Guild Wars 2

I also have this issue. It’s a random popping sound. As if someone where clinking hollow thick glass together, like two bottles. I can’t reproduce it, The reason I have noticed it is because I play with Master Vol. Slider all the way left, while chatting on skype, f.ex. The sound tends to be really loud and it does not occur outside of playing the game. The sound occurs both in OSX ML and Bootcamp W7.

- It does seem like the sound can be the endurance gauge fully refilling. But it doesn’t always happen when it is filled up.

I’ll try to record it.

Let me pop in for a bit,

The motivation for this post was the dismay at the rapid increase of gem prices (and also stated, no ability to put sell or buy prices), hence leading to the accusation of it not being a free market.

We have established that gem exchange (and the trading post at large) is not a free market. ANet has never advertised this in any way either. The market is however as ANet advertised a “player driven” market, and that is true. This also accounts for the gem exchange which is in essence player driven. As John Smith explained around launch that they would set the initial gem price and then use an algorithm to determine gem price based on b/s. Whether they alter this algorithm or not has not been mentioned, but I speculate that for the better of all of us they do. If they do, then they would do it to counter two events “inflation” and “deflation”. I see no reason to come with baseless arguments on them gradually bumping the gap between b/s prices. You may ask if they do. But please do so in a more serious and polite manner.

That said looking at how economy works and how the GW2 gem prices currently fluctuate I’d say the behaviour is not abnormal in any way. If anything it doesn’t fluctuate as fast as I’d expected it to do. By reasoning when people hit level 80 they would begin to buy gems for Gold. Before this there is a percentage that has bought for RW$. I’d suspect a large amount of the player base have reached 80 or somewhere close by now, so in other words the demand for gems would skyrocket driving prices in the roof, considering the percentage that pour RL$ into the game is much less. It is not the case however since the prices for gems seem to rise rather slowly. You could argue that the initial price for gems was high since Gem to Gold conversion seems rather unprofitable. However I wouldn’t see it from this angle. It is the case that Gem demand is higher than supply. However the price gap between Gold and Gems is not fully elastic, and is and should be designed within an algorithm to to prevent Gems sales stem into gold farming and the other way around. This is because a high RL$ – Gold return rate would depreciate Gold in-game to such an extent that everyone would run around with expensive gear. We don’t want that.

We want the economy to be stable and ANet is doing exactly that; trying to keep the economy stable. The BLTC has less friction than the Gem Exchange and you can see how supply is depreciating goods worth: most buy orders are listed under minimum sell price for a lot of equipment. Why is that you may ask? Well, at equilibrium buy orders vs vendor price should be largely equal. The problem here is that drop rate is higher than demand and the salvaging measure is not providing enough incentive.

If we had the same issue in the Gem Exchange then we would currently see Gems at a sky-high price and gold at rock-bottom. This is due to the mechanics of the game where you can buy things in the Gem Store that will benefit you in-game when harvesting Gold with which you could in turn use to buy gems that would again increase your gold inventory.

ANet is keeping the economy balanced, period.

To answer you, what ccrazool says is correct. I work as a blue shirt. Thing about MacBooks is that they are not designed to be cool to begin with. The aluminium body mitigates a lot of heat. And although the fans are well designed the components of the computer are so tightly packed and don’t have adequate room to breathe, hence they are designed to withstand long stress at high temperatures. If your computer goes too hot it will actually automatically go to sleep as a panic measure. Don’t panic yourself when this happens, it’s just a safety measure. Instead try to make sure you are in a cool room and that the air ducts by the hinge aren’t covered. Also try to play on top of a flat hard wood, plastic, or metal surface as this also helps keeping the computer cool. If you are concerned about the heat generated on the surface of the computer, it can reach somewhere around 50 degrees Celsius, I recommend getting a cooling board for your laptop. It also cools down internal temperatures.

Let me add one that I can see has not been added yet.

- Once you start playing the game or on a new character. Immediately go do some sPvP, and get some glory. The bronze chests are likely to contain bags and you are also likely to get bags on Glory level up. This is an easy way to get 4, 8-10 slot, bags quickly.

- Also you can deposit money in your bank. Use it to save silver so that you have a nice cache for when you need to buy your first trait book.

- Complete city map exploration 100%, as this sometimes earns you transmutation stones that you should save and use later when you have a nice set of “good-looking” gear that you don’t want to part with.

Actually, Lady Gaga agreed to enter the game… She needs the money for all the expensive costumes. Evon Gnashblade is a diehard fan.

Roctod.7290:

It’s almost as if…new games have problems that take time to be sorted out. Weird.

I don’t get it either. And all these consumers expecting things to work right out of the box. Of course it doesn’t, nothing ever has… Ever mmo/game I played had bugs. Sure in Gw2 right now quite a lot is often broken, but that’s how it is when you are not rolling out something new. Everquest had a year of bug fixing, AO had a year of bug fixing, AoC had a yaer of bug fixing, WoW had a year of bug fixing, SWTOR is still fixing bugs. This game is one month in.. and already consumers are “threatening” to quit? I’d say, take a break come back when you think it looks better.
It’s like Apple with iOS maps, sure it is bad. And Tim Cook said they know, please feel free to use something else while you wait for it to live up to your expectations.
At least now a days developers are transparent enough to acknowledge problems and ask the moaning crowd to move on. In the old days it could take months before patches came out fixing only a percentage of the game breaking bugs. And even longer ago you had to trade in your game for a new version, make a new save or just live with it if say you saved right before fighting the Diamond Weapon.

pmiles.3489:

I’m not staying in the dark ages… I’m not upgrading because neither OS has anything that my system will make use of. Buying the latest shiny just doesn’t make sense. If I had a plethora of iOS devices (I have none), needed the Cloud (I don’t), happen to live in China (I don’t), etc. Both Lion and Mountain Lion are marketed for the iOS crowd and the laptop crowd. I don’t deal with either, thus upgrading would merely add a bunch of features that my system would never use… how is adding additional unused stuff improving my system? It’s not.

And your frame rates are just horrid for gaming, try it under bootcamp and get back to me how wonderful Lion/Mountain Lion is in regards to improving your frame rate.

I told you, anything before 2010 is probably not going to run the game satisfactorily on Mac OS X. My computer is from 2009, i.e. it doesn’t run the game satisfactorily. Not on boot camp, not in OSX either. Unfortunately. Still I do enjoy it in Boot camp due to the slight frame rate increase.

Upgrading to ML or not is your choice in the end. However what I don’t see is why ANet should officially support a system that is not officially supported by Apple. By officially suppporting something it means you have to provide support for it, and that in turn would mean they might have to turn to Apple for advice. That is why they don’t support it.

Even though you don’t see any point in upgrading because the “major” features don’t appeal to you, there’s a lot of under the hood features that should appeal to whomever owns a mac.

The problem here is not what to do with servers. It’s how to even out the community. It would be purely idiotic to give oceanic or canadian players their own server in WvW and then have them fight… who?
WvW should work off its own server independent system is this going to be solved. Splitting oceanic and french canadian communities ONLY because WvW is unfair is not an option. I don’t WvW that much, because I don’t have a computer that can handle it. Still I’d love to be able to play with about a 20-30 people concurrently in my zone so that we can do events together for example.

That is why I the server independent structure is necessary. Look at PvP in The Secret World. It’s not the best, but there you have three factions fighting each other.

WvW should be fixed in the same way, independent of what server one plays on in PvE. There are several ways to go about this and a lot of resources are necessary to pull it through.

1. Way would be to consolidate server populations create a few servers with many guilds have a reasonable guild cap and have guilds on each server fight against each other in the WvW maps.

2. Would be to have alliances fight each other. This would require guilds to ally with guilds from all parts of the world and have these alliances fight each other much like WvW is today (3 alliances up against each other). Mind this would require an cap of players allowed in an Alliance to have fair numbers against each other.

3. To create shards independent of PvE servers. I see this as confusing and tedious. Since you would have to relate to two shards and not one. Your guild would then be split into several WvW shards. However, it is then possible to control populations on WvW shards and make sure they are spread equally.

As a temporary fix to the nightcapping we have now. It would have to be a fix listed earlier, when the point tick is down a statistic of player population from each WvW server would have to be calculated into a ratio. Points would be handed out based on ratio. It would also be necessary to have a UI element that would display the population percentages and point multiplier of each server.

At the same time as Peter said. Personal gain should be increased overall. Nightcapping should increase World gain and Personal Gain for underpopulated servers. At the same time gains from PvE objectives should be lowered overall and PvP objectives should be introduced/increased.

Hi, I live on the other side of the world, have terrible ping… about 205 s to an Austin, Texas server on speedtest. And my internet connection is an LTE tether (I used to have WiMAX).
I noticed both using the WiMAX and the newer LTE tether that loading of textures and npcs, menus etc. etc. seems very slow. In Lion’s Arch for example it can take up to 40 seconds for a character to appear on screen.
I know it’s not my computer since I played this game in Europe once, with lower ping. Things seemed to load fairly quickly.

So I looked at my network usage in the Task Manager it’s averaging about 1%. I found this weird so I tried loading you masterclass recording on Twitch.tv. Checking my Network usage I found that it averaged a 12% and the video streamed OK with no buffering.

I haven’t checked for open/closed ports yet. Also I am only running Microsoft essentials and firewall (I am literally not on the internet on this one, except for these forums… and twitch). In the firewall settings Gw2 is accepted both in and out on public networks as well as private- and business networks.

I am wondering, is it just me or does somebody else experience low network usage from Gw2 combined with slow loading of textures and sounds?

Anyone got an idea for a fix?

- Chobi

HogWash.3928:

Digital Dragon.2697:

While I love the game, I agree it should of been beta’d more. Last night I kept getting d/c like every 20 minutes (internet worked fine). I’ve had two bsod this week when I click “play” on launcher. Though it’s not enough to make me regret buying the game, I’ve had more game play then bug issues.

I just hope it becomes more stable.

I do think the game is a lot of fun. I just got another blue screen and a sound loop lock a while ago. sigh……..

Something is wrong with YOUR computer. I would daresay most people run this game smoothly without any hiccups.
– Sure there were some sound bugs with extremely loud sounds.
But if you BSOD when running the game then there’s definitely a leak somewhere. I have not experienced a single BSOD and only two crashes while playing the game. None of the crashes were related to the game but to Yahoo Messenger.
So do a dxdiag on your computer, include the relevant crash logs and send a support ticket with it so that they can look at YOUR problem.

Ranting here about it being too early out of beta does not get you anywhere.

I don’t like to repeat myself, but the majority of the players are likely enjoying this game problem-free, and would not be of the opinion that it needed more beta testing. Secondly don’t come with false presumptions that “many people stopped playing”, where is your sources on that? (As far as I know they are still experiencing about 400,000 concurrent players at peak times. Plus sales already reached 2 million.)

And before you get your fingers sweaty looking for posts to refer me to the “thousands” of threads on this forum complaining about the problem; forget it. There are about a few hundred of you and many of these problems are the same as your (hardware-software, drivers, background apps, corrupted disks) problem.

Old upgraded MBP.
Not much chance I’ll be playing unless a good performance OpenGL native client comes out.
Lions arch is 10-14
Empty Regions 18-25
Crowded Regions 12-18
Dungeons/Large Events 5-14

1. People, upgrade to mountain lion already. It’s like sticking to Windows XP even though Windows 7 is better.
Fine Lion wasn’t really that good, I found it ok, but not switching to ML? I don’t see the reason to.

2. The minimum requirements are for the Beta Client. Although I don’t believe anything before early 2010 can run the whole game satisfactorily. I have a modded MBP from 2009 and I am achieving 20-30 fps in not so crowded and detailed areas areas. And 5-10 in very crowded once and where lots of particles are happening (lions arch, WvW and Dungeons).

You might want to make sure you switch in the Power Savings option to Best Performance. While running it.

And Deww. A 9400 card won’t run this game well anyways. Sorry.

It doesn’t matter anyways. You can flag this game yourself as 64-bit using an exe editor. However as I said it doesn’t matter since GW2 doesn’t use more than ~2 GB of RAM.

It’s because of the overhead of OS X. I have 8 GB RAM and with the game taking up 1.2-1.7 GB I have only ~3.1 GB left of that. Which means that I am using more than 4 GB RAM (4.9 GB)

Hedyn.5917:

Logsi.2031:

Pull your finger out Apple and give some better OpenGL certification!

Apple are at full OpenGL 3.2 with Mountain Lion, and have promised 4.1 during the lifetime of that OS. I just wish they’d hurry the kitten up before another big cat is due.

(Fun fact: Their shader level implementations are independent of GL implementations, so it might be ahead or behind once the 4.x update comes along.)

Yeah one of the larger bottlenecks here is Apple. Apple has realised that iOS is great for gaming, and now slowly opening their eyes for their desktop/laptop OS. They need better OpenGL support and be generally better at updating their graphic drivers and work with nVidia or ATi about driver updates.

I think we’ll see a lot more games for OS X pop up in the near future and Apple should jump on that bandwagon and make it accessible and maybe also push OpenGL to be more competitive with Direct X?

Character progression after 80 was never advertised, nobody who likes this game expected it either. The game itself is about being in it, doing whatever you find fun. If endlessly getting stronger is fun then hey, go do grind in some game. AoC has a great progression system that begins at 40 and literally has you play for at least a year to fully complete. It also has raids that almost nobody can beat and almost nobody tries to beat, get some friends and do character progression there. No, honestly I recommend it. I played AoC since launch, enjoyed it a lot.

Right now, I am tired of the constant grind to become bigger, better, faster, stronger… It’s just boring and doesn’t get you anywhere. Sure, hey I got these gear stats and these abilities now, it took me three months of grinding these 5 dungeons, hundreds of hours of non-stop ganking the same mobs over and over, and now with tactics posted over at my forum I can beat this boss with my raid-team… Woot! Because you, noob, you need to get better gear and stats before you can.

No, the fun I see in GW2 is exactly the opposite. The lack of gear grind/stat grind/lots of progression systems, and the focus on diversity in a well established system of traits and skills. It gives you the ability to test out play styles, continuously improve on it. No worries that your gear is a few levels off or green, because you can still run that dungeon and beat that boss.

Or in sPvP, striving to get the upperhand in 1on1s, damage testing, build testing, running tournaments and winning.

Or in WvW just trying to sabotage the enemy alone without running into anyone or running in smaller parties trying to take over castles and supply camps.

…Or attempting to find suits of armours and dyes that makes you look really cool, and then parade down the streets of LA.

Now that is GW2s fun defined for me!

AidanTaylor.3872:

Chobiko.9182:

I am playing it ! And despite the performance decrease! It works like a charm!
And I am on a mid 2009 manually upgraded MBP 15" Highest spec at the time…

lol not that it ran so great in windows either.. but at least I could software overclock there easily.

Work in progress, I will open a "this is my spec’ thread/sticky later so we can gather some info on performance

Great to hear! Also the f1 button. f1 on macs and all the f-rows are by default extra functions… Need to either force a solution or tell all mac enthusiasts that they need to change that in settings.

I also realized I was playing on the longer battery life option. Switching now;)

I am playing it ! And despite the performance decrease! It works like a charm!
And I am on a mid 2009 manually upgraded MBP 15" Highest spec at the time…

lol not that it ran so great in windows either.. but at least I could software overclock there easily.

Durzlla.6295:

skaaz.4281:

Geiir.7603:

Should we get an OS X client for Guild Wars 2?

Anet thinks so

Source?

Check the download client section of your guild wars account. Then check my post over this one;)

Wooot! I know an unofficial cider port has been available, but I didn’t try it… But now that an official one has been released!

Yay! Also for those of you who are using this and not familiar with ports. After installing the App right click the icon in Applications or wherever you installed it, click show package contents and navigate through Resources → Transgaming → c_drive → GW2 and you can drag and drop your Gw2.dat from your windows partition into that folder replacing the already existing one. Saves you a lot of downloading;)

I also key bind like that. I Use Q for heal and E, R, T, for utilities. Still looking for a practical key to bind Elite Skill…

Bump. I am experiencing this a lot in dungeons.. Not cool, very expensive since it damages two armour pieces, one on real death, one on death after releasing to waypoint.

The death from damage after using vengeance should clear the vengeance condition.

Idk. Why not just die. Not that it takes that much time anyways. I find that most times I survive the down state because I actually use it strategically. Knowing you are going to die soon you almost kill a mob target him get downed and start killing that mob, easy to rally that way and get away.
A “die” button would most likely frustrate more than it would be of practical use as you would end up smashing it on accident some times…

Not everyone is from Asia. I am, though I am not a gold farmer.

Yes, I was hoping that the four numbers at the end wouldn’t be displayed. As for character name verification, I am against that (I also use long character names, which I will forget).

Making a long and strong password has kept many out of harms way, I dare say most, if not all who did (some people like to argue me on that).

As for the friending thing. In-game you will have a tab called followers, they are people who added you as friends but you never added back. You can block these people if you like. Nobody will be added to your friendslist unless you do it yourself.

It is indeed a wildfire, and not to spread it further, but the rumour goes that it was a fan site. A fansite with 10,000 users you said. Might well be, but all of them with the same passwords as their GW2 account? No, I don’t think so.

Yes I might be inclined to believe the plaintext login, security measures seemed low and I have heard some people claiming to have had 16 char randomised passwords.
I’d probably believe half of them or even less.

Looking at it in a big perspective I wouldn’t say poor password practice is not the root of the problem. The word from ArenaNet is that this is previously compromised WoW accounts, fansite accounts, GW1 accounts. Because not everyone nudges the user whom password and login was correct but not the authentication, leaving credential farmers with currently useless credentials, but which in the future might prove useable when users change platform. ArenaNet should have been better prepared for this, and as a last minute warning they put out this post: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/tips-for-keeping-your-guild-wars-2-account-secure/
Alas most people seem to ignore this, and as has come forth from some people I have chatted with here, they did indeed re-use a password and email which proved to be compromised. I myself during the beta had a re-used password, but changed it before launch.

Thing is there is no answer to this question yet. The only (half) answer was posted here:

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/a-world-of-choice-the-regions-of-guild-wars-2/

Excerpt.
“At launch, players will be able to transfer between worlds freely. However, once server populations have largely settled and stabilized, world transfers will be restricted to once a week and cost a variable amount of gems based on the population of the world being transferred to.”

Is the current official word.
That said I wouldn’t really expect a more detailed answer to this question before things have settled here at the forum.

Hahaha, indeed.

Yeah I was merely joking, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some here attempted such a lowlife tactic.

I think many people on this forum would be better of just leaving GW2 out of their thoughts for a week and coming back when this whole thing blows off…

That said I should be in-game and not in this forum. But I can’t be playing all day so I figured I’d try to raise some spirits and crush others on this forum…

Live chat would be nice.
And no it is not anecdotal, if you take a look at posted lists of compromised accounts you’ll see that the majority of passwords could have been easily bruteforce attacked. It is not the case of some people in this game it is the case of nearly 10,000 and it wouldn’t surprise me because it only a percentage of the full player population.

Now what is really ArenaNet’s problem is the lack of a password log-in attempt limiter and email verification as Kendros stated above.

They can.
If you are thinking about in junction with the hijackings, I remember I saw a Gary comment that he didn’t have an ETA on when that program would be started, but most likely it will be implemented when this all calms down a bit.

Yes, scamming is when the gold-seller is trying to trick you into giving you their money and not giving you what you paid for. Most gold sellers actually give you the in-game gold you buy. Thus, gold-sellers is supposed to be reported as spam.

Maybe.

But I do see some prioritising of people who go, “I have a daughter who lost her grandma a month ago, this game was her only solace” get quicker response times and priority. Maybe you should try something of the same caliber yourself! Who knows, it might help!

On the good side; they are probably (confirmed?) working on this implementation. On the bad side you might have lost your patience by the time they get your account back and that system up and running.

We, or at least the people I know and I, knew full and well that the security was low and so chose to safeguard us, we are still playing.

Please, also read guidelines from the developers which help with account security when they are still working on implementing more secure measures for account control.

Like I said, that was a miss from their side, and I think they probably regret it as much as it infuriated you, as this incident is giving them a lot of work. But still such an implementation shouldn’t give you a free pass for using bad passwords and emails.

I believe it takes time because they are handling everybody else and your suspension would probably be over when they get to you.

Even so I hope when this all calms down that people who sincerely ask will get their answer. If indeed there is such a thing that you wouldn’t know why. Until know I have heard that people only got banned for very terrible occurrences like name calling.

I am sorry, but yes I believe this is largely due to laziness on the players side. And it’s in a morbid way interesting to see when a company doesn’t have that heavy security measures what really happens when they clash.
It is not about being incompetent, rather I believe they didn’t expect this. I didn’t either. Tell me did you? I sort of understand that people can’tkittenthemselves to maintain a database of complex passwords. But when you see that something will put your account at risk further more when it states in the EULA that it’s your own task to make sure third-party doesn’t have your information, then who is really at fault, you? or ANet? If ANet is then tell me why?
They acknowledged that it wasn’t the best security system and that they were working on it, they tried to inform every player that they should take proper security measures, yet it seems about 10,000 people failed to do that, and the rest of the 990,000 are ok.

I try to tell them that, next time, choose a unique password and make sure you are protected from phishing, malware and the sorts.

Please don’t start a flame war.

And sorry for letting off some steam.

But as you, hopefully, can see; there are a lot of people even in this thread who doesn’t really realise what they are demanding of others.

Be a bit more lenient, and no I try to help people on these forums, read my posts. I may have argued with a few, but most of those arguments resolved in a solution (take a look at Sorry and my discussion of the CSC code).

And believe me they are trying to. There’s a lot happening and you are not making it better by complaining or overflowing these forums.

I am working in this business, I know a self-entitled wailing consumer when I see one, and unfortunately there are many of you here. I believe consumers are getting more and more self-entitled as they are given rights to this and that and abusing those rights in every direction.

Chargebacks are one of them, it shouldn’t be legal without a proper judicial system looking at each case individually, and sometimes it ends that way, in court. Most cases shouldn’t need to be solved like this as it only breeds anger and mistrust.

All ANet is asking for is time. They are a limited amount of people working on thousands of tickets submitted daily. Don’t tell me that it is humanly possible because it isn’t.
None of us expected this game to go bang before two weeks before launch, and they couldn’t very well post-pone the release just to accommodate for more players. They were furiously working on increasing server capacity, when out of the sky gold-sellers with long lists of compromised accounts decided to hijack the muffin out of ignorant users.

Ask me, why haven’t I been banned? Why can I still play this game?

The answer is simple. I took precautions, still take them. I don’t use swear words in chat not even F or S or G or any of that. It’s not that hard to replace your language if someone asks you to be a bit more considering of other players.

Players say they got charged money. Well I also heard players who said they hadn’t exploited when they got banned. People lie to put themselves in a better light, so take what people say on this forum with a pinch of salt, and don’t trust the person who says it was charged $1000 bucks by a fraudster using his compromised account.

If you want to hurt this company go ahead get your chargeback, or do some friendly frauding as it’s called. Spread unconfirmed rumours. And spam ArenaNet with support tickets and forum messages.
It is certainly not helping you get your game faster, and you are actively helping lower the user experience of everyone else.
You spend $60 on a game, and when you can’t play it for a week it’s a disaster that requires a chargeback and devaluing the company on BBB. Seriously. May I ask why such behaviour?

If you want to experience this great game, get back in and enjoy a good time with the rest of us, please be more constructive when giving feedback in the forums and help other people or bump the correct threads, update the tickets and do what ANet asks you to do and nothing else. Is it painful to wait? Well go pretend you didn’t buy the game and do something else until you get the mail that says your account is fixed. It’s really not that hard. I know many people who behaves and keep patient, and I would do the same if I was compromised.

Please help yourself and others by being a better person online as well.

Thank you.

PS.

DO NOT do chargeback unless you absolutely have a reason to, such as that guy above with his classic car’s engine getting trashed. Banks take it seriously when you do a chargeback. SOE’s firewall was outdated which was easy for “Anonymous” to take it out, and he proceeded to do the same for other SOE’s services around the globe after that, my CC information was compromised and my CC company halted my card and notified me before I knew what was happening.

I’ve only ever done 1 chargeback and that was when I was being charged twice for buying one thing.

Honestly, of all the online games I’ve played in the past 15 years, GW2 has probably the weakest security I’ve seen. At least add a security question on the account for when you want to change email and password, then you wouldn’t have this many compromised accounts to begin with.

Yes, don’t do chargebacks. It is not because it may affect you in the future that is mostly a scare tactic these days. Most likely you would have to do a lot of those chargebacks before your card provider will start to disbelieve you.
On the other hand, don’t do it because it hurts other people. You are putting mistrust in people who doesn’t deserve it, just because you are impatient. That is incredibly stupid behaviour, pardon if offend someone, but you are a despicable person if you do chargebacks just because you don’t feel prioritised.

The accounts would have been compromised none the less, but it might have been easier to retrieve the accounts had such a security feature been implemented.

They will most likely give a notice when the free transfer period is over, and give everyone a final chance at transferring.

World transfer can be done in-game using the World Transfer button on the lower left.

magnumgoatcolon.4235:

I’ve already changed my passwords and I run malware protection already. My email password was already different from my game password as well, which is why I don’t think they were able to access my email. That and the 2500 verification emails made me think they couldn’t get in to confirm anything. It seemed more like a brute force attempt but I will add the info you suggested to my ticket if I can.

It seems they entered your account, hence the gold-selling ban. If there were 2500 verification emails and you didn’t verify one of them, and as you say your password for your email doesn’t seem to be compromised, then they might have been able to pull the authentication system to its knees and then get into your account.

Either way it seems to me that they entered your account and sold gold. I am sorry you can’t play, but at least they can’t wreak havoc on your account either.

I’ll let you in on a little secret, only a minor percentage of users have had their account suspended or hijacked. The majority of us are still online. The ones you see in this forum are people who can’t access the game.

That said if you got banned for inappropriate language then there is one of three scenarios here.

a. You actually did use inappropriate language (swearing excessively, word abuse, name abuse)

b. Someone hijacked your account and used it for the same thing.

c. Some friends of yours had fun in game trolling people calling them colourful.

Make a support ticket, ask them for a log of what you said that was abusive.

Sorry.6741:

Well I put my cvv2 code down on my first purchase, so they did require it. When the card details were down, I was give the option to store it. And I clicked yes. – When next I made a purchase all I needed was to click amount, stored visa ending in xxxx and OK.

If it didnt store part of the information and excluded the cvv2 – then its a very unfortunate oversight that it does not ask me for the 3 digits on my second purchase.

Your suggestion that they may have a special agreement has precedence but I dont see any way to confirming it.

In fact if they do store the cvv2 I wouldnt even care, if I just could remove the credit card details myself. Its so frustrating, and I do blame myself for being in this situation.

Indeed, I understand your frustration. Here’s the thing, the rumour about them storing the CSC is false. They don’t.

Just like when you register your card on an iTunes account or Paypal account it won’t ask you for your CSC on the subsequent purchases. The card info is stored with a third party, a billing agent, and processed through it. They do a verification check upon purchase through the billing agent, and then process the payment either automatically or manually. This doesn’t require a CSC value as you have already agreed to “store” your card information which in actual terms means letting them charge your card whenever you make a purchase.

With such an agreement you can refund payments made through ArenaNet, just like you can refund through apple, within 30 days of purchase. I suggest anyone who has been victim to fraud not only does this, but reports the fraud to the police.

Removing your stored card information should not be more problematic than shooting them a ticket or an email requesting that they remove it. Due to the unexpected situation with all the account hijacks I suspect it might take some time before they handle it. It is therefore best to handle it like you did flag transactions, and if possible region lock as well.

There are some banks that allow for more security measures like only allowing purchases made with “verified by visa” (the password protected payment feature) or by using PIN. Many banks also offer to send a mail when the card has been charged, with what amount and the possibility to instantly cancel that payment.

Hi Albee. Does the drivers perform different? the 306.02 and the 304.79. Do you notice any short black screen when you start the game?

Are you running this game off of a separate drive? How stable is your connection and how much is your ping to the servers?

There might also be something corrupted in the code. Re-installing or Re-downloading the whole game again might help.

I believe you have tried a few things to make this work. If you could list the things you can remember having tried it would also help.

@Sorry

You are right about visa. However I believe whether or not a merchant utilises the CSC or not does not is up to them. I have never been asked for my CSC when shopping online at .jp sites mind you.

But let’s now assume that ANet is in compliance here, and I believe they are. From where do we know that the CSC is stored?

They might be like iTunes or Amazon using a special agreement that allows for purchase without the CSC.

This would require a bill to be issued of some sort. I believe that if it has been the case that someone has had their cards charged by NCSoft by unauthorised purchase, then they would have gotten such a bill.

Since NCSoft might (instead of saving CSC) be using the same agreement as many other large retailers I imagine that it shouldn’t be hard to flag these charges just like you did.

magnumgoatcolon.4235:

Ticket #120901-005179

I’ve been perma-banned for gold selling activity since 08/31/12. I had a couple of thousand verification emails about someone in China trying to login to my account all day on 08/31/12, so I’m assuming I was perma-banned for protection. Opened a ticket early on 09/01/12, got an email from Support on 09/05/12 asking me to answer some security questions, which I did that day and haven’t heard anything since.

Is there an ETA on how long this process has been taking? Should I update anything regarding my ticket or the email I received?

If you can log in with your password, do so, and change your password. make sure email authorisation is on, and disconnect any logins from China.

Then update your ticket with info that you have changed your password, that you would like any permanent authorisation to any china IP to be undone, include your serial and present IP and location, and that you have full control of your situation.

After you have done that shoot a PM to one of the Support Staff on here with your ticket number explaining that you were banned, but that you now have control of your account, ask them to check the ticket and de-freeze your account.

PS. You were not perm-banned for protection, someone gained access to your account. That means either you authorised (clicked the link in one of the mails) the log in attempt, or your mail has also been compromised. I would change the password for my mail as well and download some heavy malware protection softs and run a few scans see if they got anything. Take every precaution possible to make sure you have a safe connection, clean computer and secure passwords.

I say take a look at Apple. You can have an itunes account and no credit card on it, but once you register a credit card you have to delete the account to delete the card information.

How many people experience that account being compromised?

Sorry.6741:

I think I would be able to remove my cc information before my account was ever stolen I know I would do it right now if I could. – Then I wouldnt have to get my bank involved and a new card issued. See what I mean?

I suggest you shoot a mail to support and create a ticket, then send that ticket info to one of the support staff on here in a pm.

Other than that, it is unfortunate you chose to save that information at the launch of a game, one can never prepare for disaster, and nobody could foresee this. However a bit of extra caution doesn’t hurt.

I like to remember my card number instead, or both of them. That way I don’t need to sacrifice security for convenience much of the time.

@Sorry I see your Wiki reference and throw you this https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/security_standards/why_comply.php

Please research before making statements. It is not required by law, but encouraged.

To make this issue more clear.
I have no idea whether or not ArenaNet under NCSoft is regarded as compliant with the PCI DSS and approved as such or not. However, when it says compliance requires something, this doesn’t mean it’s applicable by law. As I said, CSC is just a feature meant to heighten security of internet purchases, and is thus definitely not a required feature of any online merchant. The CSC is simply a way of telling that the consumer can see the card information (preferably the card itself) when making the purchase. Thus the compliance of not saving this information.

When ArenaNet asked you if you wanted to save the information, it should state that the CSC value will not be stored if it didn’t store it, and you as a consumer are always responsible of making sure of what you are storing when you store your card information.

So now we have hopefully made all this clear.

Halfcentaur.9706:

They’re targeting emails. Compromised accounts aren’t just now popping up. They’ve existed since before the game came out, when the associated emails use to be actively used for a World of Warcraft account.

Just as I was saying. They directly logged into the game with those accounts that had the same credentials. Compromised email accounts has existed for a long time, but the hijackers didn’t start to use them to log into the game before the authentication system went up, was what I wanted to say. Now even though your game password is safe hijackers can access your mail account and use the serial key there along with a character name to reset your password. It’s very very very fragile at this moment. ANet is doing what they can to recover accounts, what players can do is start to protect them, or they should have long time ago, and this wouldn’t have escalated to where it is today.

@marcusbash The problem here is that ANet employs 30 people, blizzard 200, and an extra 50 in their CS. This problem did not exist at launch for Blizzard since there were no accounts before that game to compromise. Your account restored in 30 minutes was the result of 1 out of the 50 CS having something to fiddle with for 30 minutes that day.

There seems to be a lot of anger out and about here. The problems with hijackers are affecting a lot of people, and the forumers start to aggregate hate between each other and blame the easiest target, now we know it’s not easy to blame the real thief here, the ones who stole your accounts because… you don’t know who they are, so you blame the next best, the ones whom you rely on for the service.

Take this into perspective then: You buy an ebook from amazon, you enjoy reading this ebook, but one day your amazon account is compromised, and you are not the only one, suddenly millions of users are experiencing the same thing. Amazon is now dealing with support tickets way over their capacity, you can’t access your account so you can’t delete your cc info, and support takes “years”, so now you want a chargeback for not only the book you bought, but also for the kindle itself.

Now ANet has said they will implement the remove feature as soon as possible, currently you can request the information removed through support. Storing a CSC number is not illegal anywhere. Visa strongly discourages it, but they cannot enforce any law as to how their card is used by merchants. Just like the “verified by visa”-feature, the CSC is a feature. Just that it became a standard, many countries don’t use that feature or has just begun, like Japan. Here you can purchase with or without that code, it is not at all necessary to make a purchase.

Now, it’s not a good idea for a merchant to store the CSC info, but ANet chose to do so to make purchases more streamlined.

It is entirely on the user’s shoulder to take any formal action to stop fraud in the case of a compromised user account. You can read all about that here:
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/legal/guild-wars-2-user-agreement/

Extract from 4. (a)
“…You are responsible for any use and related liabilities with respect to any Account if you make the Account available to a third Party intentionally or negligently. It is Your responsibility to safeguard any access control mechanisms You may have related to an Account such as a password or PIN…”

I believe most of us has already “accepted” this EULA and therefore have to abide by it regarding this game.

So before making any uninformed claims about rights, please consult the EULA and the laws of your own country.

As for chargebacks these only hurt the merchant and is not a nice way of settling things just because the consumer is in a bit of a rage. The merchant will suffer from their bank and the bank from the card vendors, merchant with high chargeback frequency will suffer higher penalties.
Chargebacks were meant to be a last resort if you couldn’t get your money refunded, but has become somewhat a “friendly fraud”-thing for consumers.

If you want to settle this, send a ticket to ANet asking for a refund. I can’t seriously see how someone would want to hurt a merchant over $60. I guess some people like to sit on their high chairs and fight for a principle when the failure of following it hurt them. But hey, we are all easily bu**hurt these days right?!

EDIT: @Wizgamer. You can have your credit card information removed. Contact support, this was never an issue before the hijacks started. And even after you have been hijacked you wouldn’t be able to access your account to remove that information anyway. You better ask them to remove the CSC code from the stored info, as that is much more helpful.