Guild Wars 2

“Thats assuming they do not keygen accounts (and i dont think they do) then, what is leaving more profit to Anet, the gem store or goldsellers buying back account as the Anet team bans them.”

People keep saying things like this, it’s a huge leap to an uncertain conclusion based on absolutely no evidence.

It is known that many scammers steal legitimate accounts and use them instead of opening new accounts. It is also logical to conclude they make use of stolen credit cards and fake identities so that it is impossible to track how many accounts any given scammer has, either legitimately bought or gained through fraud.

The net result for the company, however, is that stolen accounts mean they may have lost a customer and stolen cards mean chargebacks against them from the card’s real owner. Combine lost revenue from these things and the bad publicity, word of mouth (who is going to admit to their friends that they bought gold from a scammer? most people will claim it was poor security from the game company that allowed someone to hack the account) and the cost of extra employees and lost productivity that it takes to track down, ban and prevent these things.

In the end, it costs a company much more than they ever stand to make by tolerating the scammers, which is why they actively attempt to stop it from happening. Unless you actually work in that field, however, you have absolutely no idea what is involved in identifying, tracking, and stopping the scammers and what is at stake if they start mass-banning legitimate players in an overzealous attempt to wipe out scammers.

And considering that many of these criminals are very smart and very good at what they do, any measures taken against them are only temporary. They will quickly adapt to any procedures used to prevent or detect their activity, so they are always a moving target.

Scammers are never accepted by any legitimate company because they can only harm the company. No one profits from the scams except the scammers.

@tolunart

You said:
“People keep saying things like this, it’s a huge leap to an uncertain conclusion based on absolutely no evidence.”

And then proceed to write 5 more paragraphs based on nothing but assumptions with no evidence to support them.

It is not known that “many scammers steal legitimate accounts” nor is it “logical to conclude they make use of stolen credit cards.”

You have no evidence to support either of these statements.

It may well be that -some- scammers have indeed used other people’s accounts and it also may well be that some scammers have used stolen credit card details but it may also be that there are some big companies out there that value customer trust and the law (in order to continue to be in business).

So next time you want to write an epic post don’t contradict yourself after the first 2 paragraphs. If you believe that what you wrote is true, provide evidence to support it (and no that doesn’t mean link me to wikipedia or what ANet say in their blog posts, it means link to real evidence such as court cases) and sit back and accept that even if some scammers do engage in such activities, it certainly isn’t all and probably isnt even a majority.

Oh and btw, the word “scammers” is purely subjective – they are not scamming anyone if they are providing a service that people want to use.

Legitimate companies do not provide services which directly interfere with and violate the TOS of another legitimate company. I’ve read your posts on the subject and while I won’t throw around any accusations without proof, I can say that I have no interest whatsoever in what you have to say on the subject.

Paladine.6082:

@tolunart

You said:
“People keep saying things like this, it’s a huge leap to an uncertain conclusion based on absolutely no evidence.”

And then proceed to write 5 more paragraphs based on nothing but assumptions with no evidence to support them.

It is not known that “many scammers steal legitimate accounts” nor is it “logical to conclude they make use of stolen credit cards.”

You have no evidence to support either of these statements.

It may well be that -some- scammers have indeed used other people’s accounts and it also may well be that some scammers have used stolen credit card details but it may also be that there are some big companies out there that value customer trust and the law (in order to continue to be in business).

So next time you want to write an epic post don’t contradict yourself after the first 2 paragraphs. If you believe that what you wrote is true, provide evidence to support it (and no that doesn’t mean link me to wikipedia or what ANet say in their blog posts, it means link to real evidence such as court cases) and sit back and accept that even if some scammers do engage in such activities, it certainly isn’t all and probably isnt even a majority.

Oh and btw, the word “scammers” is purely subjective – they are not scamming anyone if they are providing a service that people want to use.

ANET owns EVERYTHING attached to this game. NOTHING legal that you keep trying to regurgitate as an armchair lawyer applies here.

HI,

Please, refrain from engaging in personal wars and attacks as we dont support this kind of behaviour in our forums. Try to keep the thread civil and constructive.

Thanks for your understanding

ANET owns everything to do with GW2 and has the LEGAL right to handle anything within this game however they wish…… that takes care of the off topic legality part of this thread.
Gold/gems ratio adjusting will benefit the goldseller as much as the player (they are using the same system to their advantage) and the TP will just ask for the same VALUE of adjusted gold for the items….. that takes care of the off topic gold value part of this thread.
That leaves the original core of this thread that I PERSONALLY began. Ban the gold buyers because you can’t ban a goldseller who never has to buy back into the game when they hack accounts of those who are foolish enough to either do business with them and expose their passwords OR can’t manage to make a secure enough password in the first place.

I AM OFFICIALLY DONE WITH MY THREAD

I would have thought this thread would have tried addressing the cause aswell, instead of proposing banishment of all parties involved in gold selling.

The fact that gold is so hard to come by for the casual player who plays as a Jack of all Trades, doing a little of everything in the game, is probably one of the main causes of gold selling, at least in Guild Wars 2.

Seeing the awesome skins that are Legendary Weapons, then realizing the precursor alone requires almost 400g, if you’re going for a Greatsword, or 100-200g and moving upwards fast for the rest of the Legendaries, is quite discouraging.

So either they accept the fact that this is restricted to those with alot of time and experience on their hands, with an organized guild to aid them, or, as is more likely, they turn to gold selling, to exploits, to cheats, to hacks and to any and all other methods that could help them gain an advantage over others, with a large portion of these casuals ending up losing their accounts to hacking when they enter phishy sites or perform other shady actions.

I’d say one of the methods of dealing with gold selling, in addition to banishment of gold selling accounts, would be to ease up the gold sinks in this game, or at least provide some stable revenue source for players to acquire gold to sink them into these things in the first place.

The only way to stop gold sellers is to make it so that they can not profit from it, better security(already on the way) to stop account hacking and to prevent ingame options like botting, which so far they have totally failed to stop.

I want to chime in to say that I totally agree with the OP.
Ban the buyers who use illegal ways to get gold, aka not the in game shop, but third party sellers who are at the origin of the spam, the bots, but also the account hacking. Ban the buyers, and advertise it. Make it clear that buying illegal gold will get your account banned.

One thing people do not understand.

You can not ban people for receiving gold just like you can not label anybody receiving 100 gold as a gold buyer. Wow and all other games have exactly the same problem.

Lets imagine that I send you 50G by mail to grief you. You pick it up and get banned even tho you never bought any gold.

The problem is that it is IMPOSSIBLE to tie an external transaction to an ingame email for the simple reason that it is not against the TOS to send someone gold via mail and that you simply have zero idea that this transaction did happen. Furthermore if for some crazy reason mailing gold was banned then Gold Sellers would then switch to sending objects to sell instead of Gold…then what you also ban sending objects via mail.

People jump to “ban them” conclusion without understanding the ramifications of those recommendations. The thing is you can NOT ban people from simply getting gold via mail because it is not against the TOS.

I wish people thought a little more about what they are recommending before making these posts. Yes gold sellers suck but you got to understand that monitoring manually all transactions to decide if those are legitimate is NOT efficient.

What is the solution? There really isn’t besides banning bots. Bots are the problem…you can t do anything about people selling gold OUTSIDE of the game simply because you have ZERO proof that someone receiving gold in game is not simply a gift or someone repaying a debt of a transaction done outside of the game.

Monsoon, simply put yes they could ban someone for outside transactions, they do not need to know what those transactions are its the ingame transactions they could track.
If they are tracking transactions and see high level of gold transfers from one person or one group of people to multiple others then it is rather simply gold selling. Buying gold is enough to get banned, receiving gold from a gold seller is enough to get banned, they can withdraw your right to an account at any time. It is simply gathering intel and analyzing data.
Several games have not only banned players for buying gold, but also removed gold from players who had already received it from known sellers.
And yes WOW has banned people for gold buying. they have made announcements regarding how they track transactions, some gold selling companies a few years back had to change to face to face instead of mail transactions.

tolunart.2095:

Legitimate companies do not provide services which directly interfere with and violate the TOS of another legitimate company. I’ve read your posts on the subject and while I won’t throw around any accusations without proof, I can say that I have no interest whatsoever in what you have to say on the subject.

Paladin is right about some things. First, some terms of service and EULA’s do not necessarily hold legal weight in the eyes of the court. See http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20080831104451947, which details [i]McKee (Michael) v. AT&T Corp.[/it]. The court ruled that “Courts, not arbitrators, decide the validity of arbitration agreements.” More cases can be seen at, http://ilt.eff.org/index.php/Contracts:_Click_Wrap_Licenses. Whether or not a EULA is legally enforceable depends on a number of things, such as the content of the EULA itself and which court your case is being heard in.

Some of this has got a bit silly,

Chinese prisoners working- came from an interview by the guardian newspaper with a 53 year old Chinese prisoner and ex prisoner guard held at at Jixi re-education-through-labour camp in Heilongjiang province, believe what you want. The selling of virtual items is allowed in china, prisoners even in the EU make products for sale, no big deal, but not exactly what you want in terms of security for a prison.

Chinese farmers ect, even the Chinese government admits they are the world leaders in selling virtual goods from as far back as 2009.

EULA, game rules ect, they get you banned not in court, they have to be allowed under local laws as well but that will not get your account back without a heap of hassle.

Sweatshops, a sweatshop is not a sweatshop to someone who only has that option, or is lucky enough to have that option in some cases ,they do exist the companies reselling gold admit that, they also exist in many forms, from running games with bots, farming by human or even being paid on a 1to 1 contract with gamers in internet cafes. They are not just in Asia either. Some companies even consider it an outreach type of thing as they are allowing kids access to tech that they would otherwise never get to touch. Put it this way, would you rather work in some unregulated toxic factory, backbreaking agricultural work or any other horrible dangerous job, or sit in front of a PC for the same kitteny money.

Gold selling companies, many are straight up companies with the exception of breaking game regs. Some will not use bots or only act as resellers, so they do not farm them self. Others however range from game exploiters, botters to outright criminal organizations with regard to hacking accounts,phishing and selling of personal details ect. Again even those in the industry say that. there are multiple interviews going back to the launch of wow with these companies. Several of them even tried to work with the game companies to make things legit.