Guild Wars 2 Cheater Stripped, Thrown Off Bridge, Banned

J T Darkside, a Guild Wars 2 player, was recently captured in a video that shows him (allegedly) using third-party software to augment his performance in World vs World mode.

World vs World (WvW) is like normal PvP, except on a massive scale, including capturable castles that require siege engines to wear down, all occupied and operated by gigantic groups of players that all have to work as a team to grab and hold land. Some players give themselves unfair advantages in this mode, allowing them to do things like travel across the map in a fraction of the time, teleprt inside structures so that they can capture points without being targeted or attacked, or grant themselves substantial killing power while simultaneously making themselves almost impossible to kill.

Here is the video in question:

While I was watching this video, I was skeptical at first. His movements look a bit twitchy, but that could be a latency issue. God knows I probably skip around the map like a hummingbird on meth with my connection. And he kept disappearing but, you know, he’s a rogue. Disappearing is what rogues do! Surviving on his own against three other characters seemed suspicious to me at first, but he’s probably a condition thief (a thief that relies on applying conditions like bleeds and poisons that do damage over time and heal the thief). I’ve played a condi thief, and I know how crazy-survivable they are, so even that was something that I could, grudgingly, accept.

What really struck me as strange was that two of the people that was fighting with were commanders. Commanders are people who have spent 300 gold – in a game that I’ve spent 90 hours playing and amassed a total of 20 gold – for an icon that floats above their heads, which serves no other purpose than to announce “Follow me, I know what I’m doing.“

All of that I could push aside, but when J T Darkside finally goes down, two characters attempt to finish him – a scripted action that drops a flagstaff from the sky through a dying player’s chest, preventing them from reviving themselves – but it just… doesn’t work. As a thief, you have a couple skills while you’re on the ground that can cancel an enemy’s finisher, but you only get two chances, maybe three if you’re lucky and your timing is perfect. But this guy manages to weasel his way out of four separate finishers, all of which appear to be solidly connecting. Maybe he’s got a secret strategy that I don’t know about, I’m not a professional GW2 player by any means. I’m just relaying the parts that seem to imply cheating.

In response to this evidence, game developer AreaNet took action. Taking controller of the cheater’s account, he stripped him of all his armor, climbed to the top of a bridge, /wave’d, and then leapt to his death. He then logged out to the character selection screen, deleted the level 80 rogue and the level 1 character that was also on the account, and logs out.

In response to a question posed about how AreaNet would be dealing with the possibility that the allegation could be false, Chris Cleary, security lead for Guild Wars 2, wrote on the forum that “We don’t need to see it in-game, sometimes good video evidence is enough for me to track down who it was. In this case, the video was enough for me to find out who it was and take action. Thanks for the video, and to accompany your video, I give you this video of his account’s last moments:

The account was also banned, as well as other accounts that were apparently connected to this one.

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Wayne Meeks

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Wayne writes articles about video games that he plays. Sometimes they're good. Sometimes they're great. Sometimes they're neither of those things. But that doesn't stop him playing, or writing.