This just struck me!

[antonatsis]

Well i was discussing something over at MMORPG and it just struck me.
Having a strict policy about gold sellers and powerlevelers in GW2 is actually a good thing for the game and ANET
i mean,in a game where there are many lets call them "chinese farmers" sometimes companies dont want to ban them because by banning an acount that does that is like losing a great potential revenue of subscription money and we all know that not all companies ban every bot/gold seller out there.Now its like this

If you find 10000 acounts that fall in those categories if you ban them all its like losing 10000*15$(abjust thones numbers for a spesific region)a month,thats al lot of money and they will probably re buy the game but you might have lost quite some revenue especially since those acounts are usually from china where you pay by the hour or something like that and you dont buy the game.Now imagine this
The same people buy the game ANET bans them,they buy it again,ANET bans them again.hence and repeat(as long as its profitable for them or at least seems profitable for them)to me it seems that the whole B2P model its more profitable for the company if they just ban outright those people than just ban a part of them and all of them fearing that they might lose a lot of money.

Now i know that in a game with million of players baning some thousands it might seem nothing but those thousands give back hundred of thousands in revenue and cutting them all at once its not good for the investors.Thats why most of the time they just ban a few of them.

Well what do you think?

[Zeek Daniels]

mmm no because what if my account gets hacked and gets farmed on then banned. Do i have to go out and buy a new copy of GW2? These "farmers" dont buy the game or pay the sub, they hack active accounts and make gold, they dont care if they get banned. This is the same reason Blizz says they try and stop the programs that people bot with rather than go around banning every botter because most bots are hacked accounts.

[antonatsis]

well i dont think so...chinese farmers actually have legitimate acounts.Its just that they do their working around with trials.If you even watch any documentary about things like this or reports you always see people in rooms full of computers playing characters.
Of course hackers make gold to but their main income comes from grinders,in china there is even a prison that makes its prisoners farm things to sell in WoW

[masterpiece]

Actually a lot of it is based on compromised accounts or else there would be no reason to hack accounts. I've had my account hacked in WoW. Should that mean I loose everything i spent years on obtaining? I don't think so.

[antonatsis]

well i might be wrong but it seems that in other games besides WoW they even sell acounts.And with a quick google search it seems that the majority of them doesnt compromise acounts there is even the term gamer sweatshops.Anyway i always thought its grinding that makes more money than compromising an acount.

[Squirrelbanes]

Many people quit a game after they've been hacked. I should think many more than any hackers/farmers accounts that would be banned. I don't think it's a completely logical argument tbh with you.
And if one way making money seems less profitable to illegal organisations, they'll simply adapt to ways that work in a new model. For GW2, ul likely see more farmers.

[Deyadissa]

Guild Wars has always been harsh on RMT and exploiters. They ban over 5,000 accounts a week through RMT causes. The bans alone is a steady income even if 20% of them rebuy the game.

[Deleted]

Yeah , it is a benefit for playing a non-subscription game > they dont care if their loose the sub of that player .
I believe that will be like wow , when u/some1 else join your account , with different pc/internet conection > ur pass is reseted

[Deleted]

Its not true in sub games, and wont be true here.
Most of these accounts are bought with fake or stolen ccs, which get charged back and the company loses money. There isno reason not to ban them in sub games.

[iCandy]

Don't release the game in Asia..nuff said.

[Deleted]

When it comes to professional farmers (read, chinese), they are mostly split between legitimate accounts and accounts bought with stolen details.
For farming you need time, and you rarely have that time when you hack an account.

In WoW (and I would assume most other MMO's as well), farming only makes up a tiny fraction of the gold you can buy though. Why buy accounts (legally or though stolen CC details) that you then have to spend hours and hours on to gain some gold, and risk getting banned at any time while collecting the gold, when it's so much easier to just buy a list of logon details, or even make your own phishing scheme?

Path of least resistance really.

As for getting rid of gold sellers... Only real way of doing it is selling gold yourself. Look at Eve Online. While there still exist some ISK sellers, they are rare and far between. The profit is too low.

[jaakkeli]

mmm no because what if my account gets hacked and gets farmed on then banned. Do i have to go out and buy a new copy of GW2? These "farmers" dont buy the game or pay the sub, they hack active accounts and make gold, they dont care if they get banned..

Actually, after I quit WoW, my account got hacked and the hackers kept paying for a sub on it while running bots.

After I heard about it, I emailed Blizzard and they recovered my account. I'm not paying so they actually did lose money through that.

[zcks]

mmm no because what if my account gets hacked and gets farmed on then banned. Do i have to go out and buy a new copy of GW2? These "farmers" dont buy the game or pay the sub, they hack active accounts and make gold, they dont care if they get banned. This is the same reason Blizz says they try and stop the programs that people bot with rather than go around banning every botter because most bots are hacked accounts.

This ^ pretty much.

Whats worse is that because the companies that make the bots & employ the gold farmers (as near slave labor I might at) are based in south eastern Asian countries & china they are never charged/arrested or fined because the country they are based out of is glad to get the income especially when it causes discomfort to or costs money for people & companies in western nations.

Which is why I frankly feel that western companies should fight back using similar methods. If you know that your product is being fucked with like this why waste thousands upon thousands of dollars then months or even years in a legal dispute when that foreign nation will just screw you over anyway. I say since you have allot of programmers under your employ you should send them a targeted computer virus to fuck over all their computer systems & take them out of business.

[Hockeyhacker]

Well i was discussing something over at MMORPG and it just struck me.
Having a strict policy about gold sellers and powerlevelers in GW2 is actually a good thing for the game and ANET
i mean,in a game where there are many lets call them "chinese farmers" sometimes companies dont want to ban them because by banning an acount that does that is like losing a great potential revenue of subscription money and we all know that not all companies ban every bot/gold seller out there.Now its like this

If you find 10000 acounts that fall in those categories if you ban them all its like losing 10000*15$(abjust thones numbers for a spesific region)a month,thats al lot of money and they will probably re buy the game but you might have lost quite some revenue especially since those acounts are usually from china where you pay by the hour or something like that and you dont buy the game.Now imagine this
The same people buy the game ANET bans them,they buy it again,ANET bans them again.hence and repeat(as long as its profitable for them or at least seems profitable for them)to me it seems that the whole B2P model its more profitable for the company if they just ban outright those people than just ban a part of them and all of them fearing that they might lose a lot of money.

Now i know that in a game with million of players baning some thousands it might seem nothing but those thousands give back hundred of thousands in revenue and cutting them all at once its not good for the investors.Thats why most of the time they just ban a few of them.

Well what do you think?

As many others have already said, just no. The reason being what many have already said, lots (not all but lots) of gold sellers are hacked/phished/key-logged accounts. Yes if you are ignorant enough to click on links in emails before verifying where the links go first you somewhat deserve to be phished/key logged, but that does not mean that you should lose everything you did just because you, or someone who uses the same computer as you feel for a fake link, there is a reason that "You long lost uncle was the princess of Persia and has died pleese gave us you bank number, social security, license of Driver info, CC info and we will give you 15 billion dollars worth of Rupees which he you left" emails scams still going around, people fall for them all the time otherwise they would have stopped trying that scam.
(EDIT: thought about fixing a typo in that email example, but then realized most of those emails are really awful English, so rather then fixing it made it slightly worse to be more realistic of what they look like)

Point is, banning accounts for gold "farming" activities is not a good idea because many of them are stolen accounts, now if the illegitimate actions are done from the same MAC and IP address as what the user has used since day one, fine, but that is not the case for many of these "hacked" (using the term loosely) accounts.

But with what they have done in the game model to prevent gold selling from being profitable enough to be worth doing is the fact that many of the things require karma in addition to gold and thus making the gold less valuable to buy since you still need to get the karma in the first place and as you get the karma for the most part you get enough gold from those DE rewards anyways. Will gold selling happen? Sure, but it won't be as big of a market as in games such as WoW or Rift since their is a secondary bound to character currency in addition to gold for many things.