Duping of armbraces may be the last straw here...

[TRicciardi]

Both guru users have gotten they'r accounts back with thanks from ANet..
At least that's what's written there.

[NameAlreadyInUse]

Originally Posted by Lord Helmos

Also from the guru page, two people on the guru forums who reported the bug by using it and turning in screens of it working were banned.

I guess everyone is guilty.

Apparently ANet is looking at this as a capital crime. If you, say, discover that somebody has discovered a new, horrible way to murder somebody, and to prove it you videotape yourself killing a person that way then turn the tape over to the cops... well, good luck at your trial.

Yes, I know, this is not really an apples-apples situation at all, but there's a point there someplace. We can't be sure those two guys intentions were pure, really. And even if they were they were using an exploit in-game, which is verboten in the first place.

I would hope they were on the up-and-up (and if they were then I hope the bans are lifted in time) but for all we know they posted those pics to 'help ANet' simply because they had been duping for weeks, heard the hammer was going to drop soon, and hoped to get out of trouble by playing the good guy.

Wow... Maybe my wife's right, I may be getting way to cynical lately.

[ClarianAeneas]

Originally Posted by NameAlreadyInUse

Apparently ANet is looking at this as a capital crime. If you, say, discover that somebody has discovered a new, horrible way to murder somebody, and to prove it you videotape yourself killing a person that way then turn the tape over to the cops... well, good luck at your trial.

Yes, I know, this is not really an apples-apples situation at all, but there's a point there someplace. We can't be sure those two guys intentions were pure, really. And even if they were they were using an exploit in-game, which is verboten in the first place.

I would hope they were on the up-and-up (and if they were then I hope the bans are lifted in time) but for all we know they posted those pics to 'help ANet' simply because they had been duping for weeks, heard the hammer was going to drop soon, and hoped to get out of trouble by playing the good guy.

Wow... Maybe my wife's right, I may be getting way to cynical lately.

Why are we still discussing this? Their bans were lifted, and ANET thanked them. Gaile said that they were banned as a result of a mass banning of accounts as per the parameters that they described with regards to the exploit.

[Whipcream]

2 -3 day rollback means a lot of people loosing their demon mask as well as all their tokens and skills title points. Remember, there was a dragon festival this weekend.

Imagine making Legendary Survivor. Then getting rolled back 10,000 exp and getting killed by lag or bad luck, permanently losing the title. Would that seem like a fun time?

Originally Posted by JodoKast

So ? Then your friend will have the renewed pleasure of achieving the guardian title once more, which seems to have been one of his/her game objective lately anyway. If that goal was driving his play time for the last weeks, it can for sure be his/her objective again for the few more days necessary to achieve it again.

There is something i do not understand really : you make it so that it would not be fun to reach again the end of that title track (as if reaching it was painful, not fun or interesting) so my question would be : why did that person even started the track in the first place if that proves to be not fun to do ?

This logic is about the same as performing a player wipe. Heck why, not? People would have the renewed pleasure of achieving level 20, all their money, their min-pets, all their titles, and their expensive armor/weapons once more, which seems to have been some of people's game objectives lately.

Rollbacks are a bad idea. Not only because people don't want to lose all their recently invested time, that's the least of the problem. But if a game has a reputation for rollbacks then nobody will ever want to invest time in it again, because another surprise rollback could just be tomorrow.

[against]

Originally Posted by Gaile

Let me think this one through:

If people duped duped armbraces, they'd probably have a gazillion of them. Or our research will reveal them as having had a gazillion of them at one point or another. If the people with a gazillion armbraces are banned, they cannot access their gazillion armbraces. Therefore, won't armbraces remain valuable?

I cannot make financial predictions. I'm no wiz with the commodity markets. And yet, it seems to me that as we continue to investigate further, and as we make a few more bans here and there, we're actually assuring the worth of something that people hold in mind as a valuable item. And that would then mean that the item you get in return for the Armbrace of Truth is also still valuable? In other words, I don't value my Tormented items any less after the recent doings. Doesn't it makes sense that they are still special and valuable?

There's no way to tell how many duped AoT have been filtered through the market or cashed in for Tormented weapons over the last month. No matter how many accounts you ban, they have still been made extremely more common. I don't really care, because I don't deal in AoT. I've only ever owned one and traded it in for my Tormented Bow. The duped AoT have made them more affordable for the common player, so I actually welcome this market flood. It helps the economy as a whole.

If only people gave more attention to my post about this a month ago. You could have fixed it under the radar and no one would have known. ^_^

[Gaile]

Originally Posted by Ashiris

get rid off them asap and you won't get noticed (best would be to exchange them for tormented weapon quickly)...

Oh, you'll get noticed all right. We keep very, very detailed records. If you pass a weapon to your Hero, we know it. If you move a slab of granite from Slot No. 14 to Slot No. 15, we see it. If your miniature burps, we hear it. If you head into the Shiverpeaks, we feel the cold.

We can pull records until the cows come home, and we can continue to develop a list of those who hold or held or exchanged even a single duped item. It's easy to see those who held many, or who used them to purchase other things.

Bottom line: You can run, but you cannot hide.

But beyond that, we don't want to punish those who may have made a purchase without being aware of the source of the item. We have no intention of rooting through the inventories of hundreds of thousands of accounts to find every duped item. We have blocked those who were at the center of the problem, and we've banned those to whom they passed off ridiculous amounts of items or wealth. We will continue to research, but:

• We will not do a rollback.
• We will make a decision on future bans related to this matter on a case-by-case basis, and will in most cases not take action, if it can be assumed that the player was not aware of the duped nature of the item.

And when someone asks why he or she was banned, the answer is:

• If you duped, you were wrong.
• If you knowingly accepted dupes, you were wrong.
• If you accepted enormous numbers of items and didn't ask questions, you were wrong.
• If you sold items for ridiculous amounts of items -- armbraces, ectos, whatevers -- you were wrong.

And in many cases, your account will feel the impact of that poor judgment. Not because it pleases us to ban people, but because we need to do so for the greater good of the game.

[aspboy]

Gaile, is there an eta on the return of reconnects? ty

[Zilken Zatin]

Awesome!

I was watching all this go off thru the wee small hours of the weekend til now and am sooo glad I didnt pick an Armbrace up. That old saying of "if it seems too good to be true...it prolly is" was ringing in my ears as I watched the conversations between some of those "allegedly" involved.

GG one thing that has popped up in a couple of other threads and as I know youre on this one,...can I ask...

Rare and Exotic pet numbers. Have they suffered as a result of this? Is the world of GW now MINUS some of the funky exotics? I ask as this was apparently one of their targets for purchase (not sure if they could dupe them or not), so if they were successful (in purchasing an Exo) and are now (rightly) banned are said pets now ridiculously rare as a result of this?

[CrimsonFlame]

Originally Posted by Gaile

Oh, you'll get noticed all right. We keep very, very detailed records. If you pass a weapon to your Hero, we know it. If you move a slab of granite from Slot No. 14 to Slot No. 15, we see it. If your miniature burps, we hear it. If you head into the Shiverpeaks, we feel the cold.

Big brother, thy name is Gaile! This post made me laugh out loud.

Kahlan, I'm still with you, I have no earthly idea how the OP lost 2.5 million faction.

Finally, my impression of this is that you can feel free to buy armbraces, but you should probably expect to pay more than 10k. If you buy one for 10k, you know you're probably buying a dupe and should expect to feel ANet's cold, hard wrath. I'm just glad I saw this thread before I went to Kamadan and saw someone selling armbraces for so cheap, I may have bought one out of naivete.

[Feannag]

Originally Posted by Kahlan

I'm sorry, but 40+ pages to try to read is WAAAAAAAAAAAY too much. Would someone please PM me and explain to me how the OP lost 2.5 mil Kurzick faction? I understand about the ectos (with the duping thing, etc.), but I don't get about the faction...I got to about page 5 and was still confused at what he was even talking about!

He never explained it.