Guild Wars 2

Tonight both my wife and I were hit up repeatedly in whispers from randomly generated characters selling gold.

In a single evening she had over 20 whispers, and I had at least 5.

Is there any way to not just ban the accounts being used for these annoying messages, but also the IP addresses associated with them?

It was getting to the point tonight where it was negatively affecting our gameplay.

Just wanted to highlight this since it hasn’t been much of a problem until this weekend.

Dude, you need to edit out the website in your post as soon as possible. You’re sending them business and could be flagged as a gold seller yourself. All taken care of!

I haven’t noticed a marked increase in goldseller spam, myself. I’m sorry you and your wife got hit with that much nonsense, though.

Thanks Guhracie…. was just trying to be helpful in letting them know the offending site, and didn’t realize that was a bad idea lol. Just the same, I’ve never seen it so bad before. Hope they are able to do something about it.

I didn’t mean to sound harsh, I was just worried. I totally get that you had good intentions with it, though!

I had more than usual today too. Not as many as you, four or five. Report and Block and move on.

It did make me a bit sad though when I noticed that they were not randomly generated accounts. That means people fall in for it and in the worst case get their accounts kidnapped.

To my knowledge, IP blocks can be circumvented, and these companies likely know exactly how to do such things. (I’ve known people that play IP-blocked X-Country-Only games)
The reason I think you’re seeing a spike in them is the new Megaservers. It’s not so much that there are more bots then there have ever been, it’s all the bots across all servers are now gathered into the same place. Report them, and block them as they come is all I have to say. Ideally, since they’re all in the same place now, they’ll be reported more often, making it harder for the sellers to maintain their advertising budget. Wishful thinking at least.

I noticed that as well, and I think from now on in addition to report + block, I’ll also be writing a ticket reporting the gold selling website directly to GM’s. It’s only gonna take a moment, and I hope it will add more nails to gold selling coffin.

I got a mail from one the other day, ……… first time seeing gold selling sent via the in game mail system.

They are very annoying, more so because it must be profitable to them in some way. How many people actually buy gold from them, I’d like to know.

I reckon mostly people who aren’t very smart. Getting gold a little cheaper than by selling gems to risk your account being stolen and used to bot the game and sell gold… Not a choice I would make.

Me too I noticed they have multiplied.. I wonder why they’re being so active recently.

Leo Paul.1659:

Me too I noticed they have multiplied.. I wonder why they’re being so active recently.

more people playing with recent patch? (at least to check it out)

The increase of spamming messages is becoming annoying. Even during PvP matches I got messages for gold selling. I think I reported at least 10 of them in less then half an hour. 6 are still active (they are on my blocking list and still in the game). I hope the fact I don’t see the rest of them active means ArenaNet bans them very quickly (also when it is in the middle of the night for them).

/edit: Oh, and why is the search functionality for the forum still not fixed? Searching for “Gold Sellers” does not show a hit. It seems the forum does not search in the thread titles. Come on ArenaNet: After almost two years your forum is still crap.

Got over half a dozen gold seller whispers today, reported them all.

I am in Europe and all the whispers were in the sPvP lobby.

Hope Anet can stomp those out, its fairly annoying.

As to why they are suddenly more active, probably because of MEGASERVERS.

Megaservers wouldn’t have anything to do with it, the gold scammers just mine chat logs for names not in their spambot’s list and fire it off 24/7; they tend to increase in frequency whenever the gem store has a hot item on sale or new items available. Or when they aren’t getting enough suckers or something.

Long weekends have always been popular with gold sellers. Game mods aren’t around to ban their accounts, so they rush it while they can.

Block and Report and I’m sure they’ll all be taken care of on Tuesday.

The last 10 minutes I have gotten about 10 whispers… It started when I entered Rata Sum for a bit…

Can we please have a filtering system on our whispers so that whispers from a certain bank won’t come through anymore? Or at least give us a whitelisting system, so only people from our friendlist can whisper us if we select that option…

I went Into the charr starting area to pick up a couple easy Skillpoints. As soon as I logged In..BAM…. 1 every 10 to 15 seconds… got to where at first I would report each as it arrived. After I ended up having a few More while reporting one, I decided … eff it… I Played through got My skill points then went back to report each …I found 7…

I think for some reason the Charr are getting hit hard. Not sure why, In Human lands i didn’t get a single Gold seller. Go Humans!!! < jk>

Maybe it’s humans who try to sell gold to charr in order to undermine Charr Legion economy?

Queen Jennah is behind it I tell you! She has probably bought unhatched sylvari pods and sends them into slave labor running Queensdale champ train to get gold that she uses to kick charr economy of the rails preying on charr newly released from fahrars, and retake Ascalon when Legions go bankrupt and can’t afford weapons and armour!

takes off his tinfoil hat and eats his pills

I play on a lower population server and I guess there aren’t as many potential customers as there are on the higher population servers, so it didn’t make much business sense for these companies to advertise.

Now that everyone is “megaserver’d”, I suspect I’ll be seeing lots more gold seller spam.

LadyRhonwyn.2501:

The last 10 minutes I have gotten about 10 whispers… It started when I entered Rata Sum for a bit…

Can we please have a filtering system on our whispers so that whispers from a certain bank won’t come through anymore? Or at least give us a whitelisting system, so only people from our friendlist can whisper us if we select that option…

Bumping this one… I think this would be a great idea and would really limit down the gold farmers’ ability to advertise.

I’m surprised this hasn’t been deleted yet. I made a similar thread and it got deleted for being about gold sellers. I’m also getting really annoyed by gold sellers. Its sad that i think they spam you more when you block and report them. It’s getting out of control how many times they message you. And their messages are always huge filling up the entire chat log…

I just report them as gold sellers. REPORT!!!

I was getting them so fast that new ones would come in before I finished filling out the report ticket for the previous one. Almost all of them are from THAT bank. Anet is capable of providing a profanity filter, it should be possible to detect messages from THAT site and immediately flag it to a GM to check out and block the account sending them.

The solution is easy, but apperently not something the developers want to do.
They like all other have a profanity system and and can simply ban certain words, like the goldseller website in chat, problem solved.
This would force the goldseller to change website and they are most likely not willing to do that (becaues when the next goldseller website is created and reported, you just filter that out as well)
This would reduce the spam to a minimum because it is not hard to sell a product when you cant tell people where to buy it.

Man I’d be good as gold if I could filter out messages with keywords / phrases. “Hace a nice day” would be my first…….

I agree I had 3 spammed at me one after another after i said something in map chat at Gendarren… Most annoying thing was they spamm 3 -4 everytime I change characters and once every 10 -15min if your just on.

Since I first played I just report and block them. However it seems like they are swarming more every time I do that.

The increase in gold seller whisper-spam in the past 45 days or so is at least tenfold. That means 10 times as many spams as before. Last night during a 5-hour session I got 12 gold seller spams, and I just logged in on a character I haven’t played in a while and got 5 (FIVE!) consecutive whisper-spams from two different gold sellers in the time it took me to travel from Vigil Keep to LA- about 5 minutes.

IP blocks can be easily circumvented because, like the account names used, the spammers’ IP’s are faked and change with every login of their throwaway “accounts.”

Anet could go a long way toward blocking these infuriating criminals by simply blocking the CONTENT of the spam- such things as the known web addresses of the gold sellers, common “foreigner” phrases like “USD” which nobody but gold sellers uses in-game, etc. Another thing Anet could do is tighten up the security around whatever list of players these low-lifes are using to target their whispers.

What these bottom-feeders are doing is against the law world-wide, therefore they are, by definition, criminals. How can anybody with half a brain give known criminals their credit card information?? 0.o

We, as GW2 players, could stop the gold-seller spam completely within 30 days by simply refusing to deal with these crooks, making their spam pointless. Crooks are lazy. That’s why they are crooks. Once their spam has absolutely zero effect, they won’t bother any more.