Guild Wars 2

Back around launch there were mass bans for the karma vendor and snow flake exploits.

I have seen several exploits come and go now, and all that happens is they fix it as quickly as possible.

Nothing else.

What this teaches me as a player is that I should exploit whatever I can whenever I can because I will get to keep all the spoils of my activities with no punishment.

I don’t think banning is required for my satisfaction, but I would like to see Arenanet taking back money or items from players who use exploits to acquire them.

Can anyone refute me on the following point?

Arenanet’s recent behavior in regards to exploits (patching them out of the game and doing nothing else) rewards those who exploit.

fine but dont let the door hit you on the way out after you get banned

They stopped banning people when they realized that 99% of their playerbase was exploiting and they still needed to make money somehow. Now it is basically race to the loophole or be miserably poor.

Arenanet has not announced any bans since the snowflake incident. Usually, if there are bans even if they don’t announce them some bitter person will go on reddit and complain. There have been no such posts around the times of the last couple major exploits.

If the recent behavior of Arenanet is any indication of their future behavior, I would not get banned for exploiting.

if you think about the crafting exploit. I think they should ban the one that highly abused it (Lvled several characters from 1-80) and gained tons of SP (not a perm ban, 1 week max). The other ones (that level 1 character from like.. 50-80) i think they should reset back to their original level, but still make them lose the gold they spend.

Seems fair to me

I don’t think any developer has the right to ban people for using mechanics in the game, even if the developer didn’t intend for those mechanics to be used in that manner. If something exists which they didn’t intend, that is a failure on the developer and its QA staff, not on the player who is only using in-game functions. The only people who should suffer consequences for such things are the staff members.

I play several MMOs, and several of them have Beta servers where they release major content changes a month before rollout so these kinds of things can be identified and removed prior to hitting production servers. Players get a chance to test out new changes and usually have vast quantities of currency to allow them to experiment freely, and the devs get free and much better QA.

That said, they have every right to patch out unintended functionality as quickly as they want to, and should if it is adversely impacting other people’s experience, but they should never punish players for their own faults.

ShadowMaster.5708:

if you think about the crafting exploit. I think they should ban the one that highly abused it (Lvled several characters from 1-80) and gained tons of SP (not a perm ban, 1 week max). The other ones (that level 1 character from like.. 50-80) i think they should reset back to their original level, but still make them lose the gold they spend.

Seems fair to me

I agree. I am already nervous that nothing will happen though. They have already included the fix in the patch notes and in the past there has been an announcement of bans very close to the fix in the patch notes.

Dresden.1736:

I don’t think any developer has the right to ban people for using mechanics in the game, even if the developer didn’t intend for those mechanics to be used in that manner. If something exists which they didn’t intend, that is a failure on the developer and its QA staff, not on the player who is only using in-game functions. The only people who should suffer consequences for such things are the staff members.

I play several MMOs, and several of them have Beta servers where they release major content changes a month before rollout so these kinds of things can be identified and removed prior to hitting production servers. Players get a chance to test out new changes and usually have vast quantities of currency to allow them to experiment freely, and the devs get free and much better QA.

That said, they have every right to patch out unintended functionality as quickly as they want to, and should if it is adversely impacting other people’s experience, but they should never punish players for their own faults.

An exploit is taking their mistake and using it for your gain. All exploits will be something they put in the game because it is their game.

Here’s a thought: Send them a support ticket and ask them yourself.