As you are all probably aware by now, Arena Net banned thousands of players for “abusing in-game exploit".
Before someone says that I am whining because I am one of those players who were banned, I was not. I did not abuse this in any way (nor was it exploit while we are at it, but more about that later in my post) at all.
First of all as I just stated, I would like to point out that it was not really an exploit but rather a bug. To all of you who do not know what the issue is: Items sold by one karma vendor in game were mispriced. THIS is Arena Network's mistake, not of the players. Think about it - some people could not even know that pricing on those items was bugged in the first place. My friend being one of the , later out finding out about this by seeing price of items sold by other vendors.... though it was too late for him change anything so he had to live with it and just not do it again. What if some players bought those weapons without knowing about the bug. Sure, there were a lot of people who abused this bug well knowing that the items were mispriced but still…
They should seriously consider their banning policy, perma banning people for abusing only one bug is just way too harsh in my opinion. While I can’t be sure if it’s fully true what I am about to say, I can’t help but to wonder that you banned all those people knowing that you lose nothing by doing so. Such a thing would never happen if your game was subscription based. Even so, a lot of players who got banned are very likely to buy another copy of your game and thus your company could possibly make a profit . I just hope that this theory of mine is false.
Anyway, that is not the most bizarre thing about this whole situation so let me get to my final point. You permanently banned people who abused in-game bug that was caused by YOUR mistake (after all, they bought items the legitimate way without using any third party software, some of them not necessarily on purpose and I just can’t stress this enough). And at the same time, you did not permanently banned botters who ON PURPOSE farmed gold and items and as a result were contributing to ruining the game economy and whole game itself (also including the community). Also, most of people that you perma banned were part of the Guild Wars 2 community and your devoted fans. Such a huge ban hammer can seriously hurt our amazing community and contribute to lowering population of some servers to dangerous amount.
Thanks for reading this and taking your time and I sincerely hope that they reconsider their actions…
Guild Wars huge fan and a member of the community