Guild Wars 2

Let me rephrase something I said (and got infracted for) but I’m still worried about.

This post (and the one before) is not addressed to people of a specific colour, religion or nationaility. It’s about my worries that while the internet is global, law enforcement might be not.

I remember reading an ANet post on this forums that I should be more worried about a failed login attempt from China than I should be from one in my vincinity.

Now, without having the numbers (that ANet has), there is an IP based map of attacks (account thefts, bots, gold sellers, …) that do damage to the game.

Sure, ANet can permanently ban those accounts. And they do in batches as far as I know. But shouldn’t there be legal consequences for those that hacked the game or even worse stole accounts and credit card details?

I’m just not sure, if legislation is able to reach into the “red areas of the map” where most of tha attacks come from.

Please, ANet. Tell us where most of the attacks come from (the map) and what you are doing in cooperation with local authorities to not only ban but also punish attackers.

MikeLewis.7496:

International legal matters are extraordinarily complicated to begin with; and that’s assuming you’re talking about something that both countries involved consider illegal.

In Soviet Russia, game bots you!

There is at least one country in which RMT (Money-Trading) is not illegal. Nobody will be able to punish somebody there, because hid did not act against the law.

Another sample: Several years ago there was a virus released from an asian country. It did a lot of damage worldwide. But there wasn’t even a law against it in that country. As far as I know, they are just creating such a law now.
Result: No law broken – no punishment.

In such cases a company has no handle to try anything.

So, if there are countries that don’t consider attacking the game as illegal or make it extremely hard (if not impossible) to punish people for doing so, why do you allow IP traffic from those countries to your servers?

IP address ranges are generally assigned to an authority within a country, who then passes them out to the various ISP’s in that country. However, if there are spare addresses available, it is not unheard of for a country/ISP to rent out their addresses to another ISP (even in a different country).

While we would all dearly love to block certain IP address ranges for RMT activity, as well as other hack attempts and spam, it is rather difficult to be able to effectivly do. Especially when considering the users in those particular countries use masking proceedures to make their traffic appear to be coming from somewhere else entirely.

It has been known for many years that a specific country is the source for most RMT activity. Are we really not allowed to mention that country here? Anyone who has played mmos before likely knows which country it is. For anyone who doesn’t, look up “gold farming” in wikipedia.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter where they come from since virtually they can come from almost anywhere. Blocking IP addresses is pointless since IP addresses can change, and sometimes legitimate players can be blocked. Also, considering I could play the game using an IP address in many different countries, despite living in the US, I could still play the game even if every IP address in the USA was blocked. So blocking the USA wouldn’t block me, but it would block millions of legitimate players. (NO, I am NOT a gold farmer… lol… I am just using myself as an example)

Blocking specific IP address isn’t the solution. User education about maintaining account security (and not supporting gold farmers!!!), and giving players the tools with which they can maintain that security, is much more effective in the long run.

As someone who has been excluded from certain MMOs simply for living in a ‘Gold Farming Country’, I hate the ‘just block them all’ attitude. It’s an attitude that should have died with WW2 internment camps.