Do game admins ever go to Balthazar ID1?

Lets say they did ban all the bots and advertisers, what would happen, would they simply fade away? You seem to assume that's what will happen. And thats where you are wrong.

Take a look at almost any other mmo there are gold sellers in all of them (or take a shortcut and go to a random seller site and see just how many games they have)

If they start detecting bots and banning them, they start employing sweatshop workers instead, who wont be as easy to detect as a bot, every tine the company takes a step towards gold selling they adapt and make better software that's harder to detect or employ more people to run the accounts.
Anet's team is not large enough to combat the thousands of programmers out there who make the software that the bots are running, its a loosing battle for the companies team

On top of this, GW is almost completely instanced, so the players can't help the process because they can't see whats going on. Which leaves ANet to deal with it themselves, and that is impossible

I'm not saying bot spammers would go away, also i'm not really annoyed by them... I'm only saying some ingame admin should go to balth id1 once a while and go on a banningspree for the fun of it.

You are telling people HOW TO HAVE FUN?!

Elitist!

Simply giving up is not option.

But ofc, there is good way to deal with this situation: ban egold buyers, they are must less numerous than bots and much more important to egold companies than couple of accs, simply because when enough of them gets banned and word will spread, egold market will freeze. No buyers means moving business to another game which is more profitable.

No MMO company had guts to try it thou.

Find some seller sites (i'm sure you're capable of that), and see that they all offer wow currency, my guess is nearly all of them, if not all of them

From what i know about wow, the 2-3 weeks i played it alot of the stuff is instanced, all the dungeons. so you'll never see the bots, they are safely hidden away farming their gold.

And if they ban one innocent person they go bankrupt from the following lawsuit.

And the bad PR would be epic.

Why would you be in Great temple ID1 anyway?

lol that's what i'm thinking.
Bad advertising by the bots :P

I'd love to see anyone sue a video game manufacturer for being banned from one of their games, innocent or not. I'd love to see which judge would be stupid enough to allow that lawsuit into his court. I'd love to see the desperate ambitious lawyer who wants to set a precedent and become famous/rich by taking on a case such as this.

You have nothing more than word of mouth to use if/when something like that happens. It's their game...you paid for the CD, the booklet, the game's client files. The account you made for the game was free. The servers are theirs, the intellectual property is theirs, no ifs ands or buts. You didn't pay for the right to play their game, you paid for the privilege.

The american local district is much worse
(dont know about european, I dont use europe servers)

I know this place too..all that people on the start screen are reported by me at least

I find this terrible ..you can't write in these places 1 word..without that it disappears withing seconds..cause of the massive spam of these gold seller bunch...which just poop out characters with silly letter salad names to put them into international disses.as bots letting those spam their shit 24/7 ...


What they do is ILLEGAL, it destroys the game...they hurt far more than 1 rule of the EULA and the general rules of Anet and thus gives Anet simple the right to ban those asses ...

the problem is...simple bans won't help here versus these stupid GS-parasites...its like spaying a toxin vs. insects and they just get immune and become more and more and more over time like a plaque

When Anet really wants to change something..then they really have to do

IP-Bans...with these you get at least most of these morons for long time out of the ways..as long these guys are not intelligent enough to find a way through the IP-Block.
As logn they fidn this way not..those people just can't create ANY new accounts anmory..because the server simple blocks the IP of their PC's.

Ands then has anet really to corporate alot more with the police....let those illegal internet sites getting closed via police...and make report offences against the keepers of these internetsites and/or the players..which illegally gold sell ingame (through IP anyone skilled can find out very quick... where the owners of accounts live)

Maybe these guys have really to land into jail first..before they learn ,that the thing they do is ILLEGAL...


Hiwever.. anet MUST do alot more vs. gold sellers....

One way to reduce at least the gold seller spam would be to implement into the game an "Auto Kickout of the Game-Mechanism" against massive spammers

like post one and the same sentence more than x times per x seconds over x seconds and the game will automatically kick the character out of server and will give at least the account first a temporal 24H ban
When this happens..then the server will save up the IP of that account and the support will give into into a registration on a simple pc ...and when the exact same account gets then recognized x times b< this way.. then follows automatically the perma ban...

I don't know if all have understood that now..but I think somehow of a system..an ingame mechanism..which somehow auto cleans itself from gold seller-spam bots...something that triggers automatically in the chats would be a great help there


PS: in most european servers (at least the western lands, i don't know how it looks in the eastern european disses) you have absolutely no gold sellers at normal times...when you find eventually one..than its mostly between afteroon to early night...

and somehow I've to disagree..I don't find american worser..then international in kind of penetrant GS spam bots..I see personally much lesser bots on american..then in Int districts...but thats maybe..because I play mostly only in american..when at europeans are all sleeping..because at your side are naturally then more people on and awake ^^

Look at what Jagex did to Runescape earlier this month. Killed real world trading completely but lost thousands of subscribers.

If I were an admin, I'd gather up a nice pile of evidence against these egold sellers, and then ban them all at the same time.

It may just be an issue of manpower, as another poster pointed out, and perhaps different activities are given different priorities. For instance, perhaps the 100K gold trade triggers an alert that is more important or given more attention than someone advertising a site to buy said 100K gold...

If 100k gold trades are setting red flags, I suggest we ban The Herbalizer and Dralspire.

i agree, wasn't funny. maybe if it was about american dis, but not inter.

WUTLOL

You can report them as spamming, when they get the ticket for them and check they will ban their account once they see that they are gold sellers. Plus they are looking into adding an option (I hope they can) so you can select Gold Seller as a reportable offence.

As much as I disliked the report system at first, I jumped on the band wagon and have been using the heck out of it. With all the reports it takes them a bit of time to get the one in Kamadan and each one that pops up there.

If you chose not to use the repost system then that’s on you, and nothing to do what it would be like with/with out a monthly fee. As long as the community has a way to get involved there’s no need to have to pay extra people to GM.

Or anerf can pull there heads outa there a$$ and admit LS was a bad and horrible idea by removing it, thus actually allowing the people who wouldnt normally buy from the sellers make gold.

i've witnessed these bots duplicating peoples IGN's simply by visiting GToB ID1, and a bot would've copied your name, recreated a char with a name very similar to ones own, they would replace a "i" with a lowercase "l", and then spam gold for the next hour, all it would take is someone with poor vision do-gooder to report them via support website and report the real person in question, anet may or may not ban the real person, we've seen 10000's of false reports before so i wouldnt put it past them.

I'm with you, but just for the benefits it gives me because I don't see how this will stop gold buyers it'll just make non-gold buyers richer. The ones who buy gold are the ones too lazy to farm.

I'm sure those bots get banned.
There's a sentry bot program that suspends people for repeatedly saying racial slurs...even in private chat.
If the gold selling bots don't get banned, than me thinks the sentry bot needs some tweaking.

I complain about monthly fees. Not because I can't afford them, but because I despise having to pay per month to play a game I already purchased.

too busy to send 1 GM to ban them? o.o How hard is it to ban someone? I mean im sure Gaile is going to look at this thread. Or is there a process they have to do for banned someone?

They can ban people pretty easily provided they can work out who was doing it and check that they were. Wouldn't be surprised if the accounts in the screenshot are already outski.

Use /report, though, since it's meant for things like that.

For the record, I suspect ArenaNet will ban you for *buying* gold as well, if they find out. And they aren't going to go bankrupt for erroneously banning people, because they already have done that - and no lawsuit followed, they just reversed it where they found out they were wrong.

Plus they probably have provision to ban at their discretion through the ToS anyway... which would theoretically mean they could ban you for nothing and get away with it, but of course we all trust they won't.

Well, as much as it annoys me to say it, I understand why Anet is not fighiting hard against this problem. Because of limited resources on their part and the fact that investing more time/money/people on it would inevitably have an impact on their current projects. Gold-selling companies have tremendous resources and nothing else to do that spam and tweak bot-scripts, they really have a huge advantage on Anet and the GMs. And this industry is huge, with some Asian countries in the top5 actually investing money into it (FTL).

I'm going to try an anlogy here: do you actually know that 70% of all emails exchanged on the internet is spam? (source: Symantec's State of Spam report) That's 2 emails out of 3 that are useless (and on some UK email servers they report 98& spam), completely and uterly useless emails that are scams and preying on naive internet users ready to get into the "deal of the century". Can we avoid that? Yes we can, but it would require a dedicated team of hundreds of people adapting the anti-spam features consistenly all over the world, and that does NOT work (tools like spamassassin are doing a fantastic job, but can't adapt that fast, unless they become standard on ALL email servers...).

The "bad guys" (it sounds childish, but in the end this is what they are) ALWAYS have an edge, it's MUCH easier to destroy than to build. Every time a countermeasure is in place, they simply have to bypass it and they're very smart. The funniest thing is that Anet gave US (the GW community) the tools to fix this problem, but how many people /report this bots? If Anet received thousands of /reports on this bot, I'm sure the problem wouldn't be so big.

From a retailers point of view, banning the accounts. They are forced to buy new ones, spend more money on anets products only to get banned again. Vicious circle in which anet make a fair bit of cash.

the solution is - dont hang out in the black market aka id1

Very well put, Fril. We just have to keep reporting them as we see them. If nothing else, it makes the gold sellers spend more money and I'm sure it's a bit annoying to have account after account banned and have to buy then set up new ones.

wonder how many gold sellers are actually able to find gullable people to sell their accounts for 100k in-game gold? every now and then i'll see someone advertising for WTB game accounts for 100k.

Turning a blind eye is not a solution to anything.

If I choose not to visit a Red Light district, does that mean prostitution and crack dens do not exist?

I feel there's a deficieny in resources when it comes to gold selling/buying and botting because it's common knowledge that bots farm outside Bergen Hot Springs and the Luxon Assassins in the Jade Sea. There were Mountain Troll bots, Griffon Bots, Minotaur Bots and countless others that appeared to go untouched for months on end. Either there is not enough money, not enough staff members or they have simply do not wish to direct their resources in to bot detection and removal.

i would ban them,so they do buy another account if they desire even if they spam somewhere else,it does not affect me i just turn of the chat if necessary ,the good thing about this is the fact that they bought an account and that is profit for Anet

and games with a monthly fee don't fix the same problems either, nice try

Hi,

First I want to assure you that no one is apathetic towards gold sellers, in GToB or elsewhere. Secondly, you can be absolutely sure that team has not turned away from Guild Wars and that our commitment to keep GW a good place to play continues as strong as ever. And thirdly, we move ahead with banning the accounts of those involved in gold sales, including sellers, distributors, holding and delivery account, and more, on a daily basis.

One of the co-founders of ArenaNet has spent a good deal of time -- and I believe much of it has been his after hours time -- devising various and improved means to find and remove illicit profiteers from the game. Remember that we do want to make sure that blocks of gold sellers are accurate. We don't want to accidentally block an innocent party in reaction to a false report -- whether that's a mistaken name or a malicious report. The process of conservative action requires viewing screenshots, pulling chat logs, etc. Once the Support Team has established that an account has been involved in gold sales, holding, or delivery, we have a zero tolerance policy and the account of the seller is banned.

One thing we have been concerned about is not allowing those using trial accounts to create problems for other players or diminish their in-game experience. We've taken some steps and we will take more, if it seems that there has been a hit on Guild Wars through trial accounts. Our early research, and the test we ran a few weeks ago, indicates that we should be able to prevent the sellers from hawking their wares. If trial account holders do manage to get into advertising mode, we try to quickly remove them from the game. We have dedicated staff members working daily on this matter, and the last day I asked, the staff had blocked about 400 accounts before lunchtime. (I think the all-time records was 1,300+ blocks in a single day.)

But keep in mind, we don't want to have false positives. We had a process in place that was nabbing more gold sellers, but it was also nabbing others who were not involved in sales. Those innocent players were blocked and they then wrote to appeal and the block was rescinded. We'd rather avoid that unpleasant situation and not require people to ask for a "Get out of jail free" card. So we revised the process. This may mean that we catch a somewhat-reduced number of sellers, but it helps us achieve our desire of keeping the false positives to the lowest number possible.

The bottom line is that truly we take this problem seriously. We will take steps to increase vigilence in maps or areas with advertising, we'll respond to those that are reported (as the ones in this thread were already dealt with) and hopefully, we can look at adding "gold sellers" to the /report system, too. (I am unsure if the latter is possible but players have suggested it, and it seems a sound idea to me.)

We view gold selling as a serious problem, and we are expending time, effort, and money to do our best to solve it.

Guys,

Sorry for the long post ^ above.

Let me just ask a quick question: Have you seen a definite increase in gold selling spam? I want to give an accurate report on this matter to our team members, so please answer conservatively and honestly so that the information I pass along is as valuable as possible.

Thanks.

As I'm sure everyone will back me up there HAS been a definite increase of gold advertisers in Balthazar International District 1. It's gone from 1 or 2 different sites spamming to a whole bunch. And the alarming part is we keep seeing new ones all the time.

I think an accurate view is that more sellers are catching on and are taking advantage of trial accounts to spam for free without buying the game. It has just begun 0o

I've seen an increase in how blatant the gold seller spam bots have become. Where before they could be found in International districts, now they can be found in main cities in continent specific districts spamming away.

There does seem to be some correlation to the timing of the introduction of wide scale trial keys and the boom in spam bots.

Out of interest i went to check out GToB int.1, and was surprised that after 5mins of being there not 1 gold seller was advertising. Although it was noticible that there were some dodgy dealings going on (where the character names are just random letters, and standing ominously by storage). Although i have noticed a surge in the number of gold sellers in main towns, mainly Kamadan.

Thanks for this info. I will try to find out how the trial keys work. I was under the impression that those accounts could not be used for spamming, but I'll certainly check.

It seems that Crescent Sky feels that there has been a correlation between the trials, where milan does not think there has been one. I sure appreciate both of you sharing your thoughts.

Thanks Gaile for the lengthy reply, I think it really helps understand your situation and position. Your post should even be stickied at the top of this forum so if people respawn these kind of threads, we can point them to it. Or may be you could turn this into a little article on the main GW website?

I've seen 10. All in one location. I got just as spammed there as I did that screenshot and was actually HOWLING with laughter when you all suggested WoW doesn't have that problem.

It feels too coincidental for me. You were lucky to see 2 or 3 across the entire game back a few months ago. Now you can see around 20 constantly changing their names to be random headsmacking on the keyboards with names reminiscent of assassins in PVP.

Personally, I haven't seen an increase nor decrease in the numbers of gold selling spam. When I do see one I can't /report them because they appear to be programmed to go to a district, send their message and move somewhere else ASAP. That way players can't /report because the player you report must be in your district.

The above also happens with account buyers. E.g. "WTB GW Proph Acc. 150k (200k w/lvl20)"