Guild Wars 2

We’re aware of the issue and are looking into it.
I’ll update here as I get them.

Temp Workaround:
-Edited Out

Hey All,

We’ve been monitoring the in-game chatter tonight during the US Election, and while most conversations were civil, some were going well beyond the boundary of acceptable behavior that we allow in-game by bordering on harassment.

Guild Wars 2, the world of Tyria, and most games, are meant to be a way for us to enjoy ourselves and allow a possible escape the confines of reality for a short period of time. MMOs are nothing without their communities, and sometimes real-life can splash into that very quickly and aggressively.

We are all here because of our love for games and the worlds that they allow us to explore. Opinions can differ, but by playing Guild Wars 2, we all have something in common. So, please, stay civil. Remember that no matter what is going on in the real world, Tyria should be a safe place for everyone to enjoy.

We are all in this together.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Chris Cleary.8017:

We don’t need to see it in-game, sometimes good video evidence is enough for me to track down who it was. In this case, the video was enough for me to find out who it was and take action. Thanks for the video, and to accompany your video, I give you this video of his account’s last moments:

https://youtu.be/bqfUi9DzBuo

Oh yah, he’s also banned

You should match his login IP to other accounts, and go after his main. Banning that account is punishment, but if it were a throw away account that he got for the $10 sale, then he may do it again.

I never said this was the only one of his accounts that was banned

We don’t need to see it in-game, sometimes good video evidence is enough for me to track down who it was. In this case, the video was enough for me to find out who it was and take action. Thanks for the video, and to accompany your video, I give you this video of his account’s last moments:

https://youtu.be/bqfUi9DzBuo

Oh yah, he’s also banned

You were not rolled back, gold was removed from your account because it was purchased through RMT. Closing this thread.

I’m going to go ahead and lock this thread, at this point, further discussion on anything other than bearbow math isn’t really important and can happen on another thread if needed.

Truth be told, using bearbow math (an unproven system that may or may not lead to random photobombs…see below) isn’t always going to be exact. However, this player did not need to use bearbow math as they violated the laws of bearbow science and used a 3rd party program which is not allowed. Thats why they were banned, not because they were bad at bearbow math.

Hey Empathy! Thanks for getting my attention via the forums!

Actually, your account was never suppose to have been unbanned. Looks like this was a slipup that I’ll rectify right now. Your main account and 8 other accounts have been banned/rebanned.

Your other accounts were banned for botting (and selling gold), and your main account was banned because you mailed gold from your bots to it.

Feel free to contact Customer Support again if you have any questions.

In a player driven economy, the demand of an item surpassing the supply generated by the playerbase will increase the value of it. While there are some items in these bags that are not based around cosmetics (the low drop rate of T6 mats), the price of these bags is directly relative to the cosmetic value that is being placed on them. While currently profitable, that profit is derived directly from other players and their willingness to play a higher price. In essence, this is a transfer of wealth not wealth generation.

As far as this specific spawn of ambients is concerned, it’s defiantly one of the faster ones to farm. As long as the playerbase is willing to pay for that item, and the demand remains higher than the supply, it will be profitable. This is not an exploit, it’s the playerbase saying “thank you for farming this, because we didn’t want to”.

I’ll go ahead and play this game. The “screenshot” you’ve provided while “awesome”, doesn’t discount the fact that no one in this screenshot has been actioned. You are posting on the forums, which is a clear indication that you are not banned. None of the people in this party chat are banned. So while the “Legit” is being put into say (according to this screenshot), no action was taken against anyone here.

I know you wanted to post a screenshot of an account being banned, but you are posting a screenshot from the launcher back in 2012. We are on build 38057 not 15377.

My guess is that the GM was putting into question the validity of the tactic being used, but did not action as there was nothing against the rules.

I’ll go ahead and supply the screenshot that the GM took in context of this text. GM Stuffs and Character Name of person in question are blurred (sorry!)

Database Breaches

We’ve seen some players theorize that hacked accounts were due to a Guild Wars database breach. We have very strict blocks in place to keep network attacks from reaching our customer databases, and a team constantly monitoring for any signs of intrusion, and we’re confident that there has been no such breach.

We take security very seriously. Perhaps you can tell from this blog post. And of all the things we protect at ArenaNet, we protect our customers’ data most of all.

Companies like Blizzard and Valve presumably also had a commitment to security, yet they ultimately suffered breaches of their account databases. One day will we become such a target that a hack attempt will finally overwhelm our defenses?

If that ever were to happen, we’d be up-front with you about it, and we’d take immediate steps to ensure that it didn’t lead to widespread account hacking. And here’s something else to think about. Because we’re requiring all Guild Wars 2 players to use unique passwords for Guild Wars 2, there’s actually nothing a hacker can steal from Guild Wars 2 to help attack other games or web sites. Using unique passwords benefits you both ways. In general, making a commitment to use a unique password for each account you care about is the best way to protect yourself, not only from being hacked today, but also from being hacked as the result of any future security breach of any company you deal with.

Commerce Security

We’ve seen a very few cases where hackers purchased gems on accounts after hacking them. This is an uncommon type of attack because we do have in-game restrictions in place to prevent wealth from being transferred off an account in a case like this.

We’ve deployed new restrictions to prevent hackers from using stored credit cards on stolen accounts in this way, and we also now provide users the option to delete stored credit cards.

Of course, if any customer finds that a hacker has created unauthorized charges against his credit card, that player can contact our support team to get the charges refunded.

How Hackers Steal Accounts

Most of the security advice we’ve all seen through the years has focused on how to choose a strong password. You might therefore think that the primary way hackers break into accounts is by preying on accounts with weak passwords, perhaps scanning every word in the dictionary looking for matches. That’s rarely the case.

The basic truth is this: hackers steal game accounts because they already know the account name and password. They know them because they stole them (via security breaches or spyware) from another game or site where the person used the same account name and password.

So unfortunately, if the lesson you’ve learned from security advice through the years is to pick a single complicated password, memorize it, and then use it everywhere, that’s exactly the wrong lesson for today’s security environment. To keep accounts on different sites secure in today’s environment, you need to use a unique password for each account.

We have some ability at ArenaNet to watch hacking attempts live, and it tells a fascinating story. We watch as hackers use tens of thousands of different IP addresses to scan through millions of attempted account names and passwords, almost all of which are for accounts that don’t even exist in our database, looking for matches. They’re not guessing or brute-forcing passwords; they’re trying a very specific account name and password for each attempt. For example, account name “joe.user@example.com”, password “alligator101?. If they don’t get a match immediately, they may try a variant like “alligator100? or “alligator102?, then they quickly move on to the next entry on their list. And it’s interesting to see that the passwords on these lists are mostly quite good passwords. For every one account on the hackers’ lists with a password like “twilight” (real example, ?_?), there are dozens of accounts with good strong passwords. So the world at large clearly knows how to pick good passwords; the reason people are still getting hacked is because they use the same passwords on multiple sites.

The security environment has certainly changed. We didn’t see hackers testing these vast lists of stolen account names and passwords when we launched the first Guild Wars. But in recent years, a truly staggering number of game companies and web sites have had their account databases breached. These reports of security breaches — 77 million accounts, 25 million accounts, 24 million accounts, untold millions more — may seem abstract, too big to be real, but they’re obviously not. The information stolen from database breaches is worth a lot of money to hackers, who can take the stolen account credentials and use them to attack each new game that’s released.

So if it ever seemed safe to memorize one strong password and then use it for multiple accounts, it certainly isn’t safe anymore. Today it’s critically important to use a unique password for each account you care about and want to keep.