Filed under "Claims of some guy on the internet" comes this interesting posting from someone acting as an ex-employee of ArenaNet:

A couple weeks ago the reconnect feature was disabled due to players exploiting this feature in order to dupe items. The items that were mostly duped were Ectos or Armbraces of Truth, as they were high-demand, high-priced and stackable items. After the public learnt of the method, the population of dupers were too large to be ignored. Action had to be taken and it was. Thousands of accounts were banned. The damage to the economy will never truly be revealed, as these "dirty" items could've gone through hundreds of exchanges, through many innocent players inventories.

The exploit was intentional.

As said before, we needed a surefire way to generate mass gold supply without upsetting the players. The close circle of A.net employees that knew this information was kept airtight. This information was never leaked to the public. It is a fact. There are several theories as to how the public became to know of this information. I do not have access to A.net resources anymore, so I cannot confirm this.

I am the Queen of France. I no longer have access to French resources anymore, so I cannot confirm this. I do however have a copy of "Exploiting Online Games: Cheating Massively Distributed Systems" sitting right here. Maybe there's a chapter about the involvement of employees in cheating, hacking and exploiting.

I know that certain parties were given advance knowledge of a specific type of armor being removed from loot tables in an MMO. This resulted in that armor being farmed 24/7 until the patch hit, and then said armor was sold on eBay en mass for tens of thousands of dollars. I know that some MMO employees accept cash for in game items, xp boosts, gold and even beta invites during the "friends and family" stage. Yeah, give me a check and you can be my friend, too.

I wouldn't expect any official response from ArenaNet outside of "That's bullsh*t" and they may actually be telling the truth. I do have to wonder if the tinfoil itches the "ex-employee's" head, though.