Guild Wars 2

Excuse the verbose request, but I believe in transparency when requesting assistance:

Hopefully the community can help me direct my ticket to a member of ArenaNet staff that can help investigate my issue (ticket number: 130406-000519) and assist in helping out an innocent player.

My account was flagged terminated three days ago, and while I have received two responses within the required three day time-frame, I am getting no real information on why my account is terminated, while I have provided ArenaNet staff with every possible option I can think of why I flagged as a false positive in the system as well as a commitment to prove that I will provide any data requested to assure them that it is in fact a false positive.

Initially I was disconnected from the game, and when attempting to use my authentication code I was presented with the termination screen attached which seems to indicate that the game believes I assisted in illegal gold farming activities.

At this time it seems very coincidental that I had just crafted a set of exotic armor and jewelry for my wife (she sends me money and materials in-game through the in-game mail, I send her back the crafted items – which I assumed was an acceptable utilization of a mailing view with item slots, currency selectors and direct integration to the friends list) about an hour prior to getting banned.

I setup my initial support request, informing the Support staff that this must be a mistake, as I have gone through painstaking support requests (ticket: 130218-001419 – which is technically two requests) in the past to ensure smooth gem store purchases while out of the country on business (yes, I know, some people see this as terrible habit, but it supports the game and it’s developers) where I am sure I could have more easily utilized an RMT outlet (I am fundamentally against RMT being a software developer, I feel it negatively impacts the consumers rights to a healthy gaming ecosystem, and they pay the bills so…). I requested further investigation and a brief apology for incorrectly flagging me, as well as communicating that additional due diligence in these matters is never a bad idea from a user experience standpoint.

I would like to take a moment to put in here two things:

First, that RMT is bad for everyone, even the people that grind that work in that industry as they could just as easily get a job testing software implementations.

Second, that I am totally on-board for the additional security measures I had to go through to conduct my transactions, I agreed with them in the support requests and I agree with them now, anything that protects the users secure information within the context of a financial transaction is worth a couple e-mails as the only negative impact to me was waiting a couple days for gems, and I am sure I was probably one of the hardest valid authentications they have had.

~Sorry, I’ll get off my soapbox~

After my ticket was submitted, I received a response about 30 minutes later informing me that the actual reason my account was terminated (conflicting the reason I am shown in the game launcher) was that I utilized an ’illegal third-party tool".

I was blown away, I have never used a botting/hacking program in my life, nor would I start now… I obviously don’t play the game for gold, as I have the above-stated Gem Store quasi-addiction to time efficiency. So I started to think what I possibly would have used that produced a false flag…

What I think might have happened(?):

I am a software developer for enterprise applications, in my free time I have been attempting to learn DirectX integration utilizing C#. My first real foray into DirectX utilization outside of simple ‘spin the ball’ or ‘render the pyramid’ was a self-designed example, namely a FPS monitor and screen capture tool (which I had no intention to actually utilize day to day, I have a FRAPS license, so why try to reinvent the wheel?). However the concept of Directx overlays (ala Steam shift+tab or FRAPS FPS) seemed an interesting way to understand overlays in DirectX.

Just like most people who play GW2, while I am off doing something time consuming, I will keep a Chrome tab open to GW2Temple (sorry if I am not supposed to name name’s in the forums, I figured not linking was a fair compromise?) and checks timers for long running events kitten Teq, Jormag, etc). The only way I can see the game rendering a false positive was if the client was somehow actively monitoring for DirectX utilization outside of it’s memory footprint and I hit a timed event without exiting debug mode in Visual Studio (my development environment – which I think I would have noticed because my overlay is super-ugly right now and also quite large in reference to the small windowed mode I usually keep GW2 in).

I responded to Support letting them know that this was the only thing I can think of, and I was more than happy to not only promise to not continue development where their application could be within scope, but also that I would both happily accept a warning for not paying attention (if this did occur it was totally my fault), and also happily turn over source code to my example project so they could compare it against their logs to determine my innocence first hand.

This morning I was presented with a response to my request for a stay of execution in the form of an unsigned (I think the Support representative was in such a rush they didn’t even sign the e-mail – not a good sign for me) final decision notice on my account, informing me that my account will be closed going forward and that all future e-mails may be ignored.

My issue here is two part:

1) In no way did anyone from Support explain what actually happened (why is there a discrepancy between the termination clause I see in the launcher against the termination clause provided by support? )

2) In no way was I provided with evidence as to which program I supposedly utilized outside the scope of my test application. And if the issue was my test application, why not work with me to rectify my obviously novice approach to DirectX if that was in-fact the issue.

More to the point, after reading through Gaile’s very clearly worded amendments to the definition of ‘illegal third-party tools’ here on the forums as well as the contractual definition of illegal third-party tools on our user agreements, I don’t think a screen capture tool even falls into that list unless it somehow modified either ArenaNet memory, files or transactions, which I can’t see how that would work, and if it could it wouldn’t really make sense as it would probably be both poorly performing and intrinsically tied to the GW2 client.

In attempting to understand the process at ArenaNet I ran across a few support requests like mine, where the user claimed there was no fault on their side, but they were also presented with ‘final’ notices with no explanation, only to be overturned later after requesting help here.

So, here I am, hat in hand, asking for either a keener eye to investigate my case, or a public display of my infractions so that I can learn from whatever mistake I somehow made and move forward.

Thanks for your time guys.

dragon.9650:

My issue here is two part:

1) In no way did anyone from Support explain what actually happened (why is there a discrepancy between the termination clause I see in the launcher against the termination clause provided by support? )

2) In no way was I provided with evidence as to which program I supposedly utilized outside the scope of my test application. And if the issue was my test application, why not work with me to rectify my obviously novice approach to DirectX if that was in-fact the issue.

1: The reason there is a discrepancy should be obvious for someone with your background. The supporttool they use needs them to choose an option for why they suspend you. They obvious clicked the wrong reason when doing so. This is annoying, but no reason to unsuspend you.

2: They do not to show you evidence and in many cases can’t and won’t. The first reason is very practical. You are a bad guy (according to them) and they dont want you to know how there search methods work. By giving evidence this means you get inside information on what info they are gahtering and you know better how to program your bot to stay undetected. The second reason is that they don’t have to. There is no monthly sub and in the eula you agreed to it is actually stated in such way they can stop your access to the service anytime they want and they dont have to give a reason.

So to shorten your appeal (cause thats what it is): You don’t recognise yourself in this suspension and you want a senior staffmember re-evaluate the evidence.

I know it sucks, hope things work out. Good luck

mercury ranique.2170:

1: The reason there is a discrepancy should be obvious for someone with your background. The supporttool they use needs them to choose an option for why they suspend you. They obvious clicked the wrong reason when doing so. This is annoying, but no reason to unsuspend you.

2: They do not to show you evidence and in many cases can’t and won’t. The first reason is very practical. You are a bad guy (according to them) and they dont want you to know how there search methods work. By giving evidence this means you get inside information on what info they are gahtering and you know better how to program your bot to stay undetected. The second reason is that they don’t have to. There is no monthly sub and in the eula you agreed to it is actually stated in such way they can stop your access to the service anytime they want and they dont have to give a reason.

So to shorten your appeal (cause thats what it is): You don’t recognise yourself in this suspension and you want a senior staffmember re-evaluate the evidence.

I know it sucks, hope things work out. Good luck

Thanks a lot for the assist on understanding! I had totally overlooked something like a drop-down selector misclick as I assumed they have a confirmation dialog when terminating an account to review their steps as it is a ‘finalized’ arrangement.

However, in retrospect, with the potential size of their queue against the number of representatives, I imagine they are in quite a hurry to proceed to the next ticket and can’t really spend the time on that confirmation dialog that the requirements of the tool probably intended. This inequality of work to workers probably also explains the rush in the review process I am sure had to have took place (the same kind of thing was present in the final decision notification that was missing the traditionally appended signature).

Thanks for the kind wishes, I also hope everything works out

Sorry, too much for me to read (I have a short attention span!), but if you already have a support open, wait 3 days for a response. I do see you filed a ticket 3 days ago. I’d give it a few more hours just in case. If you don’t get a response after that, post your ticket number in this thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/account/Tickets-for-Review-3-days-and-older-merged

When putting details in your ticket, give enough info but not too much text. If there is a lot of text in the ticket, they might skip over an important detail.

gassy.8975:

Sorry, too much for me to read (I have a short attention span!), but if you already have a support open, wait 3 days for a response. I do see you filed a ticket 3 days ago. I’d give it a few more hours just in case. If you don’t get a response after that, post your ticket number in this thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/account/Tickets-for-Review-3-days-and-older-merged

When putting details in your ticket, give enough info but not too much text. If there is a lot of text in the ticket, they might skip over an important detail.

No worries, wall of text and all that but thanks for the advice

Basically I have received responses (two in fact) within the allocated time-frame (3 days for ArenaNet expedited queue) so I don’t think it would be fair to the community to attempt to utilize this queue when other members of this community who have not even received an initial response could be using that spot.

I did however put in a fair amount of text in them, so that might be where my disconnect was, I try to be a precise as possible to reduce the back-and-forth. And in retrospect, given Mercury’s insight (which he is correct, I should have thought about given my background), they might just have too much work to do per worker to field a response the size of mine accurately.

However, I am hopeful that the ArenaNet staff that frequent this forum can truly investigate my claim within their busy schedule

I’ve been terminated myself a week ago. Mine was for ‘using third party programs’, which I also didn’t. They reinstated my account after a few days, but I know it sucks
But I’m sure they will see their mistake and reinstate your account

Bimpnottin.3659:

I’ve been terminated myself a week ago. Mine was for ‘using third party programs’, which I also didn’t. They reinstated my account after a few days, but I know it sucks
But I’m sure they will see their mistake and reinstate your account

Thanks for sharing and the support Bimp, it gives me a little more hope for a positive outcome

If that doesn’t work, you can also hope that Gaile will notice this thread and flag it for further review. Several other people who were wrongfully suspended/banned due to false positives have managed to get their accounts back this way. (She’s really good about that. )

Welcome to the world of ANet support. I just recently dealt with them for another issue and I can tell you, “support” is a term I would use very loosely.

I believe the problem is that they simply aren’t required, properly trained, or given the power to really do much of anything beyond formulating cut n’ pasted replies. It’s like calling the customer service for mobile phones or ISP’s.

At least in those cases you can request to talk to someone in charge, but ANet bounces support tickets around to various people, which means that the story must be explained and understood by every new person. The problem is of course when one of those people just wants to go home for the day and fires off a generic response.

I sympathize with your situation. I wish ANet would come up with a better solution for dealing with events that lead to account termination.

In all honesty, my advice would be to not let it go. Continue to pursue it on, and off this website. I think too many people simply grow frustrated and give up. But this only serves to reinforce the spotty customer service.

Zaxares.5419:

If that doesn’t work, you can also hope that Gaile will notice this thread and flag it for further review. Several other people who were wrongfully suspended/banned due to false positives have managed to get their accounts back this way. (She’s really good about that. )

Thanks for the support Zax, I’m also hoping Gaile could request further review

Crazylegsmurphy.6430:

Welcome to the world of ANet support. I just recently dealt with them for another issue and I can tell you, “support” is a term I would use very loosely.

I believe the problem is that they simply aren’t required, properly trained, or given the power to really do much of anything beyond formulating cut n’ pasted replies. It’s like calling the customer service for mobile phones or ISP’s.

At least in those cases you can request to talk to someone in charge, but ANet bounces support tickets around to various people, which means that the story must be explained and understood by every new person. The problem is of course when one of those people just wants to go home for the day and fires off a generic response.

I sympathize with your situation. I wish ANet would come up with a better solution for dealing with events that lead to account termination.

In all honesty, my advice would be to not let it go. Continue to pursue it on, and off this website. I think too many people simply grow frustrated and give up. But this only serves to reinforce the spotty customer service.

Thanks for the support Crazylegs

Sadly it seems that my last response to Support was closed without notice (as they inform you can happen after they have reached a ‘finalized’ position). I have attempted to re-open the same ticket (in an attempt to limit the new request queue while still rendering the feedback I feel I need) and again request escalation, but I still feel I will require further assistance from the ArenaNet community leaders here in the form of customer advocacy.

I get the feeling that while the representatives defiantly have the ability to either escalate my request or overturn the false positive and re-instate my account, they are so overburdened with their workload per employee that when they look at my ticket which is very detailed (and in my opinion, rightly so given the circumstance), they just do not have time to go through it while meeting whatever metrics they are accountable to.

If anything, I think a really positive thing that ArenaNet could do for us customers would be to hire more support staff, or find another way of mitigating their current workload or improve their process to ensure a better customer support level. But that’s just my two cents as an impacted customer

Crazylegsmurphy.6430:

Welcome to the world of ANet support. I just recently dealt with them for another issue and I can tell you, “support” is a term I would use very loosely.

I believe the problem is that they simply aren’t required, properly trained, or given the power to really do much of anything beyond formulating cut n’ pasted replies. It’s like calling the customer service for mobile phones or ISP’s.

At least in those cases you can request to talk to someone in charge, but ANet bounces support tickets around to various people, which means that the story must be explained and understood by every new person. The problem is of course when one of those people just wants to go home for the day and fires off a generic response.

I sympathize with your situation. I wish ANet would come up with a better solution for dealing with events that lead to account termination.

In all honesty, my advice would be to not let it go. Continue to pursue it on, and off this website. I think too many people simply grow frustrated and give up. But this only serves to reinforce the spotty customer service.

I work for a mobile phone company for the complaints department. Although I totally understand your frustartion and I hear it a lot there is another view to this matter.

Yes they often use copy/pasteanswers. The comany demands it so reply’s are unified.
Yes resources are low and the amount of pre-experience and trainig on the job is low. Yes internally this is discussed a lot. But research clearly indicate that how high your phonebill is, is the No1 reason peoplechoose for company A or B.

What people don’t realise is that quality cost money.You are actually paying for the support and for the quality of support. Cause you are dealing with commercial company’s they have to charge you more for better quality support.

Back to GW2
This is a game with no monthly fee’s. They have delivered a high quality game with reasonable good servers. But customer support is lighter then e.g. Blizzard. But Blizzard is ripping people off with a monthly fee.

mercury ranique.2170:

I work for a mobile phone company for the complaints department. Although I totally understand your frustartion and I hear it a lot there is another view to this matter.

Yes they often use copy/pasteanswers. The comany demands it so reply’s are unified.
Yes resources are low and the amount of pre-experience and trainig on the job is low. Yes internally this is discussed a lot. But research clearly indicate that how high your phonebill is, is the No1 reason peoplechoose for company A or B.

What people don’t realise is that quality cost money.You are actually paying for the support and for the quality of support. Cause you are dealing with commercial company’s they have to charge you more for better quality support.

Back to GW2
This is a game with no monthly fee’s. They have delivered a high quality game with reasonable good servers. But customer support is lighter then e.g. Blizzard. But Blizzard is ripping people off with a monthly fee.

Having worked support when I was younger I can shadow Mercury’s standpoint that traditionally, companies prefer a ‘boxed’ answer to most correspondence with customers. I also agree based on my experience (as I tried to state above) that you can’t really blame the individual representatives as they are (predominantly) overworked and under-prepared for the situations they are asked to handle as well as usually accountable to a form of metrics in some way.

The place where this traditionally sees divergence is in ‘finalization’ process flow (for a phone company like Mercury’s this would be cancellations, for a game it would be terminations/cancellations) where their metrics are based more on ‘customer saves’ (keeping a customer and even attempting an up-sell) then a metric like ‘call time’ or ‘number of queries responded to per hour’.

This metric is where we see a complex issue without a simple solution. Blizzard (or any reoccurring services company) can dedicate employee training time and resources more freely to a ‘finalization’ flow than a business model like the one ArenaNet utilizes can. As Mercury points out, a ‘customer save’ in this game generates no additional future revenue (as we are not charged monthly by ArenaNet), so it is not traditionally fiscally responsible in this case to invest in saving customers (as from a business perspective, they stopped being a truly paying customer after their initial purchase).

A model like that makes it very difficult for a studio (like ArenaNet) to request additional funding from a parent company (like NCSoft) for something that has no chance of providing definable profit margins as supporting these customers will not save a monthly subscription (a revenue stream), but simply provide better customer service to a customer that already utilizes the resources of community leaders like Gaile, customer support representatives, GM’s, testers, developers, managers etc for really no additional funding but the occasional trip to the Gem Store.

This model is the number one reason why I also request assistance here for my issue, and also why I included other possible solutions like process flow improvement (usually minimal cost).

Really though, no one is ‘wrong’, Support could be better, but we could also pay a monthly fee to get that value. Currently ArenaNet is trying to (any I imagine it is quite painful) provide us the world and hold our hand to get back to it without reaching into our collective wallets in the process.

Never a good idea to use development tools or network utilities when playing an online game. You’re not alone in being a developer who plays MMOs, but those things have to be off when you get online or it looks like you’re up to something.

Although I’m now retired, I spent around 30 years doing both development and network management in various countries. One MMO flagged me for having a network utility running and I learned my lesson. It’s easier to just shut them off and avoid a hassle, they don’t have the time or inclination to figure out what you were doing with them.

LeCreaux.3087:

Never a good idea to use development tools or network utilities when playing an online game. You’re not alone in being a developer who plays MMOs, but those things have to be off when you get online or it looks like you’re up to something.

Although I’m now retired, I spent around 30 years doing both development and network management in various countries. One MMO flagged me for having a network utility running and I learned my lesson. It’s easier to just shut them off and avoid a hassle, they don’t have the time or inclination to figure out what you were doing with them.

Thanks for the feedback, I was intending to use a virtualized implementation going forward as they have really progressed leaps and bounds recently from performance and integration perspectives and the idea of a baseline platform for development really appealed to me as I rebuild my system frequently.

So not totally a bad experience educationally speaking