Guild Wars 2

Kako.1930:

Tife.9605:

Last time I’ve checked blocking someone would still allow them to see if you are online and where you are via their Contact list.
I get that the worlds are now instanced and all, but all it takes is for the stalker to tell someone else (and its not like he does not have any other friends) a convenient lie and that other person can end up partying with us and voila – you know exact instance we’re in and they can port the creep over.
Also, even if you change your Contact status as “invisible” people are still being informed when you are logging in.
Those things make the block feature not good, as it severely lacking.

Nephziel.6053:

Just block the person, you can’t recive the whispers or see any sort of chat from that person. Just knowing on which map you are doesn’t mean he will get in the same istance of the map.
Block System works good enough. I’d rather have ANet invest their work into something more lucrative to everyone than build this stealth system you wish for.

I don’t believe that this change would require much work really. Granted, I am not a coder/programmer, but it appears like everything that would be required is practically there, as you can set yourself to an invisible status, it just could use a few tweaks.
Frankly, making the Contact invisible status carry over to all characters and preventing the “character has come online” information as long as it is selected would fix majority of stalking problems without preventing us from playing.

Mirtis.6847:

based on what OP and you suggest, the stalker is reading this thread already and knows they’re going to play the game again. nothing’s going to change much now eh? even if A.net adds 10k more layers of privacy features.
i think you might be over-exaggerating it and the options to block people or be invisible to others works just fine.

Even if he is reading this, if we could go “off the grid” and stay invisible he still would be unable to track us down via any means offered by game itself. That would be more than enough.

As some people already said it – it is one thing for a stalker to follow us using other means, and if he is trully creative he will probably find a way. But is a completely another thing if Anet offers the tools to him. Personal privacy settings at the moment make Anet appear either really naive or with no consideration to people who were unlucky enough to experience cyber stalking.

About going to Support to ask for account and character name change – no one who has already posted about cyberstalking problem got Anet to do that for their account only, so I have gotten discouraged as I would require to have that change made for 2 accounts – my and my niece’s.

The only way I got them to do it was by telling them my account name had my real name in it, but even then, the account name change didn’t work. It appeared changed to me but would switch between my old and my new account name to the people on my friends list, usually appearing as my old account name still. I also paid to have the names of my level 80 characters changed, which only served to backfire on me because my account name change didn’t work.

In the end, the only way to avoid being stalked in GW2 is to create a new account entirely. I lost a bunch of characters with 100% exploration and level 500 crafting professions, ascended light armor set with light of dwayna, and a ton of account-bound sentimental things like the minis a friend had gifted me and the selfless potion, champion magus/phantom pvp titles with legendary champion title, plus all the birthday gifts I would have gotten from my 3 year-old charactes.

That happened about a year ago so I’ve managed to get a lot of the things I lost all over again, but it’s still not the same as the originals.

That is a real shame.
All the more reasons to get Anet to do something about privacy and deploying some anti-stalking measures.

Last time I’ve checked blocking someone would still allow them to see if you are online and where you are via their Contact list.
I get that the worlds are now instanced and all, but all it takes is for the stalker to tell someone else (and its not like he does not have any other friends) a convenient lie and that other person can end up partying with us and voila – you know exact instance we’re in and they can port the creep over.
Also, even if you change your Contact status as “invisible” people are still being informed when you are logging in.
Those things make the block feature not good, as it severely lacking.

Nephziel.6053:

Just block the person, you can’t recive the whispers or see any sort of chat from that person. Just knowing on which map you are doesn’t mean he will get in the same istance of the map.
Block System works good enough. I’d rather have ANet invest their work into something more lucrative to everyone than build this stealth system you wish for.

I don’t believe that this change would require much work really. Granted, I am not a coder/programmer, but it appears like everything that would be required is practically there, as you can set yourself to an invisible status, it just could use a few tweaks.
Frankly, making the Contact invisible status carry over to all characters and preventing the “character has come online” information as long as it is selected would fix majority of stalking problems without preventing us from playing.

Mirtis.6847:

based on what OP and you suggest, the stalker is reading this thread already and knows they’re going to play the game again. nothing’s going to change much now eh? even if A.net adds 10k more layers of privacy features.
i think you might be over-exaggerating it and the options to block people or be invisible to others works just fine.

Even if he is reading this, if we could go “off the grid” and stay invisible he still would be unable to track us down via any means offered by game itself. That would be more than enough.

As some people already said it – it is one thing for a stalker to follow us using other means, and if he is trully creative he will probably find a way. But is a completely another thing if Anet offers the tools to him. Personal privacy settings at the moment make Anet appear either really naive or with no consideration to people who were unlucky enough to experience cyber stalking.

About going to Support to ask for account and character name change – no one who has already posted about cyberstalking problem got Anet to do that for their account only, so I have gotten discouraged as I would require to have that change made for 2 accounts – my and my niece’s.

Shikigami.4013:

Honest question about this “following” thing: A map is quite a big place. How are people “following you” around, when all they have is the map you are in? You could be at dozens of different locations/camps/events on that map and he has no means to find you. How long does it take until someone actually shows up, if he has to search the whole map? And if you just port to a different map when he shows up, how long will he keep up this ridiculous search that gets him nowhere at all?

I just don’t get how anyone technically would be able to find you again and again when all he can see is a map name – provided he even ends up on the same megaserver map as the person he tries to “follow”.

Your point would be valid if that would be regarding a sane person, which clearly a stalker is not.
If the person has been sending messages over to my niece for the past 4 months tirelessly, even though she has not responded to a single one, then I sincerely doubt that he would give up trying to find us in-game no matter what.
And then he can abuse other chat channels trying to speak to my niece.
Or try to crawl into her life as a “new” friend joining our party on a different account.
Or ask some other friend to spy on us.
Surely, that option remains open for him even if we are invisible and untraceable, but then he would need to be extremely lucky.
Right now, he does not – he already knows when we play AND where we are.
The game does more than half the job for him.
There is a huge difference between trying to find a needle in a haystack versus trying to find a person in a block of flats, I’d say.
Currently all we can do is to not speak to anyone at all. And even if we don’t the guy knows we are on. Not talking to him, but then still present. To his twisted mind that might be a huge insult, mockery or perhaps a challenge.

Thanks for your posting guys.
I have noticed that over the past 3 year there were a few posts about stalker issues at GW2.
Frankly, I am surprised Anet has not taken notice of the visiblity/location feature much needed improvements thus far!

So, my niece is suffering from having a stalker.
The option to have that person’s account banned would get her nowhere because that person would only get a new account.
Besides, he has other means of stalking her online and would immediately know it was her having him banned – and we want to avoid any possible repercussions which could have followed, especially now that things are “relatively” quiet.
All in all – we simply want to avoid any interaction with the creep whatsoever.
To not agitate him at all. Just avoid at all costs.

It is working thus far – the person has gotten quieter over the past 3 months because my niece is avoiding all the games the 3 of us used to play together and she has ceased all communication with the creep.

Now, however, with the new expansion to GW2, we would like to return to the game, but with how the game currently handles friends and visibility it is just not an option.

Even if we blacklist him he will still be able to see if we are online or where we currently are, and because he still is able to see us through friendlist/following option going invisible all the time will also get us nowhere.

Therefore, it seems, the only way for us to ever play the game together is to create new accounts and start from scratch.
Now, for my niece who has not invested much into her account cept getting characters to lvl 80 this might be “an option”, but I have spent quite a lot of cash on my account in the Gem shop and it is simply not worth forsaking it altogether.
And making her create a new account but me playing on my old account would be pointless because the creep knows I only play GW2 with my niece so he could simply follow me and still get to her.

Therefore, I believe that the game is not offering sufficient means of protection against stalkers and cyberbullies in its current state.
As I said, we MIGHT report the person and get him banned, but he would simply return on a different account, agitated yet again, or even worse – try to retaliate – means of which he has – simply because you cannot play incognito, or the only thing blacklisting a person gets you is that they won’t be able to sent you messages.
Bummer.

Thus, I would suggest the following changes to the way the game handles friends/blacklist:
1) Online visibility and character location can be made non-disclosed, with several options to choose from – to cover friends, followers and guilds:
For example – visible to friends only, to friends and followers only, visible to clan-mates, never visible.
2) It would also be a good idea to split those into two separate sets of in-game options:
- online visibility
- location visibility
3) ability to control who can send messages and whispers to us – aka no random person can send me stuff if I restrict messaging to friends only. Obviously, system message would still get through.
4) Blacklisting a person should automatically remove the blocking person from the blacklisted person’s friend and following lists and prevent that person to re-adding the blocker.
4) Of course, the blacklisted person can always create a new account, but if we were able to control who can see our online status and location as mentioned above this would not be an issue.

I understand that having control over online and location visibility would make it harder for clans to measure clan members activity, but then again, clans could start adding “visible for clan” status on as a requirement while recruiting so I don’t think that would be in any way a game-breaking feature to have.

Unfortunately, sometimes getting “off the grid” is the only solution to this kind of problems, but with Guild Wars 2 it only means not playing at all.

I wish Anet would take my post into consideration.

I am experiencing the same issue.
I wanted to update the game to the latest version and log in, but the Launcher just freezes and I can’t do anything.
I have downloaded a guild2setup.exe from your site wanting to reinstall the game but exact same thing happened – I couldn’t click the install now button as the window froze on me.
Funny thing is every other launcher of every other game I have works fine so it is only affecting GW2.
I am using win 8.1 Never had such issues with GW2 before.

Thank you for the response

Hi!
I really enjoy your build but have an incredibly difficult time against GS Mesmers.
Basically I can withstand every class on 1vs1, hoover about long enough for someone to come in 1vs2, handle noobish 3 people as well, but a moderately good GS Mesmer and Im gone just like that ;/
Any tips on how to handle those?

Back in January, in this thread
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Ready-up-Devs-avoiding-to-talk-about-ele
one of the Devs said that they’re finally going to give the sPvP Elementalist some love and thought with upgrading/ making some changes to the class which hopefully will finally make it a class that you can actually “play” in spvp rather than “survive if you’re really good and a lot lucky”.

I love playing an Elementalist but the way the class is now in sPvp it really is only about working really really hard to have a chance at surviving the match for more than a second and do some good but not that great of a damage.

Never mind enjoying the game, it’s gritting teeth until they crook Dark Souls style – you can’t make mistakes or you suffer like no other class does – kind of a deal right now.

So, any ideas if they mean it as in – we’re working on it and it will soon happen or do you think it’s more of a “it will happen eventually in the foreseeable future” as in never ever kind of thing?
I tried to find some info about what exactly they are trying to change but I was unable to find anything, so are they like any news on that front?