Guild Wars 2

I own two copies of GW2 and one copy of GW with all expansions. On my second GW2 account, I log in, fiddle with dailies, do a little running around, use the extra bank space, and then send all the crafting mats to my main account where I craft in earnest.

After sending a couple messages off to my main, I get “Excessve Messaging” on the mail, and have to wait. Is it possible to have the excessive message trigger check to see if the accounts are linked? If the accounts are linked, I would think the reasons that excessive messaging would be suppressed would be moot.

Thanks for considering this suggestion. I imagine that, considering all the sales on the game “box” you’ve had, my set up is common enough that this would be appreciated by a lot of players, especially crafters — which is certainly a culture the game encourages! We buy lots of bank and bag space

There is no way to link two GW2 accounts to each other. It would be nice, but they’ve not yet offered that feature. Good suggestion though. If they ever implement linking GW2 accounts to each other, I’d support this added aspect to the feature as well.

shava.3502:

After sending a couple messages off to my main, I get “Excessve Messaging” on the mail, and have to wait. Is it possible to have the excessive message trigger check to see if the accounts are linked? If the accounts are linked, I would think the reasons that excessive messaging would be suppressed would be moot.

Although the main reason would be moot, the side effect is that this block also is a hinderance for goldsellers.

To explain this let me explain a lil bit how gold sellers work.
1: they use accounts to farm
2: they use accounts to spam
3: they use accounts to sent out purchased gold on a website.
4: they use accounts to put farmed gold over several accounts to laundry them.
All of these accounts are stolen from players or created using stolen credit cards.

the purpose of the 4th type of accounts they use is to make it impossible for support to track down farmed gold to the actual account who is selling/buying gold. By taking away this excessive msg trigger for “linked” accounts or accounts that are set to be ok by users, you make it a lot easier for them to hide the track.

Actually having retired from a career in (among other things) computer security and social engineering, and having been CEO of an indy game company that did work with virtual world events and security, I know a little about griefers, exploit sellers, crackers, and goldfarmers.

But there are heuristics for differentiating those things. We can debate and elucidate if you wish.

And, to my understanding, my GW2 accounts are linked in the support/account database, if not in the Hall of Monuments sense. The last time I spoke to support they had me as owning all three accounts in their database, likely correlated by FIRSTNAME, LASTNAME, BIRTHDAY, PAYPAL or some similar matching system. Naturally, if you give them variant info, ymmv.

It’s quite possible they do this precisely as a way to forstall banhammer reruns and other such griefing. But such a system could also be used for good rather than just to slow down evile.

BTW, not all goldfarm accounts are stolen, although many are. But obviously, with a game such at GW2, the initial key purchase is low enough on discounted periods and can be bought with untraceable gift cards, etc. — and the farmers make enough per account — that they can buy the “box” without risking getting the account shut down due to being a stolen account. It’s organized crime.

Goldfarming is prison labor in China. (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/25/china-prisoners-internet-gaming-scam) Still happening at least up to recently from what I have heard.

But linking two accounts to one verified US/EU human with a history of purchases in the game, say, is low risk, unless the accounts get stolen, at which point you have the same issue that your debit or credit card company has of triggering heuristics when your spending goes nuts when you move cross-country or visit Paris.

It’s a question of whether they want to put those measures in place. Some of them are likely already there.

The game definitely sees accounts as linked, because when opening the TP, it can show you what you last viewed on one account, even though you are on the other.

There have been other anecdotes posted on the forums about one account’s actions affecting a secondary account, as well.

Regardless, whether ArenaNet wants to implement anything in-game or out regarding said ‘link’, now or in the future, is unknown.

shava.3502:

But linking two accounts to one verified US/EU human with a history of purchases in the game, say, is low risk, unless the accounts get stolen, at which point you have the same issue that your debit or credit card company has of triggering heuristics when your spending goes nuts when you move cross-country or visit Paris.

So the gold sellers and spammers just have to buy a few more accounts and make some legit purchases on their stolen credit cards to make their accounts linked. Your solution doesn’t solve the reason the “problem” was put in place in the first place.

It would however, be nice to send four mails in a short period of time instead of two to account for the fact that parties have 5 people max.

But just go look in the Account Security sub forum. Tons of people already post asking if the scam PM’s are legit. Imagine if the scammers could send out 1.5 or 2 times the spam in the same amount of time?

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

The game definitely sees accounts as linked, because when opening the TP, it can show you what you last viewed on one account, even though you are on the other.

There have been other anecdotes posted on the forums about one account’s actions affecting a secondary account, as well.

Regardless, whether ArenaNet wants to implement anything in-game or out regarding said ‘link’, now or in the future, is unknown.

Just wanted to mention that the TP item view history is not a sign of account linking, but rather that the history is stored in a file that is used by the installation regardless of what account is logging in on the computer.

There are several files that have this behavior. Regardless of what account is logged in on the client, the files that contain these histories and settings are linked to the installation, not to the multiple accounts using the same computer.

Another example is of two different accounts using the same computer will both have the same graphics and control settings, due to it all being stored in a file and not a different copy of the file for each account that logs in from the client. Many of the instances cited around the forums to support a claim that two GW2 accounts are linked are easily explained by these files retaining the settings across logins, regardless of if it is a different account logging in as it is still the same installation on the same computer.

Seera.5916:

shava.3502:

But linking two accounts to one verified US/EU human with a history of purchases in the game, say, is low risk, unless the accounts get stolen, at which point you have the same issue that your debit or credit card company has of triggering heuristics when your spending goes nuts when you move cross-country or visit Paris.

So the gold sellers and spammers just have to buy a few more accounts and make some legit purchases on their stolen credit cards to make their accounts linked. Your solution doesn’t solve the reason the “problem” was put in place in the first place.

Actually I was thinking more along the lines of accounts with a year or more history of normal behavior of gem purchasing and such. I have maxxed out, for example, my storage on one account, have a bunch of alts, and have spent more money than I want to think of (from before my rather involuntary medical retirement after a stroke, but at least now I have all this set up) on various frills and conveniences and skins and frippery in the game.

A gold farmer is not going to have accounts that are multiple years old with a premium customer rating unless they are stolen. And then the “trip to Paris” heuristics kick in, if they are stolen. So I don’t think your objection probably holds.

It would require the definition of a favored class of customer, and that might be distasteful to the community. That’s a marketing/PR/diplomacy problem.

Personally, I think the system (with a year time) can get overcomplicated for the goal.

To solve this it would be better imo to have three things in place
1: increasing the amount of slots in an email so you send max 20 stacks at time. As farmers mostly transfer currency they have lil use of it.
2: upgrading the security flagging system to also look at items being sent around (using TP prices).

To explain the second. Currently if you sent an x amount of gold to another account, it is flagged as suspicious (the actual amount is obviously unknown) and security has a manual check to see if it is ok what is going on. afaik, currently the system doesn’t look at attached items. Ifd increasing the amount of attached items, I think it is important to change that. Just like gw2spidy can track the price of items, this system can do the same and mark a transaction as suspicious when the total worth of attachements (gold and items) goes over the set mark.

The result is that “normal” people have less issues with the supression system while the goldsellers are tackled better.

StinVec.3621:

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

The game definitely sees accounts as linked, because when opening the TP, it can show you what you last viewed on one account, even though you are on the other.

There have been other anecdotes posted on the forums about one account’s actions affecting a secondary account, as well.

Regardless, whether ArenaNet wants to implement anything in-game or out regarding said ‘link’, now or in the future, is unknown.

Just wanted to mention that the TP item view history is not a sign of account linking, but rather that the history is stored in a file that is used by the installation regardless of what account is logging in on the computer.

There are several files that have this behavior. Regardless of what account is logged in on the client, the files that contain these histories and settings are linked to the installation, not to the multiple accounts using the same computer.

Another example is of two different accounts using the same computer will both have the same graphics and control settings, due to it all being stored in a file and not a different copy of the file for each account that logs in from the client. Many of the instances cited around the forums to support a claim that two GW2 accounts are linked are easily explained by these files retaining the settings across logins, regardless of if it is a different account logging in as it is still the same installation on the same computer.

And yet something links accounts for security reasons, else GMs would not be able to state, ‘And your other 47 accounts are banned, as well.’

It is odd that the TP keeps a shared file of viewed items, but not those bought, listed or sold. I’m not disputing it does, it just is odd.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

StinVec.3621:

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

The game definitely sees accounts as linked, because when opening the TP, it can show you what you last viewed on one account, even though you are on the other.

There have been other anecdotes posted on the forums about one account’s actions affecting a secondary account, as well.

Regardless, whether ArenaNet wants to implement anything in-game or out regarding said ‘link’, now or in the future, is unknown.

Just wanted to mention that the TP item view history is not a sign of account linking, but rather that the history is stored in a file that is used by the installation regardless of what account is logging in on the computer.

There are several files that have this behavior. Regardless of what account is logged in on the client, the files that contain these histories and settings are linked to the installation, not to the multiple accounts using the same computer.

Another example is of two different accounts using the same computer will both have the same graphics and control settings, due to it all being stored in a file and not a different copy of the file for each account that logs in from the client. Many of the instances cited around the forums to support a claim that two GW2 accounts are linked are easily explained by these files retaining the settings across logins, regardless of if it is a different account logging in as it is still the same installation on the same computer.

And yet something links accounts for security reasons, else GMs would not be able to state, ‘And your other 47 accounts are banned, as well.’

It is odd that the TP keeps a shared file of viewed items, but not those bought, listed or sold. I’m not disputing it does, it just is odd.

The TP uses the internet to function. It’s essentially a dedicated web browser. The items it in are backed up in the way what you look at is backed up in any browser. It’s in a file on your hard drive. When you change to another account, you’re not using a different install of guild wars, so that file remains the same. The accounts aren’t linked.

In all likelihood, security knows accounts are linked because they can trace the IP of the account, but the accounts are not directly linked.

In fact, I have multiple accounts, bought on different credit cards with different email addresses, so there’s no real way they could be linked, except my IP.

Well, duh. Still, if the TP keeps separate files for listing, buying, selling, it would seem easy enough to keep separate files for viewing.

Same with IP addresses, but that can’t be the only tell-tale pointer, because of VPNs, etc.

Just use a guild bank to transfer that stuff, anything that’s not account bound will fit in there.