Guild Wars 2

We believe the issue has been fixed, however due to some DNS servers taking longer to update than others, some may still be running into issues. Hopefully this is resolved for everyone soon.

We believe we have solved the issue for most in NA and are still working on issues in other regions.

ETA – Hopefully Soon.

Working on the issue with our service providers. Still no ETA.

For those able to get in with the workaround, great. For those that are still unable to get in, we are actively troubleshooting the issue. Sorry for the inconvenience!

We have identified the problem and things should be recovering.

We’re looking into this, will update when I have info.

I felt that I should pitch in on the multiple issues across this thread.

First off:
Thanks everyone for raising your concern about this issue, and I want to assure everyone that we do investigate player reports for every issue. Sometimes these investigations can take some time, and we may choose to action in bulk rather than individually.

Second:
Harassment of any type is NOT OK. If you believe someone is not playing fair, please use the report feature. It not only helps us track the issue, but also helps us identify possible hotspot issues. Even though the OP has been now been actioned multiple times for using 3rd party tools, there are better ways to handle this.

Here are the best ways to report another player:
In-Game Player Reporting / Email exploits@arena.net / Customer Support Ticket

Third:
Today we took action against a number of accounts that were involved in running 3rd party tools to automate gameplay. These “bots” create an unfair game experience for everyone and can cause a toxic atmosphere both in-game and out (as we see in this thread). We will continue to do our best to keep the game fair for everyone.

There are active internal discussions pertain to issues that could impact RMT spam. We are always attempting to make the experience for our players better. Suggestions like a client side chat filter or a friend only whisper option only tackle the surface of the problem as players would have to enable those options. By doing so, they would become less social with the rest of the community and that’s not what GW2 is about. I understand that may be what some want, but I’d rather spend developer time fixing the core issues than adding surface filters.

I would rather us fix the underlying issue with this rather than band-aid the issue by enforcing rules and punishments that don’t solve the issue at all.

The core issue here is we don’t want to have players feeling that their main source of income is generated while they are not at the computer. We have already started to see the impact of this in-game and within the community. Not only does this behavior impact players in the world when they run across a pack of unattended farmers, but also the players who are performing the unattended farming. Eventually these players spend less and less time actually playing the game, and more time unattended farming.

We see the same trends in players that use bots, macros and cheats. It eventually leads to players falling out of the game (from both encountering the impact in the world, or by participating themselves).

While there is an economic impact of having a large number of players farming like this, I’m more more concerned about behavior trends shifting than anything else.

The 3 rules above aren’t just for your protection, they are for everyone’s protection. GMs have been trained to identify and handle these situations, it’s one of the first things they learn. GMs are overly generous on the amount of time that players are given to respond.

As for how we intend on fixing that, some of us had a meeting today to talk about that. While there are some systems working against each other here, we all agreed that we didn’t want to make any changes that anyone would actually run into unless they were no longer at their keyboard for an extended period.

Rest assured, we aren’t going to take away auto-loot in the world, or remove your ability to auto-cast. Everything we implement will only impact players who aren’t actually performing actions. I’m sure when we do implement something, it’ll be in the patch notes to read about. Until then, follow the 3 rules above. After that, they won’t be relevant anymore.

(Automation is still against the rules, unless you are using it to play music in-game)

I’ll pitch in on this thread, as there seems to be some confusion about this situation.

The auto-cast feature was never intended to be used as an AFK farming mechanism, and usage of the auto-cast feature while AFK is fine as long as it is not used to facilitate unattended gameplay.

Mastery auto-loot also stopping players from being flagged afk seems like a bug instead of a feature, and I’ll be sure to bring it up today while we have a chat about this internally.

1) Using skill (1 or more) while AFK
2) AFKing in a place where it is beneficial for your character to be at
3) Unresponsive to interaction with GMs

If all 3 of these apply to what you are doing, you may get actioned for it.

Most of this price increase revolves around players that are pushing the value up due to the players willingness to pay more. If players are willing to pay more for an item, it’s going to keep increasing until eventually it hits a ceiling for the commodity. We’ve seen the same thing occur with numerous commodities over time.

Right now there is a consistent supply of mystic coins entering the game (way more than are being consumed) and churning through the trading post at a very slow rate. Most of the coins on the market are ones that have been flipped.

In retrospect, this is actually causing the daily login reward to be worth significantly more to players who wish to convert mystic coins to gold.

Account sharing comes with certain risks, which is why we have a rule against it. Normally we don’t action against it (unless one of the parties was doing bad things). Doing it during a tournament is a bad idea.

I’ll make something very clear. When you share your account, we know. You can try to hide it, but we know, and we will be watching.

John Smith.4610:

It’s me.

My Bearbow math is stronger than ever before! You are no match for me!

Alright, it’s about time I commented on this.

As of now we don’t have a problem with players doing this. While the late join is unintended, if players want to pay for this service, that’s fine. It does trivialize the skins some, but this isn’t any different than the skins from purchasing a raid run or a dungeon run (which we also are ok with). As long as the transaction is completed and players are getting what they paid for, fine.

However, that doesn’t mean that we aren’t going to fix this. A fix is in the works right now, and that fix may happen before SAB closes or be there for the next time the festival opens.

Everything you say here is correct, and has been fixed.

Hey PollyMcPretty,

I looked into this for you real quick and it looks like a problem with you doing “Express Checkout” in Paypal. I see you were able to make a purchase with another payment method today, but if you want to return to Paypal, my suggestion would be to attempt to not do the “Express Checkout” option in PayPal.

If anyone else is having this same issue, please reply here, I’ll get it looked into.

Since there has been a lot of chatter about account actions lately, I’ll go ahead and answer some common questions that have popped up.

Why 6 months, why not Permanent?
This would imply that some accounts are not being permanently banned, and that’s not true.

When looking at what action is given to an account, the intent of the behavior is taken into account, and will it likely be continued if the player were to return. There is very sound data to support that players that know they will be able to get their accounts back are significantly less likely to resort to the same behavior quickly (aka buying a new account and botting/cheating on that).

The main goal with performing an action on anyone’s account (that isn’t directly related to RMT) is to correct that behavior, not remove the player. If a player returns after any suspension and continues to break the rules, there is a good chance that they will no longer have that chance to come back again with that account.

When the intention of the behavior that breaks our rules is entirely malicious towards our playerbase or our game, we won’t be granting any sort of chance to return.

Does this mean that if someone botted they get to keep everything?
Absolutely not, in most cases we are attempting to remove what we can before the player returns. However, there are just going to be some things we can’t remove.

While it is very true that there is a possibility that that player gained an advantage for a short period of time that they were able to break the rules, a 6 month suspension carries with it a significant enough penalty to offset that

How about previous actions before this was implemented, are they going to be treated the same?
That entirely depends on the action in question. At the time of previous account actions, the actions taken on accounts were deemed appropriate for the offense, which means they will stand.

A good example of this in action would be this:
Currently many states (in the US) consider any theft over $500 to be a felony. Back in 1916, a theft was considered a felony at ~$20.

The game is much different than it was 3 years ago (which might as well be 100 years for a MMO).

If you have any questions about a specific account action, you can feel free to open a ticket with Customer Support.

What do you mean the last year? 6 Month bans haven’t started until the end of last year.
We have been using suspensions for RMT Gold buying for over a year now. Data shows that these suspensions are very effective and are performing the desired effect of stopping repeat buyers from purchasing.

Skinner.4376:

Thanks ANet! Didn’t expect the ban hammer to happen this fast. A nice belated Wintersday gift to the community.

I have been told of a certain sea snake which has a very unusual method of attracting its prey.

This issue should now be resolved. Please restart your launcher.

This issue has been resolved. Please restart your launcher.

This issue has been fixed. If you are still trying to patch, please restart your launcher and try again.

skullfaerie.7203:

That’s great- shame it’s only addressing a symptom rather than the cause, but it’s something. Will your system protect people who are experiencing horrible streaks, or will they become collateral?

Being horrible, or being on a horrible streak will be protected

Being purposely horrible, or being purposely on a horrible streak will not

pandaexpress.1458:

After just advancing into the emerald division after 20-something long games of getting through Amber division, I lost a game because we had a teammate refuse to play. He stayed at home and did nothing. He did not d/c or leave, but he sometimes left home and died while autoattacking the enemy player taking the point. I wouldn’t be too annoyed at this loss if I didn’t lose a pip.

The game is rewarding players who deliberately toss games by making future games easier. When a player comes in with the intent to lose what are the rest of us supposed to do. His loss becomes all of our losses.

Deliberately throwing games is not something that we are OK with, and we should have something in-place in the near future to discourage this activity. I would look for enforcement against this negative behavior to start sometime early next week and may be retroactive since the start of the season.

I can’t really comment on system changes, as that is outside of my realm, however I do know that it’s actively being worked.

We’ve recently taken action against a few hundred Guild Wars 2 accounts that were found to be using third-party cheat program(s). We’re committed to providing an equal and fair playing field for everyone in Guild Wars 2, and will continue to take action against those found in violation of our Rules of Conduct. Cheating in any form will not be tolerated.

If you believe that you have run into a player who is cheating, please feel free to report them! You can do so by using the right-click report functionality (Report as Bot), and/or by emailing information to exploits@arena.net.

perry.9645:

Chris Cleary.8017:

Sigils of Day/Night – These will not have any benefit

does this mean Sigil of Force?

Sigil of Force is fine.

Oslaf Beinir.5842:

Please provide more details. A list would be fantastic <3

MTX Combat Boosters – Speed, Might, Regen, Swim Speed (ect)
Food/Utility with +%Damage vs Monster Type – These will not have any benefit
Pet Consumables – Ogre Pet Whistle, Fire Elemental Powder (ect) will be disabled
Sigils of +%Damage vs Monster Type- These will not have any benefit
Sigils of Night – This will not have any benefit
Costume Brawl – Costume Brawl Pet summons will be disabled

I might have missed some things here, but you get the picture. Feel free to ask about specific items, however if they are likely to add a edge to combat, they are likely disabled.

sirsquishy.8531:

This is their stance on Multiboxing, and has been since Day 1 as far as I’m concerned.

Chances are if you are multiboxing, whatever application you used to launch GW2 multiple times is getting flagged right now. This is something that the GW2 team needs to look into, and give community feedback on.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/support/Policy-3rd-Party-Programs-Multi-Boxing-Macros/first#post1532762

Dual- or Multi-Boxing

You may use more than one account at the same time.
You may use more than one computer at the same time.
You must be actively playing on each account.
And as stated above, you may not program your keyboard to perform functions on more than one account at a time.
a. For example, if you press W on your keyboard to move forward, a single character on a single account should move forward. The keystroke or mouse click should not perform functions on more than one account.

This is correct. However, if you are running multiple accounts and choose to cheat on one of them, we are going to close all of them. This ban wave had nothing to do with multi-boxing, but likely also impacted players that owned multiple accounts.

tyu.9470:

I am sure you’ll agree that false positives happen EVERY time you do ban waves no matter how much you try to check.

Cheating on 2 of your 9 accounts got all 9 of them banned.

File name:HMIPCore.dll
Publisher:My Privacy Tools, Inc. (signed by My Privacy Tools, Inc)
Product:My Privacy Tools SecureNet Service.

This is what is crashing you. Probably going to have to remove it.

We are currently aware of this issue and are working to resolve it.

We have temporarily disabled the Glacial Imbued Jar (part of the Legendary Journey for Frostfang). Players will be unable to progress FrostFang III: Tooth of Frostfang until we enable it again.

Rata Novan Instructors have been temporarily disabled. They will return after we teach them to stop giving extra credit to students that were being naughty.

The Heroic Notary and Notarized Scrolls have been disabled temporarily to deal with an exploit. We’ll enable them again as soon as we fix the issue.

Hey all,

Just letting you know we are aware of the crash revolving around the Pact Mastery for Auto Loot and are working on a fix.

In the mean time, you can disable this by unselecting
Autoloot: Quick Interact in the General Options settings

We’ll get the fix out asap!

How to Train Your Dragon was an amazing movie!

Playing Nice and Exploits

Hey everyone! Just letting you know, in case you weren’t aware, Heart of Thorns is launching soon! With any new expansion there are bound to be a couple of things that are inevitably going to happen when the floodgates open.

Playing Nice
Guild Wars 2 has the best community, it is known. Let’s keep it that way!

While everyone plays a little bit differently, keep in mind that you aren’t the only one out there. Keeping your chat and actions friendly allows everyone to have a great experience when playing together.

I just want to remind everyone that we will be monitoring for players that are causing issues for others. If you feel someone is stepping over the line, the report function in-game is the best tool at your disposal (right click the chat/player selection and select Report).

The last thing that we want to do is to have to put some people into timeout because they are making the game not enjoyable for others, but we will.

Exploits
Let’s talk about exploits. Exploits can be described as the abuse of a bug or unintended game design to gain an advantage over other players. For example, maybe that vendor is selling items for 1/100th of their sell value, or perhaps an escort event spawns an infinite number of instantly respawning loot piñatas when you cause the NPC to get stuck.

Exploits are bad news for everyone, and while we hope there won’t be any…ok I’ll just go with that.

We have a team ready to investigate issues and monitor activity, but our players our greatest asset when it comes to keeping Tyria a fair place.

If you happen to run across an exploit (or even if you think something may be an exploit) please don’t hesitate to send an email to exploits@arena.net. Feel free to send us your screenshots/videos/selfies/essays/poems if you believe you have found an exploit in the game!

Yup, his account was compromised by RMT quickly after, used to spam, and our support has helped him recover it. That being said, ArenaNet will NEVER contact you via in-game mail for issues with your account security.

It doesn’t look like your account is blocked.

Your account is not compromised, almost all of your activity is in the trading post. I would suggest looking there and in your history.

This sounds like a cpu overheat? Support might be able to work with you on this. Does it happen in any other games?

We are going to extend the beta until Noon PST on Monday – Raiding will be available the entire time (pending non disasters)! GOGO!

All systems GO! Raiding will be turned on at 8:30 PM PST (30 minutes from this posting), we may have to disable it again without warning.

Unfortunately it’s disabled again.

Raiding is now enabled. Everything looks good, but we may have to disable it again without warning. Go forth raiders!

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed an issue with the Squad UI that was preventing some players from logging in.

The Enhanced Squad UI has been temporarily disabled. Players will be unable to set squads to Raid mode (required to enter the raid) while the Enhanced Squad UI is disabled.

Squads are enabled but Enhanced Squad UI is currently disabled – Will keep updated

The new build is live

Build has been distributed and will be live shortly.