A word of warning before trading gold among accounts

Just to make sure this is clear (no one responded) this is between *accounts*, not characters. Anet has no idea that different accounts are the same person, obviously characters on the same account are the same person. Many here have several accounts from back before you could purchase character slots or for other reasons. There are also a few legitimate reasons for one sided trades between different peoples accounts.

They also only tend to flag high value transfers - gold sellers aren't going to bother with 50k or probably even 100k (not sure the cut off) so those amounts tend not to get noticed. Higher gold trades that are one sided tend to get flagged and the larger they are the more likely they are to get flagged. Things like pre-gold for post-gold are going to be hard to track so they will tend to get banned if they get high enough to get a flag. Said bans tend to initially get automated responses, a little further down the support chain and things get fixed.

Such is life in an online game and isn't unique to Anet, and in my experience in other online games Anet is - at worst - middle of the road (and those that tend to be more lenient have MUCH more issues with gold traders). Given how most logs are stored I *really* doubt that they are going to be able to see a series of trades that occur that far apart in that way and know what it is.

Once the ticket goes to support it is not hard to track as they know exactly what, when, and where to look, but until then if *you* are support and you see 300k sent to one account for either nothing or something that is totally worthless what are you going to think? Will you look at that and think "Obviously this was a trade for a pre-mini pet for post gold and I have to look through 30 minutes of *everything* those accounts did to track down that it may be that or the myriad other legitimate reasons that make up .01% of these instances".

Like any other online game you do a reasonable look at the account and ban if you don't see anything - if it is unfair then they will e-mail support and things get fixed. For whatever reason in no monthly fee online games people get *really* bent out of shape over this even though the pay to play games are no better or generally worse (and that is supposedly part of what you are paying a monthly fee for). If you really can't stand this you need to go back to offline games where you can't get banned as this is Situation Normal. Even in real life there are times where there is no reason why the authorities should initially know you are in the right without you telling them something. In those cases they also remove your rights until you talk to a position of authority (police or in harder cases the courts).

A simple way to solve this is to have an Appeal box come up when a person who is banned tries to log on, but that kinda means Anet needs to spend resources reading the appeals...oh nevermind.

So does this also mean giving away freebies (gold items, ...) to people could get you banned?

If done so to guildies and sometimes to random newbies in ascalon or the likes.
Reading this I stop doing that, yay another loss to the community!

Will ask the merchants prize instead now and hope I'll be save.

WE REALLY NEED AN ANSWER FROM A.NET ON THIS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If you read the thread you will see its only money transactions that are flagged.

wow this is frigging stupid. so now i cant send 300k to my other account to get legendary skill hunter? anet just keeps failing moar and moar

Only money? Nope sir. If you read other threads on this topic you would know a case of a player getting banned for giving other player Ectos by dropping them on the ground.

It's obvious they can track players acquiring items of value, stacks of ectos and armbraces are certainly on the list. Random golds or greens aren't, way too hard to determine their worth, impossible for an automated system.

But to the topic, the whole bannings problem looks very serious, all their saying that they don't automatically ban anyone, that final judgment in each case is up to a human GM seems really untrue.
Are those GMs that much ban-stick happy they don't even try to see that both affected accounts may belong to one player, or both accounts belong to normal players not RMT companies or bot-networks. Can't they realise a player can just give a friend some money, that 200k or 500k is just spare change for many, that players can run contests where they giveaway ingame prizes or just do big giveaways to 'random' people. That players can just lend some gold to their friends... this and lots of other basic obvious similar cases happen all the time.

They should grow a backbone and learn not to let companies walk all over them without at least putting up some resistance.

Which is probably what they actually do, despite that not being what I'm actually saying .

Wow.... so... your opinion is basically that ANET should ignore the vast number of gold trades that look exactly like what you're doing because you spend so much time in front of your computer that you not only have two accounts, but you have two accounts that you're maximizing longterm, grind-based titles on?

And ANET is the failure here?

Wow....

Anet's method is retarded.. Players don't deserve to be sprayed with the same fire that's meant for the botters and gold-sellers and that's the bottom line! SCSoft/Anet need to realize they can't stop 100% of it because they'll be taking down innocent players along with them, which is sad if you ask me. We payed to have continual access so long as we follow the rules (which're hopefully lawful). The rules should be lawful and balanced out so that players are not compromised for something potentially as easily misinterpretable as trade.

No, you didn't. You paid for the software and an account, and you got both. ANET makes it clear that if they identify you breaching the EULA, you'll be banned. If you do something the appears to breach the EULA, you'll be banned. You NEVER bought "continual access" and nobody ever sold any such promise.

You could be a dweeb and try to press a lawsuit over it if you were innocent, but given that:

a) most people have played for hundreds of hours or more now
b) very, very few people will ever become a false positive
and
c) ANET is willing to review your circumstances and correct a mistaken ban

I think you'd have an awful hard time winning any such case.

This is one of those things that falls in the category of "Grow up, kid". Yea, sometimes life has minor inconveniences. If having your account erroneously banned for a few days is the biggest problem you ever have with a company, give me your luck in dealing with business, please. I'd use all of it up just dealing with those idiots at the cable company.

I'd never go as far as to open up any case in court for a mere game. You're absolutely right when you mentioned "grow up, kid", however, you've directed the statement to the wrong poster (aka: me). It's great that they take their time and review your case to unban you (which takes approximately 72 hours, parallel to an automated temp-ban.. o_o) ..and the rest of what you've posted is stating the obvious as well as a repeat of my post.

I didn't really mean you, specifically in any of that. More referring to the OP's buddy and the handful of people in similar circumstances.

And, to clarify my comments regarding the lawsuit, I just meant that to illustrate an extreme reaction from somebody who felt particularly wronged. It's justifiable to sue a company for misleading or fraudulent activity, I'm just illustrating that somebody would have an awful hard time proving that occurred with ANET if they were the victim of an erroneous ban given all the other circumstances.

lol i spend alot of time? i have 3k hours over 35 months. thats nothiing compared to most people who have played this game since day 1. legendary skill hunter isnt a grind. it takes at most 1 week to get it if u have beaten all 3 campaigns. fail and assume less plz

I agree with lyra. There really is no efficient, cost effective way to do this how we would like it to happen.

Sorry that innocents get taken out, but A-Net has been known to reverse such things. Not every action is fool proof. Some innocents are going to be taken out for the greater good (and hopefully have their accounts reinstated).

Ive done one way trade between my accounts....i never got banned for that. Im from the same IP. Not likely to get banned.

Now...two accounts with differing IPs, more likely to be banned.

See the difference?

For those saying that all bans should be manually reviewed before being implemented, I'd suggest you take a look at the "Stats on RMT" thread
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...php?t=10274683

The interesting thing in this is:
* Terminated 4,876 accounts associated with RMT networks in 2 weeks

There's no way that this volume could be handled manually!

Given 2 weeks, there is usually an 80 hour period of time (10 days @ 8h per day).

Lets say that it takes 10 minutes to trawl through the logs to verify each case. That would mean that you could do 6 investigations per hour = a maximum of 480 investigations in 2 weeks.

But people need toilet breaks, there's meeting, other interruptions, etc - so reduce that 80 hours available to a more practical 70 hours - that drops it down to about 420 investigations in 2 weeks.

With 4876 'incidents', you're talking full time work for 12 people solely dedicated to banning accounts for RMT.

And for what? What is the actual error rate? 1%? 5%? I'd be stunned if it was any higher than that.

Taking what I'd expect to be the worst case of 5%, you'd be talking a rough number of about 250 errors. These then get communicated to support, who then investigates them - at 10 minutes per error spent in investigation (plus the time in email/resolution), your talking a bit less than full time work for one person.

In reality, I'd expect the error rate to be more around the 1-2% range - much higher, and they'd try to refine the rules further for flagging accounts because it starts to cost them too much to deal with false positives. Much like people do when their email spam checker keeps generating false positives/false negatives.

Sucks to get flagged by mistake, but it's simply not practical to try to do all this manually - the scope of the problem is too large.

Not to mention - if I was employed to spend *all* my time investigating the same crap repeatedly, I'd get pretty sick of it and *leave*. *lol*

Indeed, I was banned and they removed all 312k that I have been saving for an emerald blade over the last 2 months. I emailed gaile regarding this issue, and she is looking into it for me.

PlayNC support was:

A). Untimely (took them over 70 hours to even get back with me)
B). Rude (I was treated like a number, and I was guilty in their eyes no matter what I did)
C). Unwilling to even give my the benefit of the doubt.
D). Unwilling to even look at the evidence I provided against their claims (I screenshotted my Checking account activity and both of my credit card activity pages back to April 8th, clearly showing no gold purchased).


I was horrified by PlayNC's rudeness and total unwillingness to cooperate. They are a terrible company when it comes to player support. I wish ANET had the means to make their support totally internal instead of relying on those jerks at PlayNC. As far as I am concerned, PlayNC can take a long walk off a very short pier.

So it is ok to ban innocent people, because NCsoft is too cheap to hire enough people?

To fight their declared war on RMTs. They should sure as hell assign enough people to it.


And how many never appeal because NCsoft lies to them about bans???
How many loose their money, they invested in GW???

[sarcasm]They are just poor underpayed and overworked support members. They breached 5 million units, but that doesn´t mean they can hire more support staff, because well it is a one time income for NCsoft. [/sarcasm]

Waiting for Lyra Song, CTB and Dawnmist to declare that this treatment of paying customers is completly justified and A-Ok.

On a forum I participate at, we were going to hold a GW raffle/lottery for our members but had to cancel it due to the pay out having the chance to ban us and dissolve the gold. Now how sad is that? We weren't even comfortable helping out fellow guildies with gold or high dollar materials. Another example is that when I quit for two years, I lent a fellow guildie a good bit of gold. He's willing to pay it back but I'm not even going to risk it, for both our sakes.

gotta ?

I do most if not all the selling for my fellow guildies(out of work with an injury and I have more time them to do the long process of selling stuff).

I sold a guildies Unded Kuuna and Unded Water Djinn for him. I received a certain amount for doing the transactions.

Can I and my guildies get banned for this?

Thats troll and flame fodder. And you deserve a kick in the head for it.

There is no justification for poor customer service.

You must understand who here has the poor customer support.

Rahja clearly made a distinction between ANET and NCsoft's support.

You notice he mentioned Gaile (WHO IS FROM ANET....NOT NCSOFT) to look into it. Notice Gaile's new job position as "Support Liason"...hmmn

You might have noticed Gaile often said when she was still CR...When people got banned unjustly, to email her or PM and she will look into it to get the person unbanned. You call that POOR customer service? Gaile is REAL and ONE PERSON and she took time out to help people out.

(I'm betting thats why she got the new position, since theres more that can be done on the customer support side on individual accounts, than deal with whiners on a forum.)

You'll notice the clear distinction.

Anet support is very good. Anet is a small company based in the US.
NCsoft support is not very good. NCsoft is a large company based in Korea.

Larger companies give less of a RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GO about one customer.
Smaller companies can't afford to lose anyone.

Yes....its UNFORTUNATE.
Yes....it IS NOT justified.
Yet....IT IS INEVITABLE.

Whining about it doesn't help since Anet's strings are being pulled by a bigger company.

They need to worry about profit and efficiency and efficacy. The more people above you, the longer and more complicated simple things become.

Lets make a comparison to another game i play.

The Sims.
The Sims is created by Maxis.
Maxis is owned by EA.
All support has to go through EA's website.
EA has HORRIBLE support (updates, patches, etc)
Maxis can't really do anything since they are controlled by EA.

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

Sorry...but thats life and business.

I'd love for everything to be ideal and perfect....but that aint happening...and its not realistic.

So suck it up, be an adult and deal with it.

You must remember this is a flagging because of suspicious behavior.
Its not a RANDOM flagging.
Its a flagging based on a system thats designed to find suspicious behavior.

Why? I was right. You've spent over 10% of your time for the last three years in Guild Wars. That's the equivalent of a part time job for an awful lot of people. On one video game. That you paid for twice.

And just because other people have even less useful things to do with their spare time doesn't mean you aren't playing the game an awful lot. Aspiring to be not the worst isn't really a great argument to make (unless you're a politician).

It's your time, I don't really care what you do with it. The point is you're probably a minority of Guild Wars players for not only having two accounts, but two accounts that you're maxing out titles on. Most of the people I know in game haven't maxed a single title yet on ANY character. As a minority, you don't get to dictate how things work. Just because 1 out 1000 people might get misidentified as a bot doesn't mean a whole lot when 1 out of 10 (these statistics are totally researched and absolutely rock solid and not at all coming out of my rear end, I swear to god...) are getting bot-spammed.

No, they're a typical company when it comes to player support. Unfortunately, this is the standard. And compared to most other industries, this is pretty good treatment, too.

It's what happens when people demand that their products be as cheap as possible. You can either pay more and have some added benefits or you can pay less and only get a very basic package. Video games are expensive to develop, and they're priced to be fairly cheap compared to most other entertainment. Unfortunately, this is the end result.

Well, since they're a successful company, it must be. If it weren't, intelligent consumers wouldn't buy their products and they'd go out of business.

You get what you pay for. If you don't like the way a company treats you, don't give them your money. It's not ANET's fault most consumers are too clueless to understand such a simple concept.

And it's not abnormal either. If people actually made intelligent and rational decisions as consumers, companies like Best Buy, Wal Mart, EA Games, etc. wouldn't even exist.

But people don't make intelligent choices as consumers, so this is what everyone, including those few people who do actually try to make smart buying decisions, wind up getting.

LOL, this thread has made me laugh quite a bit! Guild wars is a great game, Anet are like gods to me, without them guild wars wouldn't be what it is (my opinion) for months people probably complained about the fact that so many bots and RMT's were taking all the gold so to speak and people wanted a system to tackle this problem! so with some time and probably a fair bit of the companies money (resources and what not) they eventually came up with the system that so many people wanted! there are alot of good replies i've read on this thread, but, now we have the system that we wanted, which does work (hardly any bots around now)! people are now complaining about it! true some instances will be innocent people getting banned but the system is just doing its job! what it was programmed to do! if it notices anything suspicious (i.e. large amounts of valuable items or gold being traded alone, nothing coming from the other person) then it's going to detect the situation as suspicious as some ppl have already stated! I hope this makes sense to people, I'm not usually good at explaining things :P but there you have it! My opinion on this matter!

Peace out! Monty for President

I have read so many posts of yours, where you defend ANet. It is basically what you always do! You always defend ANet!

A kick in the head?? Didn´t know you are so weak!

And the justification for banning innocents, even though all the "evidence" are in the hands of ANet, is?? Ah, right: Not able to hire enough people.

BTW banning innocents is bad customer service! But you justified that, didn´t you?

If your car doesn´t run anymore, would you care that it was the eletronic company, that is to be blamed? Would you complain to them or would you complain to the car manufacturer, expecting them to send it to the right department??

For me ANet/NCsoft is a blackbox. The inner workings are not of interest for me. I don´t care what department is responsible and I shouldn´t have to.
They are one company: Anything bad, that they do, falls on both partners.

A nice service for how many of the banned players? Remember the majority doesn´t visit a forum and nobody tells the new players that they can appeal. So "something special" for the forum veterans.

There is a new message on the login screen now. It tells people about RMT. Notice that not a single word is said about appealing!!!

That doesn´t work here, because unlike the real world ANet has all the evidence. They are just to lazy to look at them. Instead they put you in jail, not telling you that you have the right to call a lawyer and stopping any investigations to determine if you really did something bad, while keeping you in jail for the rest of your life. And there is no judge to question that behaviour and to ask for the "evidence" they have. Even if the evidence say, you are innocent, without you starting the investigation, you are kept in prison, unlike real world.

And that's why "ban first and let support deal with the innocent people later" is a very bad idea.

---

@dawnmist: I strongly suspect that most of those bans were not 1-investigation-to-1-ban, piecemeal bans, but rather the results of identifying the entire operation of particular RMT companies, so a-net got multiple accounts per investigation.

ok ctb. ur last argument was a perfectly coherent and civil statement, so therefore i respect your opinion and will respond in kind.

i may be in the minority of guild wars players overall, but this random banning does not only concern the minority of guild wars players. according to the other posts in this thread, people have been banned for merely giving money away. im pretty sure most people have given items of at least some worth to their friends in game (because the only gifts worth giving are those that are worth something). if this is true, that means there are potentially much more people banned by an automated service that not many know how to deal with. most guild wars players ARE casual players, so most will not visit forums such as these. since casual players make up the majority of the game, anet COULD possibly be tarnishing their reputation with many players who are banned for giving/trading gold with friends/own account. anet is responsible in that they are the ones who wrote the detection program in the game, and they should be the ones to fix or rewrite their own coding.

I'm not really defending Anet.

I'm just dislike posts with any lack of logic or common sense.

So if it seems like im defending Anet, I'm really not. I'm just refuting stupidity.

Thats why ive posted against Anet many times, for their stupid decisions and changes.

I've studied martial arts since i was in middle school including Muay Thai, Eskrima (I love my knives), Kenpo and am currently studying Capoeira. I've knocked out 2 people (both males over 160 lbs each...and significantly taller than me) COLD with right roundhouse. People in my class know to stay away from my right side, even then i love faking roundhouses and then going into a reverse hook kick. I dance and I snowboard, so my legs are very strong.

Trust me, You don't want a kick in the head from me.

No amount of people will be able to watch EVERY ACCOUNT, EVERY CONVERSATION LOG, EVERY TRADE, EVERY IP and EVERY CLIENT.

Thats why you automate things.

You clearly have no idea how this works, so I'll stop talking over your head.

A false positive ban is not bad customer service.
NOT removing a false positive ban is bad customer service.

A UPC scanner in the supermarket is the fastest way to check items.
But a UPC scanner is NOT perfect.
It will only work if the UPC code matches up to the item.
Computers have glitches, stickers get misplaced, etc.
If a scanner scans a UPC code but registers the wrong item, it is a mistake.

Mistakes are NORMAL.

Now, GOOD customer service would be the manager coming to correct it, canceling it out and rescanning the UPC.
Bad customer service would be the manager NOT correcting it.

Sorry if im still talking over your head. I can't help it. I like to explain things.

Yes, id want to know exactly what was wrong with my car, since I like knowing stuff.

Wether its a manufacturing defect, or simple wear and tear.

I don't like being ignorant and simply screaming "FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT" and blaming random people.

You just want to complain.You want everything perfect.
Any mistakes is instantly someone's fault and someone must be blamed.
Any mistakes mean the system isn't working as its supposed to.

False positives are INEVITABLE.
There is NO OTHER SYSTEM that is even remotely plausible to handle the amount of traffic on the servers.

The customer is NOT always right.
Uninformed, ignorant customers that abuse the employees are WORTH losing.

As I've said in another post, the automated message is harsh and doesn't mention appealing.

If you are truly innocent, and not willing to fight for it, and do everything you can, including going on guild wars fansites to get more information, you get no sympathy from me.

If Anet wanted to actually ban you for no reason.
Thats their right to.
You agreed to it when you signed up the game.