Guild Wars 2

One of my gripes about this game is how hard it is to make money. To make money you really have to use the trading post which I don’t want to do in part because the markets are distorted by bots and gold sellers.

There are probably a lot of people who don’t know buying gold from third parties is wrong. As far as I can tell the only way for someone to know it is wrong is by reading the ToS and who does that? Not too many I imagine.

So, assuming ANet is actually closing\banning accounts of people who are selling gold, I suggest that ANet make the consequences of buying gold from third parties more “in your face”. I suggest making some messaging changes such that it would be nearly impossible to not know buying gold from third parties is wrong and will get your account permanently banned.

If fewer and fewer people buy gold from third parties, the gold buying market will become less and less profitable and, hopefully, bots and gold sellers will all but disappear. This assumes that ANet is vigilant at banning the accounts of gold sellers as this can only work if the $60 cost of a new install significantly cuts into their expected profit margin.

So I suggest adding a message to the login screen that says something like:

Buying gold from third parties is an account bannable offense.

Number of accounts banned for buying gold this week: X
Number of accounts banned for buying gold last month: Y
etc…

Don’t buy gold from third parties.

I agree entirely, while most players will not buy from third-party sites, you have to brandish punishment to keep the other, slimy folk down.

Frankly, I think to go with that, there should be no warning. Poof, suddenly you are banned for X amount of days, anything from a week to three months depending on how much you bought. If you do it again, you are banned permanently.

It goes without saying that Anet should be incredibly precise about this. I’ve heard horror stories of people on steam being VAC-banned for hacking when it has been proven that they had never done anything.

I just want to point out that Blizzard, with all its resources and attempts to tell people gold sellers are bad, has not stamped out this problem. I don’t think its as easy as telling people its bad. Some people just really want gold and are going to pay cut rate prices for it, despite the implications.

Governments and Health Boards do that with Alcohol, Smoking and Drug statistics, but people still do it. And that’s to do with their health.

No matter how many times people do it, get banned, get warned, there’s always that voice in people’s heads that’ll say ’It’ll never happen to me’.

Why not just make it so you can’t send Gold and Items through mail? Come up with another system: Face-to-face exchange where items traded are of equal value, or something.

The people who want to or do buy will gold will do it regardless, they want the gold their willing to pay for it which means their also willing to risk getting caught from it. Banning people permantly outright for buying gold is probably not a good idea and flaunting how many accounts/people they’ve banned seems dickish. Banning the accounts that have bots farming gold would help slow the gold selling but you can never get rid of gold buying/selling completely because they will most likely buy another guild wars 2 account.

Now I know zero about programming but I would have thought it not impossible or even that challenging to have the game flag a players account for unusual appearences of gold.
When players buy gold I presume they don’t buy 5 gold or 3 or 27 silver they buy a largish set amount.
Checking the gold sellers websites would presumably show how they are selling the gold.
So when that exact amount suddenly appears in a players account its pretty certain he bought gold.
There is no way it could appear there from playing the game and if it came about through the trading post then again it would be seen.

That leaves 2 options bought from a gold seller therefore banned permanently.
Bought off another player using some none approved game transfer ie the mail system.
If the player claims this is how it was done he must prove it and identify the person he bought it off, otherwise again they are banned.

Blob: I see nothing wrong with banning every player that buys any gold however small.
Gold selling is bad for the game and should be stopped.
Its also evident that gold sellers in a country outside the reach of the company means they cannot stop the bots.
So you remove the customers, from the game as fast as you possibly can.
100% of perma banned players cannot reoffend.

One thing CCP does to buyers in Eve Online is to remove the bought currency. When the currency has been used to purchase something, this leaves the buyer with a negative wallet balance. Since they can’t afford the listing fee, they are locked out of the market (the same thing would happen in GW2).
So they come whining to the forum about a “mysterious” negative wallet balance. Which means that they just outed themselves as a gold buyer and letting everyone know how CCP punishes them. All without CCP having to violate their privacy policies.

So I propose that ANET copies this method for first offenses. Remove entire value of bought coin. Remove the items that were bought with this coin.
If that doesn’t work, keep repeating it with an increasing ban length. Say 1 week for the second offense, double that for each subsequent offense. The reason I’m suggesting temp bans is so the buyers remain in-game to warn other players of what will happen. Thus deterring them.
The increasing ban length is for those that don’t get the message.

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

One thing CCP does to buyers in Eve Online is to remove the bought currency. When the currency has been used to purchase something, this leaves the buyer with a negative wallet balance. Since they can’t afford the listing fee, they are locked out of the market (the same thing would happen in GW2).
So they come whining to the forum about a “mysterious” negative wallet balance. Which means that they just outed themselves as a gold buyer and letting everyone know how CCP punishes them. All without CCP having to violate their privacy policies.

So I propose that ANET copies this method for first offenses. Remove entire value of bought coin. Remove the items that were bought with this coin.
If that doesn’t work, keep repeating it with an increasing ban length. Say 1 week for the second offense, double that for each subsequent offense. The reason I’m suggesting temp bans is so the buyers remain in-game to warn other players of what will happen. Thus deterring them.
The increasing ban length is for those that don’t get the message.

I support this 100%

Ugg, I hate to admit it. And trust me on this I REALLY do. But Runescape was going in a fairly good direction when they limited the amount of gold that is tradeable or dropable. Depending on level and other such.

How this can be implemented into a full scale MMo is where the tough part is introduced.

On the one hand, just do it the ANet way. And set it to a max of 1 – 10 gold a month that can be traded to others players. This is also known as the way that obviously doesn’t work, and will just piss everyone off.

Or, regulate the amount of gold introduced into the game at any given time. Meaning Cash drops would be significantly decreased if there is a lot of gold in the game. Or tax players that have a certain amount. Again, this isn’t the best idea. But it can be close to the answer.

Or (probably the best one) introduce a system that tallies up individual players gold increase. See how much they earn in how much time. Those that are buying gold will easily be caught as the spike in having 1 copper to 10000 gold is easily seen. Or (again) have a limit to how much money can be earned in any given month. Additional money is transferred to Karma or Gems ( at triple market price).

So many options that doesn’t include banning, that still hinders sellers/buyers, and won’t piss off those that are innocent too much.

One thing CCP does to buyers in Eve Online is to remove the bought currency. When the currency has been used to purchase something, this leaves the buyer with a negative wallet balance. Since they can’t afford the listing fee, they are locked out of the market (the same thing would happen in GW2).
So they come whining to the forum about a “mysterious” negative wallet balance. Which means that they just outed themselves as a gold buyer and letting everyone know how CCP punishes them. All without CCP having to violate their privacy policies.
So I propose that ANET copies this method for first offenses. Remove entire value of bought coin. Remove the items that were bought with this coin.
If that doesn’t work, keep repeating it with an increasing ban length. Say 1 week for the second offense, double that for each subsequent offense. The reason I’m suggesting temp bans is so the buyers remain in-game to warn other players of what will happen. Thus deterring them.
The increasing ban length is for those that don’t get the message.

I also support this 100%.

buying gold from gold sellers warrant a permanent suspension.
no warnings.