How do they know?

Ok i am not starting this thread to have an arguement about the morals of buying money off of ebay...
pretty much my buddy and me where sitting in snake dance.. and i told him about a story i heard here on the guru about a dude getting banned for buying gold on ebay..

well he said somthing that really got my thinkin....

HOW DO THEY KNOW YOU BOUGHT GOLD OFF OF EBAY?

i mean its entirely possible for a UBER rich pal of your to hand you 100k or even 1mil if he is a good pal.... how do they know..

The only thing i can think of is the fact that they have probable cause when they see a huge transfer of funds or ecto in game..

but then wouldent that cause a problem when people try to buy great items off of the forum here that cost amazing amounts of gold and ecto...

once again this is not an attempt at an arguement.. its just a head scratcher... that is all

That is a good question, i'm no e-bayer, but it is wrong if someone gets kicked off of the game for buying money off of e-bay. For god sake if someone wants to pay for fake money with real money, let them go for it ANET should stay outa ppls business especially if their dealing with real money.
But then again its just my opinion.

It would probably be easier to track the seller of the gold, if its a corporation type thing, rather than the buyer. And then they see who made transactions with that seller, and those are the prime targets. If its a one or two time thing then I'd think it would be hard to get noticed... but of course I don't endorse ebaying gold ^^.

Just a thought. (Also I have no idea if I'm right, its just a guess).

hands foogle a flame proof jacket and a copy of the bible..

I don't beleive you can get caught.
Why? Cause if you ever farm when America has
favor of the gods. You will see the same 3 peeps. Advertising
Wtb: all chaos axes 15^50 and Fellblades 15^50, all
Ectos, and All Black dyes. All day/nite. Some times they are there
when we dont have favor, but about to in 3 more wins .My point is how can you afford all this? And buying all these everyday there is? The only way I know. Is by getting money from ebay. How else?

well.. u can only hold 1mil in ur storage as money, so when ur full u need to buy ecto's/shards/highend items to empty ur money again.

Yea we all know that....
What Im saying is I see the same 3 people
that I see every freakin time Im in ToA.
Buying these. How is it possible that you can
afford all this every freakin day/all day? I would
say I smell e-bay.

Well unless they have unlimited storage space.. i would say they bought low and sold high. maybee they are honest traders..

dont forget.. inocent untill proven guilty

But i do understand where you are goin with that... but i fear we are already falling off topic... lets try to steer back to how anet knows people buy gold off ebay

so far D4's comment seems the most probable

Simple correlation of names. Sure you might have a friend who gives out gold but I doubt that friend gives out 1 mill to everyone in the game does he? So if they see the same names doing this over and over again they tie that info together and then they go back and check the transaction logs for that name and run down the list of everyone that name has traded with without compensation and bam there you go. That's how they know.

Where's the fun in that?



I think A-Net may loosely track transactions. They understand that people with two accounts may be going back and forth between. They understand that some items cost a chunk of change. But if they see some dude like Zomg Paladin (made up name) constantly logging on just to give gold to people, it may raise suspicion.

Well if you have never talked to an account before...and then they hand you 1 mil...its quite apparent.

hahahhaha! Tyria isn't democratic, nor is it America Just messing.

There are a couple of posts floating around in the Riverside inn, with the poster complaining that their account was banned. And it turned out they were innocent (Although I was thinking otherwise ) It seems as though a-net is smiting the heck out of anything. If you are in their path you are screwed.

I don't know how A-net can tell if you're buying gold, but I can tell you this...

Don't buy gold! XD

I think it would be pretty easy for Anet to track down a godl farming network. You see say... 5 people, who only farm, constantly giving the same person 100k. This person never trades anything in return for the money, but is often seen giving MANY people 100k or more in exchange for nothing. Bam... red flags go off, and accounts get monitored/tracked/banned.

I think you guys are losing sight of reality. Guild Wars sold well over a million copies last year. Do you think it is cost effective to pay someone to sit at a pc and view hundreds of thousands of accounts just to try to find someone that trys to bend the rules?

Imo if someone was caught buying some in game items this way then they obviously did something else stupid enough to get A-Net to look at their account specifically. Such as make an offensive name, or constantly spam offensive words over chat. A-Net would defineately like to get rid of the farmers more than the single person that bought from that farmer. I really don't think it would be possible to just randomly pick accounts and look at recent transactions just in the hopes of busting a single account. If only people could imagine the # of people playing GW on any givin time.

You're looking at it wrong from a technical standpoint. What the more likely situation is is that they simply set up a database query since all the accounts are logged into one big database. The query could have simply been to look at all transactions of 1 million gold or more and then they probably narrowed the search criteria further to one million gold or more without any alteration to the inventory field in the database. From this it would probably be pretty easy to get a good grasp on the accounts and IP's that are selling gold and then working backwards from there along the transaction lists they could start issuing bans. It likely wouldn't take more than 16 manhours tops considering that they probably have seperate GM staffs for each region.

Easy near foolproof way of doing it...

First off, in most farming operations there's one account that farms the gold, one that holds the gold, and one that distributes the gold.

All anet has to do is track the accounts that are on 24/7 (either shift farmers or bots), the few accounts they trade to, and the accounts all the money from the second set of accounts goes to. If one account "gives away" 5 million gold in 1 day, and none of that gold was actualy earned by that person, or the person that they got it from, it's pretty obvious what's going on, even though the "professional" farmers have tryed to set it up so it's harder to link the accouts.

All anet has to do is follow the money trail, after all it's probably highly unlikely that a 55 that farms and sells only, never buys, returns gold to another account on a routine basis, and that account gives gold to yet another count moments before that gold is trades away... Quite unlikely any human that's not selling gold on EBAY would do somthing like that. Then they find out who got that gold, and ban them along with the whole lot of accounts that are actualy involved in the operation.

You all are funny... Not one of you knows the truth, so you all just toss out bullshit ideas. Since nobody really knows, how about you all just stop talking about it. If you buy gold, you get banned... that simple... who cares how they find out.

ebay farmer: selling GW gold
hidden anet spy: ooooh ill buy. lets set this up
ebay farmer: ok my IGN is Sell Crap
anet spy: cool! *goes and tracks down this persons trade history, maybe watches them for a while, catches all who deal with them, then POW! banstick*

Anet should stay out of peoples bussiness???

First off this is ANETS business they own it and everything in it.
They have also clearly stated the rules for THEIR business and buying or selling in-game items for real world money is a violation of the rules that everyone who plays this game agreed to before they were allowed to play it.

I'm not even going to go into the amount of damage that an in-game farming company or several thousands of them can do to the economic balance of the game that Anet has created.
And why do you believe someone should be allowed to break the rules set forth by the people who created and own the game to profit from it?

You know what would stop all those ebay gold sellers and chines sweat shops? If A-net started selling gold themselves, and change their EULA so that it says buying from them through some in-game method won't be illegal. Since it's THEIR gold anyway that they will be selling, they profit from it. Also, i'm not sure how the game is with the gold (whether there is a certain amount that can be in game at one time, or if gold and affected gold drops is limitless), but if gold in-game is limitless, then they can just "spawn?" the gold to sell. I'm saying, if everyone that plays GW had 1 million gold in their storage, and 100k on each character, would the monsters stop dropping gold completely? Or would they still keep dropping the same amount of gold, but we won't be able to pick it up since we'll be capped in gold that we can hold?

Oh and to quote sixdartbart: "I'm not even going to go into the amount of damage that an in-game farming company or several thousands of them can do to the economic balance of the game that Anet has created." Since technically ebayers and gold websites are already destroying it, why not A-net reap the profit, instead of the others? Not trying to say screw the economy, but it's a better option then letting "the others" profit.

I may have lost some of you but my point is: A-net sell gold a bit cheaper than all the ebayers and gold websites, and I bet you that you profit, and make the others lose big business! just my .02

ha you tell that to traffic wardens in england.. if they slap a parking ticket on you, you have to appeal against it and prove to them you werent illegally parked. as far as they are concerned you're already guilty! they are all scumbags! they been known to ticket ambulances on call outs. crashed vehicles and god knows what else.

sorry rant over

i think anet would be more absorbed with nailing the destributors though, than that bit of customer base that pays for stuff in the game.

Still there is no grasp on reality. Imo only the absolute obvious ones get caught. I am not sure of what it costs to buy a gp in this game but an easy scenario is:

A-Net finds a account breaking the rules and bans the account. The banned one buys another account online, starts farming again and I am sure it doesn't take them long to build enough gold again to pay for the account.
Unless A-Net could find them the very second they start farming I hardly find it worth while trying to catch and ban accounts.

On the other hand A-Net bans the account because they know the banned one will buy another account and A-Net gets more royalties.

Who really knows. I think Lord Mahal said it best.WTF cares it is breaking the rules, don't do it, and you will never know how they catch someone.

^ angry troll....cant someone ban negative people like this?.. i mean isnt the forums a place for people to go and discuss all opinions and ideas?.. by your way of thinkin this site forum would be empty.

stop being angry and abusive to others opinions .. you make yourself look even more like a 13 year old prepubecent child that is angry at mommy and daddy for not getting him the POWER WHEELS he wanted so very badly. grow up. this site is about opinions so stop trolling please

If you're going to buy gold off Ebay, the trick is to launder the money, just like you'd do in real life. Buy like 7 different accounts, then have 1 of those accounts set up a deal with the ebayer. When the Ebayer drops the gold off, have the first account divvy the gold up between 5 of the other accounts. Then have those 5 other accounts clean the money by investing in game items that are worth large amounts, like black dyes, runes, etc. Next, have those 5 other accounts drop the items off in the 7th account. Then the 7th account will transfer the items back into money and slowly feed that money into your real account at like 5k at a time.

I doubt that A-Net could track that. You might get the first account banned, though.

J/K

Don't buy gold off Ebay. I just was reading these posts and this thought popped into my head. I had to share.

Funny... no one mentioned the phrase "Intellectual Property" yet.

Anyway...

All self righteousness aside I have a few thoughts/points:

1. We live (well, most of us do and the game is located) in a CAPITALIST societies and yet people love to try and take some moral high road on the concept of buying gold/items = cheating. That is just too funny.

Usually it's touted as some moral issue about how it isn't fair to those that don't want to spend money on in game stuff and would rather earn it.

To those people I ask:

What about people that have more free time? They can play more and that's not fair to those of us with jobs, kids, school, etc...

What about people that can afford to spend more money on better computers or multiple accounts? Are they cheating by having that advantage? Is it fair?

Some people actually have more money than they do available time. Or should I say their time is worth more to them than spending umpty hours in a game to be able to compete.

Other people have more time than they do money... (Funny how that works, maybe if they were more busy they would have money? That's a whole different rant though.)

If spending more money to get more out of a game with less time commitment is not fair then their should also be a maximum amount of time you can play in a day because that is also an unfair advantage.

(sarcasm) Wow, imagine that... life… unfair?!?! (/sarcasm)

2. The main reasons that game companies generally don’t like the buying and selling of in game items is because: A. they do not profit from these sales, and B. they are a customer service NIGHTMARE (so and so took my gold but didn’t give me an item, etc..).

There is no economic balance in their minds. As a business it’s all about the bottom line. They could give a poop less about the “economy” of guild wars unless it was responsible for them loosing customers. (That's actually kind of funny since gear is such an afterthought in this game anyway.)

There are games that do not take issue with the buying and selling of their items outside of the game. Ultima Online is a prime example of such a game. They’ve been around for ever and you can buy and sell anything you want in or out of the game. Their economy isn't shot to hell. It's still going fairly strong.

3. The “Intellectual Property” BS that game companies love to tout as their reason for not allowing out of game trades is such a load of bull. It’s like Microsoft saying they own any idea or concept ever created on a Microsoft product. Or how about Craftsman saying they own every house built with their tools? (Yeah I know that one is far fetched...)

The only reason the concept stands up at all is because they include it in their EULA’s. That and no one has ever challenged the validity of the concept Intellectual Property. They tie IProperty in with the fact that they want to protect their code and all the reverse engineering stuff and make it seem like a good idea that players have zero rights in regards to code they are creating. I'm sure there are a ton of programers out there that work for free right?

Well, people have actually tried to challenge it and had valid cases in support of the fact that it was their creativity that made the character that was under dispute. However, without the kind of money it takes to hire lawyers to combat the likes of Sony and their legal teams there was not much those individuals could do.

It’s also a rahter new concept legal wise so there is not a whole lot of precedence. As far as I know there is no other sort of online service that stores created items on a server and claims ownership rights to anything contained on the server. Especially when you consider it is server space that a person has paid for the use of.

So, in the end, what it boils down to is:

They can do ANYTHING they want to ANY account they choose with NO REASON what-so-ever. It’s on their server, and the server is their property, and any data residing on the server is treated as their property.

This may be a rather pessimistic view but… It’s best to just not get attached to any character or assume you have any say what so ever as to any aspect of the character or the way the game plays.

Of course you can always choose not to buy the game or any expansions, or to return it if it’s within that timeframe.

---

In response to the original topic…

In 5+ years of EQ I never met anyone that was banned for “normal” buying and selling items. I did meet people with accounts banned from buying and selling accounts though (those were usually discovered when issues arose).

It would be simple to create the database routines needed to note sums over X amount with nothing in return. I'm not blowing smoke out of my rear end or guessing at anything. As a computer science major I had to write code to do such things. Number wise the process would be simple.

There would still need to be human involvement because that small percentage of itemless trades that actually were legit would cause them to lose many customers (see the bit about the bottom line above). There are plenty of legitimate reasons… friends, guildies, people with multiple accounts transferring money to twink a new character with, etc…

The human involvement is what isn’t cost effective. That leads me to not believe most people that claim to have been banned for a one time buying of gold or anything like that. The effort to catch people combined with the loss of a customer… I tend to doubt they ban that many people at all (especially in relation to the number of gold auctions out there).

I have to agree with the person before that mentioned that there must have been extenuating circumstances (as in the person was being a jerk or breaking other rules or taking advantage of exploits, etc…)

---

Wow, that got a whole lot longer than I intended.

I just want to tell you guys transfering a large amount of gold to another account with nothing return doesn't casusing banning, otherwise those fragging crystaline cheaters in LA would have been banned AUTOMATICALLY and even if people report them they are not getting banned.

One likely condition for anet to ban ebayer is someone reports them with concrete evidence. For example you buy gold from ebayer and then you report him with screenshot then he must be banned.

What about Anet simply performing chat log checks on random huge gold transfers.

"Hey, I bought that money from you on E-bay... can you give it to me now?"

kinda a dead giveaway if you ask me

Yeah I would never sell my gold on ebay for the main reason that you have to give your IGN, and anet may well have spies looking on ebay etc. Plus its wrong, and I love my money too much to sell for $8/100k to some bozo.

I don't think Anet would want to ban all the people who invlove in ebay, gold on ebay could raise interest of those who can't spend much time on the game. They don't actively look for ebayer, they just handle the report.

This is what I believe, if you want to know the banning mechanism behind, those gold seller could give you the answer, becasue they can tell you if their accounts was banned and what actions they has taken.

sorry for going a bit off-topic here, but can someone quote the phrase in user agreement where it says buying gold/items with real life money is not allowed?

In My Opinion

The reason they don't want people selling the money and/or items is because then it ruins the game for them and the people will not buy more accounts.

Example:
if you buy a new game and get the cheats for it the amount of time you will play it decreases. For some of us by quite a lot. So if they want the game to continue to sell and be talked about online and with friends then they must keep people from getting to many cheats ... ie ebay money or items.

Everquest and WOW want you to keep paying the monthly fee.

I think they would be smarter to allow it that way they could run the kids and people with too much money out of the game so we could enjoy playing with people who enjoy the game experience.

I am sorry to say to some that I do not want to BUY the greatest items I want to try and earn them. Just like in life you enjoy what you earn more. If I ever get to the point I am buying the MAX items without working hard to get the money then I will move on to the next game.

Just my 2 cents... I even refuse to play with someone who wants to powerlevel me. I left a guild because that is all they wanted to do.

I am also a family man and wish there was a way to have a clean server to be on... as I let my young kids play too. On their OWN account.

I still play D2 every now and again but mostly by myself to ignore the losers.

Nathan
http://www.MyPrayerSpot.com

Here are the parts that apply to everything (in my rant anyway):

No selling accounts or even loaning/lending:
You could also relate that storage/upkeep/etc... of your character and all it's items = "the service" which means you can't do anything listed above.

Selling stuff on eBay falls under "otherwise transfer" :P

---

They can do anything they want to any part of the game that they might choose to edit, delete or whatever.

---

Anyway... the EULA can be found here.

ok, thanks alot

Dunno if this has been answered, but its called Speculation, You buy 5000 ecto's for 5.5k each, and sell them for 6k each, making 2500k profit along the way

i agree. which is why i have no problem with ebayers by themseleves.
its the elitist moronic attitude of in-game esuperiority that accompanies their otherwise lack of skill in the game that tends to piss me off.
wanna ebay? be my guest...but dont pretend you're hot shit because of it.

ANet should eat everyone in augury international one. That's where bots and gold farmers hang out to sell their stuff.

Horrid misassumption. The crux of the farming operation lies with the ability to create vast amounts of different accounts. Hence when you do deal with a farmer, their name is usually "Skzzlfx" or some junk like that. These are people who are either able to buy game accounts wholesale at a very low cost, or can outright steal them and acquire them for free. There are also those who can create some form of key generator, aka "haxxorz".

Once you have the account supply, everything else falls into place. You can purchase botting programs that will farm what you need (btw, it's not stupid people who do these kinds of operations...because YOU can't conceive a bot that could pretty much replace you in terms of playing the game doesn't mean there isn't someone out there who can), or if you're in a country where the local currency is lowered much less than the US Dollar, you can actually hire people to just play the game and farm all day.

If A.Net bans an account, they create another. No big deal. Their IPs are all masked using ridiculously common software, so no way to actually stop them from re-accessing the system, and A.Net is not going to pay for a team of security experts to act as counter-hackers in order to put a permanent stop to these operations, considering that there's no real pain to their pocketbooks. Banning farming accounts is really just a customer service issue....only reason they're banned is because the kiddies with 12 hours of playtime a day don't want any competition from casual folks who can afford to put some money into their hobby to make it more enjoyable. It really doesn't affect A.Net's gold purse at all. So, there you have it...the bans, in the end, will only hurt the playerbase, because the farmers will always exist and will always do their thing, and there will always be a market. A.Net should adopt Wal-Mart's customer service stance...that is, not have any at all.

Oh, and in regards to the DB queries...lol...take it from someone who actually works in IT. When you're dealing with a database of the size that MUST be used to run a userbase of over one million people, you don't want to do ANY queries against that DB that isn't going to somehow make you money. I've already gone over the fact that banning farmers isn't profitable whatsoever. Also, consider the supply of accounts that farmers have, and the myriad of transactions that they can have amongst themselves. It no longer becomes a matter of a simple query. Even if you created a monitoring daemon to sound alerts for large transactions, you would still need a person to go in there and arbitrate whether or not it was an illegal farmer's transaction.

Plus, you undermine the capabilities of the human mind to outwit a computer. Any piece of software that could be written to formulate some sort of artificial intelligence that would be able to discover such illegal transactions would HAVE to be based on some method of infallible logic. Given such immutable logic, it's only a matter of time until someone discovers a way to bypass said logic. So if you say, "Pick out all transactions of over X amount", then someone's just going to make a lot of smaller transactions. If you put in, "Pick out all repetitive transactions within X time", then you could just wait between transactions. You could hinder farmers, but you can never eliminate them, plus such simple logic as the ones I just exemplified would return huge amounts of false positives. Heck, just last night, I transferred about 10 different items to a buddy of mine in 6 or 7 different transactions.

Whew...I've been writing for a while. Anyway, the only feasible way to catch farmers is to have players report them, and since the only players who interact with them are those involved with them, they're not going to do that. I have to wonder if those press releases saying, "We've banned X accounts for selling gold" are even true. It's not like we'd ever be able to get any actual proof.

BTW, the e-Bay/gold-seller people aren't the ones who spend hours spamming the different areas. Those are just regular players who happen to farm a lot, or people who play the market. "Beating" the economy is a goal that a lot of players aspire to. The illegal gold-sellers aren't about to advertise in-game and draw attention to their accounts. One stupid move could get said account banned, along with tons of prospective profits.

When you play golf, do you insist that everyone rent their clubs at the pro shop, or are you ok with your buddy Mike bringing along his $2,000 professional set with the titanium driver?

The point I'm trying to make is that playing MMORPGs are like any other hobby, and thus those who choose to should be able to put money into their hobby to make their experience more enjoyable. It's up to THEM to dictate what's enjoyable for them....not you.

Say NO to communist gaming. Laissez-faire!

I think the majority of ebay buyers are people who only play occasionally. They don't have time for the endless grind of farming (oops-no grind required in game, anet says, my bad) and don't want to sit in towns endlessly spamming "WTS" when they find a decent weapon they don't need. They get tired of seeing everyone else with great armor or max weapons while they have crap armor and keep getting killed.

The only legit ways to make gold:
- play thru the game- monsters drop garbage and little gold
- farm- hours of doing the same thing over and over, plus you need a good character already to make it worthwhile, making it useless for beginners
- sell loot to other players- I despise doing this. Most people are idiots and spamming 'wts' brings out the worst of them

What's the fix? Upping gold drops by at least 10X would be a good start. It would be nice to actually just play the game and find yourself with enough gold to get that nice item when you make it to the next town.

I have about 650 hours in and only about 8k gold because I don't ebay, rarely farm, and NEVER sell except to npc's.