Here's Something NOT All Players Will Know

Here's something that not everyone will know about, did you know you can get temporarily banned for logging into your "own" account? You may be surprised but this is what has happened to me...

Everyone knows trading is part of the gaming experience and that there are a limited slot on your inventory where you can keep items and another 20 slots in the common "Xunlai Storage". I keep many items for sales ranging from common crafting materials to collectors items. There are 4 available character slots so if you've filled up your common storage then you HAVE to use different characters as storage. When trading I tend to switch characters to get certain items that I can't fit into the Xunlai Storage. The ONLY way to switch character is to log out and back into your own account, and this is what I do when a player requests such item.

I left Guild Wars on while in Lion's Arch for a short while, to my suprise, when I came back I was logged out and a message appeared saying I've been "banned for attempting to hack GW & banned for 168 hours (1 week ban)!". I thought to myself "what the hell?" and emailed Guild Wars Support straight away.

It took me 4 emails before "actually" finding out what was wrong with my account. The first 3 replies were useless and were patronising (e.g. accusing me of cheating...). By the 4th email, someone actually "bothered" to check what happened to my account and told me that my account was temporarily suspended for the logins.

As a player, I NEVER cheated in Guild Wars or ANY other game for that matter. I believed that cheating in multiplayer games that affect others is definately a "no no". I even remind people in my own guild not to cheat. I myself even try to help the developers by reporting bugs I've found.

So far I've been banned for 6 days for a ridiculous reason. I've sent them a total of 8 emails, received 9 replies and still NO ONE has actually done anything useful (e.g. appologies for the mistake & unblock my account). How can someone be banned for something they did NOT know (a notice would have been nice!). This problem would NOT have happened had the developers added the "switch character" button (without logging out and in). So now I've been temporarily banned for "poor user interface" design, talk about the frustration I didn't pay $50 to write emails to sort out this ridiculous situation.... All I can do now is wait... I'm surprise that ANet & GW Support think it's ok to ban fair and abiding players!

*** So for people who don't know, refrain from switching characters often. At least until ANet / NCSoft add a new "switch character button" or remove that flawed banning policy. ***

Holy crap that is so ... lame.

Sorry for that, I wish to rub that in at any time someone goes praising Arena Net for being fair.

uhm...if you entered the password correctly everytime why would they even think you were trying to "hack" into the account....you never returned a failure packet....

How many times were you switching logins? Must have been an awful lot.

I didn't log into my account that often. Come on, I have better things to do like "playing" the game than sit there to log into my account. Lets put it this way, everytime you want to sell an item to another player that's on another character, you'll have to log out, log into character with item, move to common storage, log out, and back to original character (that was trading so buyer knows who you are) to complete the sale. How can logging into you own account to complete trade be a way to "hack" the game?

anyway, this "switch character" feature would be better than logging out/in

I ahve to say that I suspect that there is a lot more to this story.

I switch characters probably 2-3 times per day (that I'm playing) - different characters in different stages of the game, combined with guildies with characters in differen stages...

...never had a problem.

I've also cycled through all 4 of my characters (in fairly quick succession) in order to go through their inventories to consolidate crafting materials into storage when I needed to raise some quick case...

...no problems.

So - I am somewhat skeptical...

I wouldn't count on it Mugon....it took them the better part of 2 months to figure out how to implement a name change feature....

I am sceptical as well but... it wouldn't surprise me in the least if ANET/NCSOFT did in fact do this.

You do not have to go back to the original character. Just add the player to your friends, log off and then trade with the 2nd character. That will save you one step at least.
That is what I do and never had a problem with people not recognizing me.

But still we need that switch character feature.

You can change names?

Whats this name change thing, we do not have it yet do we?

Interesting, I have been known to log in/out a 5 or 6 times in a matter of 10 -15 minutes, doing inventory shuffling and have never had my account banned. What interests me though is this, "banned for attempting to hack GW for 168 hours!", you never said if you were not logged into GW for that amount of time or not.

Also, the reason why there isn't a "switch character" button is to prevent hacking, if you didn't have to log out to change characters then that leaves the client open for hacking, this has been stated by A.net as the reason for not allowing switching of characters while logged in.

The name change feature is only for those people who use inappropriate character names and are warned by A.net that the character in question will be blocked unless the name is changed(by the way, that idea was taken from a suggestion I had made as a tester).

when i am trading between chars i rapidly log in and out probably 7-10 times as fast as it takes me to finish....never had a problem

it is a pretty strange story. you would have to log in and out more than a couple of times before getting banned i would think but, it does sound like something anet would do. and as far as the charachter switch feature i totally agree.

I'm also skeptical...

I do know for a fact that if you are attempting to crack someone else's password, then your guildwars key will be temporarily disabled.

I dono. I fill my storage up with raw materials so that they can be accessed from every character when needed. I also use each character to hold specific items. When I get items that don't go with that character, I tend to let them stock up a bit before changing back and forth to sort out the mess. I find myself changing characters quite frequently during this, and I have yet to be banned or warned about it. I think their concern was based on your time in the game, not your amount of character changes. If you're logged onto the server for a long amount of time, with a long period of inactivity, it could mean that you could have went to sleep, and had someone run you from one place to another or the like. I dono, just a possible explanation.

In reply to the skeptics, I've said that I've done this switching character for trading many times before and never have had a problem. The fact is that "when" I was logged out and temporarily banned, I was NOT doing anything nor had I been trading with anyone.

I'm sure you've all left your characters on in some town for awhile to see what people are trading and buy what you need. I've had the game for 2 months now, traded MANY times, never had a problem UNTIL now.

do a thorough check on your system ... you may have a hijacker on trying to crack your account. (sunbelt counterspy ... very good for this)

aside from that you wouldn't get banned for logging in and out ... you could do so ... numerous times as I do to trade ... I'll do it like 5-7 times in the matter of 10 minutes ... and if I kill an account ... and have to consolidate his/her goods to the others ... even more than that in less time. Never had an issue.

Sounds like theres more to this story, whether you are aware or unaware of it, that is a mystery to us all.

EDIT ******* oh yeah .. and I do leave my character in town ... in ToA, in LA, hell in any town ... I go turn on the bbq, cook dinner come back ... hell I have even left it on all night and went to sleep. Never had any issues.

very odd, i switch many times and nothing happens. And even if u stay logged in for X amount of time without moving then u get automatically logged out. And for time in game then thats odd because 168 hours would amount to a week so i doubt he was logged in for a straight week if so you need help then... anyway i think when it mentions 168 hours thats the time he is banned for not how long he was in game

maybe someone else tried to hack your account, as already mentioned above. sounds logical to me.
maybe its just a bug.
maybe you are a hacker and are trying to make yourself look innocent

That does stink.

That makes more sense that the 168 was the time until he's allowed back on.

I was thinking it was how long his account had been logged on. I was thinking they were banning him because he might be a bot. It only makes sense for a bot to be logged in for 168 straight hours. My bad on that.

Yep that's right the 168 hours refers to me being banned, i.e. temporary suspension for 1 week! I don't leave the game on for a long time without moving or even overnight. And no my system doesnt have spyware / virus / trojans. I do have adware and virus scanners. Also I want to mention the fact that I'm not a little kid to be downloading random programs / porn so the risk of me getting a virus / trojans is unlikely (notice I did say unlikely before someone jumps on my throat ).

I wasnt incinuating you were a kid, I was just pointing out that counterspy is the number 1 adware removal tool rated by PCworld, Computing, and other magazines as it removes 98% of any adware (as where freebie program like ad aware and spybot only do 50-60% )

omg <<<< I'm an IT manager

back on topic ... Anet will not ban you 'for the hell of it' they need evidence. Some guy killed himself because he was ripped of by 2 people who scammed him in guildwars ... (Anet did not ban those 2 people) ... why because they had no real evidence, they couldn't.

I am sure there logs show your client doing something that consists as evidence. As soon as they have this, they can legitemately ban your account for X amount of time. Take em to court and you will have your evidence, and a whooping bill. Until then they do not need to give out any evidence as to why you were banned for security reasons. (think they are going to say "yeah, you are banned because your computer pinged our server with packets for 10 minutes straight sending a variety encoded passwords)

And yeah ... your account doesn't get automatically logged out if you stand there for 10 minutes ... I tried contacting my friend (and vise versa) when he leaves his machine and goes to watch a movie. (shows up online on my end and his end, but no one there ... and we know when we arrive back from my ventrilo server) ... yes i am not some kid either.

EDIT *** just trying to help

Dont worry Stumpy, I'm not taking offence . I know that there are spyware that are yet to be identified. I only mentioned the fact that I'm not a kid so that people don't think that I have all the time in the world to sit around and hack this game.

Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy this game aside from the bugs and this problem, oh and the lag that plagued the game for 2 weeks sometime ago.

WOW! This situation must really suck. I have never had a problem with switching accounts..i do so fairly often and quickly. I have only ever once miss-spelled my password too.

Sounds like Anet owe you an explanation and possibly an apology. One week without playing a game that you paid for?
Let's hope this is a one-off event or else many people could start a revolt that sends shockwaves through the communities. Maybe then, they might rethink their policies.

Keep sending those emails if i was you. They all have to looked over. Fill their inbox until you get a response that you deserve as a consumer...you have rights too.

i like to refer to that as the euro transitional lag (not starting a fight am i) but I believe that was caused when the euro servers had severe issues and many of them jumped on the american servers

If anet are banning people based on logs, then, just prior to the banning, I'm sure they should have a log of all your activities which warrants their action.

Well due to PvP, I log sometimes 4 times in a minute, and even create around 10 pvp characters in a day (and delete them), aslo stayed afk for a pretty long time, yet I am now online.

I hope the things get clear soon (and everyone is happy).

Why don't you just put what you are going to be selling into the storage bin, then stop hopping characters so often?

I am not convinced.

Yes I know there must be logs for Anet to check. However, I'm sure the logs would account for some XXX GBs so they would surely need some database rule of some sort to raise flags on account that "may" be cheating. From the slow response and lack of interest to investigate by GW Support, how long do you think Anet would spend to look into the logs? I very much doubt who ever banned my account took very long to review the log. I myself would like to know exactly what made Anet think I was cheating.

Storage bin is 20 slots, common and rare materials I would need to use myself and sell would account for most of the storage plus the odd upgrades, weapons, dyes, collector items. If you find a way to fit all these into one common space then let me know.

yikes I'm gonna have to be careful as I do the same thing. My ranger is holding all the items I wanna sell or keep for other people who have not collected them yet while I play my E/Mo... yesterday I logged in and out about 3-4 times in 10 mins moving items around. Guess I better stop doing that or I risk getting myself banned for "hacking" myself.

If only storage had 100 slots instead of 20...

[off topic]
I'm not a kid...it took me 2.5 hours to break the encryption on their serial keys....if you know what you're doing it doesn't take very long at all.

/off topic

[on topic]

something seems a bit strange. I have three characters that I switch to and from on a pretty regular basis....I also only close GW when I need to run Counter Strike(somtimes I don't even close GW to run CS) or when I reboot. So out of a 186 hour period(7 days) my account is probably logged in 180 of those hours.....I would be interested in knowing the rest of the story.

exactly, but they give you 20 slots to share between 1-4 characters. Now I like to travel across the map with nothing but salvage kits and identify so I can keep/salvage everything I find. I dump everything into storage. But I'm sitting on a ton of runes for my pre-searing characters so they are stored on my post searing ranger. I say the shared storage which is a GOOD IDEA, at least have more slots.

To any encryption/coding experts, is there anyway to duplicate guildwars items?

Maybe what the OP was doing accidentally triggered a related red flag.

I as well... Because I know I switch characters Tons... All be it its mostly me moving gold around for something cause I forget which one I left the majority on all the time.. lol but still... I know I switch several times a day when I'm playing. and quickly too. so I really don't know what happened in his case. But luckily its a temporary thing.

good luck..

Well if you switch every 2 min or so they could think your a bot ..

Kind of reminds me of the WoW bannings:

Do not play the game, else you may get banned.