We can’t provide any specific details about what the player did, but I can say that they really buggered up what they were doing. The only way to achieve what they achieved was by cheating (and doing a terrible job of it), it’s impossible to replicate what this player did without hacking.
The player was banned by myself after I saw the threads about the issue and went to investigate what might’ve caused the issue. I shared all the account and guild data with the dev team as well (it’s important to have multiple people check on new edge cases like this to prevent/correct any human error as well as to prevent this thing from being able to happen in future.)
In this specific case, it was very obvious that the Guild didn’t support or encourage this player’s cheating and that they really messed up the Guild War for this Guild, it’s an edge case that doesn’t usually happen (first time I’ve seen this happen), so I’ve requested for this player’s score to be ommitted if we can do so without breaking something.
If something like this happened on day 1 of Guild Wars and the Guild waited until the next Guild Wars to write to us, then it would be sort of odd and I probably wouldn’t do anything about it (at that stage I couldn’t really do anything about it anyway even if I wanted to).
If it happened and the Guild wrote to us immediately, we’d get it fixed up as quickly as possible so it would have as minimal impact as possible.
While we do have support policies to follow to keep things fair for everyone and treat everyone equally, when it comes to these edge cases we do try to apply some human reasoning to the situation if we can. If we start seeing this in every Guild in Guild Wars then it’s easy to have a blanket statement that no help will be given etc. of course this is also followed up with code that actually prevents the thing from happening.
But when it’s only 1 Guild here and there it’s a different matter and can be treated on a case by case basis with the understanding that we will treat each individual Guild as fairly and as equally as possible until the issue is resolved or becomes a large scale issue that needs a blanket policy to cover.
I usually ask myself questions like this before deciding what to do with edge cases:
- Is this a once off issue, an edge case or is it going to continue happening?
- Does the issue affect more than one player/Guild?
- How do the potential solutions affect other players/Guilds?
- If I choose a certain solution will it be fair to the player/Guild and to the other uninvolved players/Guilds?
- If this happens to another Guild do we have the time/resources to use this solution for them as well?
- Will this solution trigger a change in playstyle in other Guilds/accounts which will worsen the issue or significantly affect the team’s workload?
^ these sort of questions are things I ask myself about any sort of edge case, not just ones involving cheats. We realise that not everything is black and white so more thought goes into things than it may seem on the surface level.
I probably didn’t need to write such a detailed response but I sort of felt like providing some transparency about my thought processes around these sort of issues, especially if there was going to be concern for if this is likely to happen again for other Guilds and concern about what to do if it happens to your Guild.