Guild Wars 2

On the pretense of admitting that I have no idea how gold farmer-bots actually work, which means that this idea may actually not be fruitful at all, I was wondering if this simple idea could be a good work-around to preventing gold farmers from actively sending spam mail:

“Postage Stamps,” a simple, stacking, consumable item that costs five copper per stamp. Once acquired, an actual player will see simple instructions: double-click the stamp to use it, which will allow the user to send a letter.

To prevent gold farmer pathing-bots from leading them directly to the static location of a Postage Stamp vendor, perhaps they could rotate between one of several locations in a starting zone. There could be a Postage Stamp vendor in every starting zone / city, marked by a large postage stamp icon on the map/minimap.

It would mean more effort for new players to be able to send mail right off the bat, but it could potentially put a huge damper (if not nullify) the ability for bots to send mail to players since they’ve got to find the vendor, buy the item, consume the item, write out their mail and send it.

Either…
a. Each character on an account must reach level 10 or 15 (I.E.) or they must purchase a Postage Stamp per mail sent.
OR
b. One character reaching level 10 (or 15, etc.) means mail access is unlocked and unlimited for all characters on that account, meaning no more postage stamps.

Anyway, so that’s my idea! ANet’s been doing an excellent job of keeping gold spam nearly non-existent (at least from what I’ve seen), and it appears that most gold ads come in the form of mail now. Maybe this will be a good work-around?

Thoughts? Addons? Improvements? Post away!

Yet another thread thinking they have the solution to the gold-spam, but in the end would accomplish nothing but hassle for new players, and barely if any inconvenience to the actually gold-spammers. Really any good spammer account is lvl 10-15 in a few hours if not less

Wouldn’t work since almost all spam is done with hacked accounts (ergo with a lvl80 on it).

The best thing you can do to prevent spam, is not getting hacked. Make sure your pc is virus free. Have a unique, long password with authentication and protect your mail account with the same level of scrutiny.

marnick.4305:

Wouldn’t work since almost all spam is done with hacked accounts (ergo with a lvl80 on it).

The best thing you can do to prevent spam, is not getting hacked. Make sure your pc is virus free. Have a unique, long password with authentication and protect your mail account with the same level of scrutiny.

That doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.He’s talking about Ingame mail,so your account being secure or not does not include or exclude you from being the target of these Ingame mails.

Best thing to do,keep on reporting for now.Those hacked accounts they use,are accounts they have to Buy first…from hackers.So its costing these people a lot of money when they actually do get caught and multiple accounts all linked to the same will get closed down and they have to buy new acounts.

I think the stamp things is a nice idea,but in reality i dont think it’s gonna change anything,since they can path their bots automatically to the vendors.

Caedmon.6798:

marnick.4305:

Wouldn’t work since almost all spam is done with hacked accounts (ergo with a lvl80 on it).

The best thing you can do to prevent spam, is not getting hacked. Make sure your pc is virus free. Have a unique, long password with authentication and protect your mail account with the same level of scrutiny.

That doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.He’s talking about Ingame mail,so your account being secure or not does not include or exclude you from being the target of these Ingame mails.

Not quite. One of the best things Arena.net has done to combat bots, is forcing people to have a unique password and encouraging two-factor authentication. By making the playerbase more secure, the amount of botting and spam drops considerably.

It is a bit like the way herd immunity works for vaccination.