Guild Wars 2

This warning was just added to all in-game mail that was not sent by the game, gem store, or GW2 team:

Warning: This message was sent by another player. It was not sent by the Guild Wars 2 Team.

Two concerns about this new warning:

1. This warning seems overly alarming, and may unintentionally scare players (especially new players) who haven’t seen it before. I suggest removing "Warning: " from the beginning of the text (but keep the little yellow triangle).
2. The messages I received from Seth Chadwick also have this warning, despite that he is a part of the GW2 team. If this message had originally accompanied the “Adopt-A-Dev” messages he sent me, I might have thought it was someone trying to trick me.

There has been reports of dev impersonation in and out of game, so e-mail in game and out of game ( your physical game account email) will have this now.

I wouldn’t worry too much if its players you do know.

Maybe the message from Seth Chadwick was from his gaming/playing account. The warning about coming from official ANet employees may be only from official accounts. Gaming/playing accounts might not count for that.

I’m about as confused as the OP and others here. This thread was started with the new update about a Anet stamp on mail.

From the 9/30 updates:

Anti-Phishing

“Messages received in-game that are sent by ArenaNet in an official capacity, such as messages sent by a GM, will now display the ArenaNet logo (or the KZ logo for Chinese accounts). All other messages will display a warning that the message is from another player. Official messages from a GM or other ArenaNet employee will always display the appropriate logo and will never display a warning message. Any message claiming to be sent from ArenaNet or from a GM that displays the warning message is NOT actually from ArenaNet or from a GM.”

Its not so clear as it should be: will it be on every in game mail, from all players or does this pertain to the emails we get on our game account e-mail (one we registered to play GW 2 with) to differentiate between you guys and the fake “your account will be terminated if you don’t give us your info.” Spam?

Yumiko Ishida.3769:

I’m about as confused as the OP and others here. This thread was started with the new update about a Anet stamp on mail.

From the 9/30 updates:

Anti-Phishing

“Messages received in-game that are sent by ArenaNet in an official capacity, such as messages sent by a GM, will now display the ArenaNet logo (or the KZ logo for Chinese accounts). All other messages will display a warning that the message is from another player. Official messages from a GM or other ArenaNet employee will always display the appropriate logo and will never display a warning message. Any message claiming to be sent from ArenaNet or from a GM that displays the warning message is NOT actually from ArenaNet or from a GM.”

Its not so clear as it should be: will it be on every in game mail, from all players or does this pertain to the emails we get on our game account e-mail (one we registered to play GW 2 with) to differentiate between you guys and the fake “your account will be terminated if you don’t give us your info.” Spam?

This is only in-game mail. You are right, it says messages and not mail, or mail messages. If you send a mail to another player, or they send it to you, you get this warning message at the bottom of the mail.

I think in the attempt to be aggressive against phishing adding a warning message to EVERY in-game mail from another player is heavy handed and alarmist. Simply adding the official stamp/logo to OFFICIAL in-game mail would be enough.

Imagine if every letter you got via snail mail not from the government had a warning:

“This message is NOT from the government and could contain a BOMB!”

I think that is a very good analogy.

Astral Projections.7320:

Maybe the message from Seth Chadwick was from his gaming/playing account. The warning about coming from official ANet employees may be only from official accounts. Gaming/playing accounts might not count for that.

That’s my guess too, but this will probably cause confusion for any future Adopt-A-Dev or similar events.

Yumiko Ishida.3769:

…

This has nothing to do with email. This is in-game mail only. Anet can’t control what scammers include in their emails.

GOSU.9574:

“This message is NOT from the government and could contain a BOMB!”

I think that is a very good analogy.

LOL, this made me smile.

But I see the reason for confusion and I had an inkling it’d be a problem the moment I saw the note about it. Although I understand why Anet is doing it, it sounds like it’s as heavy-handed-looking as the note would make it seem.

I got an idea though: When someone makes a new character, send them an automated Anet-officially-stamped mail welcoming them to the game. That way people will be exposed to what official looks like in a very immediate and real way, and will know what to look for. You can even put info about what official will look like in that very same mail.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Yumiko, are you speaking about in-game message or mails? The warning is included only in mails, so conversations continue as always.

This is a symptom of a general problem I’ve noticed in the patch notes: sometimes they use what I assume is an internal name for some game term, and not the name that’s exposed to the players or that the players actually use.

For instance (I’d link examples but the Wiki’s down), I occasionally see the patch notes refer to items of “uncommon” rarity. From my experience in other MMOs, I assume that’s the second-lowest rarity tier. But the game UI always calls that Fine, and players usually call them blue.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Yumiko, are you speaking about in-game message or mails? The warning is included only in mails, so conversations continue as always.

And this is why I was confused when I read the patch notes yesterday. The patch notes refer to messages, but mean mail. Mail is a message, but a whisper is also a message. Just delivered differently (obviously).

I initially thought that the patch notes meant both. It sounded really obnoxious with whispering, but thankfully that turned out to be a misinterpretation (side note, patch notes should never require interpretation, use exact terminology).

Aside from all that, I do agree with the original post — the wording on the text is unnecessarily alarming, and removing the “Warning” at the beginning would make it seem more informational and less dire.

I can understand the aggressive policy against impersonation. Though personally I’ve never seen anyone try to pass off as official when they aren’t, clearly I can’t see behind the scenes to know how prevalent this is. So even though it does feel heavy handed to me, if there are a number of cases of this happening then I can easily understand the changes.

I do also like the idea of an official welcome message to the game for each new character. Perhaps include a bit of additional information, such as how to look up things on the wiki.

Labjax.2465:

I got an idea though: When someone makes a new character, send them an automated Anet-officially-stamped mail welcoming them to the game. That way people will be exposed to what official looks like in a very immediate and real way, and will know what to look for. You can even put info about what official will look like in that very same mail.

This, and remove the warning from all mails. It’s annoying.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Here’s an update:

We’re sorry for any confusion related to the in-game mail messaging and want to let you know the dev team is aware that all in-game mails from another account presently display this warning, even if they come from an ArenaNet employee account.

Thanks for the update.

I’m guessing the non-flagged mail would have to come from devs who are specifically acting as admins (support or otherwise) in the game. Most devs in the game are there as players, not admins.

Communications, Communications, Communications.
I was under the impression they hired a communications expert to handle avoiding this type of problem.
If not, please hire a communications expert Anet. Thank You.

I really think they should take out the part where it says, Warning:

That makes the email look peculiar, like it’s an actual warning. In common terms the word warning means that there is some sort of danger. That note is informational only, a comment.

This message was sent by another player. It was not sent by the Guild Wars 2 Team.

That gets the point across without sounding like there is something to warn against with that particular message.

“Note: This message was sent by another player. It was not sent by the Guild Wars 2 Team.”

Thinking that would be better.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Here’s an update:

We’re sorry for any confusion related to the in-game mail messaging and want to let you know the dev team is aware that all in-game mails from another account presently display this warning, even if they come from an ArenaNet employee account.

Wait… how do we know you’re the real Gaile Gray? .

Majic.4801:

Wait… how do we know you’re the real Gaile Gray? .

Maybe by the big red swoosh?

how about add an option for verification rather than display a warning all the time

My first thought was that this is backwards, that it would make more sense to display a notification only on messages that do come from Anet, rather than all the others. But then the problem is that if someone gets a message from a scammer before one from Anet (which are relatively rare) they wouldn’t know it’s supposed to have an additional note to verify that they are who they say they are.

However I also agree that labelling it as a warning is overly alarmist. It makes it sound like we shouldn’t expect to get mail from other players and it’s something to be worried about. Removing the word warning would still get the point across but in a less aggressive way.