Real Life Highscore

Arenanet has stirred up a lot of controversy recently with the actions they’ve taken against “exploits” in Guild Wars 2 and those taking advantage of those exploits.

Many users, including Youtube’s Kripparrian, have been banned by Arenanet for multiple different breaches of their terms of service. In Krip’s case, he was banned for buying items with karma and then selling it for a profit in gold. 

Although most of the permanent bans that Arenanet dealt out this past two weeks have been revoked, it does bring up an interesting conversation about what should be a bannable offense in online games and whether or not a company is just in revoking someone’s rights to play a game that they purchased and now own. Not many other entertainment mediums have this problem of dealing with terms of service after purchasing the service.

In my own, humble opinion, I think a developer would be out of their mind to punish a player for taking advantage of the developers’ mistakes, as exploiting weaknesses in a game for one’s advantage is key in almost any competitive gaming environment. Capcom would be out of their mind to disqualify players from EVO (the most popular fighting game tournament in the world) for using infinites in Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3. Valve would have to be delirious to ban users from Counter Strike 1.6 for exploiting the bunny hopping glitch.

It is only in persistent online role playing games, like Guild Wars 2, that developers feel it necessary to ban or somehow punish users for taking advantage of minor glitches or bugs in a game.  As an amateur developer myself, I’d rather spend my time fixing the problems with my game, rather than punishing players who discover those problems and use them to their advantage. Chat or name abuse makes perfect sense for bans, but buying an item and then selling it for monetary gain within the game does not. 

This is really where the problem lies: who is to say what is a purposeful exploit of a glitch or bug? If the simple act of buying and selling goods is a ban-able offense, how would a player know what items they can buy and sell without the threat of being permanently banned? Warnings become increasingly useful when developers decide that they don’t want players doing certain things.

In the end the individual bans don’t mean as much as the overall problem that they represent. Permanently banning players on a whim not only ruins the experience for those players, but also draws a line in the sand between the developers and their customers, which does nothing but generate hostilities between the two sides and alienate the game’s player base.  Obviously, Arenanet have realized their mistake and revoked most of the permanent bans, but I do have to question what they will do in the future as more of the game is discovered and possibly taken advantage of. Will they choose to issue warnings to players and take away any tangible advantage that the player gained from exploiting, or will they continue to make examples of their fans by banning them and making Reddit posts about how the player broke their terms of use agreement?

Either way, this controversy brings up the question of video game ownership and how online gaming has become more about video game leasing than actual ownership of products. As a predominately single player gamer, I find it really alien that after purchasing a $60 game the developer can take back my product without reimbursing my money. I talk about both of these topics in the video below and I hope you enjoy it.