March 18 update - Real Money Trading Policy

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.