIR forums. They didn’t even bother to respond. Now they hand out permabans to gamers – paying customers – that are using their new recipe to their own fiscal advantage. What a concept. Trying to use crafting to earn a profit. How dare they…

Some of the assumptions and stubborn accusations in this thread are ridiculous. People can rant and try to talk down to those impacted by this all they please. It does nothing to change the facts of what took place. I’m proud to be a member of the same guild as Dao and others. In my short time getting to know these folks, they are one of the outright best gaming communities I’ve had the pleasure to enjoy their company, their constant humor, casual yet effective approach to teamwork gaming and quite clearly – their integrity – which was paramount to why I recently joined.

Can’t say I feel the same about being a paying customer of the ArenaNet community at the moment. And just to be clear, that isn’t directed at any other customers whatsoever. Enjoy the back and forth. I’ve read enough to see this isn’t a debate based on achieving any sensible justice for several innocent victims of a developer’s inhouse mistake, then compounded by their own unjust reaction.

I never said anything about re-listing them at one gold a piece.

Thousands of ectos were brought into the market, but there’s no way to speculate how many came from this recipe or through regular means.

However, when players are putting in purchased (not buy orders) all at the same time, and they are maxing out their purchased at 250, it’s very possible to accidentally go beyond the threshold that you mean to pass.

In other words, TP barons have enough gold that they don’t particularly care to waste what normal players would call significant. With several people buying up ectos at a lower price than what has been the going rate for several weeks now, it’s more than possible to have seen a rise above 29s. Certainly into the 30’s-40’s-50’s and so on in a purchase race.

Like I said, these players use ectos as their 2nd currency . They trade them among themselves rather than gold for items. Since gold is incredibly inflated and holds no real value to those with several thousand. As well part of it is speculating the market future. Gold inflation rises several times more quickly than the value of ectos. Their value will continue to increase for wealthy players while the value for gold will continue to decrease.

It’s already happened once when ectos were going for 12-14s steadily. And over a period of just a day shot up to 38s-39s for a couple of weeks. This was almost 2 months ago, and there were far less people holding onto thousands of gold then, than there is now.

evo.8640:

I never said anything about re-listing them at one gold a piece.

Thousands of ectos were brought into the market, but there’s no way to speculate how many came from this recipe or through regular means.

However, when players are putting in purchased (not buy orders) all at the same time, and they are maxing out their purchased at 250, it’s very possible to accidentally go beyond the threshold that you mean to pass.

In other words, TP barons have enough gold that they don’t particularly care to waste what normal players would call significant. With several people buying up ectos at a lower price than what has been the going rate for several weeks now, it’s more than possible to have seen a rise above 29s. Certainly into the 30’s-40’s-50’s and so on in a purchase race.

Like I said, these players use ectos as their 2nd currency . They trade them among themselves rather than gold for items. Since gold is incredibly inflated and holds no real value to those with several thousand. As well part of it is speculating the market future. Gold inflation rises several times more quickly than the value of ectos. Their value will continue to increase for wealthy players while the value for gold will continue to decrease.

It’s already happened once when ectos were going for 12-14s steadily. And over a period of just a day shot up to 38s-39s for a couple of weeks. This was almost 2 months ago, and there were far less people holding onto thousands of gold then, than there is now.

If people flood the market with cheap ectos…yes, rich players will possibly buy as many cheap ectos as they can, but -accidently- going from ectos at 25 silver to 1 gold? You’re saying prices would rise because the richest players are unobservant/lazy enough to buy stacks of items at 4x the price they mean to? Really?

I…think not. Seriously. No.

Absolutely they are. Look at the person who re-listed Twilight 5 times. He/she wasted well over 2000 gold doing that.

evo.8640:

Absolutely they are. Look at the person who re-listed Twilight 5 times. He/she wasted well over 2000 gold doing that.

But you’re talking about enough people doing it at such a rate that it not only negates a high volume of new supply, but actually reverses it’s effects. It’s just not plausible.

Valmarius.4150:

If people flood the market with cheap ectos…yes, rich players will possibly buy as many cheap ectos as they can, but -accidently- going from ectos at 25 silver to 1 gold? You’re saying prices would rise because the richest players are unobservant/lazy enough to buy stacks of items at 4x the price they mean to? Really?

I…think not. Seriously. No.

Yeah, that is just not going to happen. Ever. There is no way that adding a large amount of supply is going to cause prices to go up, it will make them go down. When the “TP barons” buy up all the cheap ectos, they are going to relist them all 1c below the current cheapest ecto for sale in order to turn a quick profit.

[qoute]It’s already happened once when ectos were going for 12-14s steadily. And over a period of just a day shot up to 38s-39s for a couple of weeks. This was almost 2 months ago, and there were far less people holding onto thousands of gold then, than there is now.[/quote]

Two months ago was about the time that Fractals and Ascended gear were added (Nov 16). That price increase was because Ascended gear takes a large amount of ecto to craft, and a lot of players wanted this gear. The demand for ecto and T6 mats went up, a lot.

So wait, I’m a bit behind here as I didn’t care to craft any holiday stuff…

But salvaging a rare item for ecto (which is something that should be expected… given that rares salvage into ecto) is somehow an exploit?

I get that people did it hundreds/thousands of times… But, let’s be honest:
Ecto prices never dropped below 25 silver.
Demand was still much larger than the supply, obviously. (Most likely due to the obscene ecto requirements for Ascended gear.)

People play with the market all the time (buying out cheap items and marking up the price).

Why don’t they get banned? I consider that just as much “detrimental to the economy and other players” as this.

evo.8640:

Absolutely they are. Look at the person who re-listed Twilight 5 times. He/she wasted well over 2000 gold doing that.

You are trying to compare someone buying up an item which has a total supply of about 5 to an item with supply in the thousands, that just had that supply greatly increased.

It’s easy to fully control the supply of Twilight (assume you have the funds) because there is very little supply. I would expect people that can do this to buy them out, and relist them to make a profit.

ReginaBuenaobra.6953:

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.

As a reminder, when we dealt with the karma exploit incident in September, we said that we would show some leniency for that particular incident. However, we made it clear that future exploits would be dealt with more firmly. As a result, we have terminated the accounts of the worst offenders in this most recent incident.

As always, if you have an exploit to report, please email exploits@arena.net.

Thank you.

I see a clear difference in the two exploits. The karma exploit relied on fixed costs—the vendor cost of items.

This time, we’re dealing with variable costs, the market-determined value of goods on the Trading Post. Briefly, there was a huge profit margin available, but the market adjusted for that. Basically, this was only “too good to be true” because briefly, players were undervaluing their snow flakes and selling them cheaper than they should have… and the buyers were banned.

Some of the people banned were getting profit margins no better than what we get for just about anything else. 3 silver profit from a 25 silver investment is really nothing to get banned over.

I literally have items I craft that reliably bring in better margins than that, and I’ve sold hundreds—maybe even thousands. Am I getting myself banned by mentioning this?

So confused.