jacobvandy wrote on Jan 3, 2013, 21:29:
An exploit is just a cheat that isn't detected until somebody reports it. People who get banned for exploiting aren't your average player who might stumble across something like that, benefit from it, and then think "WTF?" and maybe try to do it again once or twice... You have assholes who will figure something like that out, or hear about it from their asshole buddies, then spend EVERY WAKING MOMENT abusing it to their gain, knowing full well it could be reported and fixed at any moment.

IIRC, the first big one had to do with an error in pricing for karma vendor items, and allowed several hundred people to accrue hundreds or even THOUSANDS of gold (not copper, not silver, but gold pieces) within the span of a day or two. You can imagine what sort of damage people can (and did, to an extent) do to the economy with that kind of immensely disproportionate wealth... Once the devs find out about it, they just hope they aren't caught, or that they decide to do a rollback/correction instead of ban. By that time, though, they may have spent a boatload of it or divvied it out to the degree where it would be too costly in man-hours to figure out how to fully eradicate the virtual equivalent of counterfeit currency.

I'm very glad Anet takes such a rigid stance on that kind of bullshit.