The players that reported the reconnect-exploit got banned?!

I doubt the people who were looking through to see who duped were told by gaile "BTW DONT BAN [X] and [Y]"

This only shows that they at least have a way of knowing who duplicated items.

I'm sure you two will get your accounts back soon enough, I wouldnt take it too hard right now considering all the crap theyre probably dealing with.

It's not a case of punishing the innocent. How many people were involved in this exploit? Tens? Hundreds? Thousands? That could be millions of armbraces floating around out there. You actually think that A.Net is going to go through and check all the millions of accounts looking for who did what, manually? No, as others have suggested, they ran a script and since these two accounts had registered as doing it, they were banned. That said I'm sure they will get unbanned as soon as it's discovered what has happened.

I lol'd irl.

I strongly suspect they aren't being punished. I suspect it was a 'flitered' ban, and they got caught in it like porpoise getting caught in a tuna net. I'm confident Gaile will attest to their dynamic duo crime-fighting efforts and free them from the tuna net.

EDIT:

Well I see Gaile posted (and so did a gazillion more people) when I was typing this and confirmed my suspicions.

ANOTHER EDIT:

I was just around looking at the bright side of this unfortunate ban on two very helpful players... at least all the people doing the duplicating of the high end stuff are banned as well.

More like the 27th Kanaxai as a reward... but i can see why it's happened at this point, noone was appointed to carry out such investigations, Gaile is not the programmer Etc etc...

Even if it is likely that they will get unbanned, they are unfairly banned now and might be banned for several days. They would have been better of not reporting it either way.

Banning someone for helping gg anet. Guess I know now not to report exploits being used in PvE to beat games...

But you have, as you said yourself in your post. Even if it's a temporary ban that will be resolved, it is still a punishment. Serving a day in jail and then being found innocent the next day and released is still a punishment. I understand that this was a broad sweep in order to save yourselves some hassle further down the road, but you must understand what a slap in the face even a punishment that may be resolved in an hour, tomorrow, or a few days is to people who were trying to help. You can be sure it will turn off people from helping you guys in the future, myself included. I've helped Anet with the RA exploits that occurred a long time ago. You can be assured that if I were temporarily banned for helping you guys the last place you'd ever see my IP visit is your support page.

You can tell these guys that their one day jail visit is just a vacation for the greater good. If you get them, and others to buy it, you were chosen well for your position. Underneath though, I think you can see how people outside Anet may view this in the future when an exploit is running rampant. Perhaps it would have been investigated by the community over a month ago when it was reported on the fan forums if people did not fear the repercussions. Perhaps.

Edit: And let me clarify. I don't think you guys did anything wrong. Broad sweep to minimize the problem, A.OK. But please, don't be ridiculous and try to say that these two are not being punished as a result of helping you guys.

Be honest, "Look guys, we recognize you were just helping. We recognize as a result of this you were banned. We're sorry we have to punish, even temporarily, the innocent as a result of a mistake that was purely our fault, but for the good of everyone it had to be done in this manner. We will do everything we can to unban those mistakingly punished. We apologize for this and hope that these unfortunate mistakes will not deter you from investigating and reporting exploits in the future."

Honesty and straightforwardness is the way to the heart of a community.

hmmm I'm just wondering what happens to the people who legitly traded items for the duped armbraces?

Anet are not known for being just in their bans so they will likly see the armbraces and just ban people

GG Anet you're teaching great morals like :
if you see something bad happening, keep your head down and walk by

thanks for the response gaile. hopefully we can get this resolved.

sounds exactly the same as how they handle the bot issue and gold sellers lol

Dont make it sound like its easy to discern honest players from bad players.

This situation is like trying to stop the rain with your bare hands.

Theres a lot of innocent players who have no idea whats going on and merely buying armbraces cause they are so cheap.

----------

I have a friend who had her car fixed, and it turns out those parts were from a stolen car, which was bought unwittingly by the mechanic. After the police tracked it down, they impounded her car as evidence.

This situation sucks for everyone who is involved.

All the A.Net hate in here is really making me sick. Some of you people really do like nothing better to kick people when they're down, don't you? There was a problem and they took steps to fix it. Some innocents got caught in those actions. This is regretable, but it had to happen. There's a loophole out there and the coders need to fix it. That means having an unthinking, scripted system in place (in addition to removing reconnects) in order to catch/prevent this from happening...otherwise they need to devote countless human resources to looking through logs of millions of accounts to find out who the offenders are. They did take the easy way (because the other way was the stupidly hard waste of time way) and in doing so did create a minor wrong. This minor wrong will be set right as soon as the problem is fixed.

But, why let that stop you. Sure just jump on the bandwagon and beat on A.Net for taking steps to solve the problem...

I'm going to agree with Gaile here - don't be so dumb, this is a pretty major issue, and the fastest methods to try and lock down the problem should be taken - and I would thoroughly agree that that means people who have duped and have dealt with dupers no matter how innocent they may be.

It's a pretty serious issue and it should be completely understandable that such drastic measures may have to be taken in the process of fixing it.

You have my vote for the winning post on this situation. Don't worry guys your accounts will be re activated soon enough and you got street cred from the community,,, that means something.

Meanwhile take a step back and relax a bit.

Gaile you know what really happened, and who was sending you the messages about the dupe hax, early in the Euro morning. You have those, their content, and I have confidence that both Fenix and Enko will get their accounts unbanned asap, and you will take part in their unbanning. I mean you have all the proofs - they were only testing.

They used their main account to test/find an exploit?

gg intelligence

Actually, Enko did the testing on his two mule accounts, which were the ones banned. He did no testing on his main account.

I can understand something like this happening, and yes I'd be a little ticked. What would be very concerning and annoying is if they asked "will we get banned for this"?, and the answer was "no you won't get banned for this." If that happened, yea I'd be pretty pissed. Don't know what happened, though.

Fenix was sighted in-game by a guildie...

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...&postcount=795

my two mule accounts have been reinstated.

did someone see fenix's mule account online too?

Can we close this thread nyiaow?

I'm not his guildy but yea i saw him in ID1 Ascalon.
Not his mule account, I think Fenix Magezi is his main yea?

So, in summation, we have 4 pages of ranting about how bad Anet is when all they did was take a totally routine and normal step when an issue like this appears which is to trust no one and especially not the ones who pose as white hat hackers without a serious check on their actions.

Check has been made, accounts have been unbanned. I'd say Anet did exactly what should have been done and what needed to be done given the circumstances and the time frame.

I'm sorry that Enko and Fenix got temporarily banned but speaking as someone who is himself responsible for IT security professionally I'd say Anet did exactly what I would have done and they've done it pretty fast too. I can only hope they banned the real dupers as speedily as well which would be a fitting conclusion to an otherwise very bad situation.

It did not have to happen and that is the problem

What this situation has brought to the forefront is ANet's failure to anticipate. Yes, now they are in a position of having to ban accounts and then investigate, resulting in innocent people being punished. However, this was a situation that was completely avoidable if they had used some forethought.

1: They have no central effective way of reporting problems. Instead of hosting their own official forums they depend on the fanbase to do it diffusing the discussion of problems over too wide an area to be easily handled. How long ago was this first mentioned? A month? But because the right person did not see the right post on the right forum (or did not consider it important) it was allowed to continue. (Yes - there is the report a problem method. But this covers everything from billing issues to violation reports - it's just too broad to handle these kinds of issues effectively and quickly)

2: They were too confident that it was impossible to dupe items in the game and so when the first posts started coming in they were ignored and nothing was done. Had they not been so overconfident they likely would have found this problem a lot earlier and fixed it without people having to do the investigation for them. They should have done this on their own without their players having to do it for them. But they were too confident and let it slide until it became an emergency. The best way to deal with an emergency is to keep it from happening and, had they listened to their players, this was one emergency that was very preventable.

Yes, they will probably get this straightened out but problems like this will continue to occur unless Anet learns to anticipate that exploits are very likely to happen and are willing to check them out on their own.

I completely understand why Anet had to handle this exploit this way. They banned all flagged accounts and removed the problem. Gaile also mentioned (pg 3?) how individual accounts will be taken into consideration later on, once the more important game-wide problem gets resolved! I applaud Anet for their quick and all encompassing shut down of this exploit! No other MMO actively fixes exploits and botting at the speed Anet does IMO.

I assume that the the ban was based on individual accounts having 2 or more items with the same unique ID number. So here is my question:

For the Armbrace of Truth: If the guilty was smart enough to do this I assume they would know about unique ID numbers and would sell what they could and immediately trade the rest in for legit unique ID numbered torment weapons once word got out about the exploit. If this is the case could they still track and punish the guilty?

Sure duplicated mini-pets and weapons would be easy to catch, but the Armbrace is unique in that it can be traded in. I hope they had other means of detecting who all was involved in this fiasco!

The ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure is a valid argument, but that doesn't quite cover this scenario. Could this have been prevented, perhaps, perhaps not, I'm not going to make a shot in the dark on this. The fact of the matter is it did happen, and then most people just joined the lynch mob, without even pausing to consider what would have been going on for them to take a drastic measure like this. The knee jerk reactions that this community has/had to this issue are just excessive. I'm just pointing out my disgust for all those then jumped up and said "OMFG ANet sucks! Deth to ANet!!"

I don't know how many of you played Diablo 2 back in the day, but the duping in there was excessive and I'm glad for the actions taken here versus the non-action that was taken there. If A.Net had done nother when they found out about it, in order to prevent banning the likes of Enko and Fenix the problem could have been several times worse. I for one am happy with the quick, decisive action with some temporary damage done to innocents, then inaction which would have made things worse.

What a load of ****. GW is the least exploited and the least bugridden MMO out there and this has ALWAYS been the case. Yes, someone obviously got careless and I'm equally sure that there will be some harsh words, perhaps involving pink slips, at Anet HQ today but you're talking rubbish. No game is impervious to such issues and no innocent people have been punished AFAIK.

This is laughable. An official forum doesnt make for an effective reporting tool unless monitored 24/7 and even then it needs to be done by devs themselves to sort the wheat from the chaff.
But hey, go check some other MMO's which have official forums and see how fast things are patched there. From reporting this issue to shutting down the exploit took less then what, 4 hours? Bans have already been issued within 12 hours and judging by the unbans of Enko and Fenix they've also already been able to clear them of malfeasance.

Yeah, right, and official forum would have been SO much faster.

Now here you might have a point. Yes, I do believe complacency may have set in because of GW's track record to date, I'm equally sure todays events will have been harsh wakeup call.

Dude, get real, please. If we could anticipate all exploits we would never ever have any in any game or piece of software.

A guildie of mine

Unless there is real evidence these guys were trying to benefit from the bug, I think that they should be unbanned ASAP.

They should also be rewarded for their contributions and in way of apology for punishing them for alerting ANet to this serious problem. Maybe a free copy of GW:EN would be in order!

IMO this sets a bad example to people who want to try and find bugs to help the game. A little extra communication before you started banning people, like saying chars X,Y, and Z reported they only did it for testing if they only duped a cheap item, delete the extra if possible but don't ban them. Instead they resorted to a heavy-handed SoE-style tactic and let someone else fix the problem whoever did the bans or ordered them created.

question, why dont bots get the same response out of A-Net as this did. they just proved that they can drop everything to solve a problem and issue mass bannings and yet there are still hords of bots running around killing the market and causing A-Net to do dumb things like loot scaling. its has been stated many times in the two threads about the dupe that this dupe only effects a very very small section of the GW players but the bots effect everyone.

can i get an answer from a dev please, probably not. oh well gg kk thx .

Why did Anet ban them?

Its simple.

They're truly a RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GOing retarded company.

Thank you for the vote of confidence.

And yes, there were a number of accounts banned. As I expressed to Enko (and I am sure he will pass it along to Fenix) the immediate block of all accounts that were sorted according to various check points was absolutely necessary. As you can see, the erroneous bans were reversed within a very short period of time. But by handling the matter in this way, we were able to prevent substantial damage to the game economy, and I do believe that two game-spirited and committed players like Enko and Fenix will agree that a few hours' inconvenience is worth that, for the greater good of the game that they care about.

I understand that someone might say "Why didn't you leave them out of the sweep?" Well, we did not have the account names or IGN's or any other information that accurately would allow us to do so. Within minutes of my receiving that information, the accounts were unbanned. If you'll stop and think about it, that's the only responsible action for us to take. The alternative is to sit idly by while we wait for information from players who might not respond for many hours with the necessary info that allows us to not ban them. In that period, more dupes are made, more people are scammed with duped items, and the economy takes a bigger hit.

Before you offer "the better solution," I ask that you stop and ask yourself if -- in the big picture -- it really is the better solution. Because some of the "suggestions for a better course of action" that I'm seeing here are both inappropriate and irresponsible.

I got banned too.

I sent a message to Ncsoft, telling my story.

I did never exploit, but I bought armbraces without knowing about the exploit.

How many people got banned now?

Am I one of the few? Are others unbanned yet?

~Prof.

my two accounts were already unbanned and as soon as fenix gets his info into gaile, i'm sure his account will be unbanned (if it hasn't already been)

I thought maybe Fenix was unbanned, but in fact it's your two accounts that were unbanned. Please relay to Fenix that he should get in touch and we'll take care of this.

there have been many dev answers already.

simply put every bot account makes a US dollar profit for the gold/item industry and banned bot accounts are replaced instantly with new one (or 2 or 3) new bot accounts to keep bringing in more income to hire addtional (china mostly) employees to make more profit.

any more stupid questions?

What we have here is...failure to communicate. It doesn't matter if they were unbanned, or if they were just casualties of the system, they were banned as a byproduct of reporting a game exploit.

This is still bad rep for ANet.