Guild Wars 2

How do they acquire our ingame names? Everytime I log in the game i’m highly annoyed by the mails sent to me and i’ve never met them ingame but they still are able to mail us.

The mail is account wide, and your account name is displayed here on the forums. As some one else suggested, they should had hidden those digits.

They probably have some kind of 3rd party software that detects and emails anyone logging into the area. I usually get mails immediately upon login or entering a new area, faster than most humans could click on my toon, paste a message and send the email, so the process is most likely automated.

This is one reason why simply banning UserX won’t stop them, they need to develop the capability to detect and block the software that is being used, it doesn’t matter whether UserX is banned he’ll just switch to UserY or UserZ accounts and continue.

Or they just saw “tolunart.2095” on these forums?

Occam’s razor.

Jestunhi.7429:

Or they just saw “tolunart.2095” on these forums?

Occam’s razor.

“Usually” the best answer is not necessarily the correct answer. I get an email seconds after login, it’s not waiting for me. There are many thousands of people online, if gold sellers are restricted to mailing people who post on the forums they are catching a few hundred people but missing 100,000 more.

tolunart.2095:

Jestunhi.7429:

Or they just saw “tolunart.2095” on these forums?

Occam’s razor.

“Usually” the best answer is not necessarily the correct answer.

Nor is it necessarily the wrong answer.

But if you wanted to get a list of account names to mail, would you develop an application to slip past whatever anti-hacking software is used in GW2 when you could just get them fropm this forum with no risk and considerably less effort?

:edit:

Re: your edit

“hundreds” of people?

Source for this data?

Someone in another thread mentioned that they get spam emails in-game whenever they post on the forums. After reading that I noticed that seemed to be the pattern for me. Anecdotal, perhaps, but it’s what I’ve observed.

We should totally get achievements for reporting botters

“Source for this data?”

Observation and estimation, this not scientific research.

tolunart.2095:

“Source for this data?”

Observation and estimation, not scientific research.

No need for scientific research, I was wondering if you had a link to a forum member list or something similar (I’ve not seen one for this forum).

But it’s now clear that your arguement that it’s more likely to be done via hacking because only a few hundred people are registered on the forum appears to be based on complete guesswork.

You in fact don’t know how many people are on the forum, nor how many people are receiving the gold spam.

And you do? I am stating an opinion, not facts. It does not matter at all whether you agree with me or not.

As I said in my original post… they probably have some kind of software to automate the process. I do not have access to the servers or any information beyond what you have. No player posting on these forums has that info.

Guys whatever it is and how they do it it needs to stop, it’s highly annoying and I don’t want to put pressure on ArenaNet but it’s kind of a big deal. It’s like walking down a street where shop owners literally pull you inside their shop to look at their wares.

Gold sellers are rude this way with the mailing situation and reporting them won’t ever stop it.

ANet should just implement what amounts to a spam filter on the mail. It’d be trivially easy to do this on the client-side too, so it wouldn’t impact their servers.