Guild Wars 2

Hi,

My girlfriend account had been banned for 4-5 days for suspect of selling/buying gold.

I’ll like to clarify that this is not e case. She merely sent me her gold to me to help her with transaction of items in the TP as she’s not familiar with the game. We earned our every single cent through hardwork and dedication. She had never send anyone gold beside my account.

I understand that a lot of ppl are facing e same issue as me and im sure neither any one of us would repeat the same mistake if we were to be given a second chance.
Any way, in the first place, who would have thought it was illegal to send XX amount of gold when the mail feature does not forbid us?

My gf and I have invested over few hundred of hours and 100 over dollars in this game. I urged you to check through her account again I’m 100% sure that we did not sell or buy any gold.

We sent multiple tickets and even posted in the 3days thread however no reply was given. Its really making us desperate so Ive no choice but to write here. Hope you guys can look into the matter and gives us a reply soon.

Ref: 121220-000489

Anet bans people for mailing gold to players. Why? Because gold sellers do that too. Just don’t do it.

can u please go to my thread and my ticket too please? 121221-003023

i would like to relay to you as well the case of my friend irl who has been banned as well for accusations of gold selling. in his case he is just sending gold and item to our guildmates including myself because he has done all the necessary items he is need of and he is just helping others as well including myself. he is one of the founding members and considered a reliable asset of our guild and is very much in need by our guild for he is the one aiding everyone. he has been accused of selling gold and items in exchange of real money but it is entirely false for me and my guild mates are the subject of his aid. he has been banned for 5 days now. and now according to the assessment of your support it is stated that his account has been accessed by an unauthorized personnel under your company. reference number of the ticket concerning the accusations of gold and item selling 121220-000004; reference number of the ticket filed for accessed by an unauthorized personnel 121223-000159. this player has been with guild wars since the very start and he is a very well respected and a very reliable player when it comes to mmo-rpg community in the south-east asian countries gaming community. he has nothing to do with the accusations at all. he has exerted a lot of time and effort in supporting this game. this is the very first time that he has been banned in an online game for a span of 14 years.

Gaile Gray.6028:

Loli Ruri.8307:

Anet bans people for mailing gold to players. Why? Because gold sellers do that too. Just don’t do it.

This is not true. Players mail gold to other players all the time without negative consequence.

The details in this case must have been extraordinary, and the team will look into the matter and resolve it in the best way possible,

I wish I could ask what makes the difference between mailing gold, and mailing gold and getting banned.

Ref: 121220-000489
Hi Gray,

Appreciate that finally someone from Anet had seen my post. This is the 5th day of ban witout any news.

I would like to tell you that my account was banned b4 for the same reason of suspecting of buying gold which i did not. Previously, i wrote to Anet and got it resolved within a day. How is it possible that this time took 5 days and still no official reply was given to my gf’s account? I am 100% sure that our accounts are clean. Most of our gold earned are from farming dungeons and we have over 400-500hrs of gameplay.

I take it that what you said is true, then the more unfair it is to my gf’s account which no buying/selling of gold had taken place.

You must know this series of bans to other ppl had triggered rumours that sending XX amount of gold will be banned. Even all my guildmates tells me that. Unless the innocent players’ account get fixed fast, this rumour will spread like wild fire.

Please understand that we are really desperate here to get our account back. The more days that our genuine problems become unanswered the more faith we lose in Anet. How could we spend more RL money in this game if we foresee more “unforseen circumstances Bans” to come. I guessed others might have felt the same way too..

Ref: 121220-000489

Just curiuos. How much gold did she mail you?

This happened to my guild leader, he sent 70gold back to a guild mate that lent it to him a month ago

My guildee recently sent me 10.5 gold so that I could craft him his exotic jewelry set. Are we going to be banned next? This string of issues seems to becoming very wide spread. I’m not sure why ANet is doing as far as researching accounts before banning them, but it seems absurd that people on this board and a few I know in-game as well have been accused of this for outright legitimate transactions. I’d like to have my friends back. I know for a fact at least some of them never engaged in gold buying. Also, how is it that these folks are banned yet there’s still map chat messages in Lion’s Arch advertising gold sales every 5 minutes?

Seems like the past two months have been nothing but full of fail from AreaNet. What’s going on with you guys? Did you change your staff over to a bunch of people who don’t know wtf they are doing or what? You can’t just go around banning legitimate players like that, especially since it can’t be that hard to determine legitimacy through five minutes of research. I’ve managed an MMO before myself, I know what’s involved.

Running a few SQL queries to seek out and determine the legitimacy of previous transactions and gameplay habits should solve your problems. If you’re not using SQL, I severely hope you picked a database architecture that isn’t a bad joke or emphasized with over bloated gimmicks and picked something that has been proven to be reliable and effective, not the latest web scaling fad. I pray you’re not listening to the iMac hipsters going on about how great things like RUBY or Mongo db, ranting about sharding and what not. It shouldn’t take you more than 5 minutes to determine a transaction’s legitimacy unless you’ve done something horribly wrong with your database and have either over complicated it or some other terrifying issue that makes it THIS difficult.

Also, how is it people are remaining banned for over five days? Why would you ignore tickets like these? Is it because of the holidays? At least give a reasonable explanation you guys, you’re breaking people’s grapes here if you know what I’m saying.

Hi Gray,

after looking thru the forum, i noticed alot of players are banned for suspection of buy/selling gold. Please kindly advise us what went wrong or at least show me any trace of evidence that we commited the offence.

It is rather unfair for us to wait for more then 5 days without any reply or update of status whereby we had already did what was instructed. Sent multiple tickets, posted in the 3days thread, nothing has been done yet.

I understand its the holiday period now and Anet staff maybe shorthanded. However, i did saw some player got unbanned within hours because his whole guild had vouch for him. Do we have to do the same thing to get the same end result?

I appreciate at least a reply whereby someone is lookin thru the matter not just an autoresponse mail which is long due 5 days ago. Xmas is coming and this thing is defintely bothering us. Please try and understand in our shoes.

Ref: 121220-000489

@Hebe Faith
Well actually a guild leader like that getting banned basically ruins game play for a whole lot of people. How big are large guilds like that?

Well if this string of issue continues without any resolvement. I forsee more similar incidents will come. Be it Guild Leaders, WvW Commanders, Friends, Family, Couple and Money Lenders.
Now that if i got my account back i wonder if we can send even materials to each other. It will become a ‘Risk’ to help one another.
For all i know, i will do anything to prevent history from repeating itself.

Hebe Faith.4087:

Well if this string of issue continues without any resolvement. I forsee more similar incidents will come. Be it Guild Leaders, WvW Commanders, Friends, Family, Couple and Money Lenders.
Now that if i got my account back i wonder if we can send even materials to each other. It will become a ‘Risk’ to help one another.
For all i know, i will do anything to prevent history from repeating itself.

Thought you said it was your girlfriends acount that was banned?

@simplesimon.2084
If its your girlfriens’a account, won’t you treat ut as your own. We played each others account too so we can experience different class. It is sad that now that she’s innocently banned I don’t have the mood to play as well until it is resolved. If you were me, what would u do. Someone’s gotta take care of things and not let it go unsettled.

I was running FOTM dungeon with my husband until something rude abruptly happened. My husband was banned for engaging in real money trading activity for no apparent reason. My husband and I supports Anet by buying gems so why do we need to engage in real money trading if we are buying gems from Anet? Slapping ourselves in our faces? My husband had recently mailed me 40g to assist me in buying materials after he got me my legendary precursor from the forge and I believed he got banned for that.
Please note that to make a legendary weapon is not cheap and if I know that sending money to me will get him banned, I would not ask him to do it.

I do not know whether it is the incompetency of the person monitoring the transaction or is it just due to system failure. Please look into this ridiculous situation you put us in on a Christmas night which disrupted our gaming with no justification at all. Thank you.

Ticket number: 121224-002243

Its Christmas already and still no news or update. This is the 6th day already. I swear we are not involved in any buy/sell gold transaction. Merely just passing some gold to buy items off the tp.

It is unfair for the innocent to wait so long. Anxious to get into the game like everyone else. I really don’t understand why players with same incident can get unbanned within a day while some of us been waiting for 5-6 days and still there’s no notification.

Do we have a queue system that is in place? We really need some priority over here.

Ref: 121220-000489

well i am terribly sorry to hear about what has happened to you im am also very glad that i have read this post. I was planning on sending some of my IRL friends and maybe some guildees some gold as a Christmas present but now know that i will get banned for mailing gold means i wont be doing that. It is really lame that we cant spread Christmas cheer for fear of getting banned.

My friend got banned as well. I can vouch for him that he did not buy or sell gold. The most he did was trading and exchanging items with his brother and me for globs and lodestones. We did not even touch goldsellers. Additionally we despised gold purchasers so much that we farmed our legendary through hundreds and may be even reaching a thousand visits to various dungeons. Kindly investigate ticket number 121224-002521 and please resolve it as soon as possible. Its ridiculous that we spent the money to buy this game, give recommendations to more friends to join, play a thousand worth of hours in gameplay and ended up getting false accusation then permanent ban.

AMra.9687:

well i am terribly sorry to hear about what has happened to you im am also very glad that i have read this post. I was planning on sending some of my IRL friends and maybe some guildees some gold as a Christmas present but now know that i will get banned for mailing gold means i wont be doing that. It is really lame that we cant spread Christmas cheer for fear of getting banned.

That to send money ingame to friends would result in bans, is an unfounded idea by some players on the forum. I simply don’t believe it. At best sending money may raise some questions and sadly some bans might be a mistake. But mistakes call for a review and a rewind of a ban, they don’t call for hallucinations.

Michael.4791:

That to send money ingame to friends would result in bans, is an unfounded idea by some players on the forum. I simply don’t believe it. At best sending money may raise some questions and sadly some bans might be a mistake. But mistakes call for a review and a rewind of a ban, they don’t call for hallucinations.

I wouldnt take a risk, would you? Go ahead and try it. I wouldnt cause my guild leader got banned for it.

It’s very hard to believe that sending items and gold won’t get you banned, when lots of people are getting banned for doing just that (and getting unbanned when appealing).

Arenanet supposedly has this philosophy of player-player interaction but it all seems like a phony charade to me.

I cannot count the number of times I’ve been muted for “excessive messaging” for simply carrying on a conversation with others in the Lion’s Arch map chat.
Also, just the other day, I had come upon a large amount of garbage dyes that I’d already identified, so I linked them all in map chat asking who wanted free dyes. After sending the THIRD (not 10th or 20th) dye, I was unable to send anymore mail for “excessive use”.
PLUS, how many times have I been in WvW only to have some second-in-command have to speak for a Commander in map chat because the commander was muted for excessive messaging?
And don’t get me started on the lack of a dungeon finder…

These are seemingly small problems, but when they happen, they are extremely inconvenient and hindering to the social atmosphere that MMO’s are supposed to have.
I don’t like to descend to insults but banning/muting people for interacting with others in a massively multiplayer game is downright stupid.

Gaile Gray.6028:

Loli Ruri.8307:

Anet bans people for mailing gold to players. Why? Because gold sellers do that too. Just don’t do it.

This is not true. Players mail gold to other players all the time without negative consequence.

The details in this case must have been extraordinary, and the team will look into the matter and resolve it in the best way possible,

Many players were banned as a result of sending gold or returning borrowed money. Can Anet give us an assuarance that no more ban for sending monetary items in future.

I believe every mmo needs a venue for trade. TP alone won’t be enough. We have friends, family, guild leaders whom we wanted to share our wealth and fortune. It is really annoying when some many of us were banned without a fair trial this coming Christmas have need to submit multiple tickets & post for something we did not do.

Every morning checking on this support thread for updates can be a hassle. From what i read recently, players that got hacked are getting more and more too. This really terrified players alot.

For Anet to be listed as the Top Mmo in 2012, this is something that should not be compromised. Please step in and do something before more and more people lost faith in this wonderful game!

Ref: 121220-000489

I just had two friends (both brothers) that helped each other complete their “Golden Title” and were banned shortly after for reports of “selling gold”. They transacted the 200G between each other and were banned immediately for selling gold. However, when they log in now, rather than saying they were terminated for “selling gold” (IE – trading it between brothers), now it just says that it may have been accessed by an unauthorized individual. Really? Two of the same people involved in the same trade? Sounds like a really poor filter on the current mailing system. Lesson learned: Don’t send money to your friends in game, or ANET will just ban you for helping someone out. Just for reference, here are their support tickets:

REF: 121224-003243
REF: 121224-003263

Gaile Gray.6028:

Loli Ruri.8307:

Anet bans people for mailing gold to players. Why? Because gold sellers do that too. Just don’t do it.

This is not true. Players mail gold to other players all the time without negative consequence.

The details in this case must have been extraordinary, and the team will look into the matter and resolve it in the best way possible,

Sorry Gaile, I simply don’t buy this poor excuse.

PS – It would likely be best to operate from a standpoint of not treating your customers as guilty until proven innocent. Its BAD publicity all around the internet community.

If you continue on bad perceptions, it will not help anybody. Sending money alone is no reason for a ban. It was stated here by an official. Stating it differently by players because of msconceptions doesn’t make it true. Even if you continue saying so.

As was said before, here are Goldsellers posting too. Nobody knows for sure (except Anet employees) who is phony and who is real. I don’t believe about a dozen postings and I don’t perceive them as a “majority” of players. It is always that the suffering people are more outspoken than the normal people on forums. I don’t have numbers.

False positives are a result of a fight against the bad guys. This is said. But I do believe, that Anet tries to avoid false positives and that they try to correct them as fast as possible.

Anything else is gossip. Unfruitful gossip.

Michael.4791:

If you continue on bad perceptions, it will not help anybody. Sending money alone is no reason for a ban. It was stated here by an official. Stating it differently by players because of msconceptions doesn’t make it true. Even if you continue saying so.

As was said before, here are Goldsellers posting too. Nobody knows for sure (except Anet employees) who is phony and who is real. I don’t believe about a dozen postings and I don’t perceive them as a “majority” of players. It is always that the suffering people are more outspoken than the normal people on forums. I don’t have numbers.

False positives are a result of a fight against the bad guys. This is said. But I do believe, that Anet tries to avoid false positives and that they try to correct them as fast as possible.

Anything else is gossip. Unfruitful gossip.

I disagree with what you say. If sending money is no reason for a ban, then why are innocent people banned for sending gold? My husband only mail stuffs to me, had never mailed anything else to any other people or received gold from anybody, he still got banned.

What they are doing now is to ban everyone they have on mere suspicion and then slowly filter out one by one. This is wrong. If a crime happens in a place, are you going to arrest everyone, put them inside a lockup, and slowly filter out one by one releasing them and giving no apologies? Or for that matter, do you think an innocent person likes to be prosecuted for something they did not do?

Especially they impose a ban (based on mere suspicion) on a Christmas Eve, which is a holiday that people can have free time to play game and yet the waiting time is much extended due to the holiday. You could have pick a better time to ban or even ask your security team to look through the logs before doing a permanent ban. I do not know if Anet understand how ridiculous this situation is and it will be much much more well managed if they put themselves in the gamers or consumers shoes who showed support to their game (whether buying the game or visiting the gems store). Maybe a staff can shed light on how would they feel if they are just an ordinary player and got banned for no apparent reason with no apologies given and even letting people wait 3, 4, 5 days or even longer to get a simple generic answer?

Michael.4791:

As was said before, here are Goldsellers posting too. Nobody knows for sure (except Anet employees) who is phony and who is real.

Yeah well they should do a bit more of that “knowing for sure” before handing out bans. People talk to each other, it’s unavoidable. That and the amount of cases being posted here, it’s demoralizing.

hey guys, i just went to the 3 days or older thread and i got this
121221-003023 RMT — will not be reinstated. Final answer.
i just dont get it why they immediately gave me a final asnwer without giving me feedback. it seems more ppl have this issue and yet they ignore it.

I ALSO went to check on your ticket, and that one got banned for the same reason as mine BUT it got resolved, explain please.

Hay Hebe. Congrats on getting the account back. With the internet being so anoniymos it’s hard to tell who is an actual victom and who is trying to con there way back in. I apoliogize for sounding so sceptical in my posts.

Yeah, my gf did got her account back finally. So after the reviewing, the result was “banned in error” for 6 days!

Although Anet apologised to us, I still feel this can be done better. At least a form of compensation to be given to show that you’re sincerely apologetic. Comeon, everyone witnessed the incident how hard we innocent ppl trying to post our explanation everyday in this forum.

I know there are real cheater and some were innocent. They were part of the implications but Anet needs to fill part of that responsibilities too. As for a non gold buyer like me i hate gold sellers and actively report those who sells gold. And yet i become a victim of suspect like them. Being wronged for 6 days! I believe they are many out there like me. Anet has the choice of ‘carefully’ screening candidates of suspected gold sellers/buyers.

It somehow infused to us players that sending gold may result in getting banned again. Although you had clarified on this matter. But its kinda of ‘once bitten twice shy’ thing. Who can guarantee that history would not repeat itself?

Now the alternative for us is to transfer gold/items by guild vault. If this actions gets bans as well, seriously i have nothing to say anymore. By that time, i’ll be thinking. Anet please do whatever you like.. Helpless Lamb on the chopping board.

I truly understand your situation, Light.

My first gw2 was wrongfully banned twice, first accusation was botting, second accusation was real money sales. Both times I had access restored but without explanation why it happened.

Then I bought a second account to play, because I was pretty frustrated with 2 bans plus the waiting time for the tickets to process. Only into a week, my second account was also banned for real money sales, the only person I ever had any gold interaction with was my first account, and somehow it constituted to real money sales? Currently, I’m still waiting fora response regarding this ticket.

Recently, my girlfriend’s account was banned for real money sales but restored 5 days later only to learned that it was “blocked in error”. She was upset because she took a week off to play gw2 through Xmas, but could not.

I never had so much frustration with account issues with any other games before. Right now, I even have a saved template to follow when writing in tickets. Nevertheless, I still love playing this game. Hope everything would be fine for those who are truly innocent, and Merry Christmas!

Does not justify your “ban first talk later” approach. I’ve seen some friends who got banned for simply helping each other out by loaning gold to each other to try their luck in the mystic toilet, and then returning the gold an hour later if they recouped everything.

I’ve also seen some ex guild mates get away with buying gold, botting, hacking and exploiting. Some of whom never got banned, some of whom actually successfully appealled and even got an apology from Arenanet.

I will not name names, but it shows very clearly that your system is completely flawed and punishes legit players.

Do you compensate unfairly banned players for the lost opportunity cost? No.

Didn’t ArenaNet say that for the first offense, you would be temporarily banned and for repeated offenses, you would be permanently banned? This issue of ban first and ask questions later is bothering me as a player that have spent a fair deal throwing money at ANet (can’t help it if the mini pets are too adorable on the gem store!).

However, my birthday is in a week so about a week ago, I posted on my facebook wall asking friends and acquaintances for a donation of gold on GW2 so that I can work towards my legendary and legendary precursor (480g!!!). So lately, I’ve received gold here and there as presents from friends whom I’ve been playing with and acquaintances whom I didn’t even know played GW2! What I want to know is what will ArenaNet do about this system and how is ArenaNet going to investigate whether the player was innocent or not? I certainly do not plan on adding every single person on my facebook that plays GW2 as a GW2 friend (I like to only keep those I play with a lot) so it would suck if I was suddenly permanently banned for receiving gold as a birthday present…

Anyway, I’ve yet to have been wronged by ArenaNet so I will continue to hold faith in them and pray nothing happens to me.

Well well, guess what guys?

Few of us friends and buddy actually started to play Guild War 2 since beta to now. One of my good buddy quit quite sometimes ago due to the concept of like able to trade and many things was like binding, etc …

After quite sometimes of persuading him to join back the team and start playing back being a player and a team of us. He finally agreed and joined back playing on christmas eve.

Guess what ???

Our Guild mate chip in gold and items (sell on market) to the treasurer. Later the Treasurer sent him the gold when he ( the one got back to play ) first got online start playing. Hours later, he got banned.

LOL, We went to his house to stay over celebrating x’mas and play together, we get him back playing and cause his account got banned? What is this? The System got him banned.

I personally think, this is a very bad issue because, it just mess up the fun and plan of player.

The ArenaNet FAILED to keep the games safe and they took it out on player, you receive gold and you got banned. I think years down the road. Where maybe some rich player plan to quit, they started to random sent gold and just get person who they hate banned. What is this? I think it’s not really fair as they claim to be a “Fair” system.

You FAIL to take care of the game and you input such system onto player who are playing, it’s like throwing a ball to the player. I suspect you, I ban you, If you are innocent, we un-ban you when we are free to review your case.

You wasted your customer times and spoilt their fun due to banning, No compensation? Just Unban and keep quiet about it? Is this the way your company is treating your customer?

Reference #
121225-001102

Gold seller Mail gold to player? Oh, then you suggest to use what other way we can deal gold to our friends and guildmate?

If mailing of gold is not allow? why do you guys implement in the system to allow it in the first place? If Gold seller is doing it, we should and MUST NOT do it? So can i say, if gold seller is also playing in Guild War 2. So should we all Quit playing Guild War 2 since Gold Seller are playing too?

Another incident happened. Can Anet comment on the “set of data” that was posted on the other thread? Why is a best mmorpg 2012 company not admitting that their system is flawed? No way to trading items and ppl get banned for using the mail system. Why not ban people using trading post as well since they could use trading post to RMT as well
It is this ridiculous system and the support being incompetent that players have to suffer. I myself quit the game because of this and my friend is facing the similar nonsense as well.

The ban on gold sending that most ppl reported has definitely become an issue. I believed quite a number of players that were innocent got an unwanted amount of banned time.

Would Anet appreciate its players and make a genuine compensation to us? It is definitely become a bad experience whether its before or after being unbanned. The after effect is FEAR in trading gold on mail which limits one of the basic function of mmo gameplay.

Best MMO of the year 2012, please do not make us regret voting you.

In my opinion this is what is going on. Programmer wrote a script with fail parameters to detect potential rmt activities. Before holidays, some “highly intelligent” dude from surveillance team ran the script on christmas eve before he leave for his christmas holidays. Bam! People got banned whether innocent people or gold sellers. He went for his long leave together with the rest of the team. While they were enjoying their christmas turkey at home, the poor support and customer service team comes under fire. They cant do much until surveillance team comes back from their enjoyment to solve the issues. Customers that were wrongly banned were just given a “cut and paste” reply and apology after waiting for a period of time.. See ya for the next ban wave.

To be honest, gold sellers are as smart as typical criminals. In fact they are a form of organized crime(I know because I wrote a paper on it). Their tactics evolved and they wont be so dumb to just use mailbox. Try adding in trading post and guild bank. Also, the usage of common sense for a banwave is very much needed which at least the surveillance team should standby everytime such a major operation occur. A word to describe this fiasco, Irresponsible.