Yesterday, John Peters, Game Designer for Guild Wars 2, had a few interesting things to say about the diminishing returns some players are seeing for rewards such as karma during dynamic events. These diminishing returns, it seems, were put in place to stop bots and economy-breaking exploits, and not normal players who happen to be enjoying an endgame gear farming session. The problem? It’s affecting everyone, even some players at lower levels.

Guild Wars 2 is a game about freedom. We want you to be able to explore the world and engage in a huge variety of activities, focusing on whatever best suits your tastes.

Some players have run into “diminishing returns” thresholds we put into the game to provide a safety net against unanticipated economy-breaking issues. We do have these thresholds in place, but it’s not our intention that normal players should ever run into them. We’ve recently had bugs and imbalances that have caused normal players to hit thresholds, and we’ll fix those.

These systems are put in place to protect the economy from botters and exploiters. We will close exploits as quickly as we can. These thresholds help create a safety net to keep the economy safe when we aren’t there to deal with the offender. It’s important to have a safety net in place. It would be bad for everyone if, for example, a group of players learned how to speed-clear a dungeon in 5 minutes, with full rewards each time, and then repeated that continuously. When one activity emerges that’s order of magnitudes more profitable than anything else in the game, it forces everyone to either engage in that activity or get priced out of the economy.

While we need a safety net to stop unanticipated economy-breaking exploits and botting, we have no desire to stop farming. Farmers are a part every online economy and when they are doing normal game activity they do not cause any harm. If a player finds a normal game activity fun and would like to keep doing it, that’s fine with us.

Initially we have to rely on smaller data sets, instinct and some guesswork to find the correct cutoff. What this means is that some players are going to bump into the edges of these systems for a while as we get them sorted out. Please bear with us while we gather more data and lower the safety net until it’s only providing critical economy protection. Looking at the numbers this morning, we believe some of the threshold systems are just too harsh empirically and we’ll be adjusting those systems within the next few weeks to ensure that fewer legitimate players are being impacted.

I hope this helps to explain why a game like this needs systems such as this to protect its economy. I also hope it gives some insight into our philosophy about botters (BAD) and exploiters (BAD) vs. farmers (GOOD). Thanks for your support and we will see you in game.

Yesterday, John Smith talks to us about the Market, the Economy and Statistics! Arenanet has put in some Mystic Forge recipes in the short term to take out specific items from the economy so that it isn’t diluted. These recipes return boxes which contain gold and other useful items.

More interesting however, is that Arenanet has released some information regarding the distribution of classes in the game. Warrior appears to be the most popular class and the least popular seems to be Engineer or Mesmer. Where do you stand?

Also if you were wondering about recent exploits and why they are bad? Here’s your explination:

Exploits are a really interesting topic because they are, in the end, dangerous and self-defeating. The game has gotten to a point in size where there is no such thing as a single player discovering an exploit. Exploits come in waves of mass participation and in the end, if they aren’t dealt with, the economy becomes hyper-inflated. After mass exploitation, your wealth is only relative to how good you were at exploiting, rather than your success in the game. This damages the integrity of the game and makes it unfriendly to new and honest players. There have been cases where exploits have severely damaged and arguably killed a game.

Read the full blog post here.

Arenanet is serious business. They are policing this game tremendously and they are doing a great job of it. Not only have they been banning people for using excessive language (which was hilarious by the way) they are taking people down who abused a bug in the game. There were certain karma vendors and an exploit that allowed you to buy weapons for 60 karma when they should of been around 63,000 karma. People were buying 100′s of these weapons and then heading over to the Mystic Forge. Here’s what Anet had to say on the subject:

Today we banned a number of players for exploiting Guild Wars 2. We take our community and the integrity of the game very seriously, and want to be clear that intentionally exploiting the game is unacceptable. The players we banned were certainly intentionally and repeatedly exploiting a bug in the game. We intended to send a very clear message that exploiting the game in this way will not be tolerated, and we believe this message now has been well understood.

We also believe and respect that people make mistakes. This is in fact the first example of a widespread exploit in the game. With this in mind, we are offering the members of our community who exploited the game a second chance to repair the damage that has been done.

Thus, just this once, we will offer to convert permanent bans to 72-hour suspensions. Should those involved want to accept this offer of reinstatement, contact us on our support website–support.guildwars2.com—and submit a ticket through the “Ask a Question” tab. Please use the subject heading of “Karma Weapons Exploit Appeal”, then confirm in the body of your ticket that you will delete any items/currency that you gained from the exploit. You should submit only one ticket. Once you have done so, we will lower your ban to 72 hours, and following your re-activation we will check your account to make sure that you have honored your commitment. If that commitment is not honored, we will re-terminate the account.

This is a first and final warning. Moving forward, please make sure you that when you see an exploitable part of the game, you report it and do not attempt to benefit from it.
We look forward to seeing you in game,

Yours Sincerely,
Chris Whiteside- Lead Producer ArenaNet

Other people have been getting banned for exploiting parts of the game. For example, a popular streamer was buying cooking materials for cheap karma, combining them, and selling them for a large profit. So this should be a warning to everyone out there: if there is a part of the game that seems too good to be true, don’t take advantage of it. You’ll get the bannhammer.