Guild Wars 2

Alucardrx.8930:

Defensive posts like that is what shows who you are. You could have just stayed quiet and nobody would notice you. But you decided to step up and defend yourself.

See if you were not doing anything illegal you wouldn’t bother. Don’t need to be Freud or Sherlock Holmes to realize that.

Wait, are you calling me a gold seller/buyer?
Is it not possible to posit ideas without being personally attacked now?

I still think that the best way to counter gold buying is to punish severely gold buyers. Even put them on trial for breaching the TOS (choose a few scape goats to do it). Give them all a fair warning about what will happen to them even before the game is released.

Then each month put a list of banned players in the website. Players will realize their friends and guild leaders are being banned and will start to worry themselves.

Alucardrx.8930:

I still think that the best way to counter gold buying is to punish severely gold buyers.

ORLY.
I´m sure you´ll be the first then volunteering to police 50+ servers and 2.000.000+ accounts for your dastardly lawbreakers.

Let me guess, math was/is not your strong-point in school.

Another solution maybe is for Anet just to sell skins through the cash shop, do away with all this farming and grinding for an item that isn’t any better than an exotic, then we all can just play the game again.

You can’t ban buyers. Let me demonstrate in a few steps.

1. ANet starts to ban gold buyers.
2. Goldsellers start to mail random people free gold.
3. ANet inadvertedly bans a few innocent players.
4. Kittenstorm and lawsuits and really bad press for ANet.
5. ANet stops banning gold buyers.
6. Goldsellers continue business as usual.

Result? ANet looses face and credibility, and goldsellers remain untouched.

Alucardrx.8930:

I still think that the best way to counter gold buying is to punish severely gold buyers.

that’s complete BS!
It’s like putting down every crackhead to stop dealing drugs!
That’s not how it’s done…

Anet should lower Prices for Gems, … I mean 10€ for ~800 Diamonds … which is not even 8 Gold …

for 100 Diamonds you get about 27 Silver … last when I checked!

With these prices, Anet should not wonder, that their Ingame-Gold-Shop does not work!

ounkeo.9138:

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.

I think this is a good analogy.

ANet has provided a safe way to buy in game gold with real currency. The problem is that the gold sellers can offer gold so much cheaper that some folks will roll the dice on losing their accounts (to the gold farmers). The reason the gold sellers can offer gold so much cheaper than the gem exchange rate is because they are making use of exploits and third party programs to farm it. I saw 1 g for the USD equivalent of about 80 gems advertised the other day – is there anyone legitimately playing the game that would sell an entire gold for a mere 80 gems?

So, I think that ANet is correctly prioritizing making it much more difficult to generate in game gold with bots and exploits. If the gold sellers can’t sell the gold a lot more cheaply than it can be bought through the BLTC, then fewer folks will be tempted.

As other folks have pointed out it is much more difficult to identify the customers of gold sellers than it is to get rid of the farmers supplying the gold that is being sold. Better that ten gold buyers go free, than one innocent player suffer.

@GaileGray
Yes any kind of third party buying of gold etc. will damage the game as it shifts balance, the economy and creates unpredicted problems. I fully agree.
To answer the OP’s: I believe that ANet should consider banning (temp or perma) gold buyers. I am sure they have ways to investigate this. I do not think that they have to be too hard and too frequent on this as I believe that a buyer of gold will come to the forums and moan. The word will spread that accounts are being banned for buying third party gold and though this might not solve the problem altogether but it will decimate the business of the sellers.
People will think twice or three times before they buy gold and risk losing the account.

One way to punish gold buyers is to ban them. Another is to simply strip the accounts.

“You have aquired game assets in an illegal way. All you assets have been removed. "

The problem with this or with banning is probably the resulting load on support. Some ppl will whine that they didn’t buy the gold, that someone they didnt know just mailed it to them.

In fact gold sellers might do exactly that …

I know other games where they temp ban the buyer and strip him of his armor & weapon. Why not trap the buyers and temp ban them. Better, why not make gold account bound, wouldn’t that solve the problem?

I thought most games banned both sellers and buyers. That’s what I’ve seen up the years.

I was perusing the Dev posts and came across this thread:
Account terminated after gold items transfers. So there are some attempts to monitor the gold getting moved around, and it is impacting innocent folks (not a criticism of ANet here – they fixed it quickly).

It’s not easy to separate the gold buyer from the non-gold buyer. Not saying it shouldn’t be done, just that it has to be done carefully and without torches and pitchforks.

anet Cannot and Willnot reduce the gem price to compete with goldesllers... this is a silly and irrational knee jerk reaction to a problem that requires one heck of alot more thought... If that happens it will wreck the economy and a loaf of bread will cost like 10000 gold

“Buy 40,000 gems at $50 which will yeild around 12.5 gold.”

So the value of a full set of cultural armor amounts to 400 real-world Dollars.

To me as a player that’s a strong disincentive to ever buy cultural armor. I hardly spend that much money per year on real clothing.

Otoh it is a strong incentive to try and convert game gold to real money.

I guess noone would have been commander yet without them, except for the few with very generous guildmembers.

Normally you’d combat other sellers by driving prices down to a point where the costs of them doing business is prohibitively high or there’s just little incentive to compete in the market…

Obviously they wrote the code and run the program, so there’s little added work. But if you compete with them and drive your prices down, then it creates less incentive for buyers to buy from the competition because the only thing they can offer is cheap prices, whereas you can offer the same + a secure transaction and such.

Say what you will about Blizz with it’s RMAH system, but after more than a decade of combating this issue, it actually was a smart play in being able to get in on the action a bit by offering a secure platform. Not saying Anet should necessarily go down this path, but it’s almost impossible to defeat the bots without really intrusive measures.

The computer virus has been around since there were two people trading floppy disks with each other and computer software companies still cannot stop them from infecting computers on a massive scale. It’s a moving target, every time anti-virus software improves, the people creating virii adapt to get around the fixes.

The dance with bots and gold sellers has been going on over a decade. The problem, and its solutions are not so simple as “ban him and he goes away.” The bots are not so simple that you can always pick them out of a crowd. And they are getting better at what they do – this week’s fixes will not work for the latest bots next month, and last year’s fixes are utterly useless because by now every bot in use has adapted to them.

If it truly was as simple as “do X and Y and the botters/scammers go away” then Arenanet would do X and Y and you’d have to find something else to complain about. They don’t do these things because they don’t work. They will never find a way to completely wipe this out, but they are searching for the best and least restrictive system to control the damage. It takes time, and no, they aren’t going to give you any details about it because if they did the bots would already have adapted by the time the new system was in place.

BrienBear.6073:

No game, as far as I’m aware, has ever banned buyers. ………..
So as much as it sucks, it’s somewhat counter-productive to the game-makers to actually kill the buyers.

Lord of the Rings Online does in fact ban, and confiscate both gold sellers and gold buyers accounts.

Given that ANet makes money for new accounts, but not for the continued existence of old accounts who aren’t buying from them, it would be very productive for them to ban people violating the TOS and buying gold from third parties.

It’s cheaper to buy electronics that “fell of the back of the truck” then to get it legitimately. That doesn’t mean Samsung should be competing with those prices. The buyers are guilty of possession of stolen goods – if they knew it was stolen, then it’s a misdemeanor or felony, if they didn’t know then it’s just confiscated and returned to the owner. They still eat up the loss either way, because the newly arrested crook isn’t going to be giving them a refund.

They can’t always find these people, but they should and do try, and prosecute them once they are found.

50 dollars will buy me 4000 gems from ANet or about 12.5 gold.

50 dollars will buy me about 11,600 gems from gold sellers or 50 gold.

Do I advocate using gold sellers? No, because you can not trust them with your credit cards and you may lose your account.

GaileGray.9587:

Guys, buying gold is against the User Agreement and the Rules of Conduct. It’s also harmful to the game as a whole. I mean, do you really want to encourage gold advertisers in the game? Would you want to give a boost to account thieves? (And trust me, most RMT accounts are stolen)

Gold buying from third parties: Don’t do it. Please.

The question I believe was: what is Arena Net doing about/to buyers? Are you taking just as hard-line a stance with them as you are the sellers?

I think that’s what the vast majority of us wants to see. I’ll even go so far as to say it should be an even harder stance.

1. There is no reason to have sympathy for illegal gold buyers getting banned. They have a perfectly legal, easy to use method of buying gold for real money. There is no excuse whatsoever for doing it illegally.

2. Banning the sellers does next to NOTHING to stop the problem. They are using hacked accounts, and are barely affected when one of their stolen accounts is discovered and banned. Banning the BUYERS on the other hand will have a tremendous effect. They typically have their own account that they paid their own money for. Banning someone who saved say $30 by buying illegally (that’s a LOT of illegal gold) means that they have actually lost money, because (if they want to keep playing), they now have to spend another $60 to get back in, as well as lost all of the gold they just illegally acquired, not to mention they’ve lost all of their progression across all of their characters.

While it’s true that most of them will probably choose not to play at all (good riddance, I say), those that do will be extremely unlikely to buy gold illegally again. (hopefully) They’ll see that instead of it saving them money, it actually ended costing them money- a LOT of money.

I say NO MERCY. Take it to them HARD. There is no excuse for buying illegal gold in this game when you have the legal method freely available.

illgot.1056:

50 dollars will buy me 4000 gems from ANet or about 12.5 gold.

50 dollars will buy me about 11,600 gems from gold sellers or 50 gold.

Do I advocate using gold sellers? No, because you can not trust them with your credit cards and you may lose your account.

However, if you are caught and banned, you will lose both that $50 worth of gold, and the $60 you spent on the game. The seller will lose almost nothing- they were using a hacked account, anyway.

You can’t stop the sellers by banning their hacked accounts. You can however stop them by taking away their market- i.e. banning their clients.

mastershke.8145:

What do you all think should be done?

Ban accounts that purchase gold.

But in other games I have been sent large amounts of money by mistake and just taken it. If gold sellers start sending gold out to random players, banning account would have to immediately stop.

i say it again. its anets OWN fault for making endgame things so heavly based on ingame currency e.g. legrinderys.

anet MADE the market by themselfs. you cant win aganist these guys other games already proved that. you can only lessen thier influence on the game by making gold less useful entirely. thats the only thing anet can change. we will see if they will. otherwise goldbuyers win again.

look at lotro or aoc for example. they both have gold aswell as ingame curreny. but in the endgame large amounts of gold barely matter. all you need can be farmed by yourself without to much effort.
not the same in gw 2 with the current endgame.

change it. untie it from absurd gold amounts and you will see these guys lose influence. if players see they can make the needed amount of gold easily you eleminate the buying big time. people buy because it helps them save ABSURD amounts of mindless and boring farming.

face it guys. its ANETs OWN mistake to design endgame like legrinderys like this.
any endgame acitivity thats so much based on ingame curreny is FOOD for this market.

nuff said.

Windklinge.4076:

i say it again. its anets OWN fault for making endgame things so heavly based on ingame currency e.g. legrinderys.

anet MADE the market by themselfs. you cant win aganist these guys other games already proved that. you can only lessen thier influence on the game by making gold less useful entirely. thats the only thing anet can change. we will see if they will. otherwise goldbuyers win again.

look at lotro or aoc for example. they both have gold aswell as ingame curreny. but in the endgame large amounts of gold barely matter. all you need can be farmed by yourself without to much effort.
not the same in gw 2 with the current endgame.

change it. untie it from absurd gold amounts and you will see these guys lose influence. if players see they can make the needed amount of gold easily you eleminate the buying big time. people buy because it helps them save ABSURD amounts of mindless and boring farming.

face it guys. its ANETs OWN mistake to design endgame like legrinderys like this.
any endgame acitivity thats so much based on ingame curreny is FOOD for this market.

nuff said.

so your suggestion is an last resort solution?

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.

Disagree with the Repairs in WvW, but everything else is green light for me. Good points made there.

ANet could do what CCP does with ISK buyers in Eve online: Set the player’s wallet to a negative amount equal to what the player bought. Therefore the player has to work off their ill-gotten gold and they’ll think twice before buying it again. Honestly, buyers are part of the problem, Anet needs to make a statement that RMT is unacceptable. It promotes account theft and exploitation of the game. Monitor money amounts, if a player’s daily income goes beyond X standard deviations of what they normally make, flag the account and watch it.

BrienBear.6073:

No game, as far as I’m aware, has ever banned buyers. See, here’s the thing. Those buyers, they’re also customers of ANet. Those buyers, I’d assume, will continue to play longer because they have their (wrongly acquired) gold. So as much as it sucks, it’s somewhat counter-productive to the game-makers to actually kill the buyers.

Actually…you’re not very aware of this but Guild Wars openly banned many buyers of illegally obtained gold…

Hellmood.2097:

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

yep agree this is it right here

Dmorin.9543:

Hellmood.2097:

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

yep agree this is it right here

Possibly another thing they could do is make the currency rates equal to the same amount of gems. I know for example, people using Euro’s pay more than American Dollars for example. That would probably help as well. Even if the currency does change a bit, it wouldn’t hurt their business too much. IF anything – it would increase the sale of gems.

@Dark
You’re analogy is talking about finite manufactured goods sold by a legit vendor/producer vs. people stealing those goods and selling them…

Bots aren’t stealing anything, they’re just making a certain amount of gold over time and selling you the cost of “labor”; the illegal part is them running scripts and selling in-game items on third party sites.

Anet doesn’t manufacture or labor to make gold… it’s a matter of click and here ya go. Anet is able to add any amount of money into the system because the resource pool for gold is infinite. Them being able to give out money is way way faster than bots being able to produce that same amount. The problem is that Anet set their prices to a point that is greater than what bots are setting it at. I’m sure they figured that price point will help maximize revenue… but clearly assuming if they’re the sole distributor; that they have a monopoly on the system. The fact is they don’t have a monopoly since, there’s clear competition and no real way to remove it permanently.

You can either bemoan how it’s unfair and qq or you can figure out how to beat the bots. Coding doesn’t work so maybe economics might? Is a botter gonna run his computer for 8 hours to make $1 profit (dramatic example but just trying to make the point)?

I think it’s a little early to do a whole lot. The anti-botting code and systems need a lot of work and gem to gold rates need to settle in. If Anet can get the botting to be a little pricier and the gem to gold rates to be a little better then people will just prefer to go through Anet even if it’s a little more.

So much people defending gold buying in this thread makes me want to puke. Online gaming is surely coming to a point where cheating will be the normal way of playing a game. This must be why Blizzard decided to become RMT as well in Diablo 3. They realized its a lost cause. So why not profit on the scum?

GaileGray.9587:

Guys, buying gold is against the User Agreement and the Rules of Conduct. It’s also harmful to the game as a whole. I mean, do you really want to encourage gold advertisers in the game? Would you want to give a boost to account thieves? (And trust me, most RMT accounts are stolen)

Gold buying from third parties: Don’t do it. Please.

You’re completely right, Gaile. Buying gold is against the User Agreement and it is an imminent problem.

However, another major issue is how many hours one must pour into this game just to make a profit. I play quite often at level 80 and I’m actually penalized for playing longer than 2 hours, receiving Diminishing Returns in the final zone because everything is Risen and I’ve killed too many to be qualified as a “bot”. This is completely unfair to the people who are out there and playing just because they enjoy the game and have a lot more time to play it than others.

So, in verdict, ANet needs to remove this ridiculous DR system. People can’t sit down and enjoy the game when they can’t get loot for their efforts. And that’s all that matters at level 80; making a profit and getting those exotics. Since you aren’t requiring a monthly fee out of us, why are you nickle and diming us for every single small detail?

Waypoints cost way too much. They were free in the last game. Why aren’t they free here? Making us pay for waypoints AND for repair costs upon death by mobs? Also completely unfair. Not to mention it’s even more of a pain to earn crafting materials with such small bag space. Making us pay for materials inside of a merchant to craft something is way overdoing it.

In short, stop nickle and diming us. It isn’t fair and it makes players feel like you’re abusing their time spent in your amazing online world. Please, remove this system.

Amiron.1067:

Waypoints cost way too much. They were free in the last game. Why aren’t they free here? Making us pay for waypoints AND for repair costs upon death by mobs? Also completely unfair. Not to mention it’s even more of a pain to earn crafting materials with such small bag space. Making us pay for materials inside of a merchant to craft something is way overdoing it.

They need a money sink otherwise inflation will kill the economy. I’m not exactly a fan of how they have the waypoint price scale (level is way more important than distance).

Don’t how bag space is an issue for anything outside of cooking since a lot of the intermediate ingredients can’t be put in your collection tab.

Why is gold even tradable? Don’t get me wrong, it’s convent to give people money but if I had the choice to give/receive gold or no gold spammers – I’d pick the latter.

Mojo.2691:

Why is gold even tradable? Don’t get me wrong, it’s convent to give people money but if I had the choice to give/receive gold or no gold spammers – I’d pick the latter.

They’d just use an item that is easily transferable to gold (e.g. ore). So it would minimally impact the gold sellers while making it harder for people giving gold for legitimate reasons.

Amiron.1067:

In short, stop nickle and diming us. It isn’t fair and it makes players feel like you’re abusing their time spent in your amazing online world. Please, remove this system.

This is the bigger issue. When players feel like a game is ‘work’ they are more likely to stop playing or find shortcuts and exploits. Because people desire items they can buy with gold, they strive towards those items. The root of the issue is that gold is transferable coupled with the ability to purchase desirable items with gold.

The “remove the ability to mail gold” is an attempt to address the transferability, but the real issue is that there are really expensive items in the game that can be acquired with gold. I support the idea that there is a non-transferable type of currency (badges, tokens, bound-drops) for the highest tier items. Those that desire those items are forced into gameplay to acquire them. As expansions are released and new content comes out, you devalue these tokens by introducing new ones. I think the system WoW has for dungeon tokens works quite nicely. While I don’t enjoy the game, essentially the hard-core players get their rewards, and those of us who are more casual, are content to wait until the next patch to move up. This seems to be a reasonable way to provide a good gaming experience without tying the high-level rewards to the economy.

Further, allowing gold/gems to be sold for real money would be a colossal mistake. This will wreck the economy by binding the in-game economy to the real-world economy. When this happens, every piece of new content is released with a black-cloud over it where players know the rewards are tweaked based on ANet’s cut from the RMAH.

@ BrienBear.6073 I was banned from Aion for buying Kinah. So they can ban accounts if they want to.

I like that idea as well, instead of banning a gold buyer. Punish the account by taking all its illegally gotten gold from all characters on the account.

Xsile.2915:

I like that idea as well, instead of banning a gold buyer. Punish the account by taking all its illegally gotten gold from all characters on the account.

Take ALL the gold from the account, not just that which was purchased in violation of ToS. If there’s not enough gold, take the difference in market value, from items held by the offending player, starting with the most valuable. It’s meant to be punishment, not a slap on the wrist. Second offense, permanently remove the ability for that account to mail gold or use TP in addition to gold removal. Perma-ban on third offense.

Attention ANet. Utupia is a dream. We game in reality. You can’t just say, oh please guys don’t buy gold! You have to ban the hell out of the cheating scumbags and remove them. Period. You are going to have to exert some effort. Magic is neato in the game itself but it doesn’t happen IRL.

Voqar.2349:

Attention ANet. Utupia is a dream. We game in reality. You can’t just say, oh please guys don’t buy gold! You have to ban the hell out of the cheating scumbags and remove them. Period. You are going to have to exert some effort. Magic is neato in the game itself but it doesn’t happen IRL.

Problem is ensuring intent can be tricky. They could pretty easily end up banning innocent people by mistake.

Banning people who buy (which is a violation of the tos) is a tool but it shouldn’t be treated as a panacea (just like how asking nicely for people to stop buying is a tool).

I don’t get why we can’t just have a GM every server that sole job is to destroy bots. He fields all complaints and seeks and destroys. I know personally I report every obvious bot i see. And continue to watch them exist for a few days thats totally unacceptable. No should need to buy gold or bot. I made a guide just to spite this whole situation http://youtu.be/D5t7yY0IihI.

If you look in arah final zone especially on anvilrock my server has atleast 10 bots going mad right now. We all reported them but they still there

Silentstorm.7531:

I don’t get why we can’t just have a GM every server that sole job is to destroy bots. He fields all complaints and seeks and destroys. I know personally I report every obvious bot i see. And continue to watch them exist for a few days thats totally unacceptable. No should need to buy gold or bot. I made a guide just to spite this whole situation http://youtu.be/D5t7yY0IihI.

If you look in arah final zone especially on anvilrock my server has atleast 10 bots going mad right now. We all reported them but they still there

I would just love to have a job like that. All day long getting those suckers banned and watching them crying on the forums.

ounkeo.9138:

Gosh you people are delusional, and I mean it from a clinical pov.

Something as “simple” as banning the buyer isn’t as clean or as easy as you think it is. If normal innocent players are get wrongfully banned for botting/gold farming/selling, do you really think banning the buyer will be any more accurate?

Well, Anet has the digital data trail!
Yes they do, and do you honestly think the gold sellers don’t have ways to thwart this rather easily? Ever heard of money laundering? It’s also done for online gold so the system can’t easily or cleanly trace it. You cast that net and a lot of innocent players get taken down as well. Maybe even yourself – and I’m sure you’ll be man enough to just take it on the chin to be banned because it’s “for the greater good.”

they also have an army of hacked accounts through which they use to trade their gold. Not everyone even knows their account is compromised. As long as the accounts are managed properly, the owner of the account is unaware, the transactions are totally legit and Anet would be banning someone who really shouldn’t be banned.

Anet knows who bought gold!
For some instances they do. For other, there’s no clear way to tell due to how the sellers can obfuscate their activities and the actual gold data.

Here’s one very simple, easy way to defeat the system. Ask the buyer to trade an item of value for which the seller will “buy it from you for gold”. For larger transactions, you make multiple trades over the course of days/weeks using different items and different accounts with the items being valued in the game market (auction house etc – though it could work with just low end items as well). Technically, this is a legit trade.

Anet also has no evidence that real cash changed hands between seller and buyer because the real cash is transacted outside the game; hence it is a legit trade. There is no way to tell.

well, they have data to show pattern on account X that it is a Gold seller
Sure, I’m sure they do but that data isn’t an all knowing, all seeing overmind. It’s data that still has to be interpreted and often, the interpretation of such data is an artform iself susceptible to bias and human error.

Also, just because that account is flagged as a seller, does not mean that the trade he just made is illegal. It could be a legit trade. the system can’t know that. It doesn’t know that. Nor would a live GM.

if gold seller kills a mob and an epic item drops (for example) and sells it to another player, that is a legit trade. Just because his account is a gold trade/sell account doesn’t mean some of his transactions with other people aren’t legit. You know, like how in real life, a drug dealer going into 7-11 to buy a pack of gum is still making a legit transaction.

the way you guys are going on, the poor cashier would be considered a drug buyer when all that happened was the drug dealer bought gum from him.

THIS IS WHY THEY DON’T BAN BUYERS – PRACTICALLY, THEY CAN’T DO IT.

In RL, drugs are illegal. These guys get busted because they get caught with the contraband or trying to trade the contraband. in-game gold is NOT contraband. Simply because one has gold (even a lot of it) isn’t illegal or immoral. All any developer can do is to build a pattern based on history and make an educated guess on it. Some will be more obvious than others. And even with that info, it’s still an educated guess – they still don’t have hard evidence of actual RL money trade. It’s just a pattern. And even then, that pattern can’t distinguish between a legit trade a non legit trade.

Well I say they have the ability to follow their own digital data trail and you say its not that easy. What you express is merely YOUR opinion of what can or can’t be done as you are not part of ANET. Neither am I , but at least what I am proposing has some teeth to it because gold buying is just as much a violation of the TOC or terms of agreement as gold selling.

If it were so hard to decipher the data trail then ANET would not have been able to confidently ban around 1000 accounts who were exploiting the Karma vendor now would they. Seems to me they are quite up to the task. This is one example that your logic of what ANET is not able or willing to do is apparently flawed.

Wow, the stubbornness is strong in this one… It is not about a data trail, and it never was, you completely fail at logic.

Ok, listen closely: There is no way to trace a purchase outside of the game, therefore there can be no way to trace it ingame. You would have to entirely block people from transferring money or goods to one another, shut down the trading post and make every single item in the game bound to account to achieve any sense of blocking illegitimate transactions.

Still don’t believe it? Let’s give another practical example: Imagine you were a gold seller, and you know someone is about to ban the people you hand gold to. The simplest way to get around it would simply be to go around town and hand out gold to random strangers, problem solved.

It does not have to be much, so lets be generous and say you hand out 10% of the gold you sell, and you always approach people with the same sentence about how you give up the game and want to give away what you have, and simply make sure your customers are among those people.

If Anet now really proceeded to ban people for taking something from a random stranger, well the kittentorm would be a sight to behold…

And to anyone who now says something among the lines of “well, it would at least drive the black market gold price up!” – No bobo, it won’t. Like, not at all. Because acquiring the actual ingame currency is not much of an issue, and the number of “fake handouts” could be significantly smaller then 10%. Oh, and no, you can’t just message everyone to not take gold from strangers or face the consequences, people are too stupid for that.

ounkeo, give me a break, all digital exchange, if they know who the seller is, they know who the buyer is period. It doesn’t matter how many hops it makes they are going to be able to trace it.

If they are getting money through mail or trade, regardless if it is several hops, from these known sellers that they are going to ban, then it is pretty clear.

If someone gets suspended then banned for no reason, they can appeal. But I highly doubt that would happen if they track all money moving between players in mail or trade.

If you are going to lose your account over buying, people are going to have second thoughts after they get their first suspension.

Other games punish the buyers. LotRO suspends then bans buyers and sellers. You don’t see the spam sellers with their F2P model. Even at their peak when their player base was at its highest you didn’t see them, because they got banned fast, and buyers got suspended and banned also.

If that game can trace them accurately then this game can also.

Seems more like worry from people buying from them to try to cast doubt so they don’t get banned when they try to stop punishing buyers.

Until companies take a real stand against it, it will continue.

Cod Eye.1632:

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

There was no in game mail in GW1, but selling was rampant in that game also. How do you think they distributed the gold then? All they had to do is send them a message to meet in a zone and trade manual. You don’t stop a thing by doing that.

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.

Do you think they send the money on those same character? They have stables of characters for each type of purpose. One for spamming, one for storing, one for farming, one for trading.

They aren’t using the same account and characters for all of those.