Getting these through Chat?
Looks like someone messed up a character maybe so it didn’t turn up the right way.
Just looks like they pasted formatted text (like from a word program) and the game’s engine displayed the formatting raw.
^ Uses Guild Wars 2 character screenshots for desktop wallpapers.
But why would it come up on my end of the screen? (Such as the Black Lion Trading Post)
That exact text came up in very small letters on the actual window!
That’s code for a web page. You can see the <html>, and <head> tags, among others, which are HTML, while the body{…}, h1{…}, etc. bits inside the <style> tag are CSS statements used to control font formatting.
Of course, you can’t use HTML/CSS in chat, so you end up seeing all that junk (which is usually hidden on a web page) and they run out of characters before they even get to the page content, which they probably intended for you to see. I’m going to guess it’s gold selling, but completely incompetent gold selling.
Probably just a copy-paste job of an existing advertisement, if I had to guess, with no thought for whether it would make any sense in GW2.
I don’t suppose you have a screenshot of it showing up in the BLTP window? That sounds more unusual. The Trading Post window is actually a sort of website embedded into the game using the Awesomium HTML UI engine, which is part of why it sometimes updates or behaves strangely. It’s likely the text showing up in the Trading Post window was the result of an error or bug. Did it have the <title> tag with the Chinese characters in it, like the whispered message did?
~The Storyteller – Elementalist – Jade Quarry~
No I was unable to take a screenshot (I closed it after I noticed it embedded and panicked).
It only had said “Verdana” in small black print with a few other lines on the Black Lion trading post window