Guild Wars 2

I would have thought Prohibition was a poor analogy because alcohol is a staple of humanity, from at least as far back as the Neolithic Era. For most of history, it was certainly safer to store and drink alcoholic beverages than water – that’s actually the history of some of those 2% alcohol beers. Comparatively, most of us don’t need to buy Gold, we earn our own by playing the game.

Further, a majority opposed the ban (which was only put through due to pressure exerted by religious fanatics), and bootleggers were rather romanticized. Here, there would be little opposition from the majority, and most hate gold farmers and bots with a passion.

Perhaps most pertinently, Prohibition only banned the sale and manufacture of alcohol, not the consumption of alcohol. In essence, it’s already happening – gold farming and selling is not allowed. The analogy is deeply flawed, given that the Vendetta’s proposal is about outlawing the purchase of gold.

Half the time, the way it works is that the gold seller gets someone willing to buy, takes their money and their account info (because the buyer is easily duped, I guess), and then steals that account and uses it to keep the cycle going. In a way, buyers do get banned – when they get turned into sellers.

Blizzard famously said they’d never ban a gold buyer. And WoW players are rather unabashed about buying it.

GW2 and ANet has been conspicuously mum on ever saying they’ll ever ban gold buyers. Check all the other sites, no one is talking about being banned for buying. Lots of talk about getting hacked. A little talk about bans for botting.

The gold spammers in game aren’t really a driving force. I’m betting everyone who plays GW2 can google.

That you can buy from gold sellers with impunity is a big part of the problem.

I agree that gold buying cheating scumbags are the problem.

I’ve been saying the same thing for years.

It’s basic supply and demand.

Kill demand, and the suppliers go away. As long as there is demand, someone will figure out a way to supply and profit.

Simply put, all gold buying/acct/toon buying cheating losers should have their accounts deleted and their credit cards perma banned.

Period.

On top of that, ANet should publish numbers on the launcher regularly so that people get the message. If you saw “we closed the accounts of 1000 players who bought 3rd party gold today” when you logged in, you might think twice about cheating.

People cheat because they’re lazy and worthless pieces of human trash. And because they can get away with it. There’s a mindset amongst morons that suggests that it’s ok to steal or cheat if you don’t get caught or punished.

Gold buyers should be banned immediately and permanently.

Doesn’t matter if you’ve bought 1g or 100,000,000g. instant perma ban.
There simply is NO valid excuse for buying gold..

Voqar.2349:

I agree that gold buying cheating scumbags are the problem.

It really doesn’t have to be a moral argument, and not everyone shares those particular beliefs.

I had a grad student from China who was avid gamer, and his belief in hacks/bots/cheats was very similar to how I view a nice mouse or fast computer. It’s not “cheating” to some — it’s just how you play the game.

Put that into GW2 where you are allowed officially to buy gold via gem store. There’s nothing “cheating” about buying your way to exotics with real money. It’s part of the game.

The part that’s against the game ethic is the RMT, the bots. The part that hurts the game is the inability of ANet to stop the bots and the rest of us suffering the effects of the RMT industry (whether it’s via spamming annoyance, living with the bots, suffering the anti-farm code and related bugs…)

Well, there is always a market that will buy gold. The problem is: As long as it’s cheaper to buy gold from a third party as opposed to gems, people will opt to do that. At present, a cursory google search reveals that you get almost six times as much bang for your buck if you go through a RMT site.

Further, it is very dangerous to ban someone utterly for buying gold. For instance, somebody could easily get rid of someone they didn’t like in game by “generously” making a small purchase of gold for them.

@GaileGray: Most users, both on these forums and off – aren’t under the impression that they can be banned for illegally purchasing gold. Additionally, in the metrics ANet provides us of exploiters banned, gold sellers banned, bots banned – we don’t ever hear about the gold buyers being banned. They need to be made a public shame as much as the rest of the bottom feeders. A PSA on the forums simply isn’t enough (in addition to TOS too of course).

The Gem→ Gold marketplace is what is at fault here.

Because it is not a straight up trade, it is not subject to supply and demand.

If I $cash buy gems, and swap for gold. The Gold is “created” at the point I purchase it.
If I trade in-game currency for Gems, the Gems are “created” when I purchase them.

While this provides liquidity, it does not reflect the true value of these goods.

Let freemarket take hold, and the price of gems, gold and cash bought gold will all equalize.

ALL gold buyers, should be instantly banned an accounts deleted, it is the only way to deal with them effectivly other than what CCP does.
Gold buyers are generally young ignorant an demanding. They do not respond to warnings, an will laugh in your face of you tel them"naughty boy"…

Instant bans deletion of account.

Only other way I have ever sene in over 10 years is how CCP does it (EVE Online)
They take all the cash you buy (isk), then you get a 2 week ban, PLUS on top of that, they debit your account same amount of cash that you bought. SO in end you cant buy an sell on markets,
you cant repair your ships
you cant buy ammo or mods
you cant trade on contracts
you cant replace your ship if lost

All you can do is grind rats (npc’s) for piddling amounts of cash 10-15k

So if you buy 5 billion isk, they take that 5 billion, an also give you a negative 5 billion.
This means your effectively screwed.

At end of the day gold buyers/sellers are the bottom of the gene pool. They are little less than animals an deserve nothing but complete contempt. It is just a shame Anet dont let us kill bots because I know I would be hosting “Kill a bot day” an give away prizes for most bots killed in imaginative ways. It worked in daoc an it worked in wow (until I was banned for being mean to botters.) lol
(oh the Irony)

I have never seen a game that was able to stop the gold sellers completely.. Does anyone know of a game that has accomplished this feat? I mean honestly, there is so much money in it to be had that if you delete an account, they just buy a new one.

Lowering the cost of gold, in the Gem Store might help though.. right now as it is.. either way, it is just not worth it for me to buy gold.

doing something about the dozens of bots in every single zone would probably be a good start to stopping the gold sellers.

VendettaDFA.9368:

If you can identify and ban gold-sellers and botters then you have the capability to follow the electronic paper trail generated by the illegal tranactions and ban the gold buyers accounts as well.

This gets pretty sticky pretty quickly unfortunately. Most of the smart sellers will deliberately obfuscate the trail of money so it’s not coming from one account. They’ll use tricks like putting money into the the trading post or trading it through hacked accounts. The trail becomes not so clear at that point and becomes hard to tell who was actually involved in the transaction.

ANet has to find a way to out compete gold farmers I think. If you think about any market, the people who offer the best product for the best price usually gets the business. The only reason folks are probably purchasing gold from these folks is because its cheaper than what is already available.

Look.. Anet has the upper hand, they can ban gold sellers, and outprice them if they want to..

Look.. Anet has the upper hand, they can ban gold sellers, and outprice them if they want to..between bannings and being undersold they will go away to a more lucrative market.. its not hard.

Look.. Anet has the upper hand, they can ban gold sellers, and outprice them if they want to..between bannings and being undersold they will go away to a more lucrative market.. its not hard.its just business… Don’t kittenfoot around it, Ban Sellers and sell for a few pennies cheaper than they do.. they will simply go away beause they wont be able to match Anets prices while at the same time having to buy new accounts all the time.

Weird, i never copy pasted that…

two ways to help eliminate botters
1.all over this very forum it is said that GW2 devs play the game, come on you mean to tell me a dev playing their own game cant spot a bot,fire him if he does not eliminate bots or cant spot one
2.give us a GM power to one shot perma death bots we see

I see alot of people crying that Gems → Gold should be much more profitable to compete with gold sellers. This is a straight up bad idea. The gem store is so integrated into gameplay that it’s almost necessary to purchase from it. And items like portable repair kits I’m sure will become absolutely necessary to play in areas to come, the hardcore difficulty stuff like UW or DoA that anet is known for. If these things start costing on the order of several gold each then GW2 becomes nothing more than any other korean F2P pay to win mmo.

It’s pretty clear with the conversion tariffs that anet doesn’t want players converting real world money into in game wealth and power. If that’s what YOU want to do, then I’d suggest playing one of those pay to win mmos.

The solution to the gold sellers and bots? Ban them before they profit. (period)

its never going to be pay to win. Anet stated that.. so there will be no problem with lowering the cost of gem to gold purchases. simply put they can do whatever they want, and there are some really easy ways to muscle out the competition.

question is.. does anet want to win the war or do they want to let gold selling happen.

I agree with the OP. In real world, you can’t stop prostitution if you only punish the prostitutes. You have to punish the customers, which is the real source. Demand is the source, supply ceases if there is no demand.

Instead of direct banning, you can also impose some sort of penalty to the buyer that if he/she buys from gold-seller, it will end up costing him/her much more from buying from the BLTC. Such as tax. Apparently most of the transactions come from mails. They simply pay with multiple mails, each with small amounts of attachment.

(1) Add a limit to number of payment-attached mails you can receive. When you exceed that amount, you need to pay 100% tax for each attachment. Which means you need to pay 2g to transfer 1g.

(2) Add a 100% tax to every mail which includes any amount more than say, 50s. Or just sum up the total amount of mail-attached gold an account can receive, then add 50% deduction tax for everything that exceeds that amount through mail.

(3) How to prevent huge amount transaction using TP. Gold sellers can ask their customers to put something rare but worthless on TP with an extremely high price, such as something that no one would ever bother to put on TP to be the unique item on the list, then the gold seller buys it with a level 1 character. To stop this, simply put a limit on the level of the character able to buy something expensive. For example, you need a level 10 character to buy something worth 1g or more, then level 20 to buy something worth 2g or so. It will take a lot of trouble to sell gold, especially in many cases that the gold-seller is merely a broker.

Hologramx: really? you know that it is against the law to pick up a prostitute and you will get in trouble with the law if you are caught.. you do know this right????

this happens every day, and prostitution still happens around the globe.

there is no way to Stop Gold Selling.. you have to Cull the hell out of it by doing business. right now no one wants to do business with Anet because it is too expensive.

Hey we got a red name to post.

Hey look, STILL not even a threat to ban gold-buyers.

/sigh

You think botters are the only source for gold sellers these days? Think again selling gold from individuals or even guild banks is huge almost to the point where resellers dont even need bots anymore.

What if the gem store had a way to convert gems back into real money.
This would raise the amount of gold you get for gems by a large amount. Converting from gold to gems then to real money would remove gold from the game reducing inflation. Lots of real people as opposed to bots would start to farm gold to make money. These people would report bots at a high rate making it easier to find bots to ban. ArenaNet would still make money because gems would convert to cash at a lower rate then they can be purchased for.

Gold buyers have been banned in GW1.

Once I traded a good amount of in-game money with my wife. The next day her account got permanently banned for gold selling and I got a 3-day ban for buying.

We were playing from China and this misunderstanding got resolved pretty quickly but it was interesting to verify that they were actively detecting and pursuing suspicious transactions, and buyers were also getting punished. I’d imagine the same will happen in GW2.

do you understand how gold selling works? They use the hijacked accounts of normal players in addition to hundreds of other accounts that they have networked. When an account is hacked they don’t just take it over and play for the lulz. They sell all the gear and incorporate it into their network.

It’s virtually impossible to track every account. I don’t think that you guys realize how large of an operation it is. Banning an account does nothing, it’s like a hydra, 2 more come up in it’s place. Would it be fair for John Doe who had his account stolen by a gold seller to have his account perma banned? You have to cut it off at the head which is what the DR system is in place for. It’s better for it to bump up against players at first than to be lax to gold farmers/sellers first, trust me.

This game has so much anti bot stuff that only effects real players, The bots run around in the same pattern for 3 straight days and they do nothing to ban them.
The farmers use teleport hacks so the anti bot code doesn’t work.
The only thing the anti bot stuff does is ruin the game for legit players with 200% magic find you hit the limit in 5 minutes, yeh that’s cool……

I think when players get 25 reports they should be banned for 1 day and then they review them quickitteno make sure they are botting. If players abused the report function all those players get a 3 day ban. Also if you do it, don’t announce it publicly just encourage people to report.

Doug.9628:

which is what the DR system is in place for.

Do you think the farmers are morons or something? they are always the ones who find exploits etc always find the best places to farm, they have worked around the code and it only effects legit players.
They also use teleport hacks(they need to work out how to stop that exploit) so DR does not effect bots, also they slow farm most areas, the ppl who kill lots fast are ppl actually playing the game.

raxx.8914:

This game has so much anti bot stuff that only effects real players, The bots run around in the same pattern for 3 straight days and they do nothing to ban them.
The farmers use teleport hacks so the anti bot code doesn’t work.
The only thing the anti bot stuff does is ruin the game for legit players with 200% magic find you hit the limit in 5 minutes, yeh that’s cool……

I think when players get 25 reports they should be banned for 1 day and then they review them quickitteno make sure they are botting. If players abused the report function all those players get a 3 day ban. Also if you do it, don’t announce it publicly just encourage people to report.

Stating that they’re doing nothing is a rather unfair assessment. Take a look at the sticky thread about botting and this: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Let-s-Start-the-Karma-DR-Dialogue/page/5#post338359

I don’t see how anyone is meant to take what GaileGray said seriously. No disrespect, but think of this way. Gold that is obtained from buying gems and converting to gold materializes that gold out of thin air and doesn’t allow the gold to come into the game naturally and over time, as it would if you spent an hour or two farming to get 1G.

On the actual subject of this thread: People buy gold from gold sellers and not ArenaNet because it’s cheaper, obviously. People will always buy gold due to how this game is set up. There are diminishing returns on every activity in the game, which makes earning gold in any way completely unreliable. If this problem (DR) didn’t exist, then people wouldn’t be AS tempted or pressed to buy gold. It would still happen, but not nearly as much. People buy gold because the actions we do in game don’t make us feel like we are accomplishing anything due to diminishing returns. Those who say they haven’t hit it are liars and aren’t helping the problem at all.

If gold buyers/sellers have run so rampant that threads need to be created about it, then DR as a solution to botting/gold sellers isn’t working and is only punishing normal players. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with admitting that something isn’t working. We as a player base are obviously going to give ArenaNet time to work out a better solution.

Being an administrator on another game and my main role being dealing with bots, you have to get creative in how you deal with them. Stopping botting software is 100% impossible, just like saying a certain security measure is 100% uncrackable. People will ALWAYS find a way to get around it. The only way to remove them from the game is to ban them (botters).

Icecat.4528:

Problem 1 – the cost to buy gold legally is prohibitive. Do the math.
Problem 2 – the game economy leaves many players nearly broke most of the time, creating demand

Fix the economy. Stop nickle and diming people to death for porting, repairs in wvwvw, and improve loot drops in dungeons. Address the demand side the the issue and gold sellers won’t have a market.

First intelligent post I’ve read yet. Likely the only one. I’ll also be the only one to agree with him.

En Masse / Tera Online made a huge mistake banning legit players for FARMING, that’s right FARMING mobs for gold.

“You’re farming illegally and your patterns are identical to a gold seller” is the basic reply you get when you account gets banned. It’s all over their forums or it was until they realized they’re complete f3ucking morons.

The problem with all MMOs is the economy. They make it like the real world economy, except, regardless of experience, you don’t get a raise or promotion to make more money. Unless you exploit. If you don’t you’re stuck with the drudge of being broke and barely able to complete what you want in a timely and reasonable manner.

Currently, purchasing gold is a great idea, just not from ANet or the TP.

The Secret World. There is a genius idea. ZERO BOTTING, SPAM ETC. Why? Currency is useless for the most part.

You get everything you from just playing the game. Novel idea right? Sure is, which is why it’s currently the best MMO on the market.

ANet purchased their Metacritic score like many other MMO companies do. (Same with BBB ratings too. look out consumers!) Funcom played fair and got smacked. Doesn’t surprise me. Look at all the companies that get the marketing hype, spend millions and they never, ever deliver. Except for Gears of War 3, sadly that’s a console game that makes most MMOs look like “Hello Kitty Island” in terms of game play, fun factor , and marketing.

Remember what I said about exploiting above? Yep, if you don’t, you’ll never get ahead.

Metracritic scores get your typical iPhone fangirls to jump ship and follow the new FotM (Flavor of the month) because the other lemmings are doing it.

I could release “toejam and earl” again from Sega Genesis, buy a metacritic rating of 80+ and I would be a millionaire, regardless of how terrible of a game it was. You all would soak it up.

There are few intelligent people left on the planet. We don’t fall for the garbage that is handed to us and then take it face value.

Thanks for reading, now get back to your mindless grind for little to no reward. I hope you really enjoy it.

@ lurinna.4306 How much bang for your buck do you get if your account is banned? “x” times more gold for your dollar is worthless if you have no account to play on. Gaile did point out that it is a violation of TOC. So to me ANET is well within their right to ban an illegal gold buyer. As far as your scenario of a setup goes, it won’t work. If the person sending the money to the player has come by it legitimately it won’t be flagged. Only transactions involving known Gold-seller account will be flagged for investigation. In the end the person receiving the money has the option of returning it. Honest players will……. and if it is known that illegal gold-buyers will get banned, even slightly shady players will opt to protect their priviledge to play.

Its not a billion dollar business because only a few people aren’t buying. So just say, ’Don’t buy from them." and expect that to be enough is a ridiculous reaction.

Just got 2 mails, and one area spam cheaper than the in game currency exchange. Not by a little but by a lot.

I’ve used the exchange twice. But I feel like I’m the dope, when I see those price differences.

Two things have to happen to stop them.

One is you have to beat them in pricing. You aren’t competitive you are always going to have some people buying from them, not you.

The other is not only punish the seller, but the buyer also. Start with just suspending them as a warning. They don’t heed the warning, start banning them also.

Until then some players are never going to care, and they will always buy from them, when they can buy cheaper with no worry of being punished.

Very constructive and for the most part civil discussion of this topic. Let me clarify a few things or simplify, as it were.
1. I feel it is much more effective to ban illegal gold buyers in addition to the sellers. The reason is a seller hacks and steals accounts and experiences little if any setback. An illegal gold buyer will be spending 60 real dollars to buy a new copy of GW2 if he wants to play again. Thats a real concrete setback that would make you think twice about dealing with gold-sellers.
2. Tranactions between legitimate players would not be in jeopardy as only transactions involving known gold-seller accounts need to be investigated. The point of possibly selling garbage through the TP to complete a transaction was brought up. Again since this posting originated with a known gold-seller it could be investigated.
3. If , as a player you are aware that there is a very real chance buying illegal gold will cost you your account, you will not be as likely to try this.
4. The residual effects are : A drop in hacked accounts when the demand for illegal gold drops because the goldsellers don’t care what game they make money off of as long as they make money. They will migrate to a less “secure” game. If the gold-sellers don’t see an EASY dollar to be made and leave, then things like chat suppression go away as chat spam is no longer a major issue. The sweet spot areas that were intended to reward legitimate players can begin to thrive again as the anti-farm code could possibly be looked at and maybe loosened. Many things that negatively affected legitimate players were put in place due primarily to botters that generated gold for their illegal gold selling and spammers to advertise their illegal gold selling. Gold selling has been next to impossible to control because banning only the sellers has proven over and over again in game after game to be futile. Banning the buyer and killing the demand is the real “silver bullet” solution that from what I have read in this thread only a couple games have done. It worked too according to the info posted in this thread.
On a closing note I am happy to have seen a RED response in this topic. It shows they are listening. Some of you dismissed Gaile’s comment but I for one do not. There is a required decorum for the professionals who represent ANET when they respond in a thread. Read her comment again ….. it’s all said very politely but it is there… don’t ignore the TOC.

Remove the ability to trade in-game currency via mail, most of the problem solved.

I have example to give.

Back in one of the other games, I was farming coin for my mount and another character was there in the same area. After a day of farming, he came over to me and started talking in Mandarin. I told him I only speak English so he typed in broken english. We had a chat for about 20-30 minutes and asked me if I got any good drops and we traded info on what we got (I got nothing but junk). Typical chit chat in an MMORPG.

What I got from the conversation was, the guy was really lonely and was just happy to have someone to talk to even if for a little while. He showed me an epic item that dropped off one of the mobs for him and to cut it short, at the end of the convo before I left and he went back to farm for more loot, he traded the epic item to me for free.

I thought he was a gold farmer. He thought I was a gold farmer. the reality was, I wasn’t, but he was. Or maybe he wasn’t. I can’t really say for certain because I aped his exact same pattern over the course of several weeks. What i do know is that, under your proposed system, I would be banned for “buying” from a gold seller because he gave me an epic item. When all it was was a lonely player grateful for some company showing his gratitude in the only way he knew how.

I’ve had a lot of ppl give me free stuff… playing a female character has its benefits.

Your proposal to “ban buyers” is an attack on the very meaning of “massive multiplayer online role playing game.” It would destroy human interaction in game completely.

Cod Eye.1632:

Remove the ability to trade in-game currency via mail, most of the problem solved.

ironically…. that’s a solution.. that could actually be put on a table. Not like you need to transfer gold or silver much in-game anyway… Wouldn’t even need much DR at that point and people would start actually making gold/resources. It would certainly hamper gold sellers as they revert to guild banks in order to do transactions… which would be more feasible to track… maybe.

I say this because it could become more feasible to track guild banks rather than individual player accounts.

Cod Eye.1632:

Remove the ability to trade in-game currency via mail, most of the problem solved.

How about if I want to give my wife’s character 30 G so she can up her crafting? I don’t like to craft, she does. I like to farm, she doesn’t. I give her money and she happily crafts stuff for me to use/wear. I’ve done it in every mmo I’ve played with her.

Like I said, “practical”. developers can do a lot of things but very few of them are functional or practical.

There are no easy, simple solutions to this. Even just limiting gold trade via guild bank is laughably easy to bypass – legally mind you.

The problem is that goldbuyers are a lot harder to spot. They don’t tend to advertise or use bots.
Gold sellers are easy to spot. They spam chat. They bot, or farm the same places over again and have websites.

Cod Eye.1632:

Remove the ability to trade in-game currency via mail, most of the problem solved.

They will tell the buyer to put up an item and buy it from them for overs. If range for all items that wouldn’t be doable. It’d take a lot of work.

ounkeo.9138:

Cod Eye.1632:

Remove the ability to trade in-game currency via mail, most of the problem solved.

How about if I want to give my wife’s character 30 G so she can up her crafting? I don’t like to craft, she does. I like to farm, she doesn’t. I give her money and she happily crafts stuff for me to use/wear. I’ve done it in every mmo I’ve played with her.

Like I said, “practical”. developers can do a lot of things but very few of them are functional or practical.

There are no easy, simple solutions to this. Even just limiting gold trade via guild bank is laughably easy to bypass – legally mind you.

Do what I have done with my missus, create a guild together, it doesn’t take long to get a bank.

Milennin.4825:

The problem is that goldbuyers are a lot harder to spot. They don’t tend to advertise or use bots.
Gold sellers are easy to spot. They spam chat. They bot, or farm the same places over again and have websites.

Thing is, the people who spam are not the same who are selling the gold. The spammers only advertise a website and they have absolutely no gold on them because they know they will get banned at anytime anyway.
The actual holding account are very underground and never do any illegal activity other than sending gold to another who will send gold to buyer.

As soon as they spot the gold seller account (which I imagine change pretty often), they can know everyone who bought gold from them. Because trade is made by mail and all mails have to be registered somewhere.

AndrewWaltfeld.4621:

Cod Eye.1632:

Remove the ability to trade in-game currency via mail, most of the problem solved.

ironically…. that’s a solution.. that could actually be put on a table. Not like you need to transfer gold or silver much in-game anyway…

And it´s useless as they will just start “money-laundering” through the market, selling copper nuggets for 5g43s21c or something like this.

I see lots of people here just don´t get it, unsurprisingly.
Typical bone-headed punishment mindset that has been easily exploited by ne’er-do-wellers and parasites since the dawn of time.

You get them by DESTROYING THEIR PROFIT, neither with a “War on Gold Sellers&Buyers” nor outright banning their stolen accounts. Which will slow them down, no doubt.
But they will always come back and learn to be sneakier if the profits are there.

Oh and Prohibition IS the perfect analogy.
Almost EVERY state on this planet is already selling drugs through legalized alcohol, tobacco and (so called) prescription drugs by taking a cut on the sale.
Hemp has clothed, cured, warmed and entertained humanity since the dawn of time too and only (somewhat) legal in the Netherlands nowadays, so the “beer argument” doesn´t really fly either.

HawkMeister.4758:

You get them by DESTROYING THEIR PROFIT, neither with a “War on Gold Sellers&Buyers” nor outright banning their stolen accounts. Which will slow them down, no doubt.
But they will always come back and learn to be sneakier if the profits are there.

This is the solution and always has been to combat this type of problem.

the problems MMORPG’s face are similar to the music and movie industry.
1. pirates providing copyrighted content
2. users downloading the content

The industry solution:
First, go after the pirates. When that didn’t work or had little effect; go after the downloaders. Thousands and thousands of regular users, innocent and guilty, old and young, people with internet connection and those who didn’t even have a computer. All targets and all threatened and/or taken to court.

Piracy is still rife.

The proper solution:
Is exactly what Apple did with iTunes. Provide a competitive alternative. Cost wise, the price is reasonable. They made content available and easy to get. the problem of piracy cannot be absolutely eliminated, but it can be managed and controlled and mitigated.

Likewise, mmorpg developers can absolutely mitigate the problem by offering the better solution. If gold is highly desirable by the community, they should provide different ways to get it.

- For people who want to work for it or have a lot of free time, let them farm/play the game as per normal.

- For people whose time is limited and they find the earning of gold and wealth to be too time consuming.

The first group are valuable, but the second group is where MMO’s are losing from from. They are just missing that opportunity. Balancing it should not be that difficult as LOTRO seems to manage that rather well. Gold is important but not important enough to really be worth buying. It’s more worth it to spend money in the shop. It really is. And the shop has minor influence on the overal in-game economy.

They have to get in there and compete. Go through Anet and you won’t be scammed. While it won’t ever match gold sellers, the prices are affordable/reasonable and there’s guarantee against scamming and it’s convenient. The formula really is remarkably simple. Executing on it; should be tricky – but not impossible.

Actually ANet´s “Gold 4 Gems” is a good solution already. Properly implemented, that is.

It´s basically copied over from EVE Online´s "Isk 4 PLEX ( gametime ) " and it has hugely impacted gold seller profit margins over there.
Their main problem is though, that it was introduced long after the game began and thus the botters had free reign for quite some time.
Also the “exchange rate” is based on the actual server wide player economy, which is huge and unprecedented to about any other game I know of.

I have no idea how ANet is determining the Gold<->Gem exchange rate here. It sure as hell doesn´t seem to follow player demand though.

Make so you cant send gold over mail.. Done and done! No more gold sellers.

It’s so easy to identify gold buyers in this thread.

Is this where you tell us how you know if someone is a witch? Or maybe we’re terrorists if we think the proposed is 100% never going to work?

Gods, I hate to say this as the concept of Blizzard’s RMAH nauseates me, but you’re never going to beat gold selling, so how about legitimising it?
The Gem store is half a solution. The flow of real world money is one-way; into ArenaNet’s coffers.

If they offered a way to reverse the process and change gold into gems and subsequently real world money, you’re a good way towards legitimising gold selling; gold sellers would have little reason to practise their trade illegitimately going through official channels instead, whereby ArenaNet could skim a tax off the top of every transaction.

I’m not going to pretend to even understand the complex economic problems faced by such a system, with the most obvious of which being that in the game, wealth is essentially created from nothing, but you’re never going to beat gold sellers, and it’s morally dubious whether you should be trying to; a lot of these gold sellers are very poor people in real life and there’s no actual real world laws against what they’re doing anyway (account theft notwithstanding).

So why not join them?

They’re undercutting ArenaNet, offering a better product.
Offer them a way of doing so with no risk associated, along with an in-game gold seller’s advertising post to keep spam out of chat and mail.

Crazy, but it might just work.

The Gem store concept implies ArenaNet have been thinking along these lines anyway. Just flesh it out completely.

Well, Arenanet really drives people to the gold sellers because
a) EVERYTHING costs tons of money in this game + it’s hard to earn money regularily
b) the gold sellers sell at a MUCH better rate than Arenanet