Anet has a pretty bad track record of fighting bots and banning legit players.

I got a temp ban in GW1 for solo farming shards in FoW for like an hour or two a day for a week. Yet there were numerous mesmer interrupt bots in pvp that never got banned.

@jesterroyal said:

Does the process of permabanning differ in games like WoW? Because I could see making the argument that you lost a years worth of subscription money when your account was permanently banned.

You would only get banned in WoW if you were running some kind of third party software or editing the game files to gain an advantage. If it was something in the game that Blizzard put there by mistake, they wouldn't blame the player.

@Zithe:

@murisan said:

*Before reading* "Is this Kripp?"

... he was advertising a way to exploit a mistake in the game to make tons of money. After being issued a 3 day suspension, he got his viewers to abusively tweet at the Guild Wars 2 devs and CM's. He also personally insulted/threatened a GM.

He deserves an IP ban.

@Zithe said:

@Gladiator_Games said:

As someone who deals with contracts all day long, the simple fact is this: he agreed to play by anets rules. He broke those rules. He got banned. It's his fault.

@psylah said:

There's always a reason for the bans.

Don't be an asshole. Play by the rules you agreed upon.

Stop crying.

This Kripp guy may have been an asshole after the fact and that is his own fault and totally on him, but can either of you tell me about this rule he broke in the game? You both say he should play by the rules. What's the rule? What he did was totally within the game's mechanics. Do you really think there's anything in the EULA about converting currencies at a certain rate? (Because you can still convert them now, just as you should be able to, just not as efficiently as the method they found.)

And yes, I understand that this would have thrown the economy out of balance very quickly and it should have absolutely been fixed and reversed, but that's the thing; fixing the bug and taking the profits the players made from it is how any other MMO developer would have handled this. It was ANet's mistake and they should be the ones to fix it. In all of my years playing other MMOs, I've seen plenty of bugs like this. None of those developers punished the players so harshly. What they should have done is taken the servers down for about 10-15 minutes, fixed the bug, taken the profits gained from the bug, brought the servers back up and said "our bad."

I really don't see the logic. Just because something you know is wrong is possible in the game doesn't mean you should or have the right to do it. Its possible to exchange kiddie porn links ingame with friends, why don't you do that and blame arenanet for the flaw.

I for one am enjoying this new precedent set in gaming and hope more devs follow suit. So many of you assholes shouldn't be playing games, its nice to know you wont be.

@George_Hukas: Transmitting kiddie porn is a legitimate real-world crime. Stealing a virtual good with no real-world value isn't.

@psylah: I was asking what rule he broke in the game but I guess you didn't specify that much in your original post. Fair enough.

@Zithe: I think the 17th rule of conduct covers what he did.

17. You will not exploit any bug in Guild Wars 2 and you will not communicate the existence of any such exploitable bug (bugs that grant the user unnatural or unintended benefits) either directly or through public posting, to any other user of Guild Wars 2.

We reserve the right, in our sole and absolute discretion, to change, modify, add or remove portions of these Rules of Conduct at any time.

Its what everyone clicked agree to and didn't read. Its up to their discretion. =/ I think they all knew it was an "unnatural and unintended benefit" to make so much gold in such a short amount of time. Especially when you listen to the stream and they talk about how they gotta get in on this before it gets patched out.

@Drakoji said:

I find it funny people don't want to buy the game because of these bans.

I can only say one thing: If you people are turned off by a developer that does not let their game go to shit by exploiters, this community will not miss your presence.

No, I just don't want normal people permabanned, thank you. And it was that very same 'community' you're talking about that received the bans, and I just didn't like the slippery slope implications to online gaming in general. In other words, I was looking out for MY community, the regular ass gamers getting shit on by a big company.

'Buy low and sell high' is something anyone knows to abuse and streamers like Kripp brought it to full attention much faster.

@Vade:

I play fully legit and I didn't get banned, don't abuse exploits and you will be fine. It's not the "Normal" people that got permabanned, it's the people who thought they were smarter than ArenaNet and thought they could pull off exploits without getting banhammered.

Buy low Sell High works for a Auction House system, it's the purpose of it. But what he did with vendors, that's an exploit. Yes maybe ArenaNet fucked up and had a bug, at worst buy some cheap weapon for yourself and no one will care, but abusing that bug is clearly an exploit, "Normal" gamers won't do that. I like to play games legit.

Didn't botters get banned for 72 hours and Krip get a permanent ban lol?

Seems like if your going to bot your fine, just don't stream, they take that shit seriously.

@haffy: You oughta read the rest of the tread. It was only upgraded to permanent after he encouraged everyone to harass ANet over the ban.

@haffy said:

Didn't botters get banned for 72 hours and Krip get a permanent ban lol?

Seems like if your going to bot your fine, just don't stream, they take that shit seriously.

He broke two rules that are a big deal that would ruin the in-game economy. If the economy is ruined, then people's experience in game is ruined. Don't exploit bugs and don't tell people about it. ArenaNet is laying down the law early on to let people know they aren't messing around. Now that people got the message, it's up to the players to make the moral choice.

@Zithe: I think the 17th rule of conduct covers what he did.

17. You will not exploit any bug in Guild Wars 2 and you will not communicate the existence of any such exploitable bug (bugs that grant the user unnatural or unintended benefits) either directly or through public posting, to any other user of Guild Wars 2.

We reserve the right, in our sole and absolute discretion, to change, modify, add or remove portions of these Rules of Conduct at any time.

Its what everyone clicked agree to and didn't read. Its up to their discretion. =/ I think they all knew it was an "unnatural and unintended benefit" to make so much gold in such a short amount of time. Especially when you listen to the stream and they talk about how they gotta get in on this before it gets patched out.

I feel like I cannot say anything here without inciting any side of this problem.
However, buying something for low karma (while all the other items being sold are high karma) and reselling it for coin is kind of 'hey, they might have made a mistake with the pricing' and not a incentive to buy shit tons of it and sell it for more coin.
Might just be basic thinking guys, but hey, MMO crowds are all about fast easy wins right? Rush to 80 gogo! Play the Trading Post so you can buy more gems and buy another slot to get another 80! Go! Go!
 
I'll just be enjoying the journey, not using exploits or quick wins, since I'm not paying monthly anyway.
I hope Anet keeps banning the fuck out of everyone who even makes a silly name, lest this game turns into another WoW cesspool.

Eh, my definition of justified meets your definition of WIlly Nilly. That we might never agree on. I think they need more robust moderation tools but I bet there's next to no free time for any of these GM's and they are just running on red bull at this point.

@TaliciaDragonsong said:

I feel like I cannot say anything here without inciting any side of this problem. However, buying something for low karma (while all the other items being sold are high karma) and reselling it for coin is kind of 'hey, they might have made a mistake with the pricing' and not a incentive to buy shit tons of it and sell it for more coin. Might just be basic thinking guys, but hey, MMO crowds are all about fast easy wins right? Rush to 80 gogo! Play the Trading Post so you can buy more gems and buy another slot to get another 80! Go! Go! I'll just be enjoying the journey, not using exploits or quick wins, since I'm not paying monthly anyway. I hope Anet keeps banning the fuck out of everyone who even makes a silly name, lest this game turns into another WoW cesspool.

Exactly. I honestly wish everyone could play this game and we all be a big happy family.

But there is always some shitty, lame family member who sucks the fun out of the room. I said it before and I'll say it again, using "I didn't know cheating was against the rules" is a fucking LAME attempt at playing stupid and no one buys that shit for a second.

What's nice is Anet isn't fucking around and now people know... makes me all giddy :P

@George_Hukas: Transmitting kiddie porn is a legitimate real-world crime. Stealing a virtual good with no real-world value isn't.

I think bans in the beginning of mmos is very popular, especially if it has to do with the in game economy. They don't want people using exploits right away or finding ways of "making gold fast" because it can destabilize the in game economy since no one is seeding it with "proper items". Now while some of them examples are of people using karma to make gold . I can't really see what the problem is here since its just a simple way of converting currencies and its not like whatever the people are selling in the vendor goes directly into the in game economy. Who knows, perhaps there is some sort of developer issue with this that we don't understand fully.

@The_Laughing_Man: @The_Laughing_Man said:

@emem said:

@The_Laughing_Man said:

@emem said:

@The_Laughing_Man said:

@emem said:

Snip
I don't know, maybe a ban was justified in this case (especially because he streamed it to thousands of people), but I really don't know and I don't care enough to figure it out. I'll keep my eyes and ears open though, it's an interesting topic.

I mean he did sign/ok a terms of use thing. So it is within their right. ALL bugs can not be taken out of a game. Its sort of like this. If you find a broken ATM are you gonna just keep taking the money? Then get mad when you get caught and sent to jail? Can you blame the workers for not knowing the machine was broken and you took the money?

Oh well, I'm not sure when it comes to such comparisons, but Anet can ban anyone for pretty much anything and there is nothing people can do about it. And I think @Dunchad is right, people definitely won't exploit anything in GW2 after today... just like everyone knows that you don't fuck with Valve (even though a Steam account ban can arguably be a little bit worse). ;)

Nah. Someone will go over the Agreement with a fine tooth comb and find a loop hole. We should see a class action lawsuit threat popping up soon. Yes maybe a life time ban is a bit much. The guy looks like he could afford to buy the game again. Someone like me who just spent money on a car for work an college however would not be amused. Then again I would not do something I even thought could get me in trouble like that.

I sometimes enjoy listening to streams in the background so I hope people don't do anything stupid to make developers forbid the streaming of their games. I think Kripp makes a pretty decent amount of money considering how many viewers he seems to consistently have. And yep, I wouldn't risk being banned either.

@project343 said:

They just posted on reddit that they will be turning all of these permanent bans back to 72 hour bans for this occurrence only.

Here's the full thing:

Today we banned a number of players for exploiting Guild Wars 2. We take our community and the integrity of the game very seriously, and want to be clear that intentionally exploiting the game is unacceptable. The players we banned were certainly intentionally and repeatedly exploiting a bug in the game. We intended to send a very clear message that exploiting the game in this way will not be tolerated, and we believe this message now has been well understood.
We also believe and respect that people make mistakes. This is in fact the first example of a widespread exploit in the game. With this in mind, we are offering the members of our community who exploited the game a second chance to repair the damage that has been done.

Thus, just this once, we will offer to convert permanent bans to 72-hour suspensions. Should those involved want to accept this offer of reinstatement, contact us on our support website--support.guildwars.com—and submit a ticket through the "Ask a Question" tab. Please use the subject heading of "Karma Weapons Exploit Appeal", then confirm in the body of your ticket that you will delete any items/currency that you gained from the exploit. You should submit only one ticket. Once you have done so, we will lower your ban to 72 hours, and following your re-activation we will check your account to make sure that you have honored your commitment. If that commitment is not hindered, we will re-terminate the account.

This is a first and final warning. Moving forward, please make sure you that when you see an exploitable part of the game, you report it and do not attempt to benefit from it.

We look forward to seeing you in game,

Yours Sincerely,
Chris Whiteside- Lead Producer ArenaNet

So to all the people who think its to extreme and they have their heads up their asses. What do you say to this?

I say it looks like they knew they went overboard and decided to take it back.

@murisan said:

*Before reading* "Is this Kripp?"

... he was advertising a way to exploit a mistake in the game to make tons of money. After being issued a 3 day suspension, he got his viewers to abusively tweet at the Guild Wars 2 devs and CM's. He also personally insulted/threatened a GM.

He deserves an IP ban.

Source? Other than a post on Reddit of course, because thats where I first saw this.

I have no love for kripp, but hes a decently likable guy, at least on his youtube channel. I don't watch the stream.

His reasoning for buying a new account is complete bullshit, but in the end if he was really perma-banned for making 6 gold from 20k karma, while people setting up elaborate bots get 72 hours... Well that's kinda fucked up.

@UssjTrunks said:

@George_Hukas: Transmitting kiddie porn is a legitimate real-world crime. Stealing a virtual good with no real-world value isn't.

Breaking a Terms of service agreement is illegal. 

@Maginnovision: Nah, i think they just wanted to humiliate the people who got banned. Notice they had a "public appeal" system on reddit?

They are also making -the player- remove all gold and exploited items from their account manually, they are not going to. They said they will check on that player and if they do not remove the items/gold within a week it's a permaban all over again.

@The_Laughing_Man

@UssjTrunks said:

@George_Hukas: Transmitting kiddie porn is a legitimate real-world crime. Stealing a virtual good with no real-world value isn't.

Breaking a Terms of service agreement is illegal. 

No it is not.

Kripps ban seems like complete horse shit. He made 8 gold off something that, from the outside looking in (I don't play the game) does not seem like an exploit. Or it seems like a very mild one on his part. The sudden permaban

Kripps ban seems like complete horse shit. He made 8 gold off something that, from the outside looking in (I don't play the game) does not seem like an exploit. Or it seems like a very mild one on his part. The sudden permaban

@MariachiMacabre said:

@MariachiMacabre

Kripps ban seems like complete horse shit. He made 8 gold off something that, from the outside looking in (I don't play the game) does not seem like an exploit. Or it seems like a very mild one on his part. The sudden permaban

Goddamn mobile site. The sudden permaban seems like they're using him as a message.

Because you don't play you don't know, 8 gold is a shit load.

Edit: He also made more than 8 gold.

@MariachiMacabre said:

@MariachiMacabre

Kripps ban seems like complete horse shit. He made 8 gold off something that, from the outside looking in (I don't play the game) does not seem like an exploit. Or it seems like a very mild one on his part. The sudden permaban

Goddamn mobile site. The sudden permaban seems like they're using him as a message.

Because you don't play you don't know, 8 gold is a shit load.

Edit: He also made more than 8 gold.

@MariachiMacabre: But his permanent ban wasn't for the cheating. His temporary, "slap on the wrist" ban was upgraded because he encouraged the harassment of ArenaNet through social channels.

@MariachiMacabre: I don't think you know enough about the subject and that your opinion might be uninformed. Kripp used the bug less than others but he distributed it far more than others (Hence the first ban). And as i posted earlier one guy taking part in that stream turned 10k in karma into the in game currency equivalent of 350 real us dollars through a process that took him less than an hour. The karma mining took longer than an hour, granted, but that conversion is just broken and they knew they were exploiting it because they openly talked about it being an exploit that might get them banned. I don't think any single individual is making "hundreds of gold". Maybe "hundreds of gold" are being generated in the economy from quests every minute due to the sheer number of players playing the game but nobody is making that kind of bank.

Thousands of people are going to find the tiny holes left behind by the only hundreds that made a game full of thousands of hours of content. Its a numbers game and it isn't a player's right to cheat the system just because by sheer force of man power they WILL find something that's broken.

Random Aside: I'm not a Redditor but man, reading through those threads makes me feel like that must be one scummy community to have SO many problems.

After reading through that Reddit thread I am even more confused now than I was before. They have tracked who bought the items, they know who did it and how much they bought, and yet they aren't removing the items themselves but asking the players to do it for them? What? This is nonsense. ArenaNet are crazy. They are actually asking people to buy items in order to spend the currency they gained and delete the items to remove the currency completely. WHAT? That has got to be way tougher and more time-consuming to track and enforce than just removing the shit. I honestly don't understand how an idea like this can pass through a decent sized company.

@CL60 said:

@SamStrife

There's always two sides to every story. I'm sure if we heard Arenanet's side we'd see this guy was exploiting some way, or being rude/offensive. I'm sure at some point during the development, Anet realised people may buy things with karma and sell for gold and balanced accordingly.

@korkesh

I try to never take those things at face value, like SamStrife said there are two sides to every story and I'm sure Anet isn't going out of their way just to ban people for doing something like this. They have even said that their main concern atm is dealing with bots, and even those are only temporarily getting 3 day bans (only in some cases, some are still getting permabanned) as they try to sort launch bugs out first.

The ban happened on live stream with 1000+ people watching. He got banned for doing what was said.

I think the ban in that case was more for the fact that he showed over a thousand people how to exploit a flaw in the system to launder money out of karma, which could harm the economy of all servers.

I mean, I'm sure the police would crack down on me if I made a DIY video on how to print money.

@MariachiMacabre said:

@Xeirus

@MariachiMacabre said:

@MariachiMacabre

Kripps ban seems like complete horse shit. He made 8 gold off something that, from the outside looking in (I don't play the game) does not seem like an exploit. Or it seems like a very mild one on his part. The sudden permaban

Goddamn mobile site. The sudden permaban seems like they're using him as a message.

Because you don't play you don't know, 8 gold is a shit load.

Edit: He also made more than 8 gold.

Compared to the hundreds others are making it seems like pennies. And the fact that they upped his ban from 72 hours to permanent without notifying him, instead telling people on Reddit (breaking their own rule of not commenting on the status of other peoples bans) and never contacting him about it or replying to his ticket. Regardless of his infraction, ANet is handling this situation poorly. Blizzard went through the same thing and at least had the decency to accept some of the blame because players never create glitches. I fully support punishing cheaters but not in this insanely unprofessional manner.

Gold is the highest tier of currency. It is broken down into Gold, Silver, and Bronze.

100 Bronze = 1 Silver

100 Silver = 1 Gold

Gold is worth quite a bit at these early stages of the game.

Edit: Just watched the video. He used 20k karma to make 8 gold. How much karma did the imaginary other guy have to make "hundreds of gold" off of it? (The answer is an unrealistic amount of karma FYI)

@Zithe said:

After reading through that Reddit thread I am even more confused now than I was before. They have tracked who bought the items, they know who did it and how much they bought, and yet they aren't removing the items themselves but asking the players to do it for them? What? This is nonsense. ArenaNet are crazy. They are actually asking people to buy items in order to spend the currency they gained and delete the items to remove the currency completely. WHAT? That has got to be way tougher and more time-consuming to track and enforce than just removing the shit. I honestly don't understand how an idea like this can pass through a decent sized company.

I'm beginning to think arena net has poor moderation tools. Im betting in the database entries for the items it has a "bought for currency" and "bought by" field which is how they are coming up with those numbers in the thread. Count where bought by = Name and for = 28 or something like that. But I'm guessing they just don't have the tools to remove those in a decent manner. Or not enough staff with enough elevated privileges to handle large scale infractions. Which is a shame. I'm hope they will get better in time.

@NickL said:

@MariachiMacabre said:

@Xeirus

@MariachiMacabre said:

@MariachiMacabre

Kripps ban seems like complete horse shit. He made 8 gold off something that, from the outside looking in (I don't play the game) does not seem like an exploit. Or it seems like a very mild one on his part. The sudden permaban

Goddamn mobile site. The sudden permaban seems like they're using him as a message.

Because you don't play you don't know, 8 gold is a shit load.

Edit: He also made more than 8 gold.

Compared to the hundreds others are making it seems like pennies. And the fact that they upped his ban from 72 hours to permanent without notifying him, instead telling people on Reddit (breaking their own rule of not commenting on the status of other peoples bans) and never contacting him about it or replying to his ticket. Regardless of his infraction, ANet is handling this situation poorly. Blizzard went through the same thing and at least had the decency to accept some of the blame because players never create glitches. I fully support punishing cheaters but not in this insanely unprofessional manner.

Gold is the highest tier of currency. It is broken down into Gold, Silver, and Bronze.

100 Bronze = 1 Silver

100 Silver = 1 Gold

Gold is worth quite a bit at these early stages of the game.

Using "other people are making more money" isn't an excuse to exploit. Lets stop being naive.

@jesterroyal: That's the only explanation I can imagine that would lead to this kind of reaction rather than the market standard. It's sad. If they had just fixed the bug and repaired the damages, this would have no lasting impact on the game whatsoever and it would have been swept under the rug like every other MMO bug that no one remembers or cares about today. Instead, they made it into an issue that people will remember.

As long as ANet has this attitude towards instant bans for first time offenses, players will always be forced to double check that everything in their game is working as intended for fear of ANet's iron fist. That's no way to run an online game. I know it's their game and they have the right to run it however they want, but I don't have to like it.

@Zithe said:

@jesterroyal said:

Does the process of permabanning differ in games like WoW? Because I could see making the argument that you lost a years worth of subscription money when your account was permanently banned.

You would only get banned in WoW if you were running some kind of third party software or editing the game files to gain an advantage. If it was something in the game that Blizzard put there by mistake, they wouldn't blame the player.

That isn't true at all. Entire cutting edge raiding guilds were banned for exploiting fights.

@Cataphract1014: I think someone mentioned that earlier in this thread somewhere but it's not something I'm familiar with. It's kind of surprising to me. Did they get anything out of it that wasn't easily reversible? I thought the vast majority of Blizzards bans were for botting and gold farming and whatnot. And they usually send out warnings about risky behavior before they outright ban don't they? In all my time with WoW, I think I got one warning for language and that was it.

@Xeirus: You might be right. I didn't see that reddit post though.

This whole thing just seems lazy to me. Rather than delete items like blizzard would do(since it was their fault) and issue a notice they ban people. This is all really poorly handled though. Banning a bunch of people and then tell them they need to submit a ticket then ditch any gold/items they got doing something that was built into the game, whether is was right or wrong, IS wrong. It's not the players fault, either this guy who was crafting and selling the item, or the people buying weapons for real cheap and vendoring them. I think the reason they were so ban happy is because you literally can buy gold. It breaks their economy.

I feel like arenanet is wrong, even though some people think taking any advantage in a game that they can is wrong. Especially when it's not even cheating, it's literally just something arenanet fucked up. Overall not a big deal though, hopefully people just don't do anything if a deal seems good in that game again, because there are no good deals in free to play.

@Maginnovision: Nope, I don't feel like Anet is in the wrong at all. I think people are just shocked a company has the balls to tell cheaters to straighten up.

They're treating people like adults, and adults should know better. People either get their shit straight or they don't play the game. I respect the hell out of them for that attitude, it's been far too long since people were held accountable to this degree.

But you and I differ on that opinion and that's fine.

I'm sure the ArenaNet Illuminati is going after 1 streamer with an inflated sense of self-worth just for the hell of it, rather than banning someone for exploiting the in-game economy. I bet he could even appeal it!

This is pretty fucking absurd, can't believe even the fanboys are supporting this shit.

@SirPsychoSexy: Could you elucidate? I mean, when people are knowingly breaking the rules I can't feel too much sympathy. If it was an honest mistake, which is extremely rare, then there is an appeal process. I've been playing since the beginning of headstart and I haven't been banned because I haven't made a stupid name, exploited the game, or broken any of the other common MMO rules.

@Subjugation: You use karma points to buy cooking ingredients, you craft recipes with the ingredients, vendor what you make and receive gold. Perma banned. All from using the fucking in game systems and vendors. No warnings, no reversing what was done, nothing. You are out $60. Sorry, but that is fucking insane.

Man I hate the term fanboy but I also wouldn't know what else to call some people here defending this shit with the worst of arguments and analogies.

The situation sucks, no doubt. If you have gameplay systems that allow the economy to go completely bananas without using anything really exploitative - you gonna have a bad time with online progression RPGs like these. So, this shit basically MUSTN'T happen under all circumstances, which leads me to believe that the release date is too early.

I mean we're not talking about some around-10-corners weird exploit. No, this is pretty straight forward.

But okay, now the problem does exist and what's to do in that case?

Depending on how quickly it's fixable, immediately go maintenance and fix that shit as quickly as possible. If necessary just disable the stuff and fix it at a later time. That of course means you have to get a hold of this quickly enough.

If not that (or it's too late already) a server rollback may be necessary but is really, really terrible to just about every player, especially when the game is new and 1-2 days mean a world for a lot players.

So if there isn't a rollback, what else is left to do? Very little really. Depending on how they set up everything they may not be able to (at least effectively) track down every transaction between players. That's very likely and means that not only the players who "exploited" the system are affected but rather the whole economy. Even if you could track it down, can you take away the item from a "legit" player who ended up trading something that was originally exploited?

Maybe you can detect the people who got huge amounts of e.g. Gold from this and trim them down or so, but that's just a rough and ineffective method. I mean who's legit and who's not? With so many players, kinda unthinkable (again, depends on what amount of data they save).

In the end, you probably can't do too much about it and have to swallow it.

What you should never fucking do of course is banning (some) of the people who abused that. I mean, fuck. This is so far away from an exploit. I don't even know what to say. And really, if they end up banning only some of the dudes who did it, is that justice?

Imagine if Blizzard decided to ban people who used the Wizard invincibility exploit, one that you can actually call that. That is UNTHINKABLE.

Either way, this situation is awful I have to imagine and it would've been best something like that wouldn't make it into a release version. If there's a basic gameplay feature that allows to fuck up the entire game economy - well, good luck.

@NaDannMaGoGo: @SirPsychoSexy: He wasn't permabanned for exploiting. He was permabanned for a) abusing the exploit to a serious degree, b) advertising to all of his streamers, and c) for encouraging his fans to harass ArenaNet. That seems to warrant plenty of permabanning to me.

The fact that I read most of this thread while I don't even play mmo's boggles my mind, I'm leaving now

@Zithe said:

@jesterroyal said:

Does the process of permabanning differ in games like WoW? Because I could see making the argument that you lost a years worth of subscription money when your account was permanently banned.

You would only get banned in WoW if you were running some kind of third party software or editing the game files to gain an advantage. If it was something in the game that Blizzard put there by mistake, they wouldn't blame the player.

Early on there were entire guilds banned temporarily for exploiting boss agro mechanics to skip an hour of trash pulls.