Guild Wars 2

GussJr.1643:

My 80 Thief… Jake Frm St Farm

What are you wearing “Jake Frm St Farm”?

Right, so.. I got my account back, but ANet so committed to this “your account was compromised” coverstory (I am 100% positive my account was never compromised) My best guess is they have either a faulty auto-ban program (even if they claim not to use such a program at all) or incompetent employees, and they realize that if it gets out, they’re going do have probably hundreds if people clamoring for some sort of compensation, and at very least think if they can convince us they were “saving” our accounts from being compromised we won’t be as angry… Even though it’s pretty obvious from their original “You are permanantly banned” message, that’s not the case.

I’m not that mad, but I do not like being lied to… So ANet, please do not tell me that YOUR error was a mistake on MY end when my password was both unique to this game and statistically uncrackable. (And ironically, the one I had to end up changing it to because they insisted I do so, is relatively less secure)

Bit of an update: I recieved an email asking me to provide the 25 digit serial number i got when I purchased the game (Which I have since done) One thing I noticed is that now when I try to log in, instead of telling me I’m permanantly banned for buying or selling gold, I’m being told my account “may have been accessed by an unauthorized individual” which is total bull. This seems very much like a CYA manuver on ANet’s part.. “Oh, we didn’t falsely ban you.. We were uhh.. protecting! yeah.. protecting your account.” Sorry, I’m not buying it. My password is almost 20 letters long, among them letters(both capital and lowercase, numbers, and symbols. And on top of that, even WITH my password (and my permission) my best friend was unable to log into my account unless I gave his IP address permission through an email I got when he tried to log in, so I KNOW they can tell when another IP address is trying to access an acount, if that was the issue that should have been the original message they gave not “we have terminated your account because you were aiding in real money transactions”

tolunart.2095:

“If they can not accurately ban hundreds of accounts in a matter of hours.. (we’re now at 18+ pages of people who are possibly falesly banned) Perhaps they should either hire more people.. or slow their work load a bit. "

I don’t see where the number of pages indicates anything. My conversation with Cerise spans at least two pages and does not add a single person to the list of bans. Several posts are repeats of information and people saying “still banned, what’s going on?” Others have had their accounts restored and have posted about it. This is not an 18-page list of names.

What is going on has already been explained – when an account has been compromised, it is locked until the owner can claim it. Most of the people banned for “assisting with RMT activities” botting and such seem to be people who Arenanet believes have been hacked or are deliberately working with RMT scammers. If the account was accessed without the owner’s knowledge or permission, an investigation will result in the return of the account to the owner. The cs agents require time to do their jobs and people who are posting multiple messages because they’ve waited 10, 15, 24 hours and are tired of waiting are not doing anything to help the situation.

It has also been stated that some of the appeals are done by those who knowingly engaged in these activities, probably in hopes that they can con their way through the system and get the account (and the gold in it) back. These “false false positives” rob the innocent people of the time it takes to investigate the ban and discover that it was in fact the correct thing to do.

I don’t know the ratio of innocent/guilty appeals. But if there are three actual botters followed by one innocent being investigated, what could take one hour will take four because the cs agent will waste three hours investigating the appeals by people who know that they were correctly banned.

I don’t blame the cs for the delays, if people were basically honest about what they are doing, then there wouldn’t be nearly so many problems with this in the first place.

I am 100% positive my account was not compromised. Even with my password, my friend was unable to log into my account without me clicking on a link to let him onto my account, also up until me being unjustly banned nothing on my account was missing or added.. Just the small amount of gold I’ve always had (that I paid Gems for)
I am 1000% positive that I have never engaged in any illegal transactions. Same goes for hacking, botting and any other ToS breaking activities. There is literally NO way my account could have been mistaken for an RMT account by anyone with even half a brain, and I do not appreciate you insinuating that my account was either compromised or i was cooperating with the RMTs. Neither is true. You need to accept that there are people who have been banned “permanantly” for literally no reason, and 10, 14, and 24 hours may be acceptable wait times for free to play games.. But not for a game like this where every one of these wrongfully banned people is a paying customer. (especially since in most of the cases here that have been resolved, it seems like it’s taken more like 72 hours.)

I’m not interested in your opinion of me.

Based on a single person’s experience, you judge the entire cs system? Talk about making assumptions…

We do not know how many cs agents there are. But we do know they have mass-banned bots in groups of thousands. When one person is responsible for checking hundreds of accounts in a matter of hours, he cannot spend several minutes observing each player in the game to judge whether it appears to be a case of botting or not. It is inevitable that some errors will be made. These errors are in the dozens at best, not hundreds or thousands.

What level of accuracy to you expect, if 99% is not good enough?[/quote]

If they can not accurately ban hundreds of accounts in a matter of hours.. (we’re now at 18+ pages of people who are possibly falesly banned) Perhaps they should either hire more people.. or slow their work load a bit.
I do not have the blind enthusiasm that ANet is telling the truth about not using an automated account blocking program.. But to me the alternative is actually worse. That a person,. or people are so bad at their jobs that they can not tell if someone is really botting/buying gold with money/whatever or not.. or more likely don’t care. Theres something wrong here either way though.
Edited by Moderator: Quote about a deleted post removed

tolunart.2095:

Cerise.9045:

tolunart.2095:

I’m not making any such claims. I have no investment, emotional or financial, in Arenanet or Guild Wars 2. I bought the game and play it casually, that is all.

I’d say I have a pretty big investment in it because I want GW2 to be as good as it can be.

Not everyone has your enthusiasm. It’s a game, not the Civil Rights Movement. If the servers shut down tomorrow I’d say “oh, what a shame,” and play something else.

It’s not a matter of enthusiasm or “Civil Rights movement” to want the good or service you spent your money on. I am capable of being calm and rational over this, but I don’t want to undersell it, this is a fairly big issue.

Ashlar.2519:

I know people are upset at having their game suspended, but we also want the bots removed from game. I wonder, though, how people would go about removing access for accounts known to be botting while still leaving non-botting accounts active? Especially when there is evidence that an account has quite possibly been compromised by another party and then used without the account holders knowledge to bot-farm?

It’s a sticky situation for ArenaNet. We want the bots gone. It also appears that there are a number of cases happening here where accounts have in fact been compromised, even though the account holder sees no evidence of that. How would you handle that if you were on ArenaNet’s end?

I believe that they are doing the right thing here in suspending the account so that the bot cannot function and then working with the account holder to secure and restore the account. In the end, it’s my opinion that it is better to suspend a compromised account – especially when the account holder was not aware of the compromise.

My account was not compromised, and if it had been.. I doubt that the offending party would buy gold from a gold seller with their own money on my account, trade it to a different account, and leave all of my own gold and items alone, and give the account back, all without me knowing,
It makes a lot more sense to me that either some person, or more likely some program (I know Gail says they don’t use a program, but I am VERY hard pressed to believe that a live human being could be making so many obvious mistakes..) is not doing their job correctly. If ANet wants to avoid being lumped in with the “bad” companies, then they will address this issue, whatever it is, quickly… And keep us informed of what actions are taken to insure it doesn’t happen again.

Cerise.9045:

MasterFhyl.3014:

I would also like to say that 2-3 days isn’t necessarily a terrible turnaround time for fixing reported problems. I’m used to dealing with Nexon support staff, and it is not at all uncommon to have to wait WEEKS for a response from their “customer service” department, and when you do get a response from them they usually dont even end up fixing the problem.
I won’t be too upset if i get my account back in the next 2 days or so (it’s already been over 24 hours) But… and this is important… If it ever happens again, I do not think I will be able to forgive ANET.

Nexon is probably the most hated MMO company in the world. So if ANet decides to look somewhere to compare their support to, it should be the last one they look at, unless they want to end up in the same boat.

I agree, Nexon is terrible, thats why I no longer play any of their games, but a lot of the people in this thread are saying theyve gotten unbanned in less than three days. If we were dealing with Nexon, we’d all get a response email saying “we’re looking into the problem” and no response even weeks later.. Except maybe a sporadic “we are still looking into the problem” auto generated message.
Ask me again in a day or two.. But as of right now, ANET is nowhere near as bad as Nexon. (Who have had their own slew of false bans by the way)

I would also like to say that 2-3 days isn’t necessarily a terrible turnaround time for fixing reported problems. I’m used to dealing with Nexon support staff, and it is not at all uncommon to have to wait WEEKS for a response from their “customer service” department, and when you do get a response from them they usually dont even end up fixing the problem.
I won’t be too upset if i get my account back in the next 2 days or so (it’s already been over 24 hours) But… and this is important… If it ever happens again, I do not think I will be able to forgive ANET.

I am a bit alarmed at the “official” position that “a lot of the people making complaints of being falsely banned are actually bots”. This is a terrible assumption for a company to have of their customers, and it doesn’t go very far to giving me confidence that ANET is going to satisfactorily fix this…
Clearly there is something wrong with the banning system in place if ANY player is getting falsely banned.. But 17+ pages of people who have been falsely banned.. I just can’t believe that all of those people are lying about this.
I know I am innocent of the crime I am accused of, (Trading real life money for gold) and a quick look at my account transactions (which I’m assuming they have) should show that I’ve never had any more than 4g on my account.. And I LEGITIMATELY traded gems for that. (Don’t know why I’d bother with the MUCH worse conversion rate of gems for gold if I was the kind of person who used the real life money gold sellers but eh) I hope ANET gets to the bottom of this soon… and if they don’t, well then I know I won’t be giving ANET any more of my hard earned money.

Well it’s still happening. I got permanantly banned for “engaging in or assisting with gold or item sales for real world money”. Something I have never done. (Seriously, the most I’ve ever had at one time was 4g, and I bought that with gems LEGITIMATELY.) I have NEVER botted or anything else like that, and I never intend to.

I logged a ticket, we’ll see where that goes.

I’ve read through a lot of these posts, and I certainly have a few new perspectives on this matter, to the point where I even believe the current difficulty may be justified… in the explorable mode but having such a high difficulty in the story mode is simply inexcusable. I use the word “difficulty” loosely by the way. The dungeons I’ve played aren’t hard because they require anything resembling skill, they are so because they have a multitude of mobs that can 1 hit ko with regular.. REGULAR attacks, that are extremely difficult to even see let alone dodge. (and if you do successfully dodge you usually end up dodging right into another 1 hit ko) The mobs themselves have FAR too much HP, and good luck if you want to run a dungeon as a melee attacker and you arent a heavy armor using class… No if you want any chance of successfully playing the dungeon, even in STORY mode, you have to spec your character EXACTLY the way ANET wants you to for that specific fight/dungeon (And they don’t even have the decency to tell you what that specific spec is either). I shouldn’t need to point out how limiting and imo, boring this is, but eh.. I just did.

I am not ashamed to say I don’t have a huge elite guild in this game, nor do I have a ton of hardcore, fully-geared friends, so the majority of my dungeon runs have been and will continue to be PuG’s. I see no good reason why these dungeons should cater only to huge powerful guilds, or people who can afford to eat dozens and dozens of silver in repair bills for not much actual reward. There NEEDS to be an option for casual players to just get together with a group and have fun.. For there not to be sounds like a betrayal of the game as it has been (and continues to be) advertised. The fact that in my server it’s almost impossible to even FIND a PuG should show that there’s something majorly wrong with the system as it is now. And before I put up my flame shield, I will remind everyone reading this that it was ANET themselves who touted this game as the kind of game you could go out and play with new and random people..

In conclusion, Please ANET, there is no need to nerf the exploration mode, there should be areas in this game for those “elite” enough to want them. But please, give those of us who aren’t an option as well, even if that has to come with a reduced reward.

The leader of Whispers is in fact
SPOILER
A human.
END SPOILER

Not gonna lie, I see what you’re talking about. I think Anet went just a tad too far… I don’t have a sylvari character, but I have seen first hand in my travels through the grove how “in your face” the homosexuality of the Sylvari is. (I know they’re supposed to all be bi sexual, but it simply does not come across that way to me from what ive seen).. I would have just as much of a problem if there were similar instances of overt heterosexuality, but I simply have not seen them in this game. Do whatever you want to do, but that doesn’t mean you need to scream it from the rooftops, and then only when it is what is, and go ahead and hate me for saying htis, an alternative life style.

Laika.8795:

Furthermore, everything you can steal is useful

This simply is not true, especially in PvE. 9 times out of 10 I wind up with some random status effect that I ALWAYS have a better/more reliable way of casting, none of them have the outrageous cooldown steal has either. In closing, there is so little of a reason to actually USE steal, that a lot of us thieves actually FORGET it’s there… This is NOT a good class mechanic.

I love the idea of giving steal the ability to “steal” utility skills. Steal right now is utter crap 99% of the time, and the traits that make it op really do nothing to warm it up to me, because that relies on giving up other traits id rather have.

Dropkick.2751:

Excuse me? Thief is the class with the best downed state of them all.

You can become invisible = opponents can’t finish you
You teleport away = opponent can’t finish you

And if you would wait for the stealth to come up while you still haven’t used teleport, you would be perfectly able to escape in PvE.

I rally constantly in PvP with my thief while with other classes I can maybe knock over one person and then get killed by his friend anyway.

And it’s the best in dungeons where you can move away from AoE attacks.

You become invisible… for 2 seconds. During which, you can still be attacked (and usually are) And after which, you die because it doesn’t make the enemies stop fighting you.
You teleport away… 4 feet. And then the enemy just walks over to you and kills you. This happens 99% of the time, and these skills NEVER keep you safe if you are alone. All you can do is pray that someone else will distract them long enough for you to heal yourself.
Face it, our downed state sucks. I usually dont even bother fighting unless the monster is almost dead when i go down.

You have a point. Steal really only does like.. 3 things.. Which all seem to be status effects that we have other(better/more reliable)ways of inflicting,. At VERY least, the cooldown is WAY too high for it (and no, the skill isn’t useful enough to warrent wasting trait points on it… not that that significantly lowers it.) It would be really cool if they replaced it with something useful, or at least gave it a % chance to steal silver or something, or at least some items. But its pretty pointless right now, probably the worst F1 skill in the game.

I forgot to mention that we are in the process of creating guild forums, and im trying to figure out what the hell vent is..

Arrrgh! We are the Desperado Pirates. We sail out of the Tarnished Coast, and are looking for new members.
Both new and old players are welcome to join our crew~ although adults (or at least people of a high maturity level) are preferred. We have a very piraty guild emblem, as well as a contract with a reputable guild armorer. Futer plans include a guild vault, and many many events. We will eventually to do it all ~ PvP, PvE, WvWvW, even a little (light) RP, but primarily we are interested in having fun, and making the rest of the world as piraty as we arrrr!

Post here, or message Captain “Fhyl Rackham” or First Mate “Dunk Vigil” in game for details.