Guild Wars 2

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/112h5t/discovered_a_high_chance_forge_recipe_for_the/

Around an hour ago, a massive scam was set up by youtube user MultiJbreezey(of some “Goon” guildmates) and reddit username the_wya. A very detailed method to create pre-cursor weapon “The Legend” was posted, along with a very well-made doctored video. Close inspection of said video “https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9VHImqIMYQ” goes to prove that the video is edited, as the 4 composition items were not “used” or “spent” as the popup for the legendary pre-cursor appeared. The video was of very questionable resolution, and the forge screen upon closer inspection was cropped very slightly at the sides.

Upon the topic’s creation, any comments citing skepticism was immediately downvoted right into bottom, and “Dummy” accounts like “Dr_Andonuts” “ElGruntox” “ThePriceIsRight” came into the scheme, and upvoted and claimed the scheme was working when in fact it was a massive pump and dump scam devised by the unscrupulous scammers. The items Imryldyeen/Silence etc. were all dumped up at massive prices, and from watching the TP the stock was getting pushed out at absurd prices (8/10g) to unsuspecting victims.

To further add credence to the fact that the whole scam was coordinated by a bunch of unscrupulous people, this post by user

ThePriceIsRight
DARN DOOD THAT SOUNDS TUFF

taunting a victim of the scam also previously posted comments such as

ThePriceIsRight
I didn’t think this would work and I really didn’t want to drop THAT much gold. I looked into this guys history and it doesn’t look like a scam so I took the plunge and it worked on my fourth try. I don’t want to drop any more gold on this, but it’s really tempting.

I find it only my civic duty to report this matter ASAP to the Anet authorities and community, lest any more victims fall prey to such underhanded tactics again.

If possible, I seek a Dev’s reply to this issue in seeking for the punishment of these scammers. One cannot let such underhanded acts be gotten away with.

If it is of any aid, the youtube channel posted prior claimed the user to be from a group of “Goons” or what not. And quoting

EntitledCasual
ArenaNet could potentially just ban his game account without even having a solid link to the OP’s reddit account, if the timelines line up and he’s the only player in game cranking these out like mad, putting them on the trading post, and making gold hand over fist. They are surprisingly pretty hardcore about players exploiting the economy.
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In all sincerity, I do hope these low-lifes get their just and karmic punishment by the community at large and an example made out of them to deter scamming in the future.

Update:

–]EntitledCasual 2 points 6 minutes ago*

kummy1 is possibly in on it (along with TheXyFy who almost certainly is, given post history), as all three of them have been not only mutually supportive and heavily conversive with each other about how to make money off this, but are also now engaged in trying to sow doubt. No guarantees though, so it’s a bit of a longshot.

Kummy’s in-game name is “kummy”: http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/z3pzz/permanently_banned_for_buying_a_few_21_karma/c619o2i?context=3

This is a possible starting point for tracking down the rest of the gang. Find out which server that guy is on and what guild he is in. If it is the Goon Squad (the OP is playing with the goon squad on one of his youtube videos) then it’s possibly the right track. Even if not, you might be able to find a norn mesmer that looks like the OP’s in the youtube video, who is in the same guild as kummy. Or, it could be a total red herring, who knows.

Ultimately only ArenaNet is going to be able to do much real tracking down, as they are the ones know who has been making money off the TP on this, but you can potentially present them with some of the likely suspects.

I’m having difficulty finding the punishable offense. Yes, it’s rather underhanded to convince people that X + Y = Z when Z is a highly desirable item and you have huge stock in X and Y. However, this is no different at all than the very slightly more subtle attempts at price manipulation like “hey reddit look at this major kewl item I got isn’t it amazing hint hint” or recently posts on these very forums by people claiming to have made money buying A and doing B with it.

Price manipulation in itself is not a bannable or punishable offense. Traders do it every single day, taking advantage of incorrect common knowledge or 0-day trends etc. All of this is really, in essence, taking advantage of the perceptions of buyers.

Gotta give them credit for this ingeniously creative (albeit unethical) idea.

MF Panda.5874:

I’m having difficulty finding the punishable offense. Yes, it’s rather underhanded to convince people that X + Y = Z when Z is a highly desirable item and you have huge stock in X and Y. However, this is no different at all than the very slightly more subtle attempts at price manipulation like “hey reddit look at this major kewl item I got isn’t it amazing hint hint” or recently posts on these very forums by people claiming to have made money buying A and doing B with it.

Price manipulation in itself is not a bannable or punishable offense. Traders do it every single day, taking advantage of incorrect common knowledge or 0-day trends etc. All of this is really, in essence, taking advantage of the perceptions of buyers.

True, but a doctored video along with artificially creating votes of confidence in a syndicated group attempt to scam the masses is pushing it too far. It’s a far cry from going “This dye in particular is very similar to White/Celestial, you guys should try it out” to suggest the masses to buy something, or “Man, The Urchin pike-gun looks so sweet!” to drum up anticipation for certain cosmetic items.

This is a blatantly coordinated attempt, along with doctored videos to scam the public at large. In the aforementioned cases it was nothing but just advertising and suggestion.

Update:

[–]EntitledCasual 2 points 5 minutes ago

Arus is the name of the leader of one the of Goon Squad’s spinoff guilds, Starfleet Dental. I’d be quite sure the OP is NOT actually Arus, but is in a fact just a random GS member trolling him. The GS connection comes from the OP having a youtube video on his channel showing him playing with the GS.

What will the dev say? That stop following random advice on the interweb. Honestly, that is quite brilliant, it is only really bad if it happened in game IMO. The developers cannot control the actions of people, outside their game and outside their realm of control which only spans to include official forum, wiki and in game.

Those silly Goons

Roger Smithee:

My point was that “oh look at this cool item I got hint hint” and this well-organized price manipulation are the same thing, the only difference being the effort put in. Dishonesty and other forms of social engineering are inherent in any kind of price manipulation.

If I buy out the stock of an item and start putting up inflated buy orders, that is every bit as dishonest as what was done here. It’s up to the buyers to believe or not believe the information they are given – it’s up to them to use their own judgment on the worth of items. A buyer could just as easily have made money off this manipulation as lost money if they approached it correctly.

My question is: what makes what this particular group did bannable?

Another question that might shed more light on the answer: should people that say “don’t kill the hands” be banned as well?

MF Panda.5874:

My question is: what makes what this particular group did bannable?

I may be interpreting something incorrectly, but from what I’ve read in this thread, some people did the following:

1) Pasted together a video where they showed that you could make a legendary precursor from item X, Y and Z. They then stated this and had several other people who were in on it state this. Obviously they are lying about it and are well aware that they are lying about it, cause otherwise there wouldn’t be any fuzz about this.

2) They then proceed to sell a bunch of these items X, Y and Z for ridiculously high prices, using the fact that the TP prevents you from seeing who the seller is.

If these were real life products, it would definitely be considered fraud. The very simple reason and the reason why this is different from the “Ohh look at this cool items pliz buy it”, is that, not only are these people lying, they are also presenting videos as proof that have been pasted together with the sole purpose of deceiving others.
Like I said, if this was tangible property, I have no doubt you could prosecute them for fraud.

It is not ANets responsibility to protect people from blindly following advice posted on another web site. It is also not ANets responsibility to ban or punish players that try and control the market by posting misleading information on a web site other than the official Guild Wars 2 web site.

The only person you can hold responsible is yourself for not doing research before jumping in game and spending all your money to use a recipe that does not work.

Has society reached a point where “personal responsibility” has become meaningless?

You got greedy and got burned. Learn your lesson and move on

Heru:

You simply repeated what Roger Smithee said. Should people that say “don’t kill the hands” also be banned? They are lying as well. Should people that buy out the stock of an item and place uncharacteristically high buy orders also be banned? They are lying as well.

I think it’s a mistake to equate real life products with in-game items, but I’ll humour you. In real life, there are tons of individuals and corporations seeking investments. They’ll promise you the moon and the stars (sometimes even literally) in order to get your money, but this isn’t illegal. You can’t protect against people abandoning their common sense. Tons of investors get drawn into what are basically fantasies due to their own greed and the masterful presentation skills of investment groups.

Jamescowhen’s analysis is pretty spot on here. Remember all those people that got banned for the 21 karma weapon incident? The same ideas apply here. If you found some special recipe in the game that pumped out precursors, it would be classified in hindsight by almost everyone as an exploit. ANet have even confirmed in dev posts that there is no way to get precursors other than random drops or random forge chance.

And that is what happend today on reddit:

The first try

The second try

What is really interessting is how much work is put into this stuff. It looks like there is a whole team on it. For the second try they produced two documents that are already removed from google – maybe to use somewhere else. But I saved them so if you like to take a look have a lot of fun and be aware if you see something again.
The data
The guide

Actually, converting sigils was genuinely profitable for a while. I made quite a bit of money doing it myself, over the course of 10k or 20k conversions. However, since superior sigil prices have generally gone down across the board, it probably isn’t worth the bother anymore.

EDIT:
Oh, and after looking at the second one, it looks much more likely to be a legitimate attempt to post a useful guide than a scam.There’s so many different types of masterworks on the market that it really wouldn’t be worth it to try to artificially inflate the prices of all of them, as they would barely go up for the most part.

However, I doubt it’s worth trying, considering that the profit margins will have mostly collapsed now that people know about it.

i made a lot of money by doing the sigil mystic forging. I bought mainly air sigils at 1s 20c (really i just bought any sigil around that price, but air and energy were the most common cheap ones)

it isn’t a scam rofl, I haven’t done it in awhile so I can’t talk about current prices tho

Yeah, I tried to buy mine at around 115c when I could. Air and Energy were indeed the most common, but people caught on to those so I started buying more of all of the other kinds at cheaper prices to keep the profits fairly high.

Current prices are a lot less favourable, though; enough that I definitely wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re willing and able to do the math for yourself.

There was a thread about this over the weekend.

It get deleted, with a PM going to everyone who posted in the thread to say why.

However, when I reposted this reason here I got an infraction, so I can’t tell you why we aren’t allowed to discuss this subject.

o.O

I don’t know and I don’t care about such ways of money making I just play, but both were created by brand new accounts and both were removed from reddit. The first removed just the text and the second try deleted his account – maybe to remove its posts too – however he lost control over his content so he removed the google docs stuff I guess… all in all this is very strange and that is what me lead to think of market manipulation. I mean the “guide” says buy conduits/bags and we all know some people are heavy speculating on this stuff. And if “they” have some bots under their control they will raise the income. It is just I dont belive this was made out of good intentions… No matter if it works or not for at least a short period. If someone put such a lot of work into it why should he try to remove it as soon as someone asks for scam? It just makes no sense at all…

Hello,

As this thread is an inflammatory one, it is now locked.