Guild Wars 2

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.

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

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.