Guild Wars 2

Can’t read the article yet, but on topic I would like this to be addressed in the future in better communication. Although I really do dislike this incident and think it should be looked at; I want Anet to be better in handling this in the future so this doesn’t happen again. Someone mentioned PTR, that would be great. Or try out the 2nd offense route with temp ban/perm ban following. Or if they are going to mass ban people, let everyone know what is a bannable offense before banning and then ban people who persist—-I’m talking about using the ingame system mail

I keep seeing the word profit being thrown around, by both Anet and gamers when I feel like it had nothing to do with profit but everything to do with creating supply.

TrapjaW.4983:

Crafting Rare Silk Shoulders:

15 T5 Mats + 3 Bolts of Silk + 1 Cured leather thick hide + 11 Silk string = 0 to 3 ectos + 1 to 3 silk scraps. ( might not be 100% accurate working from memory atm)
—————————————————————————
Snowflake Mithril Earring of Winter

1 Ectoplasm + Pristine Snowflake + Orichalcum or Mithril Ore (12)
=0-3 Ectos +1-2 Mith/ Ori Ore + chance to get Snowflake Back

If you wanted to recycle your salvages to make more Silk Shoulders, the MOST you would get back from the salvage is one Bolt of Silk (combining two silk scraps) – compared to the 30 items is takes for input. If your luck is with you, you could only recycle one bolt of silk to make more, which isn’t enough to cover the bolt of silk requirement. No creation of supply.

If you wanted to recycle your salvages to make more Earrings, the most you could get back 1 Ecto, 1 Snowflake and 1 ingot (combining a max of 2 ore), compared to 14 items required for input. If your luck is with you, you could literally recycle 2/3 requirements of the recipe to make more. If your luck is really with you and you salvaged 2-3 Ectos, you just created 1-2 Ectos with only an input of one ecto.

Lets say you start with 1 ecto, make the Earring and salvage 3 Ectos. You could then theoretically, if you are lucky, make three earrings salvage 3 ectos from each. You now have 9 ectos. Now make 9 earrings, salvage 3 ectos, now you have 27 etc. etc. etc.

My point isn’t that there was a general input of items to create more items, or economics and market equilibrium etc., it’s that one requirement, in this case Ectos, gave you more Ectos in return than what you put in – and fairly reliably.

Imagine if some trolls with a ton of gold got a hold of that recipe. Ecto market would crash, along with the Exotic market, and Mithril/Orichalcum would shoot through the roof. I think this is why Anet was so touchy about the whole deal.

First-Ban the exploiters, all for it

Second-Oh the Hypocrisy!

So, the economy is inflated by exploiters? I have news for you, so does selling gems to convert to gold. Probably more.

Is there a definition somewhere describing exactly what constitutes an Exploit?

Wiki defines an exploit as : “An exploit, in video games, is the use of a bug or glitches, rates, hit boxes, or speed, etc. by a player to their advantage in a manner not intended by the game’s designers.”

I think it’s obvious the GW2 designers intend us to craft rares and salvage them for ectos. They didn’t intend that the recipe cost only one gem. Mistakes happen, but the fault lies entirely with the programmer that built this recipe.

Braghez.7529:

I do not see where it must be "hard to find "…and after all it kinda was…who would make an accessory to just recycle it afterward, thus finding the bug. Bet not so much ppl found it that way lol.

That’s exactly what I would do with spare mats if I had ever trained a crafting skill; it’s already what I do with dungeon tokens.

This whole thing is repugnant when taken in context of larger issues, like precursor manipulation.

Rogacz.9865:

Oh just like every other jewelcrafting recipe? Like this?
Beryl Mithril Ring
Ingredients:
1X Mithril Setting[s]
1X Mithril Band[s]
3X Embellished Brilliant Beryl Jewel[s]

3X Embellished Brilliant Beryl Jewel[s]

3X

3

I wouldnt say just like when other jewelcrafting recipies you at most get back 1/3 of jewels back. Again, deliberately ignoring the obvious.

Oh, so there is always a perfect pattern and it repeats itself without exception? Like this:

Exquisite Passiflora Jewel
Ingredients:
1x Glob of Ectoplasm
1x Orichalcum Filigree
15x Passion Flowers

15x Passion Flowers

15x

15

Thus, by your logic, everybody who crafted a Passiflora Jewel exploited the system because the pattern doesn’t fit in with the rest of the Exquisite Jewels. Very interesting theory.

PS: Every time you say it was obvious you are calling the devs incompetent. Unlike you, some people assume that’s not the case and that devs(and paid testers alike) are intelligent people qualified for their job who can’t possibly miss smth this obvious…because they get paid not to… Do you know what happens when a doctor misses an obvious condition and a patient dies? The doctor loses his licence. And nobody tells the patient and his family they “should’ve known better”.

TWMagimay.9057:

Rogacz.9865:

Oh just like every other jewelcrafting recipe? Like this?
Beryl Mithril Ring
Ingredients:
1X Mithril Setting[s]
1X Mithril Band[s]
3X Embellished Brilliant Beryl Jewel[s]

3X Embellished Brilliant Beryl Jewel[s]

3X

3

I wouldnt say just like when other jewelcrafting recipies you at most get back 1/3 of jewels back. Again, deliberately ignoring the obvious.

Oh, so there is always a perfect pattern and it repeats itself without exception? Like this:

Exquisite Passiflora Jewel
Ingredients:
1x Glob of Ectoplasm
1x Orichalcum Filigree
15x Passion Flowers

15x Passion Flowers

15x

15

Thus, by your logic, everybody who crafted a Passiflora Jewel exploited the system because the pattern doesn’t fit in with the rest of the Exquisite Jewels. Very interesting theory.

PS: Every time you say it was obvious you are calling the devs incompetent. Unlike you, some people assume that’s not the case and that devs(and paid testers alike) are intelligent people qualified for their job who can’t possibly miss smth this obvious…because they get paid not to… Do you know what happens when a doctor misses an obvious condition and a patient dies? The doctor loses his licence. And nobody tells the patient and his family they “should’ve known better”.

I’ve read glassdoor on ANet and recognize the environment — telltale signs are present in other updates as well.

There seems to be little communication between sub-departments until it’s too late.

balance team for pvp does not communicate with profession design team for pve — it’s engaged on an “omg the community is FUMING” basis (unless it’s thief, in which case it’s ignored)

I get the feeling the economy team and crafting team are in similarly disjointed state.

Communication channels and inter-team integration need some fixing, I think.

This is a re-post of several points i made earlier, it did also contain points about my feelings towards arenanet , it was infracted again for " discussing customer support decisions" even thou it was adressed at the overall handling by the company and nothing specific.

Hopefully this is fine:

Overall I would have liked several things to have been addressed:

1) how are people expected to have known this was a exploit? a new recipe using new unique and time limited components gives a better profit.

so using a tried and tested method of craft/salvage to make profit , people run afoul of it and get into trouble
Yes it seems the recipe was introduced with wrong amounts , since they eventually changed it after a patch ( never any seen comment from arenanet that they made a mistake btw ). Unfortunetly people are not psychic they didnt know this in advance. So people who just thought “oh a good way to make some cash” didnt even consider it could possible be a exploit get hit by this

2) Apparently from other comments on this thread , there was posts on the forum at the time asking about this recipe . No reply to them so people didnt know if this is correct or not . Even someone submitted a screenshot of them asking a Arenanet employee in game and they would not comment.

Overall terrible communication with the playerbase , we have ingame mail , launcher msges etc etc for a reason

3) Time for them to act, if this was so bad for the economy why did it take them so long to act. Simple fact it never created wealth it redistibuted wealth via the trading post.

But if these people made so much money ( see previous post in regards to how much I know one person made and over which time scale ) which made it a threat to the economy why id first it take 4 days to patch it out , and even more importantly take over 2 weeks + to take any action when probably by that time the money has already gone back into the economy.

Overall im dissapointed in this whole handling of the episode. I dont think it was a clear cut as the previous exploit that occured ( ie 21 karma item in middle of a ist of 21000 karma items ).

Its much more of grey area on judging if people willfully abused this , or genuinely just thought it was like several other ways of making cash.

Unfortunately doubt anything will change as policy is so hard to reverse after the action .

The “exploiters” should be stripped of the extra gold, and given their accounts back.

The developer that put the recipe in should be reprimanded for his lack of attention.

Most importantly, the Anet community team should be raked across the coals over remaining silent, when players were practally begging them to answer the question if the recipe was working as intended.

This fiasco is so bad, players that were banned should be contacting the parent company NCsoft and complain.

Kiserai.3957:

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.

This. It will be me someday. I understand duping, the karma exploit, and botting. This just looks like another recipe to me, an opportunity to make money based on a gap between over and undervalued items.

I still don’t understand why this was somehow wrong, while crafting & salvaging rares is somehow fine. Both methods can easily be used to make an infinite amount of ectos, both only limited by the amount of money you have on hand.

Not to mention that this wasn’t even a bug. Some developer at ArenaNet designed that recipe to be like that. It may have had unintended consequences, but how are the players supposed to even know when ANet is trying to shift the market and when it’s a legitimate error? With the mystic chests, ANet caused the market to dump tons of butter by raising the demand. How were players supposed to know that this was not similar? This recipe would lower the price of ectos and raise the price of both snowflakes and mithril.

All I know is that now I’m afraid of being banned for completely unknown reasons.

I agree with an above post, this is more about creating items from thin air then profit, as yes the system will equal out eventually. However it does mess with the economy on a whole quite a bit, raising prices of ore and dropping prices of ectos, and conversely anything involving ectos. The economy here does even eventually to make up for it, but a few people become very rich off this and destroy the economy for other people. Its just bad all around for the game.
I cannot see how you see this as anything other then a bug or oversight on Anets part and choose not to take part in it. The amount of people banned was less then 200 and doing something thousands of times is an obvious exploit, for those that were just over a hundred or so its still an exploit just not to the extent. There should have been something from the devs about it no doubt but just because someone doesn’t tell you something is wrong doesn’t make it any less so.

You know, I thought the recipe was their way of introducing some ecto to the market to help with the stupidly high prices. And since there was precedent for them to use recipes like this (previously to remove mats) as a round-about way of doing that it’s not beyond the realm of possibility for them to do so again, nor beyond reason to reach the conclusion that that was the case here. Add to that the temporary nature of the snowflakes, as supply is going to dry up as gifts dwindle post event, and assuming that this was fully intended to bring a bunch of ecto into the market to help the prices is completely reasonable.

For your devs and your QA team to fail so hard and then blame the players is insane. I agreed that the 21 karma exploit was an exploit, because it clearly deviated from the norm; but this did not and calling it “an obvious exploit” is ridiculous.
Are we expected to look at every recipe you guys give us and evaluate whether it’s “in line” with all other recipes? Because I’ve been looking at the recipes for some of the legendary stuff…..

I’m sorry, but I just can’t agree with Anet’s stance on this. Massive amounts of ecto set to crash the economy? How exactly? Lots of ecto dumped drops the prices of ecto, and subsequently the prices of things made with that ecto. But I don’t recall people saying the sky was falling when ecto prices were a lot cheaper, so I don’t see how catastrophe could strike by bringing them back to where they were.

LordGustoff.3752:

I keep seeing the word profit being thrown around, by both Anet and gamers when I feel like it had nothing to do with profit but everything to do with creating supply.

That makes some sense, although I would point out that the ability to generate infinite ectoplasm already existed and continues to exist—but people only do it when it’s profitable. Still, that perspective helps.

However, the ArenaNet response still leaves a burning question, and it revolves around intent. If the problem was as simple as what you said, then the only actions they would have taken would be to close the hole and delete the ectoplasm that people had stockpiled. But that wasn’t the case at all—instead, the players were officially branded as people who intended to destroy the game’s economy and banned to protect everyone else from their machinations.

You see, when someone who views the trading post as its own minigame looks at this situation, he doesn’t see any evidence of that at all. Instead, he sees people behaving out of simple self-interest, following the precedent of previous strategies (salvage for profit) and events (which offered significant wealth in short timeframes for people who cashed in quickly) and having no special knowledge of the developers’ intent. The fact that some of these people did it hundreds of times isn’t evidence of malicious intent—it’s exactly how salvaging for profit works. You do it in bulk or you don’t bother. There’s no malice there, just normal actions with a failure to anticipate that this situation would have different consequences. And that’s why I’m worried now.

I saw nothing wrong, right up until the bans kicked in. I heard exactly how this worked, but said nothing because I didn’t recognize a problem. I may not be banned now, but that provides no comfort. I don’t understand the logic that led to those people being banned, which is why I don’t know how that logic won’t apply to me someday. That should never happen.

There’s really just two possibilities here. The first one is that ArenaNet knows something we don’t, and which they have not communicated to us. The second is that ArenaNet presumed malicious intent of these people, received evidence colored by confirmation bias, and have made a mistake in judgement as a result. There isn’t a third option.

Is it just me or does the topic not match the content … its titles 2 jewellery but talks of 1 bugged jewellery compared to 1 tailor recipe.

Anyways, yes you can get ecto from the tailor recipe but its not as reliable as you would think. For some of us making ecto this way is a loss even with BL salvage kits. I tried it with 30 @ 19.53s per shoulder for materials, after selling ectos I made a loss because not enough ectos were salvaged.

Unlike the bugged jewellery recipe where profit was pretty much guaranteed.

wildcode.5403:

Is it just me or does the topic not match the content … its titles 2 jewellery but talks of 1 bugged jewellery compared to 1 tailor recipe.

Anyways, yes you can get ecto from the tailor recipe but its not as reliable as you would think. For some of us making ecto this way is a loss even with BL salvage kits. I tried it with 30 @ 19.53s per shoulder for materials, after selling ectos I made a loss because not enough ectos were salvaged.

Unlike the bugged jewellery recipe where profit was pretty much guaranteed.

The reference to two jewellry recipes was in regards to the two different recipes that was involved in this whole saga , basically one was made with orichalcum and one with mithril.
It was also a play on words/pun whatever you want to call it in my mind ,yeh probably not everyone would get why i made that title but it sounded good to me at the time :P

Oh and saying you didnt make any money on the shoulders is prob due to cost of materials and also you used a very small sample size. Over time and with larger base of figures it evens out on your Ectoplasms as i have done batches of 250 of these at a time and it worked very very nicely.

Edited to add a little bit extra

So wait I appear to have gotten into this late. People were crafting things with the super undervalue mats on the trading post (increasing their value to reasonable levels) to make crafted stuff they could salvage into ectos and make a profit.

I recall a dev post saying that the problem way back after release was money being generated from nowhere, and that trading post manipulation is fine because the money comes from other players.

This is 100% trading post manipulation, at least as far as I understand it. Ask your economist, prices should have stabilize to the point where it was no longer as profitable. Whats next? Ban folks that make money flipping items?

I make a profit by buying low and selling for 20% above what I bought for. Oop I’m exploiting, BAN ME! I bought a bunch of wintersday skins and am reselling them for a gold each hoping that the prices will increase after a few months, I’m exploiting, BAN ME!

I did not know of this particular method, and I was always one of the guys that tried to see the sense in the decisions you guys made, and tried to explain the possible reasoning to others.

I see no reasoning here, all I see is an overzealous banhammer, perhaps even a moneygrab hoping those players will buy another account. Those 200 players were not exploiting any more than any other player who plays the auction house. You have lost the faith of one of your loyal players, and from the size of this thread, I doubt I’m the only one.

So tell me how a recipe is suppose to be an exploit? Really, by looking at one how is one suppose to be an exploit.. I go to crafting booth, I craft to lvl it.. I get the materials it needs and craft.. so tell me how I am suppose to spot a recipe to be an exploit.. I craft, unlock new recipes or buy them.. and yet how am I suppose to recognize one as an exploit.. All I know is what the recipe calls for.. I don’t know if it is right or wrong.. I can’t read Anets mind.. I have no clue what mats Anet intended for any recipes.. So maybe I just may stop crafting and using the trading post altogether.. If the BS keeps getting ridiculous to the point I can’t do anything in the game fearing it may be an exploit… I may just quit playing this game altogether..

Kiserai.3957:

There’s really just two possibilities here. The first one is that ArenaNet knows something we don’t, and which they have not communicated to us. The second is that ArenaNet presumed malicious intent of these people, received evidence colored by confirmation bias, and have made a mistake in judgement as a result. There isn’t a third option.

There is a third option, my personal conspiracy theory that explains everything without assuming that their team is filled with incompetence. Let’s see what happened:
- Wrong recipe allegedly slipped through the cracks. Those cracks being a dev team that has already created thousands of crafting recipes and a QA team that gets paid to notice these things. The only way that could have happened is if the recipe was intended to exist that way.
- Recipe was patched in, players noticed and put it on the forum. ANet knew about the way the recipe was working within hours of the patch. It took them 4 days to patch it out. I’ve seen accidental glitches in other games. Servers tend to get shut down within minutes of the first report. The only logical explanation is that they wanted to let as many players as possible craft/salvage as many items as possible.
- It took them 2 weeks to issue the bans. Running a scrip to find out who salvaged more than xxx items does NOT take 2 weeks, neither does banning 200 accounts. They were obviously looking for something more that just who “exploited the most” when deciding who to ban.

If you take the 3 italic lines and combine them…you tell me xD

TWMagimay.9057:

If you take the 3 italic lines and combine them…you tell me xD

That sounds too tinfoil-hatty to me. I think miscommunication or mistaken assumptions are much more plausible.

Well, for those who were summarily banned permanently for doing less than 5 gold worth of this so called “exploit” of a QA Nightmare and Dev oversight… and treated as if they robbed the bank, given blanket bans and account shutdowns and nothing more than a cookie cutter response asking for independent reviews… a petition has started to at least have them review their policy on permanently banning people with zero priors, located here:

https://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/arenanet-change-your-permanent-ban-policies-regarding-the-snowflake-salvagers

It was only natural for people to salvage some of the things they crafted. While I completely and totally understand those who actually abused the system to make massive gains… there were a lot of innocents hurt in the crossfire. Please, by all means, review your policies and don’t be so heavy handed to those who didn’t make massive gains. If anything, just temp ban to get your message across. Cutting out your supporters, people who buy gems with money, is only going to hurt you in the long run. Treating customers like people you could replace later, only drives business away as word of mouth is a strong advertising medium as it is a two edged sword.

I beg of you, I miss m’friend on Guild Wars 2 and he’s done everything he could to try and appeal something that he was innocent of, regardless of what the charged masses say. I wish people would fact check things instead of making these knee jerk, snap judgments in favor of ArenaNet as if it’s going to get them something in the long run. This was nothing more than an oversight to begin with. By all means go after the ones that rampantly abused the error and bring back those who didn’t abuse the system.

Thank you for your time… I don’t wish this to be blown out of proportion any more than it has already. M’friend helped me buy this game as I couldn’t afford it alone due to being on a fixed income. He’s spent too long in this game to want to throw his account away. Just review individual cases and make your judgements that way… don’t blanket ban.

3 Gold isn’t worth killing someone’s account over.

Last time I crafted something was when I leveled crafts 3 months ago. I salvage occasional something rare when it seems the chance to get ectoplasm outweigh the price I can get in TP. I don’t have jewellcrafting either. However I researched why somebody was banned, when I’ve seen these posts and its clear that Anet is handling bad the case. The common sense dictates that this is fault of development team, which have to make public excuse for their fault. And the so called “exploiters” are completely innocent. As note if I knew there is easy way to make some gold I’d have engaged until the value of the materials make it unprofitable, just like with all games when I spot some demand like enchants and keep making them until the competition or the materials make it unprofitable. Always it was fine to do so. Here if I want to salvage or vendor something, after I learned for bans because of buying and selling materials and items I feel like criminal who can be punished, because of some unknown to me rule.

Also I have real life business and I have idea that if I put wrong price and somebody buy the product I can’t call the police and say he has stolen. In the case of GW2 my judgement is that is highly unprofessional what ANet is doing. As somebody who spent real money willing to support ANet to buy gems for precursor, keys and other things from TP (which is thousands by the way) I am very concerned by their politics and I will wait to see their answer first, if there is any before buying again. The answer should address the unanswered questions in this forum if is this is a bug, how they permanently ban before first informing the involved players that what they are doing is wrong.
My 2 cents

I have a friend, pretty much had considering the event we are all aware of. That person got banned during the last genocide. He’s been playing GW for about 6 years. His name is Dorkfish. 1723, reference number 130103-000977 and this is his story I am sharing with you. Using the conversation he had with Anet staff member.

Dear A-Net,

I’m rather suprised that I recieved a notification today when attempting to log onto Guild Wars 2 stating that “Your Guild Wars 2 account has been terminated for abusing an in-game exploit… This action is permanent.”.

I am unsure what I did to warrant this ban. I do not believe I have done anything against the Code of Conduct for the game, or have ever wished to over my 6+ years of following your games.

There was only one situation in which I could have done something exploitative, and that was in regards to the rare mithril snowflake accessories that was generating ectoplasms. However, I did not do this to generate a profit.

In actuality, I was attempting to identify whether or not this was actually an exploit. As a long-term fan of your games, and in the spirit of giving back to you guys for all your hard work, I was trying to gather enough data on this to conclusively provide you guys with information about an exploit.

In fact, in my mail inbox for the forums, I actually sent a private message to John Smith to report this exploit along with my data. (However, I can’t actually access it as I no longer have access to the forums with this ban). In addition, I would not have kept my sample size so small to limit the effect it would have on the economy of GW2; or have only sold back enough ectos to pay for my initial investment to gather data if I was truly attempting to do this to generate profit from this exploit.

I realize that this is only my word, and that my actions ultimately can still be considered a breach to your CoC. I just really hope that a well-intended action on my part isn’t taken as malicious by you all.

Thank you for your time,
Derek Chung

Customer Derek Chung via CSS Web 01/03/2013 02:24 AM

Some additional information that came to my mind to add to this is:

1) I privately messaged John Smith (ANet employee) to avoid any public information about this exploit being released to the players confirming the ability to create profit.
2) During my data gathering, I made three attempts. The first two attempts had sample sizes of 3 and 10 (snowflakes), which are statistically too small to provide a decent confidence interval to draw statistical significance. The third attempt was to be with 30 snowflakes but I never completed it due to the update. This last group of snowflakes are still on my account after the update and in fact, I actually lost money attempting to gather this data compared to the profits I actually made on the ectoplasms to cover these costs.

Customer Derek Chung via CSS Web 01/03/2013 06:58 PM

3) I’m not sure if you need this, but in hopes that this may make the process of resolving this ticket faster:

I hereby provide you, Arena Net, full access to any and all of my game and forum account materials (i.e. my inbox, crafting mats, logs [if you keep any]) for the purposes of acquiring any proof to settle this ticket.

Customer Derek Chung via CSS Web 01/03/2013 08:20 PM

This decision is incredibly disheartening to hear. I was really hoping for otherwise. My intentions were for the benefit of your company rather than my own gain.

To draw statistical significance with a confidence interval of approximately 95%, a sample size of n=25 is required. I was honestly not attempting to profit off of this exploit, else I would not have messaged an ANet employee about it. Thus, I am really confused about your statement on “(t)he amount of times this exploit has been abused by this account”, since I had not reached my sample size goal to gain the proof I wished to provide you, beyond a doubt, that this was a problem.

Furthermore, I do not believe that my intent, as well as the numbers of times which I conducted this for experimental purposes qualifies me for Gaile Gray’s statement about being in the “worst offenders”.

I realize that the following statements will probably hold no weight in regards to your decision on this matter, but:
1) I have never utilized an exploit before for profit.
2) I have never even been warned or suspended before by your company as I follow the UA/CoC strictly.
3) I try to do my part in your games and report bots, and other malicious activities to your game’s community. I even provided write-ups about market manipulation to John Smith and the future state of the GW2 economy. I believe that during the specific time-frame at which I conducted this experiment, there was no clear statement about this activity as being defined as an exploit concretely by Arena Net. As such, I believed it MAY have been an exploit and wanted to inform your staff about it.

I love the amount of work and effort your staff puts into this great game, and I’m glad that you are cracking down on exploits. I believe that my ban is justified based on the data and letter of the law; but given my intent and history as a player in your games, I would appreciate a second opportunity having learned where the line is drawn.

Derek Chung

Response GM Alura via Email 01/04/2013 07:45 PM

Hello,

As a follow-up to our previous discussion about your account closure related to snowflake exploit, a few players whose accounts were terminated have written to ask about a possible refund. We will be reviewing the details of each terminated account and if you are eligible for a refund, we will process that within seven days.

Regards,
Guild Wars 2 Support Team
http://support.guildwars2.com

Customer Derek Chung via CSS Web 01/04/2013 09:21 PM

I want to make this purposefully clear that I do not wish for a refund.

Your company has produced a great game, and it was definitely worth the money for the short time that I was able to play it. I wish to continue playing the game from where I left off, not start anew OR be refunded for the product. As such, you are welcome to save yourselves work on identifying whether or not I was eligible for a refund.

Instead, I would much rather prefer an actual in-depth investigation into my account, as well as considerations for why I executed the actions that I did. Instead rather, I seem to be getting standardized responses that are meant to placate all users looking for an appeal regardless of their specific situations to why or how they participated in the exploit.

I do not wish to be rude, but what part of me “NOT ATTEMPTING TO EXPLOIT THIS” and “ATTEMPTING TO REPORT A POSSIBLE EXPLOIT TO A MEMBER OF YOUR STAFF” is unclear? I have done NO WRONG based on my intentions.

sahirah.3180:

I have a friend, pretty much had considering the event we are all aware of. That person got banned during the last genocide. He’s been playing GW for about 6 years. His name is Dork fikitten23, reference number 130103-000977 and this is his story I am sharing with you. Using the conversation he had with Anet staff member.

Dear A-Net,

I’m rather suprised that I recieved a notification today when attempting to log onto Guild Wars 2 stating that “Your Guild Wars 2 account has been terminated for abusing an in-game exploit… This action is permanent.”.

I am unsure what I did to warrant this ban. I do not believe I have done anything against the Code of Conduct for the game, or have ever wished to over my 6+ years of following your games.

There was only one situation in which I could have done something exploitative, and that was in regards to the rare mithril snowflake accessories that was generating ectoplasms. However, I did not do this to generate a profit.

In actuality, I was attempting to identify whether or not this was actually an exploit. As a long-term fan of your games, and in the spirit of giving back to you guys for all your hard work, I was trying to gather enough data on this to conclusively provide you guys with information about an exploit.

In fact, in my mail inbox for the forums, I actually sent a private message to John Smith to report this exploit along with my data. (However, I can’t actually access it as I no longer have access to the forums with this ban). In addition, I would not have kept my sample size so small to limit the effect it would have on the economy of GW2; or have only sold back enough ectos to pay for my initial investment to gather data if I was truly attempting to do this to generate profit from this exploit.

I realize that this is only my word, and that my actions ultimately can still be considered a breach to your CoC. I just really hope that a well-intended action on my part isn’t taken as malicious by you all.

Thank you for your time,
Derek Chung

Customer Derek Chung via CSS Web 01/03/2013 02:24 AM

Some additional information that came to my mind to add to this is:

1) I privately messaged John Smith (ANet employee) to avoid any public information about this exploit being released to the players confirming the ability to create profit.
2) During my data gathering, I made three attempts. The first two attempts had sample sizes of 3 and 10 (snowflakes), which are statistically too small to provide a decent confidence interval to draw statistical significance. The third attempt was to be with 30 snowflakes but I never completed it due to the update. This last group of snowflakes are still on my account after the update and in fact, I actually lost money attempting to gather this data compared to the profits I actually made on the ectoplasms to cover these costs.

Customer Derek Chung via CSS Web 01/03/2013 06:58 PM

3) I’m not sure if you need this, but in hopes that this may make the process of resolving this ticket faster:

I hereby provide you, Arena Net, full access to any and all of my game and forum account materials (i.e. my inbox, crafting mats, logs [if you keep any]) for the purposes of acquiring any proof to settle this ticket.

Unfortunately sahira , your post has a very short probable lifetime. As it breaks the forum rules about you are not allowed to discuss customer support on this forum.
Especially not post any comments/replys from them.

I have posted things that didnt even mention customer support as blatantly and was more focused about the companys stance on this issue on this and got infracted , so sad to say your post is going to be removed fast. against the rules

i’ve saved a PDF of this discussion.

It will be submitted to IGN and MMOChampion.

Daylight is the remedy to corruption.

Oh and posting there replys is pointless aswell as its a “standardised” response everyone gets , MMO companies very rarely go into any sort of lengthy discussions in disciplinary procedures due to several constraints such as it drags out this process and also due to the want only a official version . As they dont want multiple responses being given out which may vary with details and then them all posted all around the webs creating more fuel for the fire of arguements being one of the no doubt many reasons for this.

are you even jewellers?
for rare and exotic recipe you need 3 jewels (meaning 3 ectos) and 5 jewels (meaning 5 ectos) to make one ring, earring, pendant…
when you salvage you get back 1 jewels most of the time, some mithril or orichalcum if you are lucky 0-3 ecto or 0-5 ecto according to the tier of the recipe.
if you craft lower recipe you need just 1 jewel not ecto but you don’t have ecto back if you salvage… you mostly do it for crafting experience.
i never noticed this snowflake recipe since i didn’t need the stats but i could understand at first glance that a recipe requiring only 1 jewel (meaning 1 ecto) could have been an ecto mining source. and if only i would have bothered to see this recipe i would have told for sure this was too weird!
it is very stupid to compare this recipe to any tailoring or any other crafting branch recipe.
the tailor rare recipe don’t need ecto but need 15 t5 mats and when you salvage you never get back the mats for making the same recipe again, you never get back the insignia you need to make that recipe again. if you do you certainly can exploit the recipe!! for the same reason as above.
it is perfectly obvious that all the rare and exotic recipes of every crafting profession are intended to farm ecto (or trying precursor in the mystic forge) but the jewellers (and obviously cooking)…
the jewellers need the same quantity of ecto you could have back by salvaging… so when this is not the case of course you should have wondered is this really intended? you better ask before doing it repeatedly over and over again.

though, this recipe is certainly an error made by anet, they could have take back all the ectos and gold farmed this way and done with it… but if you craft even if you do it casual it is impossible not to notice how different this recipe is!!

edit: i admit i stop reading at page 3

Amadan.9451:

edit: i admit i stop reading at page 3

I’m glad you admit it, but explaining why you’re rehashing an earlier point doesn’t unrehash it…

Amadan.9451:

are you even jewellers?
for rare and exotic recipe you need 3 jewels (meaning 3 ectos) and 5 jewels (meaning 5 ectos) to make one ring, earring, pendant…
when you salvage you get back 1 jewels most of the time, some mithril or orichalcum if you are lucky 0-3 ecto or 0-5 ecto according to the tier of the recipe.
if you craft lower recipe you need just 1 jewel not ecto but you don’t have ecto back if you salvage… you mostly do it for crafting experience.
i never noticed this snowflake recipe since i didn’t need the stats but i could understand at first glance that a recipe requiring only 1 jewel (meaning 1 ecto) could have been an ecto mining source. and if only i would have bothered to see this recipe i would have told for sure this was too weird!
it is very stupid to compare this recipe to any tailoring or any other crafting branch recipe.
the tailor rare recipe don’t need ecto but need 15 t5 mats and when you salvage you never get back the mats for making the same recipe again, you never get back the insignia you need to make that recipe again. if you do you certainly can exploit the recipe!! for the same reason as above.
it is perfectly obvious that all the rare and exotic recipes of every crafting profession are intended to farm ecto (or trying precursor in the mystic forge) but the jewellers (and obviously cooking)…
the jewellers need the same quantity of ecto you could have back by salvaging… so when this is not the case of course you should have wondered is this really intended? you better ask before doing it repeatedly over and over again.

though, this recipe is certainly an error made by anet, they could have take back all the ectos and gold farmed this way and done with it… but if you craft even if you do it casual it is impossible not to notice how different this recipe is!!

edit: i admit i stop reading at page 3

Probably should have carried on reading past page 3 but yes it can be to time consuming with long threads.

The points made about its difference from the normal jewellry recipes are this , there is already the Passiflora one which is different and also this used a new Rare unique time limited component (snowflake) in it which may have thrown people of as how do they know how unique or rare this component is .

Yeh its a short brief answer but think ive covered it in previous post , and its nearly sleep time for me :P

Kiserai.3957:

TWMagimay.9057:

If you take the 3 italic lines and combine them…you tell me xD

That sounds too tinfoil-hatty to me. I think miscommunication or mistaken assumptions are much more plausible.

I may be over the top a bit, but I think there is something suspicious about the timeframes Anet took in reacting to this. It was allowed to continue for days, then after the fact there is finally dev posts saying that they consider this an exploit. I refuse to believe it took them 3-4 days to notice these threads.

Anet also states that they take a hard stance against exploiters. So, if this is really an exploit, why are only some of the “exploiters” banned?

And then we have Anet’s very loose definition of an exploit. Something that gives an “unfair advantage” or that players use in some fashion that’s not how Anet “intended”. That’s great, but there are two huge pieces of information missing. We don’t know at what point an advantage is considered “unfair”, and we have no way of knowing how the game mechanic/recipe/etc is “intended” to function unless they tell us. People asked if this was intended, and it was blatantly ignored until it was over.

As for being unfair, there are a lot of people that think the Godskull weapons were abused in an unfair fashion to craft precursors, people complained that others using overflow servers to repeat the “one-time” Ancient Karka event (which was dropping named exotics and precursors) was unfair. I don’t think the Godskull crafting was worthy of bans, but it’s comparable to the current snowflake/salvage incident, in terms of whether it was working “as intended” or providing an “unfair” advantage. The Karka event repeating was much more obviously used in an unintended manner, as the event was cleary advertised as being intended as one-time only. Yet, as far as I know, no one was banned for either of these incidents.

mrstealth.6701:

Anet also states that they take a hard stance against exploiters. So, if this is really an exploit, why are only some of the “exploiters” banned?

Because only a few were actually banned; the worst offenders.

They didn’t do it ten times.

They didn’t do it a hundred times.

They did it thousands of times.

Oglaf.1074:

Because only a few were actually banned; the worst offenders.

They didn’t do it ten times.

They didn’t do it a hundred times.

They did it thousands of times.

Which, as discussed for the last few pages, is not in any way evidence of intent. It’s how salvaging for profit works.

If you knew that already and were making that point for another reason, then I apologize for missing your point…

Oglaf.1074:

mrstealth.6701:

Anet also states that they take a hard stance against exploiters. So, if this is really an exploit, why are only some of the “exploiters” banned?

Because only a few were actually banned; the worst offenders.

They didn’t do it ten times.

They didn’t do it a hundred times.

They did it thousands of times.

sahirah.3180:

I have a friend, pretty much had considering the event we are all aware of. That person got banned during the last genocide. He’s been playing GW for about 6 years. His name is Dork fikitten23, reference number 130103-000977 and this is his story I am sharing with you. Using the conversation he had with Anet staff member.

Dear A-Net,

I’m rather suprised that I recieved a notification today when attempting to log onto Guild Wars 2 stating that “Your Guild Wars 2 account has been terminated for abusing an in-game exploit… This action is permanent.”.

I am unsure what I did to warrant this ban. I do not believe I have done anything against the Code of Conduct for the game, or have ever wished to over my 6+ years of following your games.

There was only one situation in which I could have done something exploitative, and that was in regards to the rare mithril snowflake accessories that was generating ectoplasms. However, I did not do this to generate a profit.

In actuality, I was attempting to identify whether or not this was actually an exploit. As a long-term fan of your games, and in the spirit of giving back to you guys for all your hard work, I was trying to gather enough data on this to conclusively provide you guys with information about an exploit.

In fact, in my mail inbox for the forums, I actually sent a private message to John Smith to report this exploit along with my data. (However, I can’t actually access it as I no longer have access to the forums with this ban). In addition, I would not have kept my sample size so small to limit the effect it would have on the economy of GW2; or have only sold back enough ectos to pay for my initial investment to gather data if I was truly attempting to do this to generate profit from this exploit.

I realize that this is only my word, and that my actions ultimately can still be considered a breach to your CoC. I just really hope that a well-intended action on my part isn’t taken as malicious by you all.

Thank you for your time,
Derek Chung

Customer Derek Chung via CSS Web 01/03/2013 02:24 AM

Some additional information that came to my mind to add to this is:

1) I privately messaged John Smith (ANet employee) to avoid any public information about this exploit being released to the players confirming the ability to create profit.
2) During my data gathering, I made three attempts. The first two attempts had sample sizes of 3 and 10 (snowflakes), which are statistically too small to provide a decent confidence interval to draw statistical significance. The third attempt was to be with 30 snowflakes but I never completed it due to the update. This last group of snowflakes are still on my account after the update and in fact, I actually lost money attempting to gather this data compared to the profits I actually made on the ectoplasms to cover these costs.

Customer Derek Chung via CSS Web 01/03/2013 06:58 PM

3) I’m not sure if you need this, but in hopes that this may make the process of resolving this ticket faster:

I hereby provide you, Arena Net, full access to any and all of my game and forum account materials (i.e. my inbox, crafting mats, logs [if you keep any]) for the purposes of acquiring any proof to settle this ticket.

am i dumb or something? but 25 is not close to 100 to me (not even mention 1000)

Kiserai.3957:

Oglaf.1074:

Because only a few were actually banned; the worst offenders.

They didn’t do it ten times.

They didn’t do it a hundred times.

They did it thousands of times.

Which, as discussed for the last few pages, is not in any way evidence of intent. It’s how salvaging for profit works.

If you knew that already and were making that point for another reason, then I apologize for missing your point…

Stop being willfully ignorant. You know kitten well that being able to turn 1 Ectoplasm Orb into multiple through Salvaging is not how Salvaging is supposed to work.

It is not meant to multiply Ectoplasm Orbs, for obvious reasons.

Oglaf.1074:

mrstealth.6701:

Anet also states that they take a hard stance against exploiters. So, if this is really an exploit, why are only some of the “exploiters” banned?

Because only a few were actually banned; the worst offenders.

They didn’t do it ten times.

They didn’t do it a hundred times.

They did it thousands of times.

The below is for the purpose of making a point I do not believe this to be an actual exploit. /disclaimer

This recipe was supposedly not “intended” to be used to return a higher number of ecto.

Anet considers using this recipe (or anything else in the game) in some way they did not “intend” as an exploit.

Whether you did it 1 time or 1000 times, you were using it in a manner Anet did not “intend”. This, according to Anet’s own definition, makes you an exploiter.

It should also be stated that (in an above post that will likely be removed) some players banned for this did not do this hundreds or thousands of time. People were banned that had actually lost money doing this.

Based on the recipe being similar to existing ones used for exactly the same purpose, the lack of communication about whether it was actually an exploit and it actually accomplishing a goal that the GW2 team had expressed intent to do (ie. lower difficulty of getting ectos for gear) I think A.Net handled this rather badly overall.

Margins being higher at first is not much of an argument – they’re always much higher when a new recipe is introduced, whether an exploit or not. High volume is standard for people using legitimate recipes for profitable trading. I can see where you are drawing the line – i.e. something of more value (jewels or insignias, not t5 mats. Apparently you don’t include black lion salvage kits, for some silly reason) was intended to be lost more consistently. However given the aforementioned point of making gear more accessible and the time limited nature of this recipe that could easily have been regarded as an intentional change.

Please try communicating better in future. Improved testing such as a public test server would also help.

Oglaf.1074:

Kiserai.3957:

Oglaf.1074:

Because only a few were actually banned; the worst offenders.

They didn’t do it ten times.

They didn’t do it a hundred times.

They did it thousands of times.

Which, as discussed for the last few pages, is not in any way evidence of intent. It’s how salvaging for profit works.

If you knew that already and were making that point for another reason, then I apologize for missing your point…

Stop being willfully ignorant. You know kitten well that being able to turn 1 Ectoplasm Orb into multiple through Salvaging is not how Salvaging is supposed to work.

It is not meant to multiply Ectoplasm Orbs, for obvious reasons.

But turning a rare found off a drop and salvaging that for multiple ecto “orbs” or whatever you call is supposed to work? I think you got your point mixed up with crafting, which in this case, if you read, someone has provided a recipe that does not fit the pattern.

Also it was a new event, who are we to say all recipes will remain the same? And it was a limited time event. Who was to say that they only intended this to work for a short time.

Oglaf.1074:

Stop being willfully ignorant. You know kitten well that being able to turn 1 Ectoplasm Orb into multiple through Salvaging is not how Salvaging is supposed to work.

It is not meant to multiply Ectoplasm Orbs, for obvious reasons.

There are recipes that require no ecto to craft, but can be salvaged and return ecto. There is one example listed in the first post of this thread. The same applies to any rare weapon or armor that is high enought level to salvage into ecto.

If I craft a rare level 80 ring (the 3 rare gems for this take 1 ecto each to make), and salvage it getting back 1 gem (equal to 1 ecto+other mats) and 3 globs of ecto, I have created 4 ecto out of a recipe that requires 3 ecto.

Can I get a confirmation on whether the above is actually possible? I don’t recall whether or not I’ve actually gotten a gem plus 3 ecto back before. Just 1-2 ecto and a single gem. Looking for any case where the total combined number of gems and ectos salvaged is above 3 (or 5 for exotic jewelry)

Are you honestly comparing the two? Really? Now I’m starting to doubt the “willfully” part of my above post…

Oglaf.1074:

Are you honestly comparing the two? Really? Now I’m starting to doubt the “willfully” part of my above post…

Yes, I am comparing the two (three) because the are the exact same mechanic fuctioning in the exact same way. The only difference is that the snowflake recipe was more efficient at it, largely because they were being sold on the TP for a low price. This stopped being true when the prices of snowflakes and mithril went up. Players should expect special, limited time, recipes that are part of a special event to be special themselves. Looking at previous events in GW2 (and at 7 years of events in GW1), holiday events have usually been very profitible due to the special items added along with them.

Looking back at the Karka event, Anet literally flooded us with precursors and named exotic weapons. And many players were able to repeat this event to get more, which was not intended to happen. The same thing happened in this event with ecto, but it was apparently “unintended”, so everyone that did it is now an evil exploiter. How are we supposed to know this was not intended?

Oglaf.1074:

Stop being willfully ignorant. You know kitten well that being able to turn 1 Ectoplasm Orb into multiple through Salvaging is not how Salvaging is supposed to work.

It is not meant to multiply Ectoplasm Orbs, for obvious reasons.

Reading this I realised smth… Progression is based on 2 things: increased costs and increased income. Like, when you are lvl 10 hearts give you some copper, but WPs and repairs also cost a few copper. When you get to 70+, hearts give you 2s while the cost of WPs and repairs increase to silver as well. Etc etc. Recently they introduced ascended gear which increased the cost but nothing was done to increase the income accordingly. That mostly concerns GoE(the price went up 2 times, after all), since we still had the same Ecto income we did prior to fotm patch but an increased cost due to that same patch, and somewhat T6 mats. A new way to obtain Ectos would be absolutely logical and even needed to maintain a stable economy.

Oglaf.1074:

Are you honestly comparing the two? Really? Now I’m starting to doubt the “willfully” part of my above post…

You should. When people say they don’t understand, it’s usually because they don’t understand.

There are a lot of people not understanding. I’m one of them. Roughly 200 more can’t post here today.

I’m quite confused how people profit from the recipe.

The recipe require 1 ecto, some mithril, and 1 pristine snowball.

But as far as I’m aware of, when you salvage, on average you’ll get less than 1 ecto back. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhUFMgIGLNDMdGtsQmZNcnoxd1lYV2ludU5FMjJhWnc#gid=1.

So how do people even profit from the recipe?

Dao Jones.6720:

I find it funny that so many people are immediately leaping to the conclusion that ANYONE who used this recipe MUST have known it was an exploit. There’s this tacit assumption that the activity was undertaken purely out of malice, with an aim toward destroying the economy.

I’ll give you that. I doubt many of the offenders cared at all about the economy.

They just wanted to get ahead, get theirs, and bollocks to anyone else save maybe some close friends.

Doesn’t change the fact that their actions did have an impact and if Anet didn’t lay down the hammer, they would have destroyed the economy.

It was an exploit. The heavy exploiters were gaining from it knowing this is a little too good to be true. They milked it in the hundreds/thousands range.

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that only about 200 accounts out of a million plus were terminated. Good people overall!

My personal favorite part is that several of these people that were banned, (only) then come out and share a wonderful way to make ectos with everyone.

Maybe to spite the economy? When in fact all they’ve done is helped it and made many players all the richer for it in ectos.

To which I say thank you and I’m sorry about your greed getting you hammered. Live and learn.

We all mess up sometimes.

laokoko.7403:

I’m quite confused how people profit from the recipe.

The recipe require 1 ecto, some mithril, and 1 pristine snowball.

But as far as I’m aware of, when you salvage, on average you’ll get less than 1 ecto back. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhUFMgIGLNDMdGtsQmZNcnoxd1lYV2ludU5FMjJhWnc#gid=1.

So how do people even profit from the recipe?

Going by this thread, a lot of people didn’t profit from it. Some actually lost money trying this a smaller number of times, yet were still banned. It would definitely require some luck in salvaging. I didn’t use this snowflake ring salvaging at all, but my luck with salvaging ecto is all over the place. Some days everything gives me 3, others I can’t seem to get more than 1 out of every 5 salvages. Someone having a good day with snowflake rings could have made a nice profit.

CETheLucid.3964:

It was an exploit. The heavy exploiters were gaining from it knowing this is a little too good to be true. They milked it in the hundreds/thousands range.

That’s based on an assumption that they knew it was too good to be true, when his point was that they didn’t know. You can’t assume your conclusion in your evidence then use that to prove someone wrong.

I just see it as converting a bunch of T5 mats and metal/silk/leather/whathaveyou into ectos. Those mats take time to farm, and the folks that are too lazy to farm them increases the demand for them. Last I checked about a week ago, silk was not worth selling, too much supply, not enough demand. Sounds pretty beneficial.

If doing it with one recipe is an exploit just because the mats happened to be cheap on the trading post, then doing it with anything that can potentially turn a profit is. And in that case, why has this "exploit" been in since launch and not been fixed?

I know I will no longer salvage any yellows for ectos until we get an official word, also as it stands now, ANet has a pretty big chunk of their playerbase afraid to play their game. Somehow, I don’t think that is desirable.

This whole thing bothers me. I feel like an “exploit” is something that someone uses some software or something to alter the game, and that should be banned. But if it’s just in the game already, then I don’t think the people should be banned at all. It’s in the game, supposedly put in by the employees of the game company, then people will implicitly trust it. I can easily see how many people would not have realized this was a glitch.

Whatever the stance the company takes on what an exploit is or isn’t though, I really feel they need to implement a clear cut policy. Most companies go with the three strikes: 1st time, you get a warning, 2nd time, you get a temp ban, 3rd time, you get a permaban.

This whole permaban on the first offense exploit policy is upsetting, because now I’m going to always be wondering “How do I tell what is and isn’t okay?” I’ve heard so many different things now, it makes me worried to do anything. Bottom line, unless someone in the company says that something isn’t okay, then I don’t see how you would know, especially if you’re new.

So I feel now I cannot spend any money in the in game store, or make the investments of time I was going to in playing.