User:Quizzical/Duping

Let's suppose that I were to find a duping bug, and have no ethical qualms about using it to cheat extensively (this is, of course, not the case). What would I do with it? I could buy a lockpick, duplicate it a zillion times, and sell them back to the merchant to effectively have infinite cash. I could buy several perfect weapons to equip all my characters and duplicate them enough to equip all my heroes. I could buy one of each relevant insignia or rune and then duplicate them enough times to equip all my characters and heros. I could buy a few sets of prestige armor for all my characters.

And I could do all of that without the general public noticing, as it wouldn't show up as a blip in prices anywhere. NPC vendor prices are pretty stable. I once bought 100 of an insignia at once (to equip 20 hero monks), and the price didn't budge.

But equally important to this analysis is that there's nothing really there to be noticed. The impact of these actions on the game economy would be pretty much zilch. Indeed, it would probably be less than buying bulk runes and insignias to equip heroes as I've been doing recently, without using any exploit of any sort. What I have equipped on my characters doesn't affect the game economy.

Sure, with a duping bug, I could dupe and sell thousands of ectos, armbraces of truth, or whatever. But even apart from ethical considerations, I wouldn't, because there's no reason to. Seriously, what motivation would there be to do that? To maliciously mess with ArenaNet? To demonstrate prowess in cheating? To get more resources for myself would not be a motivation, as I could get whatever I wanted by relatively minor duping already.

Now let's take a more insidious case: a gold-selling company finds out about a duping bug. What would they do with it? Dupe thousands of ectos and armbraces of truth, to flood the market with them? Hardly. They wouldn't want to be caught. They'd duplicate lockpicks and sell them to vendors, and get all the gold they need to sell online that way. They could probably cut prices to attract more business and undercut competitors. But still, the impact on the general economy would probably be minimal.

The game doesn't have much of an economy, but it's because ArenaNet wants it that way. If the game did have a solid economy, it would necessarily entail chances for players to seriously mess up and lose a lot of resources. Players would do so and demand that the company change the game to protect them from the consequences of their economic idiocy. Or at least that's how it played out in Puzzle Pirates.

Unlike some games, there isn't a whole lot you can do with vast amounts of cash here. For a game that isn't largely based around the economy, that's a good thing. For scandals like this, it means that not much harm gets done unless someone actively wants to do a lot of harm.

Perhaps there have been people duping stuff for months. Even if so, the net effect on the economy probably wasn't much, until people started duping stupid amounts of very rare items. That last category of people necessarily consists either of idiots, or of people who want to be caught. Such people don't strike me as being the most likely to have tons of accounts to be able to launder stuff to the point of it being untraceable. As any police officer can tell you, criminals can be really, really stupid.

And let's not forget that ArenaNet does have the right incentives here. Catch the people duping stuff and ban them from the game, and if they quit the game, great. ArenaNet already has all the money they'd ever get from such people. If they buy another account to play again, that's likewise more money for ArenaNet.

Sure, this is a nuisance. But it doesn't really change a whole lot in the game. So please, calm down, and look at recent history. It was only three days ago that people were hyperventilating that the changes to favor would mean virtually no one would ever have favor ever again. We can already see how that worked out.