Guild Wars 2

For several months now I’ve been constantly whispered by bots and throw away accounts with advertisements for pvpbank.com. When i step away and idle in Lion’s Arch for 5-10 minutes i come back to see 3-9 whispers from accounts who’s name is like Rfdsfdsfdf(adasdasdasd.7583), Tfggffgfg(dasdasdasd.2468) and Rfdsfsdfsdfsdf(dsadasdasdasd.2403), which are today’s messaged, within a 3 minute time frame. one of them showed up while i was in the middle of fractals so i guess i don’t even have to be in a hub city anymore to get the spam. It gets worse when i go AFK in the pvp lobby, i’ll come back to upwards of 20 whispers in 15 minutes, all from separate accounts and separate names.

The everyone else i ask about this says they don’t get hardly any and the few that do don’t get as many as i do. I’m literally being harassed by pvpbank with no options other then playing on invisible, which doesn’t allow me to whisper my friends or talk in guild chat, or just not play the game. I’m seriously considering legal action against the site owners. Is ArenaNet even doing anything about these gold sellers? do i have any other options besides being invisible? I can not be the only one getting this many spam whispers.

Probably every gold selling whisper (which is a large block list full) I have ever got is from them. You would think they would not be around any more. Hmmm.

Edited to add: nearly every one has happened in the PVP Lobby, but not all of them.

So weird. I dont get them, prolly cause they dont spot me as i rarely enter LA – im almost always just in WvW.

You can block and report. And Anet will get to them. Technically, your legal action is going to cost you more money and time then you could even think about it, and most likely you’ll have a hard time finding a lawyer taking the case.

Your other option is to get over yourself. It’s not destroying your personal propery. It’s a nuicence. Block and report. It’s an MMO, I haven’t been on an mmo in like 10 years that hasn’t had gold sellers. It’s the ugly side of the industry. And really, the people who are making it worse are the ones who use the service.

^well it would be interesting to see how a lawsuit against a game spammer pointing to a website will turn out

Block and report, rinse and repeat.

While I agree with others who have posted here saying “block, report and move on” it still makes me wonder how ANet hasn’t managed to shut down PvPBank on its own. God knows they could afford the lawyers to go after these gold spammers. It’s a malicious attack on ANet’s profits and customers, I can’t understand why they haven’t been able to get that site shut down. Perhaps it’s some kind of legal issue with where the spammers are located.

sunnypsyop.3025:

While I agree with others who have posted here saying “block, report and move on” it still makes me wonder how ANet hasn’t managed to shut down PvPBank on its own. God knows they could afford the lawyers to go after these gold spammers. It’s a malicious attack on ANet’s profits and customers, I can’t understand why they haven’t been able to get that site shut down. Perhaps it’s some kind of legal issue with where the spammers are located.

It is in fact a legal issue.

Most gold selling sites operate from locations in asia where it is completely legal to run such a business. Such is the case with pvpbank, and thus ANET has no legal grounds to raise a case. This is why virutally every online has spammers. For the spammers, it’s often the only job they can get (and it still doesn’t pay all that much) and socially they often don’t understand the hate directed at their profession, so there’s no ‘guilt factor’ to push people away from those jobs.

My understanding is that it’s very hard to get law enforcement and legal beagles interested in this. In the grand scheme of things, it’s considered very low-priority compared to the more serious types of cyber crimes. And, as the poster above me pointed it, it probably gets more complicated when more than one country is involved.

Best thing we can probably do is continue to block and report, and protect our own accounts so they don’t get stolen and used to harass others.

PopeUrban.2578:

sunnypsyop.3025:

While I agree with others who have posted here saying “block, report and move on” it still makes me wonder how ANet hasn’t managed to shut down PvPBank on its own. God knows they could afford the lawyers to go after these gold spammers. It’s a malicious attack on ANet’s profits and customers, I can’t understand why they haven’t been able to get that site shut down. Perhaps it’s some kind of legal issue with where the spammers are located.

It is in fact a legal issue.

Most gold selling sites operate from locations in asia where it is completely legal to run such a business. Such is the case with pvpbank, and thus ANET has no legal grounds to raise a case. This is why virutally every online has spammers. For the spammers, it’s often the only job they can get (and it still doesn’t pay all that much) and socially they often don’t understand the hate directed at their profession, so there’s no ‘guilt factor’ to push people away from those jobs.

This to most extents.

I recall some legal action taken by the folks who ran Runescape some years ago in targeting bots, and they won.

That said, I imagine the costs of doing so are immense and in the case of ANet probably aren’t costing them much business; after all, each spam account runs the cost of their game, and is likely terminated pretty quickly.

A third party can’t sue for what gets said in-game, except for maybe a few edge cases where the logs may be usable for some kind of additional evidence. The Terms of Use outlines this pretty clearly in order to protect ANet from being dragged into such a lawsuit.

It sometimes happens to me in PVE maps, but almost EVERY time I join the pvp lobby, or even joining a pvp match from a PVE map. Annoying as hell. My block list is ridiculously long.

literally every single person that plays gets gold spam. you are not being picked on, stalked, or harassed.

My blocked players list is largely alphabet soup.

I dont recall ever getting one, or maybe I just didnt see it. Wow I wonder why your getting so many.

it’s time to add some chat filter function! it’s already implemented in black desert online and it makes so fun without that gold seller!

Korunos.4758:

it’s time to add some chat filter function! it’s already implemented in black desert online and it makes so fun without that gold seller!

Chat filters do not work. Anyone who thinks otherwise is so naive they border on being criminal. For example, for JUST “www” there’s a large number of variations that can and will bypass filters- vvvvvv, wwvv, wwvvvv, wvvw, vvww, \/\/ \/\/ \/\/, etc.

Get a royal terrace pass and stop hanging in LA for your crafting/banking/trading/whatever except when you need to go fractals, you have a gate to LA there too and all the npcs are in one tight spot. And you will never see gold sellers or other scrub players there, only the finest of Tyria. Problem solved.

Aidan Savage.2078:

Korunos.4758:

it’s time to add some chat filter function! it’s already implemented in black desert online and it makes so fun without that gold seller!

Chat filters do not work. Anyone who thinks otherwise is so naive they border on being criminal. For example, for JUST “www” there’s a large number of variations that can and will bypass filters- vvvvvv, wwvv, wwvvvv, wvvw, vvww, \/\/ \/\/ \/\/, etc.

As I know, the seller from PVPBANK are just spamming. No other sellers. So just add pvpbank and you will never get any spam

I’ve often wondered why that particular URL is not blocked. Sure, it’s easy to change the spelling but it’s easy to block that variant too. A game of cat and mouse but it would just make it a little less convenient for the sellers. In Neverwinter the main gold seller message had their URL so disguised that it was actually quite hard to decipher. example : "\/\/\/\/\/\/(dot) " etc. It’s not a solution but at present it seems that they can advertise at will.

One solution to filtering would be to put it in the collective hands of the players. A player-voted filter list that we could turn on and off. If enough players add the same pattern to the list then it becomes live. It sounds like it would be open to abuse but, just like a wiki, the “sensible” majority of players would keep it on track.

As for the spam itself, I played this game for months with no spam at all then I went into WvW for the very first time and suddenly I was getting 3 or 4 spams a day. I don’t see why they would target WvW rather than, say, LA but it seems that they do.

Aidan Savage.2078:

Chat filters do not work. Anyone who thinks otherwise is so naive they border on being criminal. For example, for JUST “www” there’s a large number of variations that can and will bypass filters- vvvvvv, wwvv, wwvvvv, wvvw, vvww, \/\/ \/\/ \/\/, etc.

With a good regexp you can filter 99.99% of the possible combinations. And the other 0.01% would be difficult to read for humans. It is easy to detect these messages, and I am 99% sure that Anet has a tool for it.

Korunos.4758:

As I know, the seller from PVPBANK are just spamming. No other sellers. So just add pvpbank and you will never get any spam

I get messages from 2 sites regularly.