Guild Wars 2

Seriusly anet, all the gold sellers have the same achievement points and you cannot block those guys???? There is someone work on it? because if it is, this “someone” is doing a bad job, relocate this “someone” to another job plz.

Att,

Here’s a possibility. Maybe they all have the exact same number of achievement points because they are chars made on new accounts and by the time they get to the Mists the new accounts have earned 17 achievement points.

Second possibility. Maybe they are taken down within a day of gold sell chat spamming (block one and then check to see how long it stays active. A day is the usual max) and then because they are making new accounts using stolen credit cards or cards gained with fake information that they don’t ever pay off, they make another and start over. Which means an unending stream of gold selling accounts from the various gold selling business, all using stolen/fraudulent cards.

Perhaps you know of a way for ANet to detect stolen cards or cards gained with fake information. If you do, you should message them with this information.

Hell, if you know of a way to pre-emptively detect stolen cards or cards gained with fake information, don’t even bother with ANet; go talk to the credit card companies.

yeah, the problem is the stolen credit cards. Lets fix this then we don’t have to deal with the ingame problem.

AWESOME DUDE.

+1 for you

Mixistrike.7840:

yeah, the problem is the stolen credit cards. Lets fix this then we don’t have to deal with the ingame problem.

AWESOME DUDE.

+1 for you

Considering that gold sellers are a problem with every mmo there has ever been and no one has been able to think of a way to stop them, as they can turn around and make a new account seconds after a ban, maybe it’s not so easy as you think. I expect thousands of Devs have thought about the best way to stop gold sellers and failed, and the current way is the best they’ve come up with.

However it seems you have figured it out. Why don’t you lay out your plan. The mmo world is waiting to hear from you.

Mixistrike.7840:

yeah, the problem is the stolen credit cards. Lets fix this then we don’t have to deal with the ingame problem.

AWESOME DUDE.

+1 for you

So we should just block people with 17 achievement points from the game. Great idea!

Mixistrike.7840:

Seriusly anet, all the gold sellers have the same achievement points and you cannot block those guys???? There is someone work on it? because if it is, this “someone” is doing a bad job, relocate this “someone” to another job plz.

Att,

• Not everyone with that exact number of AP is going to be a gold seller.
• It’s not always ‘best’ to ban gold sellers immediately. By allowing suspect accounts to operate longer, ANet can gain additional information about their network, usage patterns, etc and thus be able to have a greater impact on the issue.
• Even if they were banned quickly, gold sellers have tons of ‘smurf’ accounts, so more would replace those banned. The net impact to the average player would be little.

Thus, if the goal is to reduce to the absolute theoretical minimum the impact that gold selling has on ‘honest’ players, it makes little sense to devote extra resources to going after the spam advertising accounts.

tl;dr The existence of gold selling spam is a poor metric for determining the effectiveness of ANet’s anti-RMT task force.

Suggestion – Anytime "someone’ sends a whisper or announcement that has certain key words in it, like “So much gold for $” since most messages have a similar delivery, immediately after you get such a message, Anet sends a auto message as well warning that the message you just received could likely be from a suspect account.

This way, every honest player in the game, especially those who could be duped by said gold sellers, gets a warning message that pops up in their chat box directly below the message they received from the spam account.

This doesn’t ban anyone, it just gives every single person a heads up that what they just got is likely a spam message… and maybe even Anet’s message could add a link for you to fill out a form with the name of the person/bot who sent the message, the time day and so on… so Anet can research the issue more.

This way all those fake/spam accounts not only get tracked and banned but no one will take them up on their offers to begin with and with no way to succeed many will eventually stop trying.

I rather like that idea, except for the double-your-spam effect. The problem, though, is that (as I understand it) once certain text strings start triggering anti-goldspam action, the sellers modify their messages so as not to trigger it, making game security folks have to constantly fiddle with it. If you make the trigger sufficiently broad, innocent messages get caught too … I’m pretty sure lots of legit chatter includes the abbreviation for player versus player along with a mention of the place where you store your materials.

There’s no end all be all fix to this issue, so I know it may not be the best absolute solution, but one that doesn’t trigger false bans or the like. Perhaps it will spark an idea that actually works best down the road.

Or, another idea: When ever a player logs into the game, a pop up appears (similar to the hints early on in the game) with a message about Gold Sellers and tips on what the usual messages will look like and not to purchase Gold from unknown sources. Every single player will see this message and then they can click on “Don’t show this again” but now, those who may have been duped have been given a heads up.

Cause not everyone comes to the forums but anyone who plays the game will have been given the heads up and once they dismiss the message, they carry on normally.

How about…….

When they log on each time the music stops and then a big message flashes across the screen that says, “If you buy gold from gold sellers we will confiscate the gold and ban your account! Have a nice day”. (Music resumes).

That should do it.

I still think the problem is the stolen credit cards, so lets focus on this guys.

I’d like an optional private message whitelist.

Are you in my friends list? My guild? My list of OK-to-pm-me-accounts? If not, then incoming private messages are automatically blocked.

^ I actually do like that idea. Sending a private message to anyone who doesn’t have you on their Friends list/whitelist COSTS you money.

Mixistrike.7840:

Seriusly anet, all the gold sellers have the same achievement points and you cannot block those guys???? There is someone work on it? because if it is, this “someone” is doing a bad job, relocate this “someone” to another job plz.

Att,

And you’re solution is? or you just think you have all this figured out and ?

Personally, I think your assumption that Anet does not take GREAT efforts to stop gold selling is extremely naive, considering a significant portion, if not ALL their revenues are made by selling gems.

Chamelion.9536:

Suggestion – Anytime "someone’ sends a whisper or announcement that has certain key words in it, like “So much gold for $” since most messages have a similar delivery, immediately after you get such a message, Anet sends a auto message as well warning that the message you just received could likely be from a suspect account.

This way, every honest player in the game, especially those who could be duped by said gold sellers, gets a warning message that pops up in their chat box directly below the message they received from the spam account.

This doesn’t ban anyone, it just gives every single person a heads up that what they just got is likely a spam message… and maybe even Anet’s message could add a link for you to fill out a form with the name of the person/bot who sent the message, the time day and so on… so Anet can research the issue more.

This way all those fake/spam accounts not only get tracked and banned but no one will take them up on their offers to begin with and with no way to succeed many will eventually stop trying.

And people would receive a warning about an innocent player. If a player sent a whisper to a friend asking if somesite.com is legit or they should stay away from it, their friend would get a warning making them think their friend’s account was compromised.

Automated systems never work. Another MMO I play tried auto-bans for anyone posting a gold seller website. Any account posting such a message in the chat, or sending mail to another player, would be automatically banned. What happened was players who were merely warning their friends and/or guild members got banned when they did nothing wrong. The devs looked into the matter and did in fact find some innocent players got caught up in the system.

The general consensus on how to get rid of gold sellers is basically for people to stop buying from them. As long as their business is profitable they’ll keep spamming.

Yes, but no one ever questions why people buy gold.
You will never see any complaints on any MMO about gold buyers, only gold sellers.
Both are equally responsible.
How many gold buyers do you think are in GW2.
Are there any in your guild.

Mixistrike.7840:

Seriusly anet, all the gold sellers have the same achievement points and you cannot block those guys???? There is someone work on it? because if it is, this “someone” is doing a bad job, relocate this “someone” to another job plz.

Att,

If I recall newly created accounts start with 17 AP, they don’t start with zero because they get some points that are no longer available in the game anymore. That’s why gold sellers have the same amount of AP, so in other words you want to ban all new accounts?

Best way to stop gold sellers is not to buy gold from them so inestead of complaining about Anet doing a bad job, how about helping them to report gold sellers (and buyers) and don’t think about the sellers messages anymore?

If no one buys gold from them, then there will be no profit to sell gold and thus Gold sellers will stop. Simple.

Chamelion.9536:

Suggestion – Anytime "someone’ sends a whisper or announcement that has certain key words in it, like “So much gold for $” since most messages have a similar delivery, immediately after you get such a message, Anet sends a auto message as well warning that the message you just received could likely be from a suspect account.

This way, every honest player in the game, especially those who could be duped by said gold sellers, gets a warning message that pops up in their chat box directly below the message they received from the spam account.

This doesn’t ban anyone, it just gives every single person a heads up that what they just got is likely a spam message… and maybe even Anet’s message could add a link for you to fill out a form with the name of the person/bot who sent the message, the time day and so on… so Anet can research the issue more.

This way all those fake/spam accounts not only get tracked and banned but no one will take them up on their offers to begin with and with no way to succeed many will eventually stop trying.

They do something similar with mail – there is a note at the bottom of every single mail from another player letting you know it’s from another player and not from Arenanet. They started doing this when scammers (almost certainly linked to gold sellers) were sending out fake ‘your account will be shut down unless you put all your login info into this fake site’ messages.

And the forum was full of people who had read the warning at the bottom still asking if it was real and if they should follow the instructions.

It wouldn’t surprise me at all if there were others who either didn’t bother to read the warning or somehow decided it’d be ‘safer’ to give away their account info just in case it was a bug (because everyone knows everything in this game is full of bugs right?) and the message actually was real.

Your suggestion might stop some people from following it up, but others won’t read it, won’t believe it or quite likely already know all the bad things gold sellers do and that it’s against the EULA to buy from them and still think it’s worth the risk because they imagine they won’t be the one who gets caught.

What really annoys me is that they can still use these 3 times as big letters for their scam site. Atleast that should be easy to detect and stop them for a few days if those messages simply vanish in thin air without notice.

Axarion.3098:

What really annoys me is that they can still use these 3 times as big letters for their scam site. Atleast that should be easy to detect and stop them for a few days if those messages simply vanish in thin air without notice.

They won’t vanish. ANet might block “BUY GOLD FROM AXARION BANK LTD” and then the RMTs would use “Bai Gold from A X A R I O N”. ANet would filter that and the RMTs would try something else.

Meantime, players who use similar conventions for advertising their guild would get hit with false positives and complain about being suppressed for recruiting. Map commanders posting instructions on meta events (especially in Dry Top) would also be hurt by this.

Meantime, the current system already slows down adverts and RMT smurf accounts are banned quickly after folks /report them in-game.

tl;dr filtering systems are also high cost, low gain tactics that would have little overall impact on what we see already

The best way to fight RMT is to discourage anyone you know who buys illicit gold from using their services.

I’m curious, how many have actually bothered you?

I play almost every day and I haven’t seen one since the game went free to play.

Dean Calaway.9718:

I’m curious, how many have actually bothered you?

I play almost every day and I haven’t seen one since the game went free to play.

Right now they seems to be haunting the PvP lobby. Go in there and stand around awhile and the likelihood of getting a gold selling whisper is high. I rarely if ever get whispered anywhere else.

The Heart of the Mists and Rata Sum are the only places I’ve seen them in a long time (on EU servers). And even then I usually have to hang around a while before they target me.

(I’ve never bothered blocking gold sellers either, I prefer to be able to report them every time they spam.)

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Mixistrike.7840:

yeah, the problem is the stolen credit cards. Lets fix this then we don’t have to deal with the ingame problem.

AWESOME DUDE.

+1 for you

Considering that gold sellers are a problem with every mmo there has ever been and no one has been able to think of a way to stop them, as they can turn around and make a new account seconds after a ban, maybe it’s not so easy as you think. I expect thousands of Devs have thought about the best way to stop gold sellers and failed, and the current way is the best they’ve come up with.

However it seems you have figured it out. Why don’t you lay out your plan. The mmo world is waiting to hear from you.

edit uout

one way to eliminate gold spam would be to do away with trade/mail all together. Make crafting more viable resources in world more abundant and let the player create their own gear and gather their own resources. With no way to send or receive items from other players gold sellers would have no way of exchanging money between players. The auction house effect would still be available as it does not require any form of direct player to player exchanges.
I’m not saying its viable or feasible as most MMOs social elements revolve around the idea of mail, but it is a solution that would work in context of gold sellers.

malachi.7503:

one way to eliminate gold spam would be to do away with trade/mail all together. Make crafting more viable resources in world more abundant and let the player create their own gear and gather their own resources. With no way to send or receive items from other players gold sellers would have no way of exchanging money between players. The auction house effect would still be available as it does not require any form of direct player to player exchanges.
I’m not saying its viable or feasible as most MMOs social elements revolve around the idea of mail, but it is a solution that would work in context of gold sellers.

You would need to eliminate gold and item exchanges through the guild bank also. Guilds would not be able to help new members or put freebies in there for anyone to use. It would also mean that guilds can’t hold raffles where they collect gold then give away a precursor to a winner or that husband, wives, friends can’t help each other. People couldn’t donate to gold to help someone get a commander tag or pool resources for various projects.

I’d have to think that the cure is worse than the disease.

Someone mentioned that gold buyers are as much or more to blame then sellers. So, target them. Make that mail filter that secretly flags an account when it recieves a message containing gold seller keywords. Then, if they recieve mail later containing gold, it sends information on both accounts to an anet investigator. This person then reviews the message sent between the accounts, looking for any reason for this gift of gold other then gold selling, and if it’s determined to be a gold seller transaction, it results in a ban for both the seller and the buyer.

Taigen Raine.8752:

Someone mentioned that gold buyers are as much or more to blame then sellers. So, target them. Make that mail filter that secretly flags an account when it recieves a message containing gold seller keywords. Then, if they recieve mail later containing gold, it sends information on both accounts to an anet investigator. This person then reviews the message sent between the accounts, looking for any reason for this gift of gold other then gold selling, and if it’s determined to be a gold seller transaction, it results in a ban for both the seller and the buyer.

They already are monitoring gold movement across accounts and will go in to an account that received RMT gold and remove it as well as banning the gold seller.

I doubt very many people do it twice.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Here’s a possibility. Maybe they all have the exact same number of achievement points because they are chars made on new accounts and by the time they get to the Mists the new accounts have earned 17 achievement points.

Second possibility. Maybe they are taken down within a day of gold sell chat spamming (block one and then check to see how long it stays active. A day is the usual max) and then because they are making new accounts using stolen credit cards or cards gained with fake information that they don’t ever pay off, they make another and start over. Which means an unending stream of gold selling accounts from the various gold selling business, all using stolen/fraudulent cards.

Perhaps you know of a way for Anet to detect stolen cards or cards gained with fake information. If you do, you should message them with this information.

Yeah…it’s called black-list the card used to make the account THEN go back and delete every account associated with whatever card info Anet has on file. Obviously not he entire card number or cvv code.

Think of it Like ArenaNets personal TMF or MATCH File.
A black list of cards that can’t be used to make purchases at least directly from the site.

They (person) will run out of cards faster than they acquire new ones AND if they were wise enough to buy the fake account(s) and their real account with the same card…well.

Oh they’ll just go out and get empty debit cards and what not.
Say hello to the beginning of diminishing returns.

Also…they could not sell the game from other outlets….Promote your own sales on your own site. Now there’s an idea. Saywhatabouttheforumshmm?

That way…you will definitely limit the chance of of them buying 200 copies from Amazon and just wasting account after account. If they bought 200 copies with the same frickin card and repeat offenses occur regularly. There is assurance. Kill all the accounts why wait until they are made and in game?

Stupid customers wife: “Oh but my husband did the gold selling, don’t punish our kids.”

Anet: We didn’t, you did.

Anet can’t determine fraudulent activity on a credit card but they sure as hell could stop obnoxious problems in game that are connected to them. It’s income in the end really which is why I suspect it goes on and on.