Guild Wars 2

Allie Murdock.8152:

So, it looks like Meteor Shower should have a red circle. Is there a chance that it is being culled out in the situations you experienced?

I have never seen a red circle for meteor shower in any situation. If it’s culling, I’d think the graphics for a meteor shower would cull before the red circle would… and I typically see the graphics.

While you’re at it… Mesmers’ Feedback and Null Field have no red circles either. Null Field and Feedback have very visible animations (as does meteor shower), but you never know if it’s a friendly or enemy feedback/null field/meteor shower.

Anet is encouraging the player base to use a different venue to discuss WvW matches. They are being naive if they think the venues to host such communities are going to stop with just WvW matches as the subject matter. They are jeopardizing their entire feedback loop.

Back in the day, I used to play several MMORPGs (by various developers). Those games took the same mentality at release that Anet is doing now. They tried to separate themselves from the mudslinging that happens on forums.

The consequences of that separation ran pretty deep. The gaming communities found other venues to host forums (VNBoards was big back in the day). Since so much discussion started happening on 3rd party forums (that the developers didn’t always know about), the developers lost touch with their target audience…. which made the overall health of the games suffer. The developers then decided they would try to participate in those 3rd party forums, but found they had absolutely no influence over the community and had a less than stellar feedback loop. In some cases, it drove a wedge between the developers and the gamers.

In my honest opinion, if they truly want to continue a quality and productive feedback loop with gaming community, they should think long and hard about dismantling any part of it, no matter how productive (or unproductive, as it may be) it is. Once they jump down this rabbit hole, it’ll take a long rope to climb back out …. Anet will have to gain the trust of the community before they’d be willing to come back. In this day and age, having an offline gathering place for a given game is a necessity, requiring dedicated staff to maintain it.

I do think changes are necessary to keep the WvW matchups forum healthy, but closing the forum entirely seems to be rather extreme. I find it hard to believe they have exhausted all other options.

Let’s hope Anet has considered what I’m talking about and are prepared for what’s ahead.

If you play WvW the way I perceive it’s meant to be played, you’ll probably lose money or break even, in all actuality. By ‘meant to be played’, I mean you buy/deploy siege, upgrade capture points, and matches are fairly even where sometimes you’re trading deaths with your competitor. Okay… I’ll admit… the last one is a pipe dream right now

If you let everyone else do all the upgrading and deploy all the siege, you can probably come out ahead… but you really won’t be pulling your own weight in WvW either.

I actually perceive WvW as one of the end-game money sinks. After all… once you get all the gear you want and your character appearances the way you want… what else do you have to spend your hard earned gold on?

I actually PvE to fund my WvW habits. I usually will spend one week (total days, not usually contiguous) out of the month farming gold to pay for my WvW expenses for the other three weeks.

If you go PvE in the WvW zones, I imagine you could come out ahead… but it’s probably more profitable to DE farm in Cursed Shore. And by PvE, I’m referring to farming mobs in the borderlands/EB plus flipping undefended capture points.

To me, the bigger question isn’t how they didn’t get caught by the legendary defenders… but how they got up there. I thought the entire citadel was surrounded by either cliffs or walls… with the cliffs being tall enough that you can’t jump up. The only ways in or out are supposed to be the gates that only the home team can use or waypoints. The legendary guards are basically supposed to be Plan B.

I’m guessing exploit/hack or someone found a bug with a little piece of terrain that allowed them to jump up onto the plateau.

I didn’t think walls could be damaged by handheld weapons. I was under the impression that only catapults and trebuchets could damage walls at the moment.

I know this is frustrating. I’ve spent several hours (plus the money involved) upgrading a tower, defending the tower… area supply camps/yaks while I wait for supplies to complete upgrades, and setting up defensive siege… only to have a zerg roll in and take out all my work before a defensive force can make it there.

I’m thinking this is partly by design though. Supply camps are meant to change hands frequently. Towers are designed to flip, but not as frequently. Keeps are designed to flip rarely.

I’m not sure that a flat increase to the ‘health’ of the doors and walls are going to fix the issue. What I’m not sure was anticipated is having a group of 30-50 banging down the door of tower/keep that only has a few defenders.

I know this won’t work the way I’m going to propose it, but it’s a possible starting point:

There are a lot of Dynamic Events in PvE that scale to the number of players that are participating. I believe this is partly to ensure everyone in the area that wants to participate can and partly to make sure that the event lasts a certain length of time. Why not apply this same principle to WvW, to a certain extent? Make the ‘toughness’ of the walls and gates scale with both the number of attackers and number of defenders. More defenders than attackers? The gates are weaker. More attackers than defenders? The gates are stronger. About equal numbers? The gates stay where they need to be. This would have to scale to the type of capture point too.

There are two kinks with this possible solution that I can think of:

First, long range siege. I’m just not sure how that could factor into this… since I don’t believe the operators of long range siege get credit for point captures unless they leave their siege and run up before the point is captured. So… they currently aren’t considered a part of the attacking force.

Secondly, capture point upgrades need to be taken into consideration. I’m not sure how that should factor in either.

I’m an old DAoC vet. The blitz tactics used to take a tower or keep before defenders can get there is not a new concept to me. The difference between what happened in DAoC and what’s going on in GW2 is the number of possible capture points. There were many more capture points in DAoC. Losing a tower was a minor setback. In some circumstances, losing a keep wasn’t a major setback either. With the design of GW2, the maps are smaller and there are far fewer capture points. This leads to more conflict… especially since these points determine the score.

Though I have offered the above suggestion, I’m really on the fence with this. Population balance aside, I don’t think it’s all a design issue. I think it’s partly the tactics that the players are using. All too often, I see Commanders just going on the offensive. Unless a keep in EB, a Garrison (not always the Garrison), or an orb are at stake, Commanders haven’t shown much of an interest in defensive tactics. This isn’t only on my server, but the servers we’ve faced off against as well.

If/When the commanders start seeing the value of defending owned structures, this may not be as much of an issue.

Just some things to think about on this topic….

I agree that changes need to be made. There needs to be more incentive for guilds to claim. There needs to be more responsibility laid on guilds that do claim.

I’m not sure I agree with ownership being based on who spends the most at the upgrade NPC though. The reason being in matches with heavy action, guilds may claim a tower, but if the supply camps are flipping like mad and the yaks are getting killed off, it could take hours for upgrades to complete. Then it becomes which guild has a presence in that wvw zone for longer. You’ll end up cutting out smaller guilds that may only have members in one or two time zones. In some circumstances, it’ll become a race to upgrade points. With supply camps, it may actually hurt your server more if you start upgrading right away, draining all the supply in that camp. Yes, the ‘whoever spends the most gets the claim’ proposition will probably work with the ‘safer’ points, but points that get contested frequently won’t see as much benefit due to lack of resources to complete upgrades.

My suggestion would be to give guilds more incentives by claiming. Give them something to encourage them to claim and defend their claim. Maybe award them a certain amount of gold that gets deposited in their guild bank for every 15 minutes they can hold a point that they’ve claimed, provided boons for, and started upgrades on. Providing bonus gold for successful defenses would encourage the guild to stay and defend… and encourage folks to claim points other than the ‘safe’ ones. Maybe the amount of gold can be tiered. Alternatively, influence could be awarded.

Whatever the reward, the point would be to offer an incentive to a claiming guild for actually defending a point and upgrading it.

I ran TA explore Upper today and was having aggro issues. I was bomb/heal support specced. I was wearing full exotic cleric’s, +heal jewelry, and cleric’s p/s. This setup gives me high armor (toughness) and high +heal. The group consisted of me (engy), a thief, a ranger, a mesmer, and a necro. I was consistently pulling aggro. One fight that sticks in my mind was there were 4-5 of these tree/hairy Ent looking things that come at you in a corridor. after 1 bomb (with heal), I had all of them on me. Not only that, but they did chain knockbacks on me. I literally lost all control of my character for about 15 seconds, all the while dying. I was downed about 6 times throughout the run. I died 3 of those times. The others were downed twice, but the necro was the only other one that died and he died once.

I definitely can’t figure out their aggro system. If you ever want to see how weird it is, just do the abomination fight at the end of the Plinx DE chain in Cursed Shore. That champion usually locks on to one target for the entire event. If if that target dies and comes back, as soon as the target engages, the abom will usually go after it again. I’ve been that target many, many times… lol. In that particular fight, I did notice I was more apt to be the target when I was in a condition build. I have yet to pull aggro in that fight when I was in a power/crit setup.

Not sure if this helps come to a conclusion or not… just thought I’d share the info. That Abomination at the end of the Plinx DE might be a good place to start looking at aggro behavior though.

Assassinin.4963:

Get real dude. You think corporate and politicial players who are conferred with leadership title such as CEOs and Ministers earned their title entirely through merit? The game is mirroring what the real world is. Money talks louder.

That’s a valid point. I take it the majority are okay with the current system. If so, that’s acceptable. The current system is better than no system… was just trying to think of ways to improve it.

I personally don’t like seeing several commanders all on the same map with no cooperation between them. I was just thinking there might be some mechanic/system that would encourage or reward good leadership.

I remember back in my DAoC days…. they did come out with a siege tower. But… they were non-movable structures that were built against a wall and only usable against keeps. In addition, I think the wall had to be destroyable. They took a large amount of resources to build, in addition to taking a long time to build. They were fairly easy to destroy, but had enough health where it took several people if you needed to take it out quickly. They weren’t cheap either (in DAoC, there was a crafting profession to make the good siege equipment). After a certain point during the construction process (a certain percentage of completion, iirc – any old DAoCers may have to help me remember), if the siege tower was destroyed, it dropped the health of that wall a certain percentage as sort of a consolation prize.

The whole idea of the siege tower was to distract the defenders with your main force by attacking one side of a keep while a small special ops group goes and sets up this tower where the defenders aren’t looking.

I agree. It’s like buying a seat in Congress. Any yahoo with enough money could buy a seat. If you were elected commander, it makes having that little blue thing above your head mean something. Having 5 commanders running around the field because they (or their guild) bought the tag just doesn’t work… too many chiefs and not enough indians at times.

Taking away the existing mechanic would tick off all the players/guilds that spent the money to get the title. I say leave that in place.

My suggestion:

Create a new role: General. Make Generals voted on by the server on a weekly basis. Have a nomination period. Have time slots (to encourage coverage). A byproduct of this process might expose coverage weaknesses. By being elected a General, give them access to a special chat channel that allows them to communicate with other Generals.

Expanding on this idea (and keeping the existing commander system), treat the commanders as second in command. Have a chat channel where the Generals can talk with commanders.

With the chat channels, you’re basically created a dynamic, election based, guild-like hierarchy… only it’s for all of WvW on your server.

Just a thought….

Toggles.1783:

Consider that the system is already in place since you can’t siege within your starting points… it shouldn’t be difficult.

I’m not sure that’s entirely true. I could be mistaken, but I thought the current mechanic prevents any siege from being placed in your starting area. It may be more difficult for the developers to prevent a single type of siege engine from being deployed in an area.

To be frank, I think this is an intended mechanic. As someone else stated, there are a lot of towers that are just inside the range of a trebuchet. In addition, there are pads in Stonemist (as well as some of the towers/keeps in EB and the Borderlands) where the shape and size of the pad is perfect for a trebuchet.

Although I do agree and wish something was done so Stonemist would flip more often, taking it to begin with is a strategic advantage for whatever server that owns it. I don’t think we should diminish the reward for holding it.

In my opinion, you should not be looking at banning trebuchets from being placed in Stonemist. I think we should be looking at making Stonemist more of a centerpiece for conflict and more vulnerable to attack. The design of EB is like a game of king of the hill. It shouldn’t be easy holding the top of that hill. Give some sort of strategic advantage in the surrounding towers… additional defensive capabilities, a long range ballista instead of cannon, etc … but only if your server doesn’t hold Stonemist.

HoD and ET,

You can choose to believe me or not (up to you), but there are folks on BG advocating for people to back off so this can at least be fun for everyone. Personally, I don’t want a repeat of last week. Hang in there guys and gals!

You know… it’s really disheartening to see all the sterotyping and assumptions happening here about Blackgate. I’ve been on BG since release. I am not a bandwagoner. I don’t particularly enjoy running in a zerg unless strategy dictates I need to. The time I spent in WvW (on average, an hour every evening) this week was spent trying to defend our interests in the Lowlands in EB.

Every server has it’s bad apples. Unfortunately, due to our recent population increase, it may seem like there are more on BG…. but I’m pretty sure the ratio of respectable players to bad apples is about the same on BG as it is on FA or TC. The main difference is it was more visible due to BG’s server population.

When you start questioning the population size of BG, one has to ask themselves… why did those guilds decide to go to BG out of the 24 NA and 27 EU servers they had to choose from? I know I asked myself that when I heard about them coming over. I know there has been active recruitment to find coverage in the off hours on BG. There’s no reason FA or TC can’t recruit. Heck… even Kaineng, one of the lowest population servers, has a major recruitment drive for transfers!

To be frank, this week’s match was not that enjoyable for me. It’s no fun when there’s no one to fight. I would much rather lose a close battle than win a lopsided battle. Winning is a matter of perspective within those terms. I can say with some certainty that some of the offensive behavior happened out of shear boredom and lack of action. Heck… there were times when our own started griefing us because they had no one to fight. I do want to give kudos to the BG commanders. They did a fantastic job coordinating an overall strategy.

I didn’t get the chance to face off against FA too much (they didn’t venture into the Lowlands very frequently when I was out there), but I do have one strategy suggestion for TC. You all did a fantastic job of flipping supply camps in EB on a regular basis. I’m not sure what you were trying to accomplish strategically by this though… or if this was being done as a part of a strategy. The groups that were usually doing this ranged from 5-20 players. Your routes got very predictable. Almost every time, the route was Darkrait > Golanta > Klovan > Rogue’s > Molevek > Speldan. In some cases, we could literally provoke the start of the route by taking out your alliance in Darkrait. There were usually about 5-10 of us that were staying to defend most of the Lowlands. We usually couldn’t get together quick enough to stop you from taking a supply camp, but we could call out the intel and flip the supply camps within 5 minutes of you taking it. Sometimes we could convince enough folks to head you off, since your route was predictable. My suggestions: 1) Stop and defend those supply camps for a little bit. You weren’t really interrupting our supply chains or other advances since we were flipping them back in fairly short order without having to pull resources off of the front line. 2) Mix up your route and timing. You became very predictable, which isn’t good from a strategic standpoint.

All that said, I greatly admire the resolve and determination of both TC and FA. I’m sorry you all don’t feel the same about BG and apologize that your overall experience with BG was less than stellar, in your eyes. Though I can’t say I care for the light you all have been casting on BG and its accomplishments to get where it is, both TC and FA are very classy groups and fun to face off against with even numbers! Maybe we’ll get to face off against you all in the future under better circumstances.

Best of luck guys and gals!

**DISCLAIMER: This is all purely my opinion/thoughts and in no way is a reflection of the opinion of any group associated with the BlackGate server.

I’m with what a lot of others have stated: versatility in play style. I love mobile ranged classes. I love ranged classes that can get up closed and personal, but get out of dodge in a hurry too. The mobility of the class is the reason I favor builds that are heavy into swiftness and vigor (either procs, traits, or elixirs).

But what I love most is the uniqueness of the class. Every fantasty MMO out there has bow users, magic casters, tanks, melee dps, and assassins/rogues. I have an 80 ranger in addition to my 80 engineer. The ranger is just like every hunter/scout/ranger I’ve played in every other MMO. But how many MMOs have a class that specializes in gadgets, explosives, and gun powder?

I don’t particularly care for npc/player targeted grenades. I’ve done some extensive farming underwater with grenades, which uses npc/player targeting instead of ground targeting. The problem with npc/player targeting with grenades is if they are running toward or away from you at a fairly shallow angle, everything is smooth. As soon as your target strafes or starts moving perpendicular to your line of fire, all your grenades will miss. That’s too much of a liability for me. If grenades were made to be npc/player targeted, I probably wouldn’t use them anymore for this reason.

Bard.7215:

Also, this game isn’t like other MMO’s, endgame is nothing massive or to look forward too. This game is more about the journey too endgame, there is no rush. So if you’re rushing to 80. you’re really missing out.

Nothing massive about end-game? I’m not sure I follow. If you’re talking about the scale of end-game activities, I’d suggest you set foot into WvW on a decently populated server. If you’re talking about major milestones by reaching 80, I don’t think that’s totally true either. I don’t think sPVP is impacted as much by leveling as other aspects of the game. You get access to level 80 exotic armor, which for PvE and WvW is the best that you can get. Plus you get all your trait points to spend at 80. There are some grandmaster traits that can totally change your game play. Though I do agree that the PvE side of the game is more about the journey to end game, I think you’re dismissing some of the incentives of being 80 as well.

But I digress from the topic….

So I’ve started looking into what kind of impact using the stats from weapons may have. For testing, I’m looking at just the power attribute. The reason I went with power as my testing attribute is the formulas for condition damage are more complex (each condition has it’s own formula on how it uses the condition damage attribute) and I really didn’t feel like doing all the math for each condition we have access to while in a kit right now. lol

So… I’m looking at the formula on how Power is used:

Damage done = (weapon damage) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Armor) (Source)

Currently, all kits have a flat weapon damage of 969 at level 80. This is lower than a level 80 masterwork rifle, but higher than a level 80 rare pistol. An exotic rifle at 80 has a weapon damage of 1205. An exotic pistol at 80 has a weapon damage of 1029.

For the purposes of this discussion, I’m going to assume a spell-specific coefficient of 1 (since I’m not sure what the coefficients are for each skill), armor of 2000, and power of 2000 (not including weapon stats). I’m going to run these calculations using a rifle that has 128 power on it.

Calculation using the current kit weapon damage:
969 * 2000 * 1/2000 = 969

Calculation using an exotic rifle’s weapon damage:
1205 * 2000 *1/2000 = 1205

Calculation using an exotic rifles weapon damage and additional power:
1205 * 2128 *1/2000 = 1282.12

Calculation using the Kit’s weapon damage with the additional power from rifle:
969 * 2128 * 1/2000 = 1031.02

The difference between the kit and rifle: 236 damage (24.4% damage increase)

The difference between the kit and the rifle with power: 313.12 damage (32.3% damage increase)

The difference between the kit with +power and the rifle with +power: 251.1 damage (25.9% damage increase)

The difference between a current kit and a kit with +power: 62.02 (6.4% damage increase)

I’m not sure what percentage increase everyone feels we need (if any), but I think I would be happy with them just including the stats and sigils off our weapon and keep the weapon damage the kits currently have. Guess I’d need to see how it played out or know the current coefficients.

I have two characters that I gather Orichalcum and Ancient Logs on. Until yesterday’s patch, I was able to gather these resources once every 24 hours on each character…. character based lockout. I just discovered that I can now only gather on one of the two characters. Apparently the lockout timer has been switched to account based instead of character based. I’m going to check periodically this evening to see if they’ve changed the length of the lockout timer.

I’m okay with it if that’s what’s intended… I’d just like to see some consistency and patch notes.

Hippocampus.8470:

And crafting will not be profitable as long as such a large portion of the players can craft any given item, even without switching crafts. If 25% of real-world people could buy the materials needed for a Ferrari, press a few buttons, and suddenly have a finished Ferrari, making Ferraris would stop being profitable, too.

This was the point I was trying to make earlier. A-net has made crafting easy, so anyone (everyone) can do it. This set the stage for economic state that crafting is headed. I can’t figure out whether this outcome was intended or not by A-net. I’m sure A-net followed reasoning somewhere along the lines of making all content/gear more attainable to everyone… but that comes with a cost.

I honestly don’t think we’ll see any change in the immediate future. The changes I’ve seen suggested here would be major design changes, which would probably only be done with a major update or expansion.

In my opinion, they would have to introduce recipes for some sort of consumable item that everyone would want/need, but make it challenging enough to get the materials or the recipe itself in order to curb the likelihood of everyone producing said item themselves. Specializations in crafting professions may help the issue at hand too, but not to the extent that needs addressing.

Warning: Long Read

I’ve really been struggling with this myself. Yes… I’m one of those masochists that really likes crafting. But… I like to be rewarded by my efforts too. There are a few things related to the profitability of crafting that has thrown me off and makes me concerned.

The Economy
The scale of the economy is much different than other MMOs that I’ve played. The fact that A-net publicizes that they have an economist on staff tells me that they are closely controlling how the economy scales as well.

Personally, I’m not used to making an end game item (i.e. exotics) and making less than 50 silver of profit (profit after subtracting what you could have sold the materials for). Compared to the scale of the economy from other games, that amount of profit is small potatoes. That’s taking some getting used to. Then again… in other games, crafting took a substantial amount of time, effort, and money to max out… but the reward was being able to make decent money off of your wares since mastering a craft wasn’t something that everyone did. I know there are folks that may argue this, but in GW2, crafting is easy and attainable for anyone… so I’m assuming that’s one justification for smaller profits, to a certain degree.

If you actually try to farm most of your raw materials and sell what you make, you could’ve spent substantially less time to make the same amount of profit by just farming events and selling your drops. For me, the time invested to make a profit just isn’t worth it from a monetary standpoint.

The Future
I’m beginning to be concerned about the longevity of crafting as well. I’ve been watching very specific categories in the trading post over the last month. A little more specific… I’ve been watching the prices of exotic armor and weapons, plus the cost to purchase the materials to make them. A month ago, I could actually turn a 1-2 gold profit off of exotics. As of yesterday, there were many cases where I would be lucky to break even (in some cases items were selling for a loss).

I believe there are a few factors that are driving the costs down, making it less profitable to craft. First, most folks have purchased the armor/weapons that they want, so demand has gone down. Second, now that many people are hitting level 80, they’re finishing leveling their crafting skills and trying their hand at crafting exotics, so supply is going up. Those two combined should drive the price pretty low.

It’s possible there might be another surge for equipment when folks start getting alts to level 80. It’s possible that folks may look at putting together new sets of gear if they change their specs. Other than that, it’s hard to see what the sales future may look like.

Other Thoughts
I’d like to know what direction A-net plans on taking crafting in the future. I’m sure they’ll add new recipes and craftable skins at some point… which can temorarily boost the profitability of crafting. Many other MMOs put degradation on gear (meaning that eventually the item will permanently ‘break’). Though that feature is hated by most, it also kept the crafting community alive. That doesn’t really seem to work for GW2 though.

At this point, I’m going to continue to watch the market and look for targets of opportunity. Those moments of opportunity don’t seem to last long though. I swear other crafters are spying on me sometimes….lol.

I’m having this issue as well.

If it is for halloween we probably wouldn’t know about it until later this month.

It seems a little strange to have a completion task on the monthly achievement, but not give you a month to complete it…. wouldn’t put it past them though.

So…. If I can go pay the Seige Merchant 6 silver for an arrow cart that takes no time to build and has more to offer in both damage and range, why would I consider using my Mortar elite skill?

When I first saw the mortar skill, I thought ‘Oh cool! It’s like a grenade kit…. I have to stay in one place, but it has much further range to compensate for making me a stationary target!’ It doesn’t sound like that’s what it’s intentions are.

Skills 1, 2, and 4 are repetitive skills from the grenade kit. Skill 3 is okay, but nothing to write home about, in my opinion. As someone else said, might as well use an elixir gun, med kit, or healing turret, though I do concede that the heal from this skill is better… not sure if that would hold true with some +healing. Skill 5 is really the only skill that’s unique, but it’s effectiveness is situational (if your team is trying to aoe focus fire a certain area, it’s not a good idea to knock the enemy out of that area).

In my experience, to setup the mortar, you have to be in the hot zone (even at 1500 or even 1600 range)… either being hit by other siege or pummeled by player fire. You have to have line of sight with your ground target for the skills, so you can’t hide in the back or over a hill and fire away. I’m usually lucky if the the mortar lasts long enough to get off 2 rounds of skill 5 before it’s destroyed.

I play around with the mortar during Keep/Tower defenses/attacks in WvW, but that’s it. Mortar is a one trick pony and has very few uses outside of WvW (I’ve tried using it in PvE… fun, but not the best use of your skills). It seems very lackluster for an elite skill that has limited applications.

If the engineer community feels that the mortar’s usefulness is on par with other elite skills, I’m okay with that. I’ll just have to lower my expectations for the skill. Personally, if this is how Anet plans on implementing it, I’d rather see them replace the skill with an AoE concussion grenade (like the 5 skill on the mortar) on a 90 second cooldown. That would at least open up the situations that it could be used in.

I tried to post my build with all the dirty details here… but apparently there’s a limit to how long the post can be… lol. So… I had to post it to a fan site and link to it.

The short version:
This build was primarily developed for WvWvW, but could be used in other scenarios.

Speedy Grenadier/Rifleman

If you have any questions or comments, I’d be more than happy to hear them.

Smart Spam Filter for Chat and Mail

Issue
The amount of gold selling spam I’m seeing in both chat and mail is starting to become an issue for me. I’m sure the amount of man power necessary to control all the reports of gold sellers is fairly substantial as well.

Possible Solution
A pre-processing spam filter for both the mail and chat systems. I’ve seen this used with other games I’ve played and was extremely effective. The filter would work sort of like the profanity filter, but would need to be server side. These filters would process chat and mail before it was sent to the game clients for certain patterns and web addresses that the gold spammers are using in their advertisements. If found, the mail/chat is dropped and reported internally. From a support standpoint, I’m sure this would have to be done so the filter could be updated dynamically by your support folks so as the spammers come up with new addresses and patterns, they can add them to the filter for immediate response.

Alternative Solution
An alternative solution might be to do the above on the client side as a spam filter similar to the profanity filter. If turned on, it actively watches your chat and mail. If the spam patterns/addresses are detected, a gold spamming report would be automatically sent and the mail/message would not be displayed in chat. Instead, just the system message acknowledging a report would display in chat. For this to be effective, a regular update of the client side spam filter would be necessary.

Outcome
These possible solutions negate one use of stolen accounts. By preventing the gold farmers from advertising, it makes it substantially harder for them to get the word out… which will dry up their potential customer base. In games where I’ve seen this type of system implemented, gold selling/farming was all but non-existent because they had no reliable way of recruiting customers.