Smith gives two examples in the ArenaNet blog post, one hypothetical, one from the game’s first week. His hypothetical example:
For example, a player discovers a recipe that allows them to craft items from vendor goods for only 50 copper and then sell back the crafted item for 100 copper. The player now has an infinite loop of value gain. If this were working as intended the game’s currency would hyper-inflate very, very quickly as all players swarmed to this recipe to generate gold.
This certainly sounds exploitative, but there are two flaws in using it as the Platonic ideal of exploitation. First, players have been trained by their life in a capitalist society and dozens of different video games to know that this is wise in-game behavior. Suikoden II had an entire subsection of the game where you bought otherwise useless items from one vendor and traveled to another town in order to sell them at a profit. There are even games named “Capitalism” that are about finding exploitable niches in markets and making as much money as you can.
Second, if ArenaNet considers this an “exploit,” then they’re the cause of the exploit. They created a game system that benefits players. If players use that system, how is the players’ fault?
The practical example given was the karma weapon vendor exploit from the first week of the game. Players who complete quests receive “karma,” which works as in-game coin, except it can only be used on vendors, and can’t be transferred to other players. Initially, powerful weapons what were supposed to cost 35,000 karma were available for only 21 karma points. Many players purchased a lot of them. Those who bought in the hundreds were permanently banned (although ArenaNet later allowed them to apologize and change that to a temporary ban).
While I can certainly see how this might be considered an exploit, I have issue with the permanent bans, and the language in the leniency post that implies that this is a one-time display but ArenaNet was still doing the right thing. First of all, the initial error was theirs, not the players’. Second, the players are behaving in normal game and capitalist fashion—find advantages and utilize them. Third, ArenaNet had the ability to rectify this. They could easily delete all purchased weapons and refund the karma after correcting the price (alternately, they could roll back player accounts). Instead, ArenaNet found the players morally culpable, and took away their ability to play a game they had purchased.
ArenaNet and its supporters justify this by declaring that they’re acting in the long-term interests of the game’s economy. By banning players who “exploit” the game, they’re sending a message that they want an healthier community. “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,” says the letter about the karma weapons. This is a form of social engineering, an attempt to convince every player in the game to be a better person and think about the betterment of the game world. A capitalist system is built around the idea that people are fundamentally self-serving, that they will exploit what they can, and the damage from the exploitation can be mitigated by laws and regulations. Guild Wars 2 is built around the idea that people are fundamentally good, so they will constantly be avoiding exploits, and that those players who don’t abide by that ideal should be removed.
Perhaps this is an ideal we should all be working toward. Perhaps it’s naïve and authoritarian, especially given how easy blog and forum posts are for players to miss.. Either way, it’s diametrically opposed to the ideal capitalist economy presented in Guild Wars 2, a system which makes exploitation inevitable.
