Acid for Blood

I meant to post about the PAX Guild Wars party last night, but I ended up being too tired from work (and still tired from the weekend) to concentrate on writing. Instead I just played Guild Wars and relaxed in Pre-Searing Ascalon. I’ll try to write about the party tonight after work, but first…

I’ve been keeping an eye on this story. He (she?) chooses to remain anonymous, and there are questions as to this person’s credibility in the comments to their blog post. There are some things that just don’t add up, but enough content of interest to at least take a second look. This person makes some very serious accusations about ArenaNet and their ties with gold farming companies, what the person calls “GFCs”:

Know that every MMO company that has a large GFC presence in their games will use this to their advantage and form an unofficial partnership to boost income. This income may not be recorded properly, or at all in financial statements. Obviously the large GFCs are much more protected than the small. Some of these connections may not even be known to higherups and seniors. We are the latter. Even if the seniors do know, they will most likely do nothing about it. It generates revenue and keeps the gold buying population happy. In all regards, it is a good thing.

The ex-employee alleges that there was an exploit used to “dupe” (create) gold and items via the automatic re-connect feature. This person states that ArenaNet intentionally left the bug in the game with the knowledge that eventually gold farmers and players would figure it out and use it to create gold and items. Furthermore, this person says that when the amount of new gold and items entering the market devalued gold and certain rare items, and the population of dupers became too large, the auto re-connect feature was disabled and thousands of accounts were banned. The informant further states that ArenaNet communicated with the gold farmers prior to banning accounts:

We initiated several “ban floods”, much like the publicly announced 26th May 2006 affair. Obviously this was just PR material. These were waves which bot accounts would be banned. The GFCs knew the accounts that were being banned. We provided them a list of accounts that would be banned. Some GFCs were told to remake the accounts under different character names to thwart the PvE community, or remain inactive on those accounts until later periods. A majority of the accounts were shutdown.

Mmobux has an interview with the former ArenaNet employee:

In your work, do you have to work directly with the gold farmers? What is the company’s policy on gold farming business and how were you told to handle the issue? What was your perception and experience with the gold farmers?

I’d like to take a moment and go a little off topic here. A common misconception from the responses to my first article is that working with GFCs is a bad thing. It is quite the opposite. More co-operation means both parties are happier, and more money flowing into ArenaNet’s pockets means they can afford larger investments into the game. Apart from a slight degradation in the game environment, it does not negatively impact upon the game’s overall health at all. Like I said in my article, I am not trying to hurt anyone, only tell the truth as it is.”

As I have stated, an unofficial partnership usually prefers indirect approaches. Another common misconception is that the whole of ArenaNet knew about these “under-the-table” deals. If this was in fact the case, the whole company would be in an uproar. This knowledge is confined to only a small circle of members.

Worlds in Motion has a nice summary of the issues raised by these accusations, though they also note that there is no way to be sure that this person is credible.