Patch created a pretty bad exploit....

Oh, see my character is ascended. I only get 100xp for killing my mirror repeatedly.

Fun glitch.

I think it's unfair to ban people. If there was a bug that suddenly made lvl 3 characters drop gold weapons 50% of the time, would you sit there and think "Well hang on, this is probably a bug so I'll go report it" or farm your little arse off.
Then again if you're sitting there thinking "Heh, I wonder if they realised you can get X amount of xp now if you do this" then that is devious.

Some people would have realised, and some people wouldn't have. I don't think along the lines of bugs and glitches. I see a game, it's there, it's meant to be played.. so I'm gonna play it.
I think what they should do with the offenders, is just remove the xp and skill points they aquired. Then it's no harm done.

This ^^^ doesn't teach people the right way to react to this:
If people learnt to report it instead of abusing an obviously broken thing they wouldn't get banned, then there is no harm done.

Oh cause that's gonna happen real soon

Besides, some of the people who did it were just "playing the game", they had no bad intentions. They just came across something that made them go "Oh, wow neat". Why should they get banned. And it does teach people because if the xp gained is removed then all they did was waste their time. They got nothing out of it.

Pressing alt-f4 during cinematic after a 10second fight to boot out before quest-update over and over and over again for hours is something you come across "playing the game"?

It the banning here is the same reason guild UBER did not win alpha-testing spots for exploting the old ladder...

Find an exploit - report it, don't abuse it.

What Luggage said but why does this thread even still exist as ANet has already fixed this bug/exploit?

I've never "duped" items in Diablo 2 so I'm not even sure what you have to do to do that. BUT:

If it was done in-game without any hacking or secondary programs then no, no one should have been banned. It would have been an error by the developers. It would be the developer's burden to 1) put a message on the log-in screen telling people that anyone who CONTINUES to use this exploit will be punished, and, 2) patch the game as soon as possilbe

If duping was done by hacking or secondary programs then the accounts should be banned.

Well, to me the Underworld and Fissure seemed "obviously" broken considering you could do the 5000xp and 10000xp quests as many times as you wanted but I still played those over and over again (as did many others). Those two areas "set the bar" by saying that some xp rewards can be done repeatedly.

You equate a 5-20second "mission" that advances the story-line, that can be bugged to give 50000 exp over and over if you quit it while the cinematic is playing...
You equate that with running the only PvE end game missions that takes a group of 8 people over half an hour to do?

Because they give the same kind of exp?

From GW.com:

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As players may have noted, we took action to close a game exploit today. We would like to remind players that the willful use of exploits is against the EULA and the Rules of Conduct. Several players who used the exploit have had their Guild Wars accounts permanently banned. If you find an exploit, please contact us directly through [email protected]. We are grateful for the assistance of the community in such matters, and will attend to reports as promptly as possible.
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Serves them right.

Anyone who dares make a statement like this in or out of game should have their account tracked and banned just for having the nerve to do so and the fact you have basically admitted you are a future threat to the server. NOTHING gives you the right to abuse coding mistakes and oversights to your own advantage just as no one has the right to drive off in your car if you accidentally left the keys in the ignition.

The ones that came across it and went "Oh, wow neat" aren't the ones that are getting banned. It's the ones that came across it and went "Oh, wow neat, I should do this 50 times so I can be teh.secks," who are going to get banned. Arena.net is fairly smart about this.

Why does everything have to turn into a flame war. I suppose I'm adding to it by answering but I must defend myself.

I make a clear distinction between what a game allows you to do from taking it upon yourself to make/find a program to bypass what the game allows you to do.

The developers of any game give you a playground to do stuff in. As long as you play within the confines of the game given to you then you shouldn't have to fear losing the ability of playing the game that you've payed for.

As I've said, I've never used the "dupe" hack for Diablo 2 so I'm confused how you've come to the conclusion that I'm a menace that should have my account taken away. Also, you're comparing this to someone stealing your car if you forgot to take your keys out is really not equivelant. We're not talking about stealing property here.

If anything, a better example would be if I leave a permanent marker beside one of those "Dry Erase" boards by mistake. If someone came along and started writing on it with this unerasable ink then I'd have no one to blame but myself. Now, if this person had brought their own Permanent Marker to defile my board...THEN it would be their fault and would be punished (I'm thinking...marker to the face?).

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There's been various levels of "abuse" that I've been hearing about so far.

Should everyone who kept farming the really good spots for the "l33t" loot be banned since this was also an oversight by Anet. They clearly never intended it to happen and rectified the situation once they learned about it.

How about those that took advantage of some of the bugged skills during PvP to secure massive amounts of wins and sigils. Should they be banned?

How about, once the Rare Material trader appeared, all the people who bought the cheap stacks of rare materials from the normal Material Trader and sold them right back to the Rare Material trader for massive profits?

Or, this is stretching it a little, those who form teams of the mighty-near-unstoppable Aeromancers thereby overpowering the arenas.

Or those who body blocked the center of one of the HoH challanges thereby making it impossibly for the other team to get there, thus creating a no-win situation.

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Just to make something clear, someone has FINALLY described how the Aurgory Rock exploit was achieved, and yes, that was CLEARLY a punishable exploit as people were manipulating how the game itself ran. Hitting ALT-F4 at the precise time to affect how the game registers your victory is not contained within my definition of "normal use". However, forever banning access to the game is a little extreme for this situation. It would have been better if they'd rolled back their characters or gave them a sizable skill point penalty. What these people gained from this exploit doesn't even affect anything in the game except their individual characters. It's not influencing the economy or making it any more difficult for anyone else to play. They're not flooding the chat boxes or causing people to get disconnected. They simply gained an intangable boost for their character.

Sounds like a scare tactic statement from A-net.

They are pleased that the exploit was reported this quickly I am sure.

It was a coding error on their part, not a hack induced problem.

Has anyone actually complained on these forums that their account was banned for this???

That's a good point.
I am also sure that not more than a handful of people were banned due to this. So all the melodramatics are for nothing really

the game is less than 2 months old and Anet is letting people know in no uncertain terms that they intend to keep order here and cut down on future exploit users

Tell that to the folks who got perma-banned!

Synnical has made some good points. Who is to say what is and what exactly is an exploit? Many people might feel that suiciding in prematch to get 50 minions, the vengeance exploit while it was bugged, or blocking the altar in the HoH for over a minute with a dead ghostly hero is exploitive. I think Arena.net needs to be very clear on what is and what is not an exploit. Defining it as something not possible under normal operation of the game through external programs or hooks or disruption of the normal flow of the game is probably the best option. I personally feel anything allowed in the normal operation of the game's mechanics should not be bannable since it can be very ambiguous on what may or may not be intended by the devs. It should simply be fixed promptly and possibly roll back things if need be.

In this case, the exploit was not a "normal operation of the game's mechanics." It involved closing the game specifically after the death of the mirror-self during the cutscene. Rinse and repeat. That's not playing the game normally, but rather taking advantage of a technical glitch, especially as the repeat 50k experience would not be given had the cutscene been allowed to go to completion (as it would in normal, uninterrupted gameplay).

So, don't worry. ANet takes account banning very seriously.

And.. since the exploit has been fixed (as well as this thread being filled with spam).. thread closed.