March 18 update - Real Money Trading Policy

Inde Edit: There's a new article on GuildWars.com as well titled: Real-Money Trading Policy that concerns the below as well.

March 18th Update

Real-Money Trading

Today we are taking steps to further protect the game from abuse by real-money trading (RMT) companies. Please read our Policy on Real-Money Trading for more information on how and why we block real-money trading.

* We are adding the ability to block certain IP addresses from the game. In the coming days and weeks, we will be using this capability to block addresses of RMT companies that heavily abuse the game.

* We are also adding code to detect and block IP addresses that are running an open proxy, so that players cannot mask their real IP address by connecting to the game through an open proxy.

* To clarify our policy on blocking IP addresses from the game, we added the following line to section 7 of the User Agreement:

NC Interactive may from time to time in its sole discretion implement various forms of filtering, blocking or monitoring of IP addresses or proxies used to use, play or access the Game(s) or the Service, including without limitation blocking or filtering measures that restrict your ability to use, play or access the Game(s) or Service outside of the territories in which NC Interactive makes the Game(s) or Service available.

* To combat a growing problem with account fraud, newly created accounts are now restricted from trading with other players within the first 24 hours after account creation. Please see today’s Dev Update for more information on this change.

Bug Fixes

* Fixed a bug in the Fissure of Woe quest The Tower of Strength [sic] that sometimes caused one of the Shadow Patrol groups to spawn inside the tower.


GuildWiki Notes

Players will need to re-accept the User Agreement that was modified February 2008.

User Agreement Changes -- 18 March 2008

We would like to provide our players with a means to clearly see any changes that are made to the Guild Wars User Agreement. Changes will be shown in a format that allows you to see what was removed, via strike-through, and what was added, via bold text.

Today's changes involved only the date and seventh section of the User Agreement. The changes are noted below:


7. OFFICIAL SERVICE

The Game(s) is designed for official play only as offered through the Service by NC Interactive at the Web Site and not through any other means. You further agree not to access, create or provide any other means through which Game(s) may be played by others, as through server emulators. You agree not to use any hardware or software, including but not limited to third party tools, or any other method of support which may in any way influence or advantage your use of the Service which is not authorized by NC Interactive, including but not limited to the use of "bots" and/or any other method by which the Service may be played automatically without human input. You acknowledge that you do not have the right to create, publish, distribute, create derivative works from or use any software programs, utilities, applications, emulators or tools derived from or created for the Game(s), except that you may use the Software to the extent expressly permitted by this Agreement. You may not take any action which imposes an unreasonable or disproportionately large load on our infrastructure. You may not sell or auction any Game(s) accounts, characters, items, coin or copyrighted material, nor may you assist others in doing so. NC Interactive may from time to time in its sole discretion implement various forms of filtering, blocking or monitoring of IP addresses or proxies used to use, play or access the Game(s) or the Service, including without limitation blocking or filtering measures that restrict your ability to use, play or access the Game(s) or Service outside of the territories in which NC Interactive makes the Game(s) or Service available.

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Here are the notes, in particular, I'm addressing this one:

Sounds good, and I'm glad they're moving to stop RMT abuse, but there's one catch: a lot of podunk ISPs out there have misconfigured gateways that effectively function as open proxies, and I think a lot of legitimate users are going to start getting blocked.

Now, this isn't really ANET's fault or problem - the ISPs should be contacted and told to fix their network configuration problems. But many people won't know this is what happened to their accounts and I think you're going to see an awful lot of the "wwaaaah my account was banned for nothing" posts here pretty darn soon...

You really think they will be banned for trying to connect from an ''Open Proxy''?

Or will it simply just block their connection until they connect normally?

Except they dont actually ban your account. I'm sure it will state a reason for being denied access however.

Sadly, this is very likely to happen. I wonder when the flood will start coming in...

It is.

Any word on whether they've fixed the gold trader reporting stuff yet? Reporting people that jumped out-of-district would help quite a bit.

I hadn't considered that, I just assumed block to mean ban.

Still, do you think people will actually bother to read any message or look up any code it throws? :\

That last bit about 24 hour incommunicado is a great addition IMHO. Won't STOP fraud, but it certaintly will help while true new accounts only have a minimal loss.

I approve. And we all know how much I matter to the entire world.

EDIT: I am awesome and never wrong...

A little QQ is worth a step against teh ebil gold sellorz of dewm (and the buyers that keep them in business).

remember kidz, dont buy gold

I was wondering where the new center of the universe was located.

I like this update, may cause a few problems at first, but nothing that can't be fixed. Hell they even managed to fix a bug this time.

knock on wood but ive not encountered a single ite**** bot. I think/hope Anet will find solutions for the legitimate players who will be affected. Its the pedophilic tin foil hat wearing community that will really take it on the chin

Wow...way to go Arenanet! The game is *JUST* out for 3 years, and you're already taking measures against something that has been happening since june 2005! Hats off to ya! And maybe while you're at it, why not try to address the real problem, which is that your friggin drop rates suck? Why the heck do you think that people buy ingame gold? *HINT* you've got a "casual" game that rewards heavy farmers.
Thank god you're game developers and not running a country.

Don't: bot,buy/sell gold for real world currencies, or hide.

Seems fair to me.....

Now we need to add:

Play nice with others.

Those bots are certainly tying up game servers by spawning lone instances for themselves 24/7. This seems largely

A) A move to reduce load on their own servers.

B) A pilot for how effective such an approach might be in GW2.

Good to hear that Anet at least doing something more about those gold trader. However, I would afraid that more account would be error-banned after this update.

well just need to wait and see who the first person with a non-static ip that gets blocks posts a thread......shall we take bets?????

I look forward to see how effective the changes will be.

IP changer anyone?

Open Proxy =/= any firewall.

They are blacklisting known proxies, not whitelisting non-proxied clients.

In other words, in order to get filtered by this, you need to actively route connection through a third-party external proxy, not associated with your network.

This kind of thing cannot happen by accident, unless your ISP is doing something really shady. Proxied connections of this type are also of considerably lesser quality when used for real-time networking.

lol yeah the game would be much more fun if I could just have everything now.
Goes both ways. Botting is not "ok". And getting 10 golds & 2 armbraces from every run is not the answer.

Actually it has NOTHING to do with protecting new players. One manner of bot would do the first few quests in Factions and trade away the quest rewards once they reach like, level 5, get deleted and recreated in a manner of miniutes. You could see the E/W bots/farmers in Shing Jing all the time.

A very smart way to fix the problem that won't negatively impact normal players.


Edit: Open proxies are those "computer thingies" that let you change your IP address. A.net is blocking those too.

Where are you getting that info? That's not what the update notes say. The update notes say "open proxy". While it could be that they're banning known proxies, a more effective and simpler route to finding a proxied connection is to simply:

1. Get the originating IP address
2. Issue a standard HTTP GET request to it (e.g. "get guildwars.com/test.txt")
3. If that works, block the IP

Slashdot has been doing it for years as a mechanism against the shitstorm.pl flood codes that have been periodically released by trolls to flood the site's comments.

RUN for the hills!!!

They found out something, if you own a server....you can change ur ip address!!!
Everyone tihnks im in NE...lol.

Do what now? When did I say it "protects" new players? I am saying new "honest" players will suffer minimal loss of active community involvement via trading.

And uh, I meant players... not characters. I still blame you for misinterpreting my horrible communication skills.... soon an edit will make your critique laughable...

Great update!

Good thing, also good fix for the people that like to clear FoW.

I certainly applaud them for taking the time to do this. I hope it will cut down on the number of gold sellers in general, though I doubt it will have much of an effect.

Great move by anet against gold sellers, jsut hope no innoscents get banned.
spelt wrong to further my point..whats the point?..no sure

Erm. The notes say the trading restriction is only for fresh accounts, not characters.

I thought they had fixed that one...

Props to ANet, they've been able to keep up with most of, if not all of, the major complaints that we've been coming up with. I for one am thrilled that they are taking steps to address the situation, whether the steps work or not. At least they are trying, especially while they are working on an entirely new game at the same time.

Major props to ANet, their customer service and updates are awesomes. One of the major reasons I am still playing guild wars, a year and a half after i first picked up prophecies...

Why just the gold sellers? Why not all third party program users (INCLUDING MAP MODDERS OR W/E THERE CALLED GRANDMASTER CANT GETTING NOOBS) and the bots...but this is a good start.

It will still have the same effect, after being banned, a bot will not be able to continue the same operation.

Aren't IP bans ineffective to a degree because of dynamic IPs?

Because making a new account more frequently than every 24 hours is affordable.

P.S. trial accounts can't trade either.

Yes IP bans are very ineffective. Anyone using a router can change their ip in a few seconds, just by changing the MAC address for the router.

I can only speak of my experience with banning IP's here on Guru but it does have a measure of effect. If banning the user name doesn't work we change to banning IP's, but always first verifying that it's not connected to another forum users' account. I wonder if ArenaNet will be doing the same perhaps? It's fairly easy for us though to see if the attached IP happens to also belong to a legitimate user based on their posts. Or if it's a university or library IP for instance. For the large gold sites that persistently and constantly change IP's we have to implement other measures such as email bans. So while there are certainly a lot of variables I find that it only slows them down, makes the registration and posting process harder instead of stopping them. Maybe that will be enough though here.

Texmod has been said to be a legal program by ANet themselves.

I wonder if I will get banned, my computer is protected by the firewall of my university... Don't know what kind of security they have built in, but for example, I cant Change Wikipedia articles because they cant "see" my IP-adress...

Since we're discussing today's update here, I wanted to provide a little note that we just did, or will be doing, a small update to the game regarding the UA. It seems that you will need to sign the User Agreement twice today. This is because (to be perfectly honest) we didn't have the UA with the new text in the first build today, even though you were asked to sign it. (This means you signed the UA that you had already signed. ) We realized that error and when you sign again, you'll be signing with the new sentence in place. The details of what was added are on this page.

Except that the gold sellers have a much bigger insentive to get around the ban than people who cause problems here. I'm sure Anet is doing more than whats described in the release notes to track them, but still simply banning by ip doesn't work.