Since this is out in the open now … there’s been this dirty little secret in Warcraft. It involves the Auction House and, if I’m to be blunt about it, cheating. Y’see, you can set up circumstances so that you always win the auctions and can never be outbid.

Let me back up …

A few weeks or so ago, one of the guildmates was spamming that he needed to talk to me on the phone. TeamSpeak was down until our guildleader got home from work, but he needed to … talk … on … the … phone. *wink wink*

This could only mean one thing. He had to talk to me about something that shouldn’t … hmm, how to say … be documented anywhere. In other words, this was going to be some sort of ethical issue. And how I hate ethical issues.

I prefer black and white. I really hate the gray areas.

So I got the cell out of my car and we had a convo. Long story –> short, he had talked to some of his buds, who had talked to some of their buds, (ad infinitum), and there was a situation that you could set up whereby you always won whatever Warcraft auction you wanted and at the minimum bid to boot.

Now, this bug has been almost common knowledge for weeks, we learned of it weeks after that, and the present time is even weeks more after that. So besides the Advanced Gaming Ethics questions raised by this dirty little secret, exactly how long does Blizzard think they have before we’re all exploiting the hell out of this game like it’s a Hollywood teenaged runaway? JFC, patch this shit before temptation gets the best of me!

Anyways.

My e-bud lays out how it works and then asks what I thought. Y’know, other than “this is fucked” because we can all agree that it’s fucked, the larger question is … do we do this?

I don’t know how other people resolve ethical dilemmas, and I’m not saying that how we resolved this one was correct, I’m just saying … this is how it went:

First, we confirmed that it works by messing around with the AH with our own stuff.

Second, we said holy shit, it does work.

Third, we tossed out scenarios. Y’know, will we get caught? will we go to Hell? how much do we think we can make off of this? (as if quantity somehow equates to inculpability … we were just speaking theoretically!)

Next, we tossed out other scenarios … if we’re just stealing from ripping players that we hate, that isn’t wrong. Right?

Believe me, we tried all the scenarios with all the rationalizations. At some point, we both realized that if we had to set out all these conditions and if 42,894 rationalizations were necessary, we weren’t doing the right thing.

Ultimately, it came down to this: There’s a story, really more of a parable, where the guy cheats on his wife. Years later, he confesses and it causes quite the problem in the family. Afterwards, his nephew asks why he fessed up … after all, he had gotten away with it.

As the story is told, he says, “it was the getting away with it part that I couldn’t live with.”

I guess you know what we decided.

I mean, it’s just a game and it’s not real money, or real property, or real anything. No one would know but us. But, it was the getting away with it part that we couldn’t live with.