New Annoucement - A Stern Warning

Thats all well and good, but seriously 72 hours is nothing...there are hardcore 'ebayers' they won't be detered by such a short ban.

So HP spoilers are allowed? YES!!!

brb ra

I'm assuming multiple offenders will have it worse than one-time traders. Still, there's nothing new about this. It's the same way other games deal with participants in the RMT. Temp bans, then permanent ones.

All true, prob is how do you catch them? gold sellers buy new accounts every few days to avoid detection, just go to Ascaslon Inter1 for a week and see if the spot the same name more then twice in that timeframe.

Anet won't be able to fulfil this threat in any meaningful way. Yea a few people will be caught be the rest will carry on as if nothing happened. They'd be better off spending their time and money focusing in on the gold sellers weapon..the bots.

What I find interesting about this is that A-Net is now targeting the PURCHASERS of gold, not just the generators of that gold (i.e. the bots).

A good place for them to identify these purchasers would likely be starting with those gold sellers that advertise on forums and in game...and finding ways to track/identify those who use those sites. They could actually use those bots as "lures" (by tracking their trading activity) to see who actually buys gold from them, and then slap a big ban on them.

Interesting move by A-Net, although likely it's just an empty threat.

My thoughts exactly...

Ron knocks up Hermione in a primal backlash against being cast as the third wheel, beta male for seven books. Harry, being the oblivious young dork that he is, flies into a rage at losing his woman in such obvious fashion, killing them both along with their unborn love child. Aghast at what he has done, and what he had unwittingly become, Potter hangs himself as the only means of overcoming the emotions he was utterly unprepared to deal with.

The rest of the school celebrates, having wanted to off the kid themselves since the second book. The world returns to sanity, where powerful magi thoroughly trounce shaky novices in contests of skill.

...sorry for the spoilers.

IP bans may be the best route since they buy new accounts two or 3 times a week....you can ban accounts all day and not make a dent in the bot populace where as an IP ban may be a lil trickier to get around. all in all i think its rather futile to try. WoW has paid GM's and all sorts of dev people working on their own bot problem...they have some great deturrents but it wont do much of anything to stem the tide. right now the biggest thing they have is organized rings of farmers that farm on a 6-8 hour shift for a higher up in which time all items must be sold for whatever price and gold must be transferred to the "master account" in turn that person who holds the account turns around and sells the money on random website and downloads bots to go in-game and spam their product. the funny thing is you can report spam by simply right clicking someones name while in chat. when they ran into this hurdle they started spamming by the in-game mail system....in turn they added a report button there....and now the biggest thing is theyll start raid groups and invite everyone and spam their message upon the arrival of someone dumb enough to click the accept from someone named hjkhsdjgsoid

I've heard that they track you in two ways, interconnectedly.

They
A. track large trades of gold with a reciprocal (I couldn't name you a figure, I guess 700+?)
B. Match the IP addresses of these trades. Different IPs mean possible fraud?

It's just what I've heard.

By the way, if you haven't yet, read the New York Times Magazine article on this. It was sunday before last. Excellent article, and while it's meant to make you feel sympathy with the botters, I just ended up feeling more vindicated against both botters and buyers.

I transfer gold between my 2 accounts and exchange gold with my guild mates quite frequently. Hopefully I don't have to rant other over the place because of banning mistakes.

They have to do that, so when they start banning people, they wont get inundated with the "why me" emails.

Step one announce.
Step two ban.

How do they know?
I am pretty sure they track botters and can follow the gold trail to the end consumer.

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

I see it as a sign soon the Online store will start selling Gold...

yeah!

exactly....now they can say people have been warned...

most people don't read the EULA...and I'm sure there are a lot of people who don't know it's against the rules...the announcement clears it up for them.

However...it's still extremely difficult to prove that someone bought gold....since they can't track that side of the transaction...they can only prove that someone accepted gold in game in a trade...which happens thousands of time per day. Someone basically has to admit that they bought gold before they have the proof to say they did.

it is largely an empty threat...but one which will hopefully cut the number of people buying gold online....and in turn...cut down on the number of bots in game.

Haha Office Space FTW.
_____

On topic, I think it's good that gold buyers/sellers are going to get the ban hammer now. The gold buyers are the ones that destroy the economy all the bots do is farm the gold. Not saying that bots are good but it's about time that the actual players buying the gold get banned.

As always, Ensign wins again!

On-topic? Um, people are still gonna buy gold...
And the signs have yet to be nuked.

Aye, happened to a good friend of mine because he was transferring large amounts of cash/ecto/items from one of his accounts to one of his other accounts. Though his ban was apparently meant to be permanent. Eventually he was able to prove that both accounts involved in the transaction were his and ANet lifted his ban.

Carefull out there, Big Brother is watching.

Yea as that was to stop bots, now you've given up Anet can us players get our rightful loot again?

I'm a little worried about this too. Me and my friends often share Gold between each other..

That could work. Large amounts of gold being traded between 2 accounts logged in from the same IP could just be someone moving gold to a secondary account and should just be ignored. If the trade is between accounts logged in from different IPs, it should be flagged for closer investigation. Flagging this way could let the trades from bot account to sell account slip through, but the sell account would get flagged upon trading with the gold purchaser.

well if thats the case all that they will hafta do (other than stealing more accounts) would be using more accounts for gold transactions so they spread the money out more (200-500k per account) and transfer em that way via internet cafe or something. solves the tracking accounts by gold amount and the IP thing. dunno why theyre trying to stop bots when no one can stop them...just ignore em quietly or you can rage at them from time to time to blow off some steam.


as a side note: what do yall think a-net does with gold and items on banned accounts or confiscated accounts?