Last week, ArenaNet decided that it was going to use a new payment processing service for those who are buying gems in Guild Wars 2. That service, apparently, had a pretty significant bug that one player discovered and chronicled – a bug that could have sunk the economy if the wrong people had exploited it.
According to the post from the player, the new pay processor featured the usual options for credit cards and PayPal, but among the “other” options was a service known as Paysafecard, which lets players buy a pre-paid code of virtual funds and then apply that code at checkout to draw from that ledger. However, this method was apparently automatically adding huge stacks of gems – 1600 of them at a time – every time this UI was being used without any payment being processed. Oops.
Mercifully, the player reported the bug, ArenaNet repaired the issue with the UI, and the player was even allowed to keep half of the accidentally free gems as a reward.
This bug, or perhaps a different one, appears a bit more persistent on GeForce NOW, where in-game purchases have been disabled for the time being. Players on the service will have to buy their gems on the web for now.
