Guild Wars 2

I used to get a whisp from the odd gold seller like once a month or so. I would report, block, and move on. Nowadays, I get whisps from obviously temporary accounts (weird random usernames) like every day, always advertising the same gold selling website (do not wish to advertise them so I won’t say the address). I actually got two whisps about the same site in the space of 20 minutes. I always report these but it seems I’m getting spammed more and more.

Would some policy that you can’t whisp people not on your friends list if your account is less than 10 days old be possible? Something to help cut down on this, it’s getting annoying.

I have been getting the same thing, but I am afraid reporting and blocking wont because most of these whispers are indeed coming from temporary accounts, and also most likely bots.

I’ve talked to a few friends about this and they’ve all noted a sharp increase in whisps from gold sellers. I know a few friends isn’t exactly a big sample size, but it is a bit concerning. Spammers are annoying.

I’ve noticed that they’re spamming in Lion’s Arch frequently.
In addition to this I’m about 1-2 whispers a day.

A solution could be to have a system that suppresses whispers if they contain certain words and let the users setup whatever words they want included. Or explicitly suppress whispers that contain the website name that they include (that we’ve all seen spammed to us).

Newman.6847:

Would some policy that you can’t whisp people not on your friends list if your account is less than 10 days old be possible? Something to help cut down on this, it’s getting annoying.

This I support very strongly. Making it so that new accounts can’t whisper people for a set number of days, unless those people have to listed as a friend, would sharply cut down on the number of gold selling bots.
A similar rule of some sort needs to be implemented to fight back against WvW spies. (really when you see an up-level character siting in your map spawn all day, and he has less than 100 achieve points, that’s an obvious sign). And to stop the spies abusing the fact that if they delete all their characters and can then transfer for free to a new server: Make it that if they delete all characters and take the free transfer, they can not enter WvW for a few days.
Sure, this can affect a few legitimate players, but lets be honest, how many honest players would this really affect? I suppose you could turn this restriction off for free trial accounts, have to let those trial people try out WvW and all obviously. But otherwise this would not affect many real players.

They are getting really annoying and more aggressive than ever. Something must be done about it,

Making it so that new accounts can’t whisper people for a set number of days, unless those people have to listed as a friend.

I like your idea of removing the whispering function to new accounts for a couple days, but on the other hand it would be useless because gold sellers would just have to wait a couple days before starting to spam the hell out of everyone.

But there must be something to do as to whether new accounts can whisper someone who’s in each other’s friendlist.

I just got a whisper from one in WvW today o_O how do they even get our names? The cheater was nowhere around in our zerg, so they must have guessed my name – which begs the next question… did they have my name on their list the entire time and waited till I was online to spam me? Kind of freaky.

Edit: I would support a whisper function where only those you have on your contacts/friends list can, well, contact you.

I get multiple a day. All from the same blabla bank with a special surprise. I hope they do not use hacked accounts because all of them go on report to be banned.

aspirine.6852:

I get multiple a day. All from the same blabla bank with a special surprise. I hope they do not use hacked accounts because all of them go on report to be banned.

Considering all the whispers I get are from fnjwenfj or abfawfo I doubt they are hacked accounts and if they are…well they should’ve actually named themselves if they didn’t want us thinking they were bots.

If the game weren’t about grinding and gold, these sellers wouldn’t mean any trouble…

Zaoda.1653:

I just got a whisper from one in WvW today o_O how do they even get our names? The cheater was nowhere around in our zerg, so they must have guessed my name – which begs the next question… did they have my name on their list the entire time and waited till I was online to spam me? Kind of freaky.

Edit: I would support a whisper function where only those you have on your contacts/friends list can, well, contact you.

I suspect they are going to the leaderboards. The account names are there and you can mouse over them to see last time someone got achieve points, which shows active players. If nothing else, they can just go down the leaderboard whispering everyone. They probably have to type in account names, but this way they know account names of people who are likely to be on and haven’t stopped playing.

it’s a shame, anet had gold selling sorted for a long time but now it has come back with a vengeance……. anet must realise now that the community is shrinking it’s more important to stop this erosion before they start loosing people to this problem.

Not a bad idea. 10 days would be plenty to rule out plenty of the whispers. The only time I ever get them is when I join Lion’s Arch which can be for all of 5 minutes or 50 minutes.

let’s do something wild, remove the gold→ gem exchange and see how much gold is worth.
no overpriced items, no gold sellers needed, no spam in your whisp. XD

Astral Projections.7320:

Zaoda.1653:

I just got a whisper from one in WvW today o_O how do they even get our names? The cheater was nowhere around in our zerg, so they must have guessed my name – which begs the next question… did they have my name on their list the entire time and waited till I was online to spam me? Kind of freaky.

Edit: I would support a whisper function where only those you have on your contacts/friends list can, well, contact you.

I suspect they are going to the leaderboards. The account names are there and you can mouse over them to see last time someone got achieve points, which shows active players. If nothing else, they can just go down the leaderboard whispering everyone. They probably have to type in account names, but this way they know account names of people who are likely to be on and haven’t stopped playing.

Ah ok ty, I never knew about the leaderboards :O that would definitely explain in then. Quite weird how our display names can be so public even if one were to never use the GW2 forums :-/ would be cool to have an ‘opt out’ option so you aren’t visible on the leaderboards, because I personally don’t care what rank I am, I just get achievement points for the rewards XD

its been happening to me too and i’ve reported/blocked everyone of them. its more than a little annoying. somehow we end up on a list that we can’t be removed from because I was nowhere near these spammers when i got the whisps. I’m not sure how this can be handled but I have to say its really getting on my nerves.

Problem is, the Gem prices are not adjusted to the inflation.
There is a new value-trend to deal with, and overhelming farmers with more golds isn’t acceptable.

strange, i was wondering why goldsellers still tried, every time i get a whisper from them the website name is 2 dots “.” with lots of empty spaces between them.
thats it, so i thought they had been taken care of. why would they even send whispers if thats all i see. maybe not being able to whisper could be tied to achievement points because all goldsellers have 0 of them.

edit: makes me think, cant they do something about the website thats selling gold instead of having to change their game?

Magische Boek.2530:

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edit: makes me think, cant they do something about the website thats selling gold instead of having to change their game?

It’s chinese, so no they cannot do much about it.

aspirine.6852:

Magische Boek.2530:

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edit: makes me think, cant they do something about the website thats selling gold instead of having to change their game?

It’s chinese, so no they cannot do much about it.

Actually since Anet is an American company they can. They go by the laws of the country the company is located in not the country the other guy is in.

Silvercyclone.1462:

aspirine.6852:

Magische Boek.2530:

s

edit: makes me think, cant they do something about the website thats selling gold instead of having to change their game?

It’s chinese, so no they cannot do much about it.

Actually since Anet is an American company they can. They go by the laws of the country the company is located in not the country the other guy is in.

Believe me, people have ways to keep their websites online, no matter how illegal. Just look at thepiratebay. Not to mention the law is filled with loopholes.

I’ve been getting a lot of those whispers lately also. The only problem with limiting whispering by account age is that is unfriendly to new players. I’d rather they block whispers in low age accounts that contain key words or phrases like “buy, gold” and others key words.

Besides, if you limit the whispering they will just go back to mail and map chat usage.

Whatever solution occurs, I want it to be new, legitimate player friendly.

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

Silvercyclone.1462:

aspirine.6852:

Magische Boek.2530:

s

edit: makes me think, cant they do something about the website thats selling gold instead of having to change their game?

It’s chinese, so no they cannot do much about it.

Actually since Anet is an American company they can. They go by the laws of the country the company is located in not the country the other guy is in.

Believe me, people have ways to keep their websites online, no matter how illegal. Just look at thepiratebay. Not to mention the law is filled with loopholes.

the piratebay is blocked in holland and belgium, we need proxy servers to loop to the website and they are closed all the time.

they can do the same thing with gold sellers, forbid them everywhere and eventually no one can visit their website.

Those of us who actually know anything about economics knew this was going to happen from the get-go. There are so many gold sellers, because it works better in this game than any other, never seen gold selling as bad in any other game as this one. Why?

The gems to gold conversion, made to combat gold selling in the first place. How a supposedly professional economists could be ignorant enough to think that would work, I will never know. But in reality all it did was give gold real world value, something it doesn’t have in most games, and which kept most gamers from ever participating in the gold selling market in the first place. But now that it has a real world sticker value, it’s just a matter of price, and ANet will never be able to compete with the gold sellers in a pricing war.

And for those suggesting that ANet block all gold-selling sites. For one, they can just shut the sites down and make more under different IPs at almost no cost, these sites are just tiny billing platforms, not giant sites with huge data servers like the pirate bay. Secondly, it takes an act of congress for a nationwide IP block, Anet doesn’t have the pull for that.

they should stop this on the roots

ban the players who buy gold and even sue them

when noone buy gold than noone will sell gold

I doubt the bots are actually getting banned , nobody would spend 1800$ worth of games just to advertise…

yeah i get at least 2 whispers a day. my blocklist is increasing daily and its very annoying.

sorudo.9054:

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

Silvercyclone.1462:

aspirine.6852:

Magische Boek.2530:

s

edit: makes me think, cant they do something about the website thats selling gold instead of having to change their game?

It’s chinese, so no they cannot do much about it.

Actually since Anet is an American company they can. They go by the laws of the country the company is located in not the country the other guy is in.

Believe me, people have ways to keep their websites online, no matter how illegal. Just look at thepiratebay. Not to mention the law is filled with loopholes.

the piratebay is blocked in holland and belgium, we need proxy servers to loop to the website and they are closed all the time.

they can do the same thing with gold sellers, forbid them everywhere and eventually no one can visit their website.

I’m dutch and there are plenty of websites that give multiple means to evade this block and they always work, what are you on about?

This “block” is a joke.