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