Guild Wars 2

Sure, I know this issue’s all over the forums, but so far as I’ve seen, people keep just suggesting different ways of tracking botters, sellers, and clients. Each idea is good in its own way, but honestly, doesn’t address the overall issue in my mind.

So here it is: If you want to end gold farming permanently, disable the ability to send gold in the mail, and add an attachment fee to all other items. THEN work on fixing the issues that let this happen in the first place.

Stop dorking around with Diminishing Returns that are punishing the playerbase. Stop struggling around with hundreds of thousands of Gold Selling reports a day. Stop dealing with countless hacked report issues. And for the love of the Six, stop devoting your entire staff to an issue that, quite honestly, doesn’t need to be the top #1 over every other problem in existence.

Once the mail system has been dealt with, THEN, and ONLY THEN, should you devote teams to fixing the underlying issues letting people exploit the system. The approach you guys are taking right now, honestly, is counterproductive. There’s little to no benefit in fighting a problem that keeps resurfacing and getting worse whilst you try to fix it.

Disabling the gold-trade system will:
1: Kill gold-selling through all current means excluding remote-logins.
— This is the problem of the player to deal with if they get hacked. Their fault for giving out login info to third parties.
2: Almost completely alleviate the number of hacking attempts being done.
— There’s no profit in hacking people if you can’t actually do anything with said account.
3: Free up however many people you have running damage control and allow you to reassign them to FIXING the issue. Once the underlying issue has been fixed, then you might be able to put the mail system back to full function.

Setting an attachment fee to all other items would discourage the botters from mass-sending items to the main account. Make the attachment fee scale to the number of items being sent, and to the value of said item. Again, there’s no profit in botting if you can’t offload your goods in a quick and free way.

And to everyone out there that’s undoubtedly going to hate this suggestion:

I’m sorry. I really am. But look at it this way, the botters and gold farmers are making a huge negative impact on the game. It’s taking up the time and power of the developers who could otherwise be fixing the 100+ bugs that your class suffer from, or the storyline that won’t work right.

If it’s between a few weeks of inconvenience, and having to rely more on the Guild Bank, the Trading Post, and NPC’s to kill farmers, or slogging through the countless issues that are going to still be there in the same amount of time while ANet struggles to plug all the holes in the boat, personally, I’d rather just take the moderate inconvenience.

Ignore this thread. Do not limit or punish me for sending items / currency to people in a MULTIPLAYER game.

:edit:

And it will solve nothing.

Goldseller: You bought 100g!
Customer: How do I get it?
Goldseller: Find an item which no one is selling on the TP (a random piece of loot, etc) and place a sell order for 100g. We will then buy it.

What’s to stop the gold buyers and sellers from temporarily joining a guild, using the guild bank to xfer funds, then breaking the guild?

Or using a guild bank to strip a hacked account?

This will be just one more instance of punishing the rest of the playerbase in order to try and stop the farmers.

I’d say it’s one of the more reasonable suggestions presented so far. Whether that’s good or bad, not sure.

Tradewind.6913:

I’d say it’s one of the more reasonable suggestions presented so far. Whether that’s good or bad, not sure.

Doesn’t stop gold sellers, does limit normal players.

Hinders them a bit. Since you’d have to look fairly hard to find items not listed on the TP that are in abundance. Ready enough anyway to sell. If they went the route of providing the item to the player to repost, then either that person is losing 15% of what they just paid for, or the sellers are eating an additional 15% cost to reimburse the posting/sale fees. You’d also have to have the money in the first place to place the sell order, which may be prohibitive for the buyers.

Tradewind.6913:

Hinders them a bit. Since you’d have to look fairly hard to find items not listed on the TP that are in abundance. Ready enough anyway to sell. If they went the route of providing the item to the player to repost, then either that person is losing 15% of what they just paid for, or the sellers are eating an additional 15% cost. You’d also have to have the money in the first place to place the sell order, which may be prohibitive for the buyers.

Then the gold sellers just need to get some of the item and mail one to the customer, telling the customer to then sell it back to them for 100g.

It means the gold sellers lose out on tax, but it won’t stop them or cause them any real problems.

:edit:

All it would likely do is change how much gold you get per dollar.

Which was in the second half there. I don’t think that’s a sustainable model, not without the sellers raising their prices. If every transaction is going to cost them an additional 15%.

Feycat.4370:

What’s to stop the gold buyers and sellers from temporarily joining a guild, using the guild bank to xfer funds, then breaking the guild?

Or using a guild bank to strip a hacked account?

Both good questions. Though I’d imagine tracking guild inventories and funds would be profoundly simpler given the disparity between the number of accounts, and the number of guilds. ANet has to track individual transactions in the mass of logs they have, if their database is anything like it should be, they have tools to filter between the huge list of personal transactions and guildbank transactions. Once you find the guild that the farmer is putting into, and withdrawing from, then you can just outright ban every member in the guild, dealing blows out to multiple accounts simultaneously.

And to the above, punishment? Not really. There are still viable ways to give people things. Just because YOU don’t the thought of not being able to send those few crafting supplies to your guildie for free without going to the bank, doesn’t mean it’s an overall punishment. If you’re sending people stuff in the mail to sell it, there’s a trading post for that.

Tradewind.6913:

Which was in the second half there. I don’t think that’s a sustainable model, not without the sellers raising their prices. If every transaction is going to cost them an additional 15%.

Yeah, that’s why I added in my edit as the first part of my post pretty much mirrored yours.

But, if all it does is mean they raise their prices by 15% to cover the additional tax, what will have been accomplished?

Jestunhi.7429:

Tradewind.6913:

Hinders them a bit. Since you’d have to look fairly hard to find items not listed on the TP that are in abundance. Ready enough anyway to sell. If they went the route of providing the item to the player to repost, then either that person is losing 15% of what they just paid for, or the sellers are eating an additional 15% cost. You’d also have to have the money in the first place to place the sell order, which may be prohibitive for the buyers.

Then the gold sellers just need to get some of the item and mail one to the customer, telling the customer to then sell it back to them for 100g.

It means the gold sellers lose out on tax, but it won’t stop them or cause them any real problems.

:edit:

All it would likely do is change how much gold you get per dollar.

That’s probably the driving point behind the whole idea. Make it more costly for the Gold sellers to do business in the first place. Make it costly enough… then players will just buy gems.

AndrewWaltfeld.4621:

That’s probably the driving point behind the whole idea. Make it more costly for the Gold sellers to do business in the first place.

It would make it more costly for the customer.

You think the gold seller is going to take a 15% profit loss rather than passing it on?

:edit:

You would need a stupidly high tax rate to have it be as expensive as the gem – gold exchange rate…

Jestunhi.7429:

AndrewWaltfeld.4621:

That’s probably the driving point behind the whole idea. Make it more costly for the Gold sellers to do business in the first place.

It would make it more costly for the customer.

You think the gold seller is going to take a 15% profit loss rather than passing it on?

:edit:

You would need a stupidly high tax rate to have it be as expensive as the gem – gold exchange rate…

But if that cost was closer to what ANet provides for the Gem>Gold conversion, what’s the point in going to the third parties? Admittedly I don’t know what it’s going for these days from those third parties, never checked.

Jestunhi.7429:

AndrewWaltfeld.4621:

That’s probably the driving point behind the whole idea. Make it more costly for the Gold sellers to do business in the first place.

It would make it more costly for the customer.

You think the gold seller is going to take a 15% profit loss rather than passing it on?

:edit:

You would need a stupidly high tax rate to have it be as expensive as the gem – gold exchange rate…

Last time I bothered to actually read one of those spam-mails their rates were already matching, if not slightly above the IGX. Maybe they don’t update their copypasta as often as they do their sites, who knows.

Edit:

Here’s another thought.
If ANet actually advertised that one could actually buy gold, using in-game, and 100% secure resources, they’d probably be a little more inclined to do so.
They advertise the ability to buy gems, and the ability to convert gold to gems readily. But they don’t really hint on the fact that one can freely exchange purchased gems into gold.

The lot of us who know we can do that sit around pondering why people buy gold from scrupulous sources and risk their accounts.. Could be just from a lack of information?

Black Wyvern.3128:

And to the above, punishment? Not really. There are still viable ways to give people things. Just because YOU don’t the thought of not being able to send those few crafting supplies to your guildie for free without going to the bank, doesn’t mean it’s an overall punishment. If you’re sending people stuff in the mail to sell it, there’s a trading post for that.

You seem to think that DR is a punishment on legitimate players to stop goldsellers.

How is making me pay for sending crafting mats to my friend NOT punishing me to stop goldsellers? Besides being somewhat laughable, since pretty much every other MMO does that and they all still have goldsellers.

Lets see…

800 gems for £8.50, 100 gems = 29 silver. £8.50 = 2g 32s

5gold is £3.84 on a random site that I just found via google.

So, once again, you’d need a stupidly high tax to price gold sellers out of the market.

If the 800 for £8.50 is wrong someone please correct me, did that part from memory.

:edit:

nm, checked ingame. 800 gems for £8.50 is correct.

Feycat.4370:

Black Wyvern.3128:

And to the above, punishment? Not really. There are still viable ways to give people things. Just because YOU don’t the thought of not being able to send those few crafting supplies to your guildie for free without going to the bank, doesn’t mean it’s an overall punishment. If you’re sending people stuff in the mail to sell it, there’s a trading post for that.

You seem to think that DR is a punishment on legitimate players to stop goldsellers.

How is making me pay for sending crafting mats to my friend NOT punishing me to stop goldsellers? Besides being somewhat laughable, since pretty much every other MMO does that and they all still have goldsellers.

Getting one ore from a Rich vein is a punishment.
The botters run around farming high-yield mobs and jump from node to node selling every little scrap to fuel the goldselling mains.

You can’t possibly tell me that putting in the gathering DR’s are not a stop-gap to try to slow the income of them, which in turn hurts us.

Other games have fees to send mail, but those other games also have character-to-character trades. Since GW2 doesn’t, the mail needs to remain free.

Kwami.4356:

Other games have fees to send mail, but those other games also have character-to-character trades. Since GW2 doesn’t, the mail needs to remain free.

They also still have gold sellers, whether they have the mail tax or not.