This guy claims to be an ex-Arena.net employee, and he’s decided to burn some bridges to the ground. Among his unusual assertions:

1) Some enterprising lower level employees of Arena.net has forged an ‘unofficial’ partnership with gold farming organizations (’GFCs’), who they feel are providing a valuable service to the goldbuying public. This partnership is, shall we say, not a corporate mandate.

Some of these connections may not even be known to higherups and seniors. We are the latter. Even if the seniors do know, they will most likely do nothing about it. It generates revenue and keeps the gold buying population happy. In all regards, it is a good thing.

2) Arena.net would give a ‘heads up’ on mass bannings to GFC organizations, so they could move product off those accounts before the ban stick dropped.

We initiated several “ban floods”, much like the publicly announced 26th May 2006 affair. Obviously this was just PR material. These were waves which bot accounts would be banned. The GFCs knew the accounts that were being banned. We provided them a list of accounts that would be banned. Some GFCs were told to remake the accounts under different character names to thwart the PvE community, or remain inactive on those accounts until later periods. A majority of the accounts were shutdown.

3) Arena.net deliberately put in dupe bugs to allow GFCs to create product to sell.

A couple weeks ago the reconnect feature was disabled due to players exploiting this feature in order to dupe items. The items that were mostly duped were Ectos or Armbraces of Truth, as they were high-demand, high-priced and stackable items. After the public learnt of the method, the population of dupers were too large to be ignored. Action had to be taken and it was. Thousands of accounts were banned. The damage to the economy will never truly be revealed, as these “dirty” items could’ve gone through hundreds of exchanges, through many innocent players inventories.

The exploit was intentional.

As said before, we needed a surefire way to generate mass gold supply without upsetting the players. The close circle of A.net employees that knew this information was kept airtight. This information was never leaked to the public. It is a fact. There are several theories as to how the public became to know of this information. I do not have access to A.net resources anymore, so I cannot confirm this. But this is my theory.

The implication is clear – this is no garden variety GM Darwin incident, but an orchestrated, team effort. But it’s still an awful lot to take without skepticism.

There’s a great Paul Reiser sketch where he describes how every Penthouse Forums letter eventually becomes completely unbelievable (the point when the author says, “And then we took a shower and did it again”). This letter wanders into that territory once it starts suggesting intentional dupe bugs being put into the game.

  • Almost any developer with more than 15 minutes experience knows how devastating a dupe bug is. Dupe bugs are talked about by game developers in the same tone of voice normally reserved for things like 9/11 or the Holocaust.
  • So no one senior knew about this, but a crew of junior people decided to do this, not for any sort of financial incentive, but just for the ‘good of the game’? And one of them was a programmer, whose work putting in a dupe bug can be tracked down in source control trivially. Yeah, I suppose it’s possible that there is a programmer that stupid, still…
  • Gold Farmers don’t LIKE dupe bugs. It devalues their product, if anyone other than the gold farmer figures out how to do it.

Could it be true? Sure, it COULD be. Stranger things have happened. But is it? I would invite the reader to maintain a healthy level of skepticism until more information comes out.

Original comments thread is here.