Guild Wars 2

I’m getting tired of randomly getting spam from gold sellers. It is ridiculous. The moment I get 1 message an block and report it, the next minute I get the same message from another account, then 1 min, another account, like 10 different accounts in a row. One night I got 30 in a row during a span of 30 mins! Yeah I know I can block them but it is SO annoying, I think I’m running out of space on my Blocked list, and there should be an easier way of preventing this.

I’m guessing they probably add you to their Friend list, get your ID (Name.####) and remove you real quick so you don’t notice it, then their bots just start spamming all those accounts they have on the list, at least that’s how I would do it if I were developing a spamming program.

Usually at the point it really annoys me, I just go Invisible, but then I have a new issue: I cannot use guild chat, and people cannot easily invite my to parties by using guild window or friend list, they have to manually type my name.

I have some suggestions on how to make this issue go away:
1. Add a setting so I can enable something that says that no one outside my friend list can /whisper me. It is not too much to ask, you can do this in probably almost every social network since ICQ to Facebook.
2. Have a new Online(Do Not Disturb) mode where no one can /whisper you, so I can be online and talk with guild chat. That’s a feature IM programs used at work have, no one can IM you when you are set to Do Not Disturb, but they do see you online.
3. Fix that if you are Invisible, you can talk to your guild, that way I’ll go invisible when these spammers are hard at work and my gameplay experience is not affected.
4. Do like other MMOs and require you to Accept/Reject someone from adding you to their Friend List; I keep seeing people that are following me that I’ve never met in-game and I’m suspicious that they are trying to either steal my account info or just spam me with gold seller messages, so privacy is a concern.

If it’s gold sellers you’re concerned about the best thing to do is right click their name and report them for gold selling. That way they’ll get banned. Not right away, but fairly soon. If you report them and block them you don’t need to worry about your block list filling up because you can empty it periodically since all the old ones will be banned already.

I do however agree it would be nice to have more control over who can whisper you. There’s plenty of times someone may not want to get whispers from strangers but also don’t want to block the people who might whisper them (or doesn’t know who they are until it’s too late).

Finally however I should say you don’t need to worry about followers stealing your account info. All that means is they’ve added you to their friends list and you haven’t added them to yours. But they can’t see any more info than they could otherwise. To steal your account they need your email address and password and those aren’t visible to anyone, anywhere in the game for exactly that reason.

I agree with number 1 the most, as I think this is a great solution regarding privacy anyway. Not so sure about 2 or 3, although they have their uses.

As for number 4, I’m pretty sure that gold sellers access your account name and number from the leaderboards available online. Most of the random followers I get are people who have added me after I have helped them in map chat or something, or pugs after a dungeon run.