Guild Wars 2

I have an idea that may help put a stop to the gold sellers that whisper. How about making it so accounts can not whisper until they have say 100 achievement points. If not a global block, one that people can choose to enable.

This is a massive deterrent for new players, who need to ask for help to get around the game when they first start.

Flissy.4093:

This is a massive deterrent for new players, who need to ask for help to get around the game when they first start.

How would it be? You don’t need to whisper to get information or advice anywhere in the game. In fact a new player is much less likely to use a whisper function, since they generally don’t know anyone. New players are already restricted from gold>gems conversion with a time limit. It still leaves them all the other chat channels to ask advice on. Hell implement a City of Heroes system where a new player cant whisper out but they can reply to one sent to them.

I would support a whisper restriction on new players based on either AP or Account Age.

Whisper is not a massive deterrent in my opinion. They still have many other channels they can use to ask for help. And again, it doesn’t need to be a global block. But, I would certainly enable it. I suspect that I’ve never even received a whisper from a truly brand new player in well over a year of playing.

Since the original idea seems to raise a flag. How about just a toggle to allow/disallow the channel period. I rarely use it and wouldn’t have any issue disabling it.

I would not support it- I get many more whispers from new players asking for help/ advice than I get gold seller whispers. If the latter I just report and block

Lexandro- sometimes new players want quite detailed advice- map chat is not always appropriate for that

I just generally think any restrictions based on AP is a bad idea

The other problem is that the sellers are usually stolen accounts – these have a good chance of having more than 100 AP.

The real solution is to permaban the sellers, and slap anyone who bought (received gold) from them with a 2 month tempban (as well as subtracting the gold from their account, even if they have already spent it and it sends them into the negatives).

Although I agree that gold-sellers should be removed, you can’t perma-ban the accounts if they are ‘usually stolen’. This is why it takes some time to address the problem; each account must be investigated to see what’s really going on.

Most of the messages I get from gold-sellers are from accounts with gibberish names, though. On the other hand, I have seen a few accounts on my server of regular players who chose gibberish names, so that isn’t always an accurate indication, either.

You know, the gold-sellers used to spam their chat in /m or /s, but now they are using /whisper. ArenaNet must have done something to make them move to /whisper, as it is much more efficient to spam the other forms of chat. ArenaNet will probably address this problem, as soon as possible, as well.

There is a higher chance of them being reported by multiple players if they use /m or /s.
By whispering I imagine they have a higher success rate and face less reports. Also I guess it would stretch the reports out in time which would make it look less suspicious.

Best thing you can do – the second you see a gold seller in ANY chat, right click their name and select Report from the drop down. To be honest I’ve only ever been whispered by a gold seller once, and I very rarely see them in map chat (even in LA), so I am wondering if there are specific servers that are targeted?

they always send the same message, it can be filtered and banned easily.

zamalek.2154:

The real solution is to permaban the sellers, and slap anyone who bought (received gold) from them with a 2 month tempban (as well as subtracting the gold from their account, even if they have already spent it and it sends them into the negatives).

Anybody who buys gold from gold spammers should receive a permanent ban. No exceptions.

They know what they’re doing and they should face the consequences for doing so.

Erus Keb.8379:

Since the original idea seems to raise a flag. How about just a toggle to allow/disallow the channel period. I rarely use it and wouldn’t have any issue disabling it.

That exists. Go into your chat tab settings and unclick Whispers. Done. The whispers will still exist but you’ll never see them unless you toggle the box on.

I am with those that are against this suggestion. I know that many a new player will wsper someone to ask a question, or for help. I have 2 new members in my guild that didn’t realize there was a guild chat (didn’t realize we were talking to them lol) and they wspered me (the leader) to say hi and introduce themselves. I’ve also had players wsper me on starter maps to ask me if I could help them or to ask about something that had them stumped.

My suggestion: just report, block, and move on. The same as if the seller had advertised in all chat.

I get these whispers almost every day. Some days more than one from different accounts. They even manage to make some of the text larger than normal. In my case, whisper gets very little use. Guild/Say/Map/Team all see a lot more use. It’s also a bit more annoying when I get them in WvW. These people are not in wvw, or at least not in my sight so I can’t block them. I can report them but I have to leave wvw to block them as that is not an option in wvw in the chat window.

In my experience, these are accounts with 0 AP. I report them, block them and look to see what the AP is in the block list.

For those that say they don’t support it. If it was an option along the lines of the language filter, would you still not support it? As in, you have the option to allow/disallow whispers from anyone that has less than say 100 AP.

I’d also like to make it clear that 100 is just a number I threw out there. I’m sure that ANet would be able to come up with a reasonable number.

Lexandro threw in the idea that new people can’t send whispers but can respond to them. Another thought along these lines: rate limit the new players in the form of how many people they can send whispers to in a time period. I’ll throw out another number as an example: 10 people per hour.

As far as them always sending the same message, they would change the message in a million ways if the message was blocked based on the content. People can get really creative in this respect.

My concern with just not viewing the whisper channel is that people may think I’ve received messages when I have not. If it was a channel toggle, then the game could possibly respond that that person is not accepting whispers. Of course, my preference would be a toggle that blocked any whisper from those with less than 100 AP and let the sender know it was not received.

Thanks for all the responses!

And a special thank you for all of the progress already made concerning the gold selling spam. Especially, the reduction in map chat. Thanks!

FlamingFoxx.1305:

There is a higher chance of them being reported by multiple players if they use /m or /s.
By whispering I imagine they have a higher success rate and face less reports. Also I guess it would stretch the reports out in time which would make it look less suspicious.

Best thing you can do – the second you see a gold seller in ANY chat, right click their name and select Report from the drop down. To be honest I’ve only ever been whispered by a gold seller once, and I very rarely see them in map chat (even in LA), so I am wondering if there are specific servers that are targeted?

2 weeks ago I was whispered by 5 gold spam bots in a matter of 20 minutes. After not talking in map chat all day when I was in orr for dwayna temple

Why not just block them? Surely there can’t be so many that you’d constantly have to be blocking people. I haven’t had a single one whisper to me yet, so they can’t be THAT prevalent.

It’s been theorized in other threads that the bots are using the leaderboards to gather names. I will sometimes get 3 or 4 in a day, then go a few days with none.

Gold spam will always slip through, no matter how harsh the restrictions are.