Not Even GW2 Is Safe

Standard NCSoft policy, apparently.

I'm sure the non-subscription model makes them a lot less hesitant to hand out bans. They're not losing reoccurring income.

If somebody's found an activity with a disproportionate risk/reward profile, the proper response is to fix the activity and roll back the rewards. No further punishment is needed -- just letting it be known that you can't expect to keep your ill-gotten gains can act as a deterrent.

Feeding $1 to a machine and getting $2 is an obvious mechanical malfunction. But when you start talking about "crafting expensive items using cheap supplies," how is that an unambiguous exploit? Generally, you don't want to have your players constantly worries about doing "too well" because the rules of what's an exploit and what's good planning aren't defined. You can't just ban people when what they were doing was never outed as an exploit.

City of Heroes, I think, handled it best. When people started doing something unintended, the developers patched the game so it became impossible. The only time bans and repossessions were ever carried out was when the development team straight-up warned us what not to do, and people did it anyway. THAT is grounds for penalty action, but because someone found he could herd 100 wolves in a dumpster due to poor collision detection and lack of ranged attacks, and then nuke them all for fast profit? That's not grounds for banning, it's a player being smarter than the developers who designed the encounter and finding a way to run it in an unexpected way.

You don't offer people a broken game that offers hugely disproportionate profits with seemingly no oversight and then ban them when they can't resist. That's called "entrapment" and it's not a nice policy for a game studio to adhere to. If a certain game mechanic is problematic, then hot-patch it in, or at the very least warn people not to do it BEFORE you start handing out bans.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

And when someone named themselves BATMANZ0R, they were changed into Generic123, and handed a rename token. They didn't get a 72-hour ban for being an idiot. That's not a slap on the wrist, that's a shovel to the face.

Sometimes people need a shovel to the face, some people multiple times because they don't get it.

Bugs are the software equivalent to a mechanical malfunction. If software manifested itself as a mechanical device, the shear size and complexity of all the gears, levers and cogs working together would boggle the public's mind. It would also allow them to grasp why sometimes a gear slips or a shaft gets bent in a device that complicated.

When every other case of merging two common $1 objects produce a $3 object, a combination producing a $10000 object seems rather unambiguous to me.

The game was less than two weeks old, with 11000 accounts already compromised by gold farmers in the first few days. This is just another form of gold farming. And like I said, those who stumbled upon it and only used it a couple of times, no ban but if you started to crank them out like iPhones at Foxconn then hammer time. No mercy for gold farmers.

I believe it was patched within a day of it's discovery. Also isn't it usually policy in MMOs not to mention an exploit until it's fixed. The Mission Architect incident was a case of asking players to use it to tell stories and not as a power leveling tool because the devs couldn't figure out how to allow the first without allowing the second. If anything it's a prime example of what you get when you try to warn players away from an known exploit.

That reasoning works so well as a defense. "Your honor it's not my fault, I couldn't resist stealing that car, they shouldn't have parked it somewhere I could see it". I think there was plenty of oversight since it was caught and dealt with quickly. Don't forget at the time the game was less than two weeks old.

It's entrapment if it was intentional. It was a bug, likely one caused by a simple mismatch of indexes between tables. It's like when Citadel got his face put on sideways. Some build step was skipped or some newer/older include file was used while patching an unrelated bug and this was what cropped up. And with over a million players, 3000 is a trivial number of abusers.

Well said and pretty much what I was trying to get at.

They are handing out bans for arbitrary numbers.

An 8 year old game introduced MARTy to keep XP exploiters in check and made the numbers for exploiting no longer arbitrary. You hit this point X? Your rewards will be throttled. XP exploits solved!

The 1 dollar in, 2 dollars out change machine isn't a good example of a gaming exploit. What is usually happening is closer to Casual player X finds a way to make 500 gold per hour, power gamer Y knows a better way that nets 1k gold per hour. Clever Exploiter Z can net 1500 gold per hour doing less work than the power gamer grinding away. Finding the greatest risk/reward ratio is part of the game for a lot of people who want to get the good stuff as quick as possible. If I normally have to grind 5 hours to find the greater soul slaying toothbrush of power but find a way to get it in 60 minutes, you're dang right I'm going to do it. Thats 4 less hours of grinding to get the carrot on the stick.

As a final note, I had to laugh as a game who supposedly removed the grind from MMO's has people AFK XP farming. Grind removed indeed.

This is another poor example of an analogy involving exploiting in a video game. Its more like going to the HR department and saying "Listen, Larry and I put in our 10 hours a day slaving away at the factory. But Joe found a way to make the same product twice as fast. Can we ban him or something?"

As a bit of a side story, I used to work for Mead (who makes notebooks and binders and such) over the summer while in college. The standard pay was something like $12.83/h but they had an incentive program where there was a baseline production level, if you went so far above that you'd recieve extra pay based on how much you could produce. Some people just produced what they needed and got their 12.83 an hour. Others went above and were getting $16-18/h. The operator that I was with was knew the products with the friendliest production rates and would put in for those work orders pushing my paycheck up closer to $23-25/h. Was I exploiting when most of the other temps were only making $12-15/h?


For things like duping and account hacking what you said works just fine. For risk vs. reward ratios infractions its doesn't really make sense to compare it to theft.

That's like saying that people who chose to spend all their time in AE powerleveling in virtual reality drained the "superhero" from the superhero-ness of COH.

People playing the game counter to it intended purpose don't negate the purpose. They're just buttheads.

There is no grind, but you can CHOOSE to grind if you want to. For some reason, many people do. I am mystified.

The best thing they could have/should have done with AE is make it never drop XP, just tickets or even no reward at all. Then it could have been a pure storytelling device and not a treadmill.

do you do anything other than haunt GW2 threads reflexively defending everything about the game?

Just curious.

Define grind though...

Some of the CoX badges are a definite grind to get, and i know people who would constantly AFK away nights or *weeks* in lava pools whilst on holiday to get the damage received badges.

I think for GW2 it is more annoying in that people *wanted* to hit the level cap as fast as they could, and if they could get at least *some* progress whilst being at work then they would do it. To be honest, this "must get to cap as fast as possible" mentality is something that i always ignore, and if people complain about a lack of stuff to do at the cap 2 weeks into an MMO that has just launched... i will tell them to "slow down and smell the roses". People are more competative today, and even in "non pvp mmo's" you still see people burning to the cap in just a few days.

*shrugs* Personally, in any MMO, I would have it so that no matter what you would be logged out automatically between 30 and 60 minutes of no movement.

Course, that is easy enough to get around if you just have a macro set up on your keyboard (autohotkey if you don't have a fancy keyboard) to hit forward and back every couple of minutes to "keep the connection alive".

If you actually read my posts, I guess you'd know the answers to both part of that. The answer is that yes, I do post in other thread, and no I don't defend everything about the game.

Do you do anything other than troll threads of a game you're not interested in?

Just curious.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with enjoying the trip to level cap or working your way up to godly gear or anything like that. Kind of like there is nothing wrong with the people who want to RP all the time or those who are only there for PvP or those who just like to raid. All represent valid playstyles within the MMO community.

For everyone who enjoys the ride, there is probably someone else who wants to get to their own personal end game as fast as possible. Sometimes those players burn through the game so quick, get bored and quit. Othertimes they amass 60+ level 50's with full IO builds and still sub to the game after 8 years.

As for grinding, it was mostly a tongue in cheek statement, mainly stemming from the notion that things that are most difficult to get require you to actually set up AFK farms to see them either achieved or earned. (See PVP IO's and things like the Empath badge in CoH).

I would think for GW2 the fix would be easier than AFK loggers, mainly XP rewards set for NPC's based on damage done.

Ironically, if you want to look at it from an RP perspective, the AE is very much a super hero training ground, allowing your character to fight bigger and badder threats on a virtual stage to better prepare themselves to handle the threats in Paragon. The AE didn't drain anything from anything.

There is a grind, there needs to be a grind, there needs to be a carrot at the end of the stick for a majority of gamers to feel as though they have accomplished something. (In action oriented MMO's) Some people turn it into a casual trip not caring when they get there, for others they want the carrot as fast as possible. Both are valid playstyles, there is nothing to be mystified about.

And what would taking Xp out of the AE accomplish. Right now it is a story telling device for those who want to use it. Its a treadmill for those who want a fast track to 50. Both playstyles get to do what they want with it. If your issue is sharing your game space with players who don't match up with your playstyle, then a bit of self reflection may be due.

I always chuckle at the "I can't find good stories only bad farm maps in the AE" thinking somewhere there must be someone looking for farms saying "Ugh all these low XP maps, with text spam everywhere, I just want a decent farm" Both players enjoy the game, albeit for different reasons. There is no need to invalidate ones playstyle to appease another when they can (and do) coexist.

If you made that comment, Larry would fire you for not working as hard as Joe.

No it's more like Joe found out the ERP software doesn't sanity check number of hours worked per week and he was putting in for 1000 hours instead of 10 and getting paid for it and nobody caught it yet.

"But it's not theft, ArenaNet isn't out of anything." True but there's a reason RMT and gold farming (because the gold has to come from somewhere) is banned/harshly discouraged in every MMO out there. It destabilizes the game economy, it discourages players who can't $2W and encourages more to use RMT which in turn can cause more hacked accounts. Also ArenaNet has their own RMT system in place for GW2 and really don't want the competition but do want to limit gold production so the exchange rate remains somewhat stable.

Why was it in our game that every new feature it seemed had it's own currency that you couldn't trade or convert from one to another? It's because they wanted everyone starting in the same boat. They didn't want someone to immediately buy all the things you can get with the new currency without at least doing the content that rewards that currency. And since the amount of that currency is tied to the number of times that content is run there's a risk/reward metric built in. It's why we have MARTy in AE now, to keep the rewards in check with the effort required to get them.

That actually isn't true. As long as I am meeting the production standards I'd be just fine. Working above them is good (and as an incentive you are paid more) working below them gets you in trouble.

Depends where you work. My mother used to work in a production line, and it was torture for her. Every time a younger kid got hired (rare, took a hard working kid that also was not smart enough to study or get a better job), they would suddenly outperform everybody.

The immediate reaction from every manager: determine this should be the new production standard and make everyone else kill themselves to match it.

Then relatively few would have played it and the development time would have not seen any ROI.

I love the storyline aspect (even wrote one myself); however, I liked it better coupled with the ability to level (albeit more slowly with the types of missions I played) to get past areas of dev content I didn't care for.

Especially villain side. I got so tired of the snakes missions that when I made new alts I immediately took them to the AE to level past them.

If one didn't play farms in the AE, it was a great alternate leveling path. I like games that provide multiple leveling paths so that not every character had to play exactly the same linear route.

That's one of the things I like in LOTRO. There are four different starting areas and at various levels two or more regions you can do so that alts can take different paths. It keeps the game fresh. Completionists (those who have to play every single piece of content on a single character) don't care for it so much, but those of us who like to try different class/race combinations love it.

In STO, the leveling is so fast now that it's possible to hit Vice Admiral via duty officer missions and still have all the storyline content left to play. It's not so bad since the missions scale to your level, but it means you outlevel some cool ships along the way. I have two characters that I am leveling strictly via the Foundry (which will take roughly forever) to have alternate paths and use some of the early level ships longer. It allows me to basically craft individual experiences for each character. Fun stuff.

You must work for a union shop.

It was temp work over the summer, but yes there definitely was a union involved lol.

What Starsman said also echoed true. There were people in their 60's who couldn't keep pace with physical demands met by people in their 20's. It was the union that kept the production standards reasonable rather than what a few were able to crank out for production. I'm pretty sure a few years after I left they made some changes to the way things work, but it was just my little anecdote about the siutation.

Bad analogy. It's more like an FPS player found a particularly good, borderline unfair camping spot from where he can score massive frags and so get massive progress towards his gear unlocks, while other people can't get to him easily. Half the point in a game is to find better ways to do things and gain things.

Actually, I have a better analogy still. It's like Shield Charge. It's not rocket science to figure out that Shield Charge deals nearly nuke-level damage over a very large AoE radius, for a relatively low cost, no crash and with a recharge of 90 seconds. So you bet that when I took it and used it, I fell in love with the power and used it as much as possible. I didn't know it was broken at the time. Sure, I figured it out after a week or so of using it that I was levelling up too fast, but by that point...

Or I have an even better one. From Launch to Issue 2, Devices -> Smoke Grenade had a 50% to-hit debuff that stacked with itself. The only Blaster I had ever played and my second character ever was an AR/Dev Blaster and you can bet I used the hell out of Smoke Grenade. My health was low, my damage wasn't that good, so when I found a power that kept me alive, why would I NOT use it? It took several months before I played another Blaster and realise that the others just... Aren't as good. I kept wondering what their version of Smoke Grenade was, until it transpired that no-one had a version of it. Slowly, I started to realise the power was broken... And here I thought I was just a great player. So when it got brought back to 5% debuff, non-stacking, I took it well - by that point, I'd realised it was a bug.

I got neither banned nor warned for using either power, and I used the hell out of them. Trying to present finding clever ways to playing as some kind of crime is disingenuous and actually quite insulting.

It doesn't matter if it's intentional. It's entrapment if you're complicit in presenting a person with a situation of entrapment. You're far too fast to condemn people, when all you end up doing is creating a situation where players are expendable. Who cares about those 3000 people who got banned when they have millions? Who cares about those couple dozen thousand City of Heroes players when they have many millions of players across their other games?

I mean, seriously, if that were the case, we'd have lost thousands of people over the Winter Lords event, wouldn't we? When you bungle your game, you patch your game to stop the exploit and, at most, take back what was gained from it. You don't punish people for using what the game provides them, because you're basically punishing people for finding a more efficient way to play.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.