Guild Wars 2

Has anyone noticed an increase in tenacity in gold spammers?

Till recently I have dealt with gold spammers by reporting them and moving on. They were slightly changing their name and repeating the same message with random changes in a specific areas of the message.

Now I’m at times getting dozens of the messages but from the same character, all in a row. It’s happening more now and reporting doesn’t seem to stop the spam. Leading me to manually blocking the character after reporting all the spam.

Did Anet’s anti-gold seller scripts break? And does reporting each gold selling message affect Anet’s ability to deal with the gold spammer?

My guild chat remains broken so I can’t just set myself to offline, else no one in the game can communicate with me. So what do I do about it?

It’s because the game is 75% off.

Gold sellers have been buying new accounts to use. But those will get banned just like they always do.

If you look closely, you will notice each message has a different number at the end. I suppose that is how they circumvent the spam restrictions.

Nevertheless, you would be best served by reporting and blocking. If you do so, you will never get a message more than once from the same account.

Good luck.

Danikat.8537:

It’s because the game is 75% off.

Gold sellers have been buying new accounts to use. But those will get banned just like they always do.

Pretty much this trolls and spammers are really get the most benefit from the game going on sale like it has just like every other time.

Yet more evidence that systems like DR do not work and do not prevent bots or gold spammers at all. Their scripts didn’t break they just never worked in the first place.

tigirius.9014:

Yet more evidence that systems like DR do not work and do not prevent bots or gold spammers at all. Their scripts didn’t break they just never worked in the first place.

What does diminishing returns have to do with gold spammers?

Haven’t you noticed that all of the gold spammers use stolen accounts at one point or another? Their main source of gold isn’t bot farming, it’s stealing accounts, liquidating all the assets, then sending it to their customers – customers who wind up getting their accounts stolen as well because they were dumb enough to fill out the registration form on gold seller sites with the same details they used to sign up for GW2.

Pandaman.4758:

tigirius.9014:

Yet more evidence that systems like DR do not work and do not prevent bots or gold spammers at all. Their scripts didn’t break they just never worked in the first place.

What does diminishing returns have to do with gold spammers?

Haven’t you noticed that all of the gold spammers use stolen accounts at one point or another? Their main source of gold isn’t bot farming, it’s stealing accounts, liquidating all the assets, then sending it to their customers – customers who wind up getting their accounts stolen as well because they were dumb enough to fill out the registration form on gold seller sites with the same details they used to sign up for GW2.

You’d be surprised how many gamers don’t bother with software firewalls such as zone alarm, or bother to configure hardware firewalls in their modem or router. A lot don’t bother with anti-virus, anti-malware or even turn on their windows firewall. They just log on and play and go to any link sent to them willy nilly. I used to build, sell and fix gaming rigs and the amount of people that came to me wanting their machine fixed could have averted a lot of problems just by simply covering those basics.

Shivan.9438:

You’d be surprised how many gamers don’t bother with software firewalls such as zone alarm

Wow .. i remember Zonealarm was popular maybe 15 years ago .. don’t know if it
even still exists.

All in all those firewalls did maybe more harm than that they really helped against
anything.

Beldin.5498:

Shivan.9438:

You’d be surprised how many gamers don’t bother with software firewalls such as zone alarm

Wow .. i remember Zonealarm was popular maybe 15 years ago .. don’t know if it
even still exists.

All in all those firewalls did maybe more harm than that they really helped against
anything.

It still exists today. And I’ve ran ZA, Spybot, Malwarebytes, Avast/AVG (alternatively) for years, never been hacked, never had an account stolen in WoW, GW, or any other game.

And i just run Avast and Windows Firewall and also have never been hacked.

The biggiest problem in MMOs are that people use their login data somewhere
else in forums, raid-planner or something else.

Read maybe also this :
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/mike-obrien-on-account-security/

Not helping…

This thread is kinda getting side tracked by talking about gold spammer psychology…

At least, does reporting each message help more then reporting just one?

I’m also surprised reporting someone as a gold spammer doesn’t automatically block them for you. It seems to make allot of extra work that seems unnecessary for the player.

Nova.7261:

Not helping…

This thread is kinda getting side tracked by talking about gold spammer psychology…

At least, does reporting each message help more then reporting just one?

I’m also surprised reporting someone as a gold spammer doesn’t automatically block them for you. It seems to make allot of extra work that seems unnecessary for the player.

1. Yes, report each message.
2. Not everyone wants to auto-block gold sellers because (a) sometimes it’s from a stolen account and folks don’t want to block it and (b) the spammers/spam bots know that they won’t get to send that many messages, so they stop on their own (or get banned quickly), i.e. it might not be that important to block them.

They are working multiple angles here:
• New accounts popping up and spamming map chat and whispers.
• People getting accounts hacked.
• A new money transfer system pointed out on reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3253rz/ok_so_who_did_this_0_o/

Low cost items being posted at extravagant prices, then snatched up seems to be the workaround for the limits imposed on email transfers of in-game gold.

I scream BRING THEM ON . They buy new $10 accounts from ANET then they get reported/banned and BAM its money in ANET pocket to create more content for us.

Well if Anet is pulling a net profit from it then I’m not as worried but I’d assume gold sellers would of found a way around buy Anet accounts with promo-codes or something.

If your looking at profit for Anet it would be nice to see accounts used for advertisement become less effective and force them to get more accounts to do the same task.

Shivan.9438:

Beldin.5498:

Shivan.9438:

You’d be surprised how many gamers don’t bother with software firewalls such as zone alarm

Wow .. i remember Zonealarm was popular maybe 15 years ago .. don’t know if it
even still exists.

All in all those firewalls did maybe more harm than that they really helped against
anything.

It still exists today. And I’ve ran ZA, Spybot, Malwarebytes, Avast/AVG (alternatively) for years, never been hacked, never had an account stolen in WoW, GW, or any other game.

??? Who the hell is trying to hack people’s MMO accounts with viruses when it’s just as easy to get them to hand you the credentials on a platter?

Not all are hacked accounts. The newest ones don’t seem to be. After I block I mouse over the name to see the display name. If it’s fgdgfrvbf.1345 or similar then it’s not likely to be hacked as real accounts normally have real display names, as seen on the forums.

So, either they are taking advantage of the $10 sales or they are using stolen credit cards to buy large numbers of accounts.

I’m guessing they use stolen credit cards. They know the accounts will be closed down pretty fast so they won’t want to use their own money. This way they can pass on the costs of losing the account after a day of messaging to ANet, who loses the sale of the account when the credit card holder gets the charges reversed and get hit with various fees and costs related to having a sale reversed. I imagine they consider it poetic justice to hit ANet with the gold sellers costs of doing businesses.

And here is what happens to RMT gold buyers

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/support/Roll-back-3/first#post4970778

Danikat.8537:

It’s because the game is 75% off.

Gold sellers have been buying new accounts to use. But those will get banned just like they always do.

While cheap accounts are part of the issue, new potential customers are the REAL reason they are upping their game right now.