In Arenanet’s latest update, the Guild Wars 2 team have confirmed that they’ve applied a wave of permanent and temporary bans on players who used exploits to get their hands on end-game weapons. Players that were also confirmed for botting were also dealt with, albeit very lightly.
The exploit was based around a bugged karma vendor that was selling weapons at a thousandth of their original price. When players spotted the mistake they took advantage by buying hundreds if not thousands in an effort to make a tidy profit selling them. Some even took them to the Mystic Forge where you could combine four of these high end weapons for a chance of receiving further end game weapons.
The bug was finally fixed in an emergency build update; but not after the bug had spread on forums and reddit.
In the update ArenaNet explained the scope of their action and thanked players who responsibly reported the exploit. “We permanently banned 3,000 accounts of players who substantially exploited it, and applied 72-hours bans to another 1,000 accounts of players who mildly exploited it.”
A clarification on Twitter explained that the ban was applied if you’d purchased over 50 of the cheaper weapons.
In a post on reddit following the announcement Chris Whiteside the lead producer from ArenaNet explained the reasoning behind the bans, and offered some leniency.
“We take our community and the integrity of the game very seriously, and want to be clear that intentionally exploiting the game is unacceptable.” He also offered a second chance to those that broke the rules “We also believe and respect that people make mistakes. This is in fact the first example of a widespread exploit in the game. With this in mind, we are offering the members of our community who exploited the game a second chance to repair the damage that has been done.” Players that appeal will have their permanent bans reduced to temporary bans as long as they dispose of their exploited profits.
For the rest of the community life resumes as normal in Tyria, especially for our PCGamesN guild. If you see an exploit in-game be sure to contact ArenaNet on this new email address at [email protected].