3,000 Guild Wars 2 gamers banned for flogging stolen loot

Developers of the hit Guild Wars 2 online role-playing game have banned thousands of players who cheated the system to trouser weapons at a fraction of their normal cost. ArenaNet nuked 3,000 gamers who took advantage of the so-called Karma Weapons Exploit - better described as a bug - to build up massive armouries. The flaw …

[Hieronymus Howerd]

Meanwhile back in the real world...

Not a single crap was given.

[Anonymous Coward]

Guild Wars

Guild Wars is a lifestyle choice generally for those that don't get out much, no girlfriend, need sunlight, and have few friends because unless you cheat your whole life will be taken over belonging to one of those Guilds questing for the better sword or gold coin.

I on the other hand have made a different lifestyle choice, I have friends and go out.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Guild Wars

You sir are a tit.

My wife plays this because she like the gameplay and graphics and it isnt wow.

[Jedit]

"Guild Wars is a lifestyle choice generally for those that don't get out much"

Except, of course, Guild Wars and its sequel are both best known for being designed for the casual social gamer. They have no subscription fee to make players feel pressured into maximising their online time, the content is set up so that you still make progress even if you never play for more than 20 minutes at a time and gear is so readily available that the only reason to grind is for vanity items. And if you'd bothered to read the headline of the article you'd see that cheaters don't prosper - they get banned forever.

If ignorance is bliss, then I'm amazed you were even able to make your troll post - I imagine it's hard to type when you're having orgasms 24 hours a day.

[Reue]

Re: Guild Wars

My GF and I both play it, with the curtains open and the glorious sunlight pouring in. Then we go out for a couple of drinks with our friends in the evening.

What a shame that you and your lifestyle are incapable of managing to handle the complicated nature of both having friends and being able to play an online game at the same time. Best of luck for the future.

[Zmodem]

its not much of a game or online "world" without any corruption in the markets

[Zmodem]

run cutting people heads off in a mystical world with the politics of disney world, they should just get the potion out and make their player models 30x smaller for a month and not ban

[asdf]

> make their player models 30x smaller for a month

I like the obvious visual shunning aspect but something tells me these tools would just be able to find more exploits with their player models a different size.

[Zmodem]

if the player model is 30x smaller and a 400mb patch that includes smaller models, then all player physics and abilities would have a -30x handicap

[Robert Heffernan]

@Zmodem

Good idea for the debuff on stats, but they wouldn't need to make new models 30x smaller, they just do a scale on the models in memory... very cheap and easy to do.

[Zmodem]

Re: @Zmodem

most game engines are rubbish and cant scale models or do much complex stuff outside of the renderer

[Destroy All Monsters]

The Central Bank of Swordplay?

"Swords! We need swords. Lots of them"

(Entire racks appear from nowhere as if freshly printed)

"SELL THEM!"

[Joerg]

So first these software house release the cheating hacks..then they ban who used those?

Because that is what really happens.

All the cheats and hacks and cracks it's 90% of the time the same developers that do the release under "warez scene" names. 10% of the time they dirty thing it's done by competitors instead.

That is what happens in the real world. Far from fair. Far from right. Far from legal. But it's what is going on nowadays.

[asdf]

Re: So first these software house release the cheating hacks..then they ban who used those?

Gee I guess when you lay off 150 devs and outsource to India you might find in the future your employers are not really company men. Oh well at that matters is executive management gets their bonuses for hitting quarterly targets and if things fail that is what golden parachutes are for.

[thomas k.]

similar incident

There was a similar incident in Guild Wars a few months in where they mispriced what was supposed to be a very expensive vendor item for at just a few plat, players snatched them up in bulk and proceded to resell at a substantial profit. ArenaNet had to completely roll back the server to a previous saved state, one of only 2 times that the game actually went off-line (that I'm aware of).

[Iceman]

I understand it is bad that the players took advantage of a bug, but the real ones to blame here are the developers.

[Vehlin]

Actually it's more like going to the shop, seeing something underpriced and buying them out of stock then after paying the store lawyers come knocking on your door asking for their stuff back.

[adnim]

"...and the integrity of the game very seriously"

Not seriously enough to create a bullet proof product, but seriously enough to make coin from an exploitable product.

But then, as a software developer they are not exactly alone are they? They stand shoulder to shoulder with the "best".

[Affian]

Re: "...and the integrity of the game very seriously"

Have you ever seen any large scale complex system that is flawless? Ever?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "...and the integrity of the game very seriously"

Oooh, absolutely anything with "Apple" written on it would be flawless I imagine.

[Anonymous Coward]

What exactly is the definition of "cheating", anyway?

I used to play the original (well, the second implementation of the original) MUD on Compunet. It was well understood there that there was such a thing as cheating, which would include breaking into others' accounts, or using buffer overflows, but also that there were such things as logic bugs in the game design, which were the fault of the designers not the users, and that any outcome of playing the game that came about by playing the game by inputting commands and relying on the outcome of those commands as implicitly specified by the design implemented by the coders, even if there was some complication they hadn't thought of when they wrote the code, was legitimate.

In other words, if typing "go north" from a room that didn't have a northern exit according to the description worked and got you somewhere useful, that wasn't cheating, but if you typed "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa....aaaaaa" and overflowed someone's buffer, that was an exploit, not just using a mis-design feature in the way in which it was built to (but not intended to) work.

If the designers build a system that operates in a particular fashion, and we discover an implication of their deliberate decision that they did not anticipate, that's their own fault, not ours for playing with the system in the way in which it was built. The implementers can't decide after the fact that they take back what they deliberately did of their own free will just because they weren't clever enough to realise what they were doing at the time.

Has anyone read the GW2 terms and conditions? It's the worst piece of pseudo-legal-but-almost-certainly-unenforceable bullshit I've ever seen in an EULA(*). First it starts with a couple dozen paragraphs of absolutely ludicrous supposed definitions of terms, which define "an account" as being "an account", an "account id" as being an id for an account, a character id as being an id for a character, a service as being a service, and other pathetic tautologies that actually say nothing at all. It then goes on to make undefined and indefensible claims such as that "harmful activities" include to 'Use, or provide others with, any “hack,” “cheat,” “exploit” or “mod”', without having defined any of those terms, and to attempts to include the "rules of conduct" as part of the terms of the contract, which include such claims as that "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." without the slightest clue or definition what counts as intended or unintended or what the hell "unnatural" means in this context.

This pathetic ass-covering bullshit is entirely undefined and unenforceable in any court, and it's a bogus smokescreen for the devs to claim that it's the in-game economy they care about. It's their own income in the real world economy that these measures are intended to protect, and they are arbitrary, undefined, unreasonable and unenforceable. Anyone who loses their account or any subscription fees over this matter should issue small claims proceedings, drawing attention to the arbitrary and un-pre-warned nature of the supposed infractions, and get their money back (plus expenses) from these incompetent backpedallers.

Yes, I'm not a lawyer. My opinions are based on what is just, not necessarily on what is justice.

(*) - well, this week, anyway.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh wow what the fuck?

Sorry for replying to my own post but I just disovered something else even more stupid in the so-called terms and conditions:

You warrant and represent [ ... ] that You understand that You have no fundamental right whatsoever to use the Game,

What the fuck? They really expect that you can be legitimately asked to hand over real money as one side of a contract that they claim actually offers you no rights whatsoever? That's simply not a contract. Contract law specifies that each side must gain a benefit from the exchange, not just one side getting something and the other having no enforceable rights whatsoever.

Fuck them and the virtual horse they rode in on, this is daylight robbery.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well go on then.

Say why you think what you think, not just what you think. I'd honestly be interested to hear.

[Anonymous Coward]

Opinions are like arseholes:

Everyone has at least two of them, generally pointing in opposite directions. If you can only be bothered to announce that you have (at least one or more), but not what it is, why should anyone care?

(That was a rhetorical question. The answer is that they shouldn't.)

[Trygve]

Re: Opinions are like arseholes:

"at least two of them, generally pointing in opposite directions"

err, what? Life in your universe sounds very messy indeed.

[Naughtyhorse]

Re: Oh wow what the fuck?

They really expect that you can be legitimately asked to hand over real money as one side of a contract that they claim actually offers you no rights whatsoever?

well that's solved it then - a busload of lawyers is leaving cupertino as we speak and will sue them out of existence.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Oh wow what the fuck?

You buy the game. However they control access to the servers

Simple as.

[foo_bar_baz]

Re: What exactly is the definition of "cheating", anyway?

Put yourself in the game company's shoes for a moment. How would you run it?

1) magically produce perfect, bug free code

2) run the company at a loss, spending all your cash on testing and not releasing any updates

3) let exploiters ruin the game dynamics by introducing megabazillion $currency into the game economy

Ofcourse it comes down to real world money. If you let a minority ruin the game for everyone else, customers leave and you don't get a return on your investment.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: What exactly is the definition of "cheating", anyway?

Let me guess you cant banned for scamming ?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're cheating, what's the first thing you do?

Hand off the goods to a character on a completely different account.

[Steven Roper]

What these MMO devs don't understand is

basic human psychology. In this case, e-peen. MMO players place the greatest store on their in-game reputations and standing with other players and guildmates. (I know, been there, done that!)

So what you do with the cheats is you don't ban their accounts. Let them keep right on playing, but stick a bloody great finger over their in-game avatar's head with a huge flashing neon sign, advising everyone who sees the character, "I AM A PATHETIC CHEATING ARSEHOLE" or something to that effect. Then leave it there until the player has remedied the effect of their cheating.

As a bonus feature, the Cheating Arsehole debuff, by virtue of its much increased visibility, could have the NPC mobs also notice the cheat sign by increasing the character's aggro radius by a factor of 25. Then, even if other players don't care about their reputations enough to try to group with the cheat, hoping his unfair advantage will give them an edge, the fact that he'll aggro half the zone the moment they set foot in it will definitely discourage such attempts!

I guarantee that will fix the problem.

[Pascal Monett]

I like that solution.

I like it a lot.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: What these MMO devs don't understand is

Make the debuff Bind to Account so if they delete the character, change to another character or create a new character, the debuff stays with them.