Guild Wars 2

I really can’t see the fine line between what is an exploit and what is considered acceptable reward per effort. Sure you have farming Orr over and over on one side, which you can easily tell is not exploiting. You also have the snowflake salvage exploit, which very easily gave you a considerable sum of gold, which even I could see was considered an “exploit”. But what about the small tidbits that you find in new content? With Lionguard Lyns, you could have gotten Black Lion Keys for 64 silver each at a point. You normally buy them for 125 gems each, which currently costs $1.56. If you were to dump $1.56 straight from gems to coin, you’d get about 1g40s. That’s more than double the price per black lion keys. No bans have been given out yet for this, but this I can see was very profitable, especially if you got an unbreakable bell/everlasting tonic out of doing this.
This is only one example. What if in the future, more things get overlooked? If we find something profitable, are we to shy away from it with the fear of it being unintentional, like the karma cooking items or snowflake exploit, or do we just dive in and hope we get to this new resource before someone else finds out about it, always with the shadow of fear of being banned in the back of our minds? How much is “too” profitable for it to be considered an exploit?

Use common sense, its as simple as that. If you can make more money from the thing you are doing than you can make from, say, doing a dungeon then its probably an imbalanced way of making gold. Also think whether its new gold coming into the game as opposed to changing hands.

If in doubt use the 3g/hour rule. If you can make more than this then only do the transaction a handful of times before contacting admin through the ticket system to make sure its legit.

The only 2 things that have gotten a ban wave for money exploiting have been the low-karma culturals and the snowflake jewelry.
Both of those were BLATANTLY unintended.
Take that for what you will.

Not sure, but I just play the game. I don’t stay up all night at the edge of my seat trying to find the next best way to make gold.

This is an excellent original post and I believe it deserves a response from Anet for clarity’s sake. Without this clarity, their justice seems to be quite random, arbitrary and ruthless.