If I had a dollar for every time someone wrote us a letter or comment about how he’d been unfairly banned from an MMORPG, we’d have enough cash to hire a truckload of columnists. That’s why a post on the Guild Wars 2 subreddit this past weekend raised more than a few eyebrows, including a pair at ArenaNet itself.
The poster, going by the name MegaWormHole, says that he ran a hack program “for a few months,” even taking advantage of insta-speedruns in Super Adventure Box back in April to make $75 at a gold selling website — and never got banned. And he’d like to know why not.
“If these ANet customer support employees claim the system does not make mistakes, and the decision is final, why have I been hacking for a few months and have apparently been reported by other players countless times, and I’m still not banned? Now, I’m not over here yelling for you guys to come after me, I’m posting this expecting major consequences, I’m just letting people know that this is a serious problem we have on our hands, and it shouldn’t be taken lightly.”
Guild Wars 2Â Game Security Lead Chris Cleary has responded, saying he thinks he knows what happened.
“While not every system is flawless, ours is fairly forgiving when it comes to flagging players. That being said, normally when it comes to players actually being wrongly actioned it is because of human error and not error in detection. Eventually a person needs to review and perform the action. We’ve been doing our best to cut mistakes but every now and then we do make one. The only case where I can think of where detection has failed us was about 3 years ago when a fluke teleport in a jumping puzzle caused a number of players to get flagged and banned. We fixed that within hours and players were back in. It should have never happened, but it did. As far as you not getting banned, well, you were flagged. You didn’t evade detection. Your account was in a list of about 300 others that were to be actioned sometime in early April. You should have been actioned, but for some reason you fell through the cracks.”
Essentially, Cleary argues, “It wasn’t [that we had] a problem with our detection, but that we had a slip-up in our process to handle what our detection found.”
Have you ever hacked in a game and inexplicably gotten away with it?
