Guild Wars 2

First off let me start by saying I was one of the people who got permanently banned for this. I myself made 150 mithril snowflake rings, and salvaged them for ectos.
As a trader who used to craft rares, and then salvaging them for ectoplasm (making rare silk epaults) this is a real shock to me that they decided snowflakes were an exploit.

I was curious about the reason the recipe was even taken out in the first place. As an avid market player I had noticed the market had already nearly reached equilibrium by the time they took it out. So naturally I went to the forums to ask some questions and share the real numbers and data. I was quite surprised that John Smith, the Guild Wars 2 economist seemed to agree that the margin I was trading at was not considered an exploit at all, and that it was something else people were doing with Wintersday Recipes.

http://i.imgur.com/xXXrd.png ¹

Today I was banned for exploiting for using the recipe and margins I expressed in the statement he quoted. Doing exactly what he claimed was not an exploit.
I had the bad fortune of crafting these rings when I could have just crafted silk shoulderpads and still got nearly the same return. In fact you can still make the shoulderpads right now and get this kind of return.

It’s true those players who got in early before the snowflakes went to 25-30 silver made a lot of money, but just banning anyone who made them is extremely unfair. I paid 16 silver per salvage, you can still buy a lot of rares for less than 16-17 silver and salvage them. This is clearly not an exploit, and even John Smith agreed with me.
Obviously I am a little upset I put a lot of time into both Guild Wars 1 and Guild Wars 2, and have always been impressed with their leadership. This latest choice is really making me question what has happened over at Anet. I hope they are just confused and don’t fully understand how many people they are finding guilty by default.

Full Thread on the Issue:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/How-to-make-1-glob-of-ectoplasm-into-stacks/first²

is not safe to play this game, when I hear of this I had no idea this was even a bug or xploit… now is like maybe they make another mistake like this and we will got punish because some bad Developer.

You need to appeal with customer support, and hope you don’t get somebody who doesn’t care, lacks compassion, and walks strictly with policy.

I’m honestly debating if I care enough to, I’ve played hundreds of hours, and I mostly enjoy playing in the markets. If I am always worried I am not playing how they want me to and am risking getting banned all the time It’s not really worth it.

After thinking about it for an hour I may just ask for proof that they followed their own ToS when deciding to permanently ban my account.

Permanent Account Terminations
‘We exercise careful judgment in every case in which an account is terminated. We will review breaches of the Rules of Conduct and the User Agreement with close attention to the most flagrant and persistent patterns of rules abuse. In such instances, particularly when we perceive a risk of substantial real or potential harm to the Guild Wars 2 community or to the game’s stability, an account can and will be permanently terminated.’

Anyways maybe they will just refund my money instead of go through the headache of proving they followed all the proper steps in each case, as I really doubt they did.

At the end of the day they banned me for breaking rule 17.

You will not exploit any bug in Guild Wars 2 and you will not communicate the existence of any such exploitable bug (bugs that grant the user unnatural or unintended benefits) either directly or through public posting, to any other user of Guild Wars 2.

I would say that a reasonable person would see and agree that I didn’t know I was exploiting a bug since it worked the same as other things, and I didn’t gain any unnatural or unintended benefits because it had the same profit margin. It’s why I’m not sure what I did wrong here.

The problem with these recipes lies in their nature. The mystic chest recipes, for example, were something that I made a great profit out of because the price of butter and what have you was substantially low enough to beat the RNG of mystic chests reliably and produce several mystic forge conduits (the permanent portable mystic forges) which I subsequently sold. By Mr Smith’s definition “cycling reliably” that would be considered an exploit, yet there was no problem with this recipe.

This drained a lot of the excess resources out of the economy (butter / green dowels) but the ones who found out early were the ones who profited immensely before the market prices shifted to accomodate the new value (butter prices went up substantially). So what’s the difference between mystic forge conduits and ectos, butter and mithril? Both had recipes introduced that altered the value, yet one is considered an exploit, the other, completely fine.

My point is that how are we to know whether a dev team introduces a function in order to balance out supply and demand in the economy, or whether it is a subtle exploit, when they can’t even be thorough enough with their own QA testing to identify said exploits? Other companies run public test servers quite successfully for this kind of thing.

I myself didn’t touch recipes, I never performed the karma exploit, and have never been banned. Despite this I am finding an increasing number of reasons to be disappointed in the devs and to stop playing. Perma-banning enthusiastic members of the community (and subsequently shaking up subsets of said community) seeks to be another nail in the coffin.