Perma-Bans

No no you misread me. I said we all bend over and submit to them because they are our gods in this game world. We follow the rules and that means bending over and submitting.

Yes, that's true - which makes bitching & moaning in GWGuru even more pointless.
No-one's ever been unbanned because of a complaint at GWGuru. CF the shitstorm following the banning of the 117 exploiters.

@mummified one: No, threads like this shows that the OP didn't like being banned, and that people are willing to believe that he was innocent and NCSoft support wrong, even though there is no evidence.

My dog knows everything but she's not talking

I have to say I have worried about guild gifting for a while or even family gifting as I tend to buy mini's for b-day gifts and such. we've never given away 100K though and after reading this I doubt we ever would

I have no opinion as to innocence of the guy complaining since I have no proof either way

Yeah and like I said the reason they come here to complain is to try and sully Anets name or they actually think Gaile will come read and care. When all she'll do is come in and say CONTACT SUPPORT.

This is..just laughable. I too give away free items to friends. Just yesterday, I gave a friend of mine all my loot that dropped in a fow run. Is anet gonna look and ban me for giving a few shards for nothing? This seriously needs to get fixed..

Proof of that?

I very seriously doubt it, no serious company (and NC Soft is one of them) would write such an email!

The more I read these threads (with some new nicknames that look very aggressive and anti-Anet), the more I think of the 117s ...

It's a conspiracy theory in essence, but I've seen it already when I moderated a big forum: Anet banned my account and I'm pissed off, so I'm going to ruin their reputation on their forums with stories of unfair bans, doomed economy, broken PvP and grindfest PvE ...

Or I'm just very tired

Given the circumstances of recent ANET is less likely to un-ban anyone. ANet has already made their money of GW 1 and prejudice carries over.

Exactly, this thread is just full of lies. Those lies are just reinforced when the "innocent" jump in with: Anet insults; insults to those who could possibly not believe what they've said; and hurl "retard" at said people.

I think i might go make a thread stating i'm a rank 12 champ. Only, no-one ask for screenshots please - honestly, i'm telling the truth!

Too true

Whether this poster is legit or not, as i can tell from those who have been confirmed banned/unbanned ANet stopped having real people make the ban decisions long ago - it seems like it is just automated now with real people looking at the situation (maybe - if you are lucky) only when a banned player files a support ticket.

This lack of real human involvement is one major reason why, although I still play GW a small amount of time, I will not be continuing to GW2.

The Internet is surely not "civilised" and definitely not ruled by the real-life laws of "presumption of innocence". It takes 2 minutes to create an email address and forum account, it requires very little knowledge to hide your IP and it's possible, though technically more difficult, to fake information and hide traces of your actions.

On the Internet, there's a good reason why people are more cautious, to the point where you "presumed guilty until innocent". There are so many scams, around 75% of email communication is spam. Not to mention that we're at the moment posting messages on a server hosted probably in the USA and so we're under their laws, even if we're in not in the USA.

And one Godwin point for this thread! Don't feed the troll guys ...

This is a lie if you trust what Gaile said on this forum, she said that no banning action is automatic and it is always verified by a person (check the message where she said it on the Game & Dev Tracker).

Wouldn't it be funny if the OP hadn't been banned, but phished out of his account by a fake support mail?

That said it IS hard for NCSoft to tell when someone buys gold. They can't know what the player does on eBay or gold seller sites, all they can do is track the movement of gold, and when large sums flow from, say, a known gold-seller account to someone, they may assume a transaction has taken place.
The fact that it's hard to prove that someone buys stuff (especially as gold-sellers use multiple accounts to "laundry" the gold) is why so few are banned for it.

But the OP's story is even more unlikely: he was banned for SELLING. That's even harder to prove; pretty much the only ways I know to get nabbed for that is to a) say you're selling for real cash in chat, b) sell to someone who screenshots & reports, or c) use the same email for eBay ad as you use for your account.

Since you have inside knowledge about ANET's systems and internal processes, can I ask you a couple of other questions?

Oh.. wait... you have no such knowledge.. you're just wildly speculating again.

+1+1+1+1

Or may be a GM saw a whisper saying "did you receive my payment in your bank account"? Or may be this thread is an invention by one of the 117 who wants revenge, or an Internet troll that likes to create chaos? Or may be the GM clicked the wrong button? Or a packet-collision changed the ID of a banned player to the one of the OP's friend?

As someone said before in this thread (please read it, it's interesting), all we do is speculate. And try to make a little bit of sense into this thread before it's closed.

Tbh ; the people that duped the millionz & billionz of braces sent in just the same type of post here on guru ; trying to be innocent

Ofc it might be right but is there any proof that he didn't / did ..

I xxxxx a sentence because ofcourse you want that your friends get his account back ; but really posting on guru isn't going to help it ..

But, unchecked before bans are issued, apparently

The appearance is rather one of immature people getting banned and moaning to get back their accounts, while Anet takes the best care they can to not ban innocents, an impossible task given than some people's job depend on their illegal activities not getting caught, which means they'll go to great length to avoid being spotted.

And then there's the people like who prefer to accuse Anet, who attempted for the last 4 years to create a no-monthly-fee MMO that we can enjoy and would loose their while business if anyone had PROOF that they're not checking their server's data (it's not like the myth of this "ex-Anet employee" who wanted to reveal the "truth about GW", which turned out to be a load of lies and non-sense).

So, Gaile has never lied or mislead anybody before, nor been lied to or mislead by others, either ?

It would actually be worse if it's not a ban bot, because then those people aren't doing their jobs correctly in the first place.

If Anet said straight, "Look guys, we need to keep costs down. We're putting a ban bot in place, and it may catch people who are innocent. If it does, send us an email and we can sort it out.", most people would cheer their honesty. Instead, they send email replies asking for every character name on the account, when they were last played etc etc. They are deliberately obstructive and monumentally slow. This data is already on their servers, an un-ban shouldn't take 3 days to a week to process.

The proof is in the unbanning, after sending emails to support. If the data is there to justify an un-ban, why wasn't it checked properly in the first place?

How do I know this happens? Because I know a number of people who have gone through the process of getting their accounts unbanned. One was banned because Anet thought her skill at Droks running with a R/Mo was botlike. She was also banned again after giving a guildie 100k to buy items while she was offline. Both times she got her account back. Another ally got banned for a similar "offence" and then unbanned on appeal.

I don't believe she ever did lie (unless you consider omitting to say a few things is a lie). For the Polar Bear Mini, she said she knew it was in the code but didn't know it was activated. The sheer madness of people's reaction was the people's own fault, the greed of some and the temptation for others (I'm not trying to blame everyone, I would have loved to be among the very lucky few), and some people took it on Gaile.

It's a natural reaction and we see it everyday. The PR (here it's CR) person ends up as the punching bag for angry and immature customers. I'd love to see these guys ending up in her shoes for a day or two!

The un-banning is not proof that all data was not checked, simply that some data was not checked or misunterpreted. If you've ever been in customer support for big companies, you know this happens. That's why computer were invented, to make information processing fast. But contrarily to some other companies Anet choose the sensible and cost-effective way of asking human (though imperfect) to take care of this.

I think Anet is going a brilliant job, given the number of immature, greedy and non-sensical people (I'm not pointing the finger at you!) in this forum (it's a small fraction of a small fraction of the GW population and most people know that GWG's vision of GW is distorted by emotions).

And how would you know? Are you employed in a successfull company that produces a no-monthly-fee MMO?

This is your expectation, may be because you play other MMOs or simply want the answer to come to you in a matter of hours (the amount of patience people have can vary from seconds to days). And then there's the reality of Anet, they're not forcing you to stay (and surely not "don't care because they've got your money" as some say here).

Ah ... these emotional threads ... where are the other people?

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i lol @ this thread..... so thats why there are no more chinese bot farmers.....

some sacrifices need to be made for the greater good

That's not it at all. Six-armed Venusian demondogs come into the office and chase the staff away, then randomly ban innocent, underserving children of pure heart and mind before rocketing back to their fairytale cities of jade and tears in order to plot the overthrow of Omicron-8 for their vast stores of Atlantan nightmares.

/ random, stupid speculation ftw!! wwwweeeeee!

My point is simple. Mistaken bans happen, we all know that and it's pretty inevitable. But Anet seems to go the extra mile to make it very tedious to get yourself un-banned if you are innocent.


If Anet are so successful, then an un-ban shouldn't take 3 days to a week to process, as they should have better customer service than that.

If Anet are struggling, then using a ban bot and having humans dealing with appeals would be faster, since they wouldn't have to deal with the bans as well.

All of this assumes that Anet do not employ a ban bot already, which, frankly, they would be bloody stupid not too, since their human "banning machines" aren't any better than a bot would be. The bot would also be much cheaper than a human to run.

On a personal level, I don't actually care, but inefficiency annoys me and software houses are some of the most illogical and inefficient companies in the world. And games developers are amongst the worst software houses. Fourteen years of working in the IT sector is how I know.

Ok, so if the information on the servers is checked before a ban, then most unbans would NEVER happen, since the data is the same before the ban as it is when the ban is appealed.

That's not speculation, it's called logic. Feel free to try developing some. It's something the denizens of this board seem to lack by the truckload, and as Tesco says "Every little helps"

Just to clarify my statements: I know that Anet makes mistakes (and some forum posters have been very cool about it, which is good!); they use a ban-evidence program without a doubt, that is a program which gathers evidence from all sorts of suspicious activities and reports, but then the information is processed by a human, which issues the ban.

And the reason why it takes 3 days to unban is Anet's business model. No monthly fee means that they can't provide the same level of support as, say, WoW. End of story.

Disclaimer: GWG is not Anet's official forum and we can't do anything about the OP's friend situation (if it's true).

I can see exactly how all of those things look and work by logging into the game.

I can't see that at all without breaking into ANET.

So... hmmm.. on the one hand we have people complaining about directly observable game mechanics and style... on the other we have people speculating wildly about things they can in now way interact with or observe... I wonder if these two things are directly equivalent in scope and validity?

Actually, if you'd bothered to think it through, it would occur to you that the information in the system is NOT the same after the ban is challenged by virtue of the challenge. Unless, I don't know, maybe when you contact anet with things you make no attempt to provide any contextual information that would be useful to them. I guess in that case you could be right...

But, sure, go ahead and pretend MY logic is where the problem lies here.

Geez, why do people create threads like this. They have no purpose other than to start a gripefest.

Your friend might be guilty as sin.
Your friend might be innocent.
Actually you yourself have no way of knowing. Your friend could be lying to you.
Your friend's little brother might have logged into his account and done some damage.
The whole "my friend is..." story could be bogus and you're the one with the banned account.

The point is, we can't help you. The only thing you're gonna get from Guru readers is...
"Awww poor thing. I hope that big bully unbans you soon"
and
"Bwahahaha!! I hope your account burns in Hell you evil botter!!!!"

Mods, can we close this one now?

[QUOTE=Ctb][quote]balance, skill and game updates, character and weapon skinsNeatly done, avoiding addressing my point in any way whatsoever and being reduced to name calling. That's not logic, it's avoidance.

Edit: that's why I said "most" not "all" bans would never be reversed. Show me how you contextually prove that you aren't a bot who runs. My friend was banned on that basis ie. Anet claimed she was using a bot to run. She got her account back on appeal. Exactly what contextual evidence could change their original verdict? There was none to provide... See the problem with your idea there? The data was identical apart from an email of appeal.

You want some logic? Then put yourself in the shoes of Anet (well we can't really since most information is confidential, but your best guess is as good as mine):

logs to check are huge, horrible files full of lost of information on various layers (network communication, server status, client status, client action, etc.); you have to take a lot of things into account so you have to write smart programs for helping GMs to look through this mountain of information; all this takes developers' time (which is very precious and costly) and you just can't afford to redo it every week or so; so you tweak the system only when major threats occur (duping, new waves of bots, etc.)

anyway, my point is that it's humanly impossible to check every piece of data, just think like this: next time you're playing GW, just look at the number of things you're doing (each action may be a packet sent to the server, possibly more) over a period of, say, 15 minutes, this includes clicking in the window, using the keyboard shortcuts and typing messages in the various chat windows, plus more importantly all your interaction with other players (which themselves are doing lots of stuff that is recorded in logs)

now after this 15 minutes period, just put on the GM's shoes and look from his perspective: great, I've got to look through the logs of a player and all the players he's interacted with and try to understand what he did ... yeah, sure, very easy task! So he's opened trade window to sell this for nothing, let's look at if he talked to the other player and what he said, and what he did before the trade, and what the other guy did before the trade, and this and that also ...

I hope you're starting to understand the logic here: it's ummanageable unless you've got permanent staff (well, they'll be more like robots, but I digress) to do that, and NC Soft (which handles support for GW if I'm not mistaken) must do that for their collection of games so as to keep the cost of this staff low. In other words: GW being no-monthly-fee gets less support, which means longer times to un-ban.

Hope this helps to clarify the situation.

Disclaimer: I'm not an Anet employee (or fanboy) and have no particular knowledge of their internals, I've just gathered information from various places and used my knowledge of IT for the rest.

Sorry, I couldn't resist: if you can tell me how to solve this problem, I'd like to submit this entry to the Loebner Prize (a.k.a. Turing Test competition) for $100,000 !

(on a more serious topic, coming from a computer science background I can tell you that this is no joke as programs can look very much like human beings, where you regularly perform some pauses and unrelated actions... soon bots will be PM'ing us and having a casual conversation à la Eliza)

My point being: the difficulty of detecting bots varies from "a lot" to "an incredible amount" depending on how much money the RMT companies can make on your MMO. So let's no over-simplify the situation here.

/end of loosely-related comment

---------------------------

Take your goalpost-moving, psuedo-intellectualism to Fark or Slashdot where there are people who won't notice what you're trying to do. Your nonsensical comment comparing two unrelated things was easily exposed as gibberish and I won't play a game of whack-a-mole with you every time you try to change your position midflight.

/ignore

Given the choice of beliving Random Anonymous Person On The Internets(tm) and believing ANet, I will, in the absence of evidence, pick ANet yes.

1) I guarantee that ban-by-bot is much, much, MUCH less accurate than ban by human.
2) I strongly doubt ANet use ban-bots. They'd be idiots if they did, and besides Gaile has said they don't. They're however guaranteed to use filters which flag suspicious events (like someone cycling a set of skills with microsecond accuracy hundreds of times, or someone receiving a large amount of gold from another account) for human GM's to take a closer look at.

So, either their evidence-acquisition program is faulty or some employees are suffering from chronic laziness in actually processing the evidence.

I'm sorry, but if Anet employees find giving 100k to a guildie suspicious then they need a head check. Especially when they then give you items and change back in a separate trade later on. Which the evidence gathering program should be looking for, it's not even a particularly complicated idea.

I still can't believe that they can't write a 100% automated program to ban people without human intervention.

Yes, there would probably be more appeals (I'm not convinced though, given how dodgy their banning process is currently), but this would free the people currently banning people to deal with un-bans. This is based on the assumption that 90% of those who are guilty don't appeal their bans.

The point I was making is simple. There was no contextual information which my friend could or did supply to prove she was not botting. The data Anet had available was identical before and after, aside from an email saying "Um, hello? Yeah, not a bot!"

So, either their filters are really crap, or they are banning by bot since their accuracy is pretty pitiful.

I should also add that I have never actually known someone in game who was banned and claimed to be innocent who lost an appeal. And that's heading towards the 30 mark pretty quick.

Edit : Actually, there was one guy who tried to get his second account back and didn't. He was spamming /rank on his brother in our GH and his brother and some guildies reported him. That was funny as hell, since he had just made R9 on that account.

Cussing out Anet on the forum is not going to help anyone get their account back.

However, persistence and patience with GW support will help if you are legitimately innocent.

Guilty until proven innocent is the standard, because everyone loves the drama and believes that everyone on-line is a liar. It's to much of a reach to assume that someone actually might be telling the truth.

/sad to say the least.

yup, Hitler and Stalin already said that.

Just handle it through support, I once got banned for botting but after I sent in the email with some evidence that I wasn't, I was unbanned within hours.

And I'm the goalpost-moving, psuedo-intellectual who tries to change my position in midflight. Which two unrelated things are gibberish, exactly? Quote and highlight please. Also, please highlight how they were nonsensical, and where exactly you exposed them as such. Oh, never mind, you can't.

Ok, maybe I haven't been clear here. Ctb, take your retarded arse back to the mental home, ok? It's almost feeding time.

I just find the email. NCsoft give me the link to the whatever Privacy Policy and the EULA.
They said that they can't provide the method for finding the offense. (I misunderstanded that email that they don't have a method. sry) And give me the EULA link that they preserve the right for doing so and so. They just didn't answer my question(whether I would be banned for transferring items or not)

Remember I had also been banned once but unlocked a week after. I'm not anti-Anet/NCsoft. I'm also contacting the support for something else and quite satisfy by their fast response. What I doesn't agree is their unclear method of banning innocent ppl. If they have a proof such as a pm "I would buy 100k for 5 bucks", they should contain that in the response.
I helped a guy for his account. NCSoft said he brought money from cash but had no proof mentioned in their reply. In this way, I'd still trust my friend that they are error banned.

Besides the flaming and insulting going on in this thread, I have to lock it. If the matter has been taken up with NCSoft support that's really all that you can do.