Guild Wars 2

Some of the forum threads are many screens long, but the only way to navigate forward or backward is to scroll all the way to the top of the thread.

Recommend adding navigation links to the bottom of threads or maybe make them floating so they’re always visible.

synk.6907:

Why have you waited for two months to follow your guild?

I can’t help but think of a military commander missing the unit’s deployment and having to stand at a civilian ticket counter trying to get the airline to bump passengers off so he can catch up to his unit. I spent almost 30 years on active duty and I don’t remember ever forgetting our commander

Good luck catching up to them, but you’ll probably have to do like everybody else and time it right.

I’m far more likely to socialize with a player who’s near me and trying to do what I’m also doing. I’ll help kill a champion. If there’s an area of thick aggro, I’ll help fight through it. If I see a dead player I’ll fight to them and give a rez.

What I completely ignore are random invites and whispers. Too many times in MMOs I’ve found those are generally not with the effort to respond to. I treat those like the old telemarketers who call during dinner.

Today the game downloaded a patch then activated my Windows 8 UAC for permission to system files.

I authorized it, then my system froze and the hard drive went to 100% utilization. After a few minutes of my system being locked up I tried to kill the GW2.exe process. It showed that it had locked many of my system files.

I had to power down the system to get it unfrozen, but as soon as I started the game the cycle repeated. After maybe 5-10 minutes it unlocked and logged into the game fine.

I’m OK if this is a new security feature, but I’d appreciate knowing that the client is going to access my system files and freeze the system for 10 minutes.

I don’t see the mistake here.
Edited by Moderator: Quote about deleted post removed

Manoa.5897:

This is all assuming the name was removed due to a copyright violation, of course.

Could also be that it’s sort of nonsensical, although I don’t see that in the naming policy

Many games specifically don’t allow nonsensical character names like “Xyz” or “X Y Z”.

It’s one of those “sole and absolute discretion” things. If you name your character “Peanut Butter” and they don’t like it then that’s pretty much the end of it, just make up another one.

Reference: Guild Wars 2 Naming Policy

“This policy may not cover all inappropriate or disallowed names. ArenaNet reserves the right to reject any name it concludes, in its sole and absolute discretion, is indecent, obscene, offensive or otherwise violates our naming policy or the Guild Wars 2 User Agreement. ArenaNet reserves the right to examine names on a case-by-case basis and take whatever action we deem necessary in our sole and absolute discretion. We reserve the right, in our sole and absolute discretion, to change, modify, add or remove portions of this Guild Wars 2 Naming Policy at any time.”

Item 9(b) might be the answer.

“Each Account may only be used by one person. If a minor has been allowed access to an Account by his/her parents or legal guardians, only that minor may use the Account thereafter. You may not make any assignment or transfer of rights, obligations or liabilities related to this agreement and any attempt by You to do so is null and void. However, You may allow access to an Account to any family member who is living in Your household.”

It also says something about forbidding use in an Internet Cafe in 8.(h)(ii).

I’m thinking some of those 10,000+ bots might not be legitimate accounts. That would explain how brazen they are. But I have faith they’ll sort it out.

“We keep close track on the number of compromised accounts and it is certainly not enough to explain the volume of bots in-game. Sadly, there are plenty of other sources for these accounts besides just stolen credentials; I can’t go into much detail beyond that, unfortunately.”

Considering you guys have already banned some 10,000+ bot accounts and more every day, it’s closing in on a million dollars in game clients. That’s more than I’d have thought botters could afford, considering they’re supposed to be trying to make money in the deal.

Probably update your support ticket. Although Gaile Gray can help interpret your ticket, in the end everything goes though support tickets.

She helped me get my GW1 linked to my GW2, but only as a liaison. All action happened through support tickets. They were pretty fast, I think I got an update every day or so until it was resolved.

Same here, getting disconnected every 10-30 minutes since the event started last night.

One of the bot swarms I used to see in Frostgorge has been missing for a few days. Wonder if they’ve been busted or just on vacation.

xlion.3065:

I would assume that the majority of your (potential) customers prefer news pulling over push. Go ahead and be a good example. Don’t send out newsletters and thereby help the internet to become more secure.

I have to disagree on this one. Only a few of us are martial arts and computer experts. Joking aside, marketing likely shows that without “push” information (aka advertising) most customers wouldn’t know what’s going on. That’s why companies spend so much money on polishing such products.

Sure, there’s going to be the technophiles out there who pull information and fact-check everything…but most probably don’t. I confess I also read the forums, the wiki, sometimes reddit, and have GW2 on my iPhone Twitter ap…but I didn’t even notice the Halloween thing until I got an email on it. A few minutes later my daughter notified me about it when she got her email. And she’s a bigger junkie than me. Neither of us really noticed it until we got the glitzy email.

First bug (FIXED)

My daughter was able to connect the authenticator to her account and log in to the game BUT it wouldn’t let her log in to the forums. It gave her an error 401: Unauthorized, ActionController::InvalidAuthenticityToken.

Ticket 121011-000359

CORRECTIVE ACTION: She had to decline the ToS and then log in a second time, accept the ToS, and it worked.

Binarynova.2476:

This is great news! However I have to admit, it’s a bit confusing right now.

See, on my iPhone screen I see two codes. Both labeled as “myemailaddress@email.com”. One is for Guild Wars 2 and one is for another account. I can’t seem to find a way to change the labels (which is all it would take to clear this up).

Any suggestions?

I was able to rename mine by clicking the “edit” button and then the email string. I renamed mine Guild Wars 2.

I make tickets to report the ones I see, along with their character and account names. I’ve been doing a lot of reporting out in Frostgorge as well. The ones in this screencap are all level 7 multi-boxed off a level 80.

That was EASY to setup, my iPhone scanned in the barcode and it was done. This is now the third game I play with an authenticator and that barcode scan thing was the easiest to use.

Lysico.4906:

Fix the problem first. You know, like adding speedbumps to a parking lot, instead of having one cop busting 1 out of 100 speeders…

Stop the issue at the start, not after the fact Anet.

What’s your suggestion?

I need some of these solutions for other things also. I have a noisy neighbor I’d like to silence, he should have never been allowed to move next door. And that dog that poops in my yard shouldn’t have been born. I’m making a list of other things that need to be stopped at the start, I think we’re on to something big here.

I took a screen cap and looked up the account names.

Sent it in as ticket 121010-000282. That’s five more bots for the list.

Yes, it made me feel cheery at least.

BTW I did report my first bots yesterday. I wasn’t completely sure they were bots, but since they ran in circles and had names like “asfsfs” I figured they might be.

I encountered this today for the first time. I but hadn’t done WvW in a few days so not sure how long it’s been going on (i.e. can’t connect it to patch day).

Basically it started out when I tab targeting an enemy player that was only visible as a red arrow over his head. I thought it was a glitched rogue or something. I downed and finished him but he didn’t appear until a little while after he was dead. I immediately tab-targetted another and another, none visible. As I moved toward the major fight there were no visible enemies. All I could do was tab target and attack air.

Later I was running down a road and tab targetted an invisible player again right in front of me. Based on the attacks I was suffering I had a feeling I had run into an invisible zerg. Sure enough, shortly after I died about 20+ players drew on my screen.

I think ArenaNet wants this game to have minimal anti-social attributes to increase its appeal to civil-minded people. Hence the crackdown on anti-social language, names, and behavior. It’s probably brought to them more players, and loyal ones at that, than it’s cost them.

Monsoon.2589:

By showing names you are only going to cater to one type of players: the ones that like to grief others. You want to be able to see the name easily so you can go back to that player over and over be cause you know he or she is weak or bad.

This is how I feel about it also. I confess that I have enjoyed ganking players of ill repute in other games, mainly because their attention-seeking behavior got on my last nerve.

It’s sort of like being pleased when the police pull over a driver who’d been a menace to other drivers. I’m just glad to see them get what they deserved and that’s all.

I’d wager there’s a lot of players out there, maybe even the majority, who think “I love MMOs, but not a lot of the people who play them”. And that’s why I’m glad GW2 has anonymous enemies in WvW.

I’m pretty sure there’s more options than quitting the game or becoming a botter. You can always ignore the botter or report them while going about your own business.

I would think diminishing returns (I assume that’s what you mean by DR) would only affect the character farming drops and not every player in the zone. If me getting a rare drop prevents you from getting a rare drop, that doesn’t make sense to me.

I don’t think bots are as game-breaking as PvP radar hackers were in DAoC. In that game you really had to either not PvP or become a radar hacker yourself since the Frontier was saturated with stealthers and gank groups running radar.

I think WvW radar is the only thing I’m afraid of, I can work around PvE bots. The last thing I want to deal with (and I won’t) is gank groups chasing solo players around using radar. If that happens I’ll be out of here, WvW is where all my fun is at.

In some areas, especially some level 80 areas, the respawn rate is so fast that mobs I just killed respawn while I’m fighting the ones that added. This turns the fight into an infinite loop.

I want to have to work to clear a path for myself. But too many areas are unpassable due to the respawn rate. If possible I think the respawn rate should be slowed when there’s only one player in the area and increased when there’s more players in the area that can share the load.

Areas like Cursed Shore are near impossible to navigate solo—not because of the terrain and roaming Veterans and Champions—but the regular level 80 respawn rate. I’d welcome getting the chance to reach that Veteran but he’s not the real danger.

Many lower level areas in the 70-80 range have this as well. Ravines where the mobs are many with overlapping aggro ranges, then respawn and aggro again mid-fight. I just think it’s a little high.

I was in Frostgorge Sound yesterday and several areas were full of little armies of identical players. There was one ravine in particular, don’t remember the name of it, where they were running a route back and forth from one end of it to the other like a swarm of bugs.

I’m not confident I can identify a bot so I haven’t reported any of them. They all seemed to be independently moving like a human was at the controls, it was just odd that they all looked exactly alike in a level 80 zone where most of us have made our avatars unique.

I remember when people were saying that GW2 was going to be the “wild west” of language and bad behavior, but it’s turned out to be maybe the “cleanest” game out right now.

This is glaring if you log in to any of the other titles after a month of GW2. I’ve played MMOs since the 1990s and apparently had gotten desensitized to the trolling, insults, and profanity. But when I logged in to my old game recently to make sure my mailbox was empty it was amazing to see what I had been tolerating.

I sent some sign-off messages to old friends and reminded them to behave if they come to GW2.

When I first saw the game I thought “there’s no way I’d play an Asura”.

But when I made one it was so silly it became my favorite. I made the shortest, skinniest, floppiest eared, friendliest faced Asura. His fight animations with a greatsword are my favorite.

I contrast him to the players who make the largest and meanest faced characters and play them with such self-importance. My little Asura is just as tough and jumps and dances and is generally silly to play.

He’s in total contrast to me in real life, I’m almost as tall as a doorway and pretty serious all the time—so my little Asura is like my e-opposite.

I like the anonymous nature of WvW and I was a major ganker in DAoC, WoW, and Rift. Yes I did enjoy the adversarial nature of those games, keeping track of worthy foes and all that. But to me GW2 is stress-free PvP and I like it.

Sometimes I get ganked bad by 2 or 3 or 20 “invaders” or “defenders” and as the camera pans back from my defeated and shamed avatar I realize — hey, I’m as anonymous to them as they are to me. Right on.

LeCreaux.3087:

GaileGray.9587:

LeCreaux — I’d really like to help you. Do you have any of the ticket numbers, so I can look this up? Alternately, could you PM me your log-in name? (That would be an email address.)

Sure, I’ll look in my email archives and send you the login name. I never did get any response to any support requests. Once GW2 came out I gave up trying.

Sent, it’s in your PMs.

GaileGray.9587:

LeCreaux — I’d really like to help you. Do you have any of the ticket numbers, so I can look this up? Alternately, could you PM me your log-in name? (That would be an email address.)

Sure, I’ll look in my email archives and send you the login name. I never did get any response to any support requests. Once GW2 came out I gave up trying.

VanderBeltLegacy.4736:

LeCreaux.3087:

I have a similar problem, I have GW1 and at least one of the expansions but only played it for a few weeks back in whatever year it came out.

When I tried to log in to it a few months ago I got “this account permanently disabled”. I sent message after message for weeks to NCSoft asking for information and never even got a reply.

I’d also like to connect my GW2 account to my GW1 and see if I can get some Hall of Monuments items. But I’m really concerned if it got hacked, I wouldn’t want to risk attaching it to my new GW2 account.

you should of got an Automated response saying your ticket is submitted, then they give u a ticket number…if you have that ticket number,, please post it for the Mods to be able to see what’s going on with your ticket.

I would if they gave me one, but I got zero response. After about a month of sending emails to their support address I gave up on them. In fact I wasn’t even going to play GW2 until they at least responded to my GW1 support emails. The only reason I ended up playing is my daughter bought the game for me and asked me to play.

I had bought GW1+expansions for my 3 kids when they were still school age (4 sets all together). They’re all adults now, but when they were kids we used to run around in a perfect group. I think my account is the only one of the 4 that got “permanently disabled” for whatever reason. I can only assume it got hacked at some point.

I have a similar problem, I have GW1 and at least one of the expansions but only played it for a few weeks back in whatever year it came out.

When I tried to log in to it a few months ago I got “this account permanently disabled”. I sent message after message for weeks to NCSoft asking for information and never even got a reply.

I’d also like to connect my GW2 account to my GW1 and see if I can get some Hall of Monuments items. But I’m really concerned if it got hacked, I wouldn’t want to risk attaching it to my new GW2 account.

I played DAoC and Darkness Falls was awesome. We’d go out on the frontier (PvP zone) to open our entrance and close all the others. Then we’d attack Darkness Falls to kill all the enemy players there. Sometimes fights inside Darkness Falls would rage until another side opened their entrance and closed ours (putting us on defense). And since I played a stealth class it was a ganker’s playground.

Yes we had dry spells where we couldn’t even get in there, but that made it even more desirable. There was good loot in there, not to mention player kill points. That website with player kill points was more motivation than all the gold in the land.

This issue only applies to folks who care about the score more than the fun of doing World-vs-World. I do not know what percentage of the player base that is.

In most games there’s some who want to kill the biggest raid boss, if not be first doing it, and then there’s the masses who don’t even know where the entrance to the dungeon is.

I like to do WvW and don’t really care what the score is. I look at the 4 maps and pick the one where I think I’ll have a good time. If I want to defend something I pick a map where we’re losing. If I want to run around with a zerg I pick one where we’re dominating.

Of course I’m happy as everyone else if we’re winning on the scoreboard, but it doesn’t mean anything to me toward participating in WvW. I do get demoralized if I’m on a map where we can’t do anything but flee from the horde—but that can happen even if we’re in first place by a mile.

Although it’s none of my business what people do with their gold, I have no idea how this could possibly be enforced.

I have a daughter who plays and I’m constantly buying gear for her as she levels. But what if I told her “get an A on your homework and I’ll buy you an exotic weapon on the trading post?”. That’s trading real world action for in-game currency. She’d have to tell me “sorry Dad, can’t do it, don’t want to get you banned”.

Or what about the guilds out there who are farming gold to buy their guild leaders Commander books? They’re surely mailing a lot of gold to one player. I know the guild Gaiscioch over on Rall is farming 500 gold to buy 5 books.

How do you tell if that 500 gold is from gold sellers or guild members? How do you know if 4 gold I send to my daughter is a gift or a reward for an A on her homework?

When my ranger was lower level, even with rare gear and upgrades, I got run over consistently by full level 80s. I could give them a good fight sometimes but it pretty much always ended the same. But I think I was mostly spamming keys hoping for victory.

Now at level 80 with a mix of rare and exotic gear my ranger holds his own quite well in 1-vs-1 fights. Biggest improvement was probably more from experience in PvP than in the gear. I had to lose a bunch of fights to learn what worked vs other classes, key spamming definitely didn’t win any fights for me.

I’m used to seeing the bots in WoW running routes mining every node, or the bots in Rift with nonsensical names doing the same. But what exactly does a GW2 bot gain by standing around swishing a sword? I don’t get it.

I do think that some players are a little to report-happy about claiming other players are bots. In WvW there’s constantly people saying on map chat to “report all the bots in the keep” or whatever. One day I was on a keep wall with another player fending off attacks and occasionally jumping down to fight and run back…when we both got accused of being bots in whispers because we weren’t running with the zerg. Same for the players using the trading post in the main keep. I think some players just want everyone else to obey them and use the bot accusation as their weapon of choice.

I’ve only seen one player who I thought was an obvious bot…some ranger that was teleporting to mobs in a hidden valley I stumbled onto. I wasn’t level 80 at the time and thought it was some skill that level 80s got.

Drintar.1246:

An example of in game mechanics would be a ranger that goes AFK where his pet can kill a single spawning mob over and over.

Hey, rangers are players who need to AFK sometimes also. There’s not always a mob where I need to AFK but sometimes there’s a dead one there when I get back.

It’s not like a level 80 ranger needs the xp or the mob is going to loot itself. If a pet defending its AFK owner is an exploit then it’s got to be the worst one ever. I would think an exploit would provide some kind of benefit (other than surviving an AFK).

The patch notes say they fixed 10 different exploits. Good on ArenaNet, bad on the players who used them.

I always enjoy reading the posts of those who got caught, hopefully we see some good ones over in the account forum.

FIXED. I got an email authentication today for my current IP address.

The authentication message told me my IP address, when I clicked the link it took me to the web site and confirmed it for a second time.

Worked perfectly.

I changed my password today, but did NOT get any kind of email verification or even a notice that I did it.

The change did work, but I expected to get some kind of message. I did verify my email address way back when, but I’ve never gotten any verification messages.

Reality check needed here. From a computer security perspective we can debate password complexity all day (and we really do) but in the end it’s a balancing act between what the user can handle and the threat.

1. The threat here is a list of known passwords and the usual easily guessed passwords. It’s not hackers with an offline copy of ArenaNet’s password files with endless time to crack them (if that ever happens the best defense is simply a mass forced password change).

2. The users are just gamers, of all ages, regular people just trying to have some fun. Yes, a small percentage have the ability and willingness to use high-complexity passwords (overkill for the threat). But for the threat, most probably just need to come up with something that’s NOT on the known list, not used anywhere else, and can’t easily be guessed.

I have the same issue. I just changed Internet providers yesterday and expected an authorization email when I logged in from the new location & service.

However I was able to log in to everything (the game, my account, the forums) without getting an authorization email.

I just logged in from a different location, with a totally different IP range, both to my account and to the game, and did NOT get any kind of email authentication.

The “security” tab does show the IP addresses, but since I was doing so from a completely different range of IP addresses shouldn’t I have gotten an email confirmation message?

I don’t buy it. Who among us hasn’t forgotten to lock their car, their house, their garage or their computer. Those are self-defenses against crime not the blame for crime. It’s an ethical leap to blame the victim’s poor self-defense as the cause for the crime. We can’t all be martial artists and computer experts.

Sure, when I see a neighbor forget to close their garage I do think “he might get robbed” but not “he deserves to get robbed” or “it’s his fault if he gets robbed”. We have to keep our empathy for the innocent or the criminals begin to look like the innocent ones.

Alec Owlyear.6782:

Aren’t passwords supposed to be encrypted within the database? Specifically against hackers and unscrupulous employees the same? You usually will see some sort of disclaimer of “If you lose your password we cannot retrieve it”. I would imagine that this is the industry standard, but if not, it could be cause for investigation…

Yes, a secured system would have encrypted passwords. The decryption is done on copies of the files containing the encrypted logins. Typically the entire files are decrypted, not just a single password, revealing every login on the system.

While system administrators are able to do this at any time, it’s not done to recover a password for a user. It’s more secure to make you prove your identity and then reset your password. Although that “prove your identity part” can be real iffy.

I just retired from almost 30 years in IT security. In all that time we suffered constant attempts from outside, but in my experience most successful events were either from inside or socially engineered using somebody on the inside. Regardless, the safe bet is to protect all of your logins from each other.

…which is what ArenaNet has been preaching, just without the back story.

I did a paper on this subject in college and found a larger problem. Research shows that approximately 7% of the IT workforce has “ethical flexibility” when it comes to online crime (i.e. it’s ethically OK if they’re not stopped from doing it).

Take note…these are the people who manage the IT where your name and password are stored. As all IT security professionals are trained, the biggest threat is NOT the unknown hacker outside—-it’s the system administrator with a login working for the company. Yes, it really happens, the system does not have to get hacked for your information to get out to the buyers.

Never trust that your login is protected within a system. It’s only as secure as the most dishonest employee of the company. Always assume that your login has already been stolen and never use the same one between systems.

Source: Inside the Mind of the Insider
http://www.securitymanagement.com/archive/library/000762

I don’t agree that crimes are “caused by” the victim in any crime. The criminal causes the crime to happen, the victim is innocent. All victims can do to prevent criminal behavior against them is take steps to prevent becoming victims, but they’re not part of the crime at all.