CALM . . . DOWN . . . sheesh

Ok, yes, I get it . . . you can't get into your housing for a day. *gnaws on hand*

AND, YES, I know I know . . . it was an exploit that caused this. *GASPSERS THE FRIENDLY NECROMANCER'S GHOST*

The majority of you probably don't know anything about this exploit and how it worked. No worries for you guys whatsoever. Life will return to normal soon, and I'm sure KI will make everything good for the innocent.

Just . . . chill.

*breathe*

Do you hear that wonderful ocean wave in the background? Here you go, listen to this for a second or two:



Ahhh, the real world is awesome. There . . . don't you feel a little better now? Most of you will, but there are most likely a few of you who won't.

It's all about perspective with stuff like this. Here's mine:

Remember that nasty wing exploit? I tried to tell you that you shouldn't do this again, and if you discover an exploit, you need to report it, but did you? nope! (remember this exploit lecture you ignored back in episode 10 of Ravenwood Radio) Guess what . . . for some of you it's strike two! You're out!

What kills me is that it's Wizard101 we're talking about here. Like, do you guys realize that if you're going to exploit a game, this is SO not the game to exploit? We have a gold cap here and you can't trade items outside of bazaar sniping and treasure cards. If you're going to exploit, go to a game where you can at least make real money from the exploit.

I remember going over to a friend's house circa 2003, and we got talking about Everquest. He said, Oh yeah, well I have Everquest running on three computers right now actually. I was totally boggled, "you multi-box Everquest? I did't even know you played!"

No no no. He was running a macro on his computer to duplicate gold, then he and his cousin would turn around and sell the gold to a guy named Yantis, and Yantis would turn around and sell gold at a marked up price to the Everquest addicts. What this did to the common player was create mudflation. My friend wasn't playing my game, he was basically ruining my game. LOL. It was ok though, I still liked him and Everquest. He was small potatoes compared to what some exploiters were doing. Don't make me bring up the Methical Everquest2 Dog Pet duping story . . . .

So, guess what? That Yantis guy is still around only now there's about 20 times more Yantis-ish people in the world because of WoW, and he doesn't even sell Everquest gold anymore. Selling gold is almost mainstream now. I don't know if you're even aware of the gold sweat shops. I'll never forget being jumped on nodes by a Chinese gold farmer using exploits in WoW. I was furious.

The difference here for us? Kingsisle took care of every minute detail in their game to discourage this type of behavior from outsiders, which makes it so we live in a Gold Farmer free world. You have gold caps, you have fixed prices at the bazaar, and you have limited item trading. Gold farmers don't want to touch Wizard101 with a 10-foot pole. INSTEAD, KingsIsle controls all the money through their crowns shop, which means, unfortunately, the rule breakers are all players.

Don't worry. It's not the end of the world.

Best of luck to you all who were banned because of that whole auto-harvest bug or what have you. Luckily it's not hard to re-level a character in Wizard101. Think of it as a new challenge set before you! And if you go to a different game, you know, have fun and try to remember the awesome times you had in Wizard101. When you start to get spam in your inbox from gold farmers and malicious people hacking your account in extremely inventive ways, maybe a part of you will understand that Wizard101 is actually a pretty safe and awesome MMO that way.

Happy Dueling!