Curse

Tom Swift · Mar 19, 2008, 12:51 PM // 12:51

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chthon

1. I'm very pleased with the new changes and I completely agree with the policies behind them.

2. Let me repeat #1. I'm very pleased with the new changes and I completely agree with the policies behind them.

3. I am a bit apprehensive that there will be too many false positives. Adequate care is not taken with account bans, and I certainly hope support is more careful with IP bans.

4.

First of all, as Fusa said, the clock may have already started ticking on that account's eventual ban. If it takes 48 hours for a-net to catch up to credit card fraud and ban the account, removing 24 hours of trade cuts the value of a new account in half, doubling the cost to the RMT company.

Second of all, guessing when accounts are going to be banned and need replaced is bound to be an imprecise science. Up till now, when an account got banned, they could buy a new one on the spot and be up and running again. Now they can't do that. If they buy too many accounts in anticipation of bans that don't come as soon as expected, they waste money on more accounts than they have farming employees and/or spammable districts for; and if they buy too few accounts because bans come sooner than expected, they end up with gold farming employees and/or a spammable districts without enough accounts to exploit them. Either way the RMT company's bottom line gets driven up.

lol - I though Gaile had assured us that most botters do not in fact buy accounts (when she was trying to convince us that ANet does not make money from them) - according to her they mostly use stolen accounts.

And if it is credit card fraud they aren't out any money either - that's why it is called "fraud."

In the mean time - what about:

The new player who finds a black dye in pre on his first day? (as happened to my son when he stared playing). Sure - it's just an "inconvenience" to wait to trade it but it makes the game less fun to have to do so.

The new players to whom I used give things like unnatural seeds or spider legs so they can get armor. Sure it just saves them a little time but it makes the game more fun for them and me - now I can't do that.

The new players (dozens of them) to whom I gave weapons that were too nice to merch but I didn't want to spend the time spamming to sell - most of these were first day players And I'm far from the only one (look under the "nicest people I met" thread" many of them remember a more experienced player giving them something which they kept for months because it reminded them how welcomed they felt).

I'm sorry but I'm not willing to be inconvenienced just to catch the botters - restricting play style to do so is just a stupid move and I suspect you are going to find all the "wow good job ANet" comments on this thread turn to major complaints in a very short time.

Angel Killuminati · Mar 19, 2008, 12:59 PM // 12:59

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tom Swift

The new players (dozens of them) to whom I gave weapons that were too nice to merch but I didn't want to spend the time spamming to sell - most of these were first day players And I'm far from the only one (look under the "nicest people I met" thread" many of them remember a more experienced player giving them something which they kept for months because it reminded them how welcomed they felt).

Unfortunately Tom, these steps need to be put in place because of the bots and gold sellers. If bots didn't exist in a perfect World, then Anet wouldn't have to do these kind of things. Yes it spoils new players experiences for 24 hours, but point the finger of blame at the bots, not Anet.

As somebody said earlier, Anet can never win with an entire World playing their game. Some will like it, some will slate them for it. You have two choices, accept that new players can't trade for 24 hours (remember that players usually only spend a few hours on the game per 24 hours any way - only the no lifers spend more on it) so the 24 hours will be over before you know it. Or don't have trading limits and get spammed by bots etc etc.

If bots weren't here, we wouldn't have to have lame changes to the Eula agreement, but because of idiots in the World, changes have to be put in place. I thought some of you would have realised now that the internet is a breeding ground for complete dickheads?! Countermeasures need to be added for these dickheads.

The Meth · Mar 19, 2008, 01:47 PM // 13:47

Let me rundown how things are going probably going to work a week from now:

Botter gets banned (yay!)
Botter gets another account
Botter can't log in because ip is banned (yay again, right?)
Botter learns anet is banning by ip
Botter changes ip in 5 seconds
Botter goes on their merry way, just being forced to change their IP every time they are banned.

Later:
Real player connects to internet, by gets the same ip a botter used to use by pure chance. Real player cannot play.

Changing your ip address is really that easy. Google search it, you will see 5 seconds is an overstatement.

I completely agree with with the restriction on trading for the new accounts. THAT is an example of a good change that WILL hurt botters, but WILL NOT hurt real players.

I have a problem with banning IP's, this change will mildly disrupt botters for a short time, but has the potential to completely cut off a real player from the game. After the first few weeks, all botters will be doing is running a 2-line batch file before they log in.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Inde

For the large gold sites that persistently and constantly change IP's we have to implement other measures such as email bans. So while there are certainly a lot of variables I find that it only slows them down

Let's say you own a store, which is at risk of being robbed by a local gang. The gang members all wear blue. Does that mean that not allowing anyone wearing blue into your store will keep you safe? No, any gang member who wants to get in will just wear different clothes. Meanwhile you turn away numerous customers who don't know about your no-blue policy. The gang is mildly inconvenienced, while an unlucky customer will get punished.

bel unbreakable · Mar 19, 2008, 01:55 PM // 13:55

most of the stuff in the game is cheap there is really no need to buy gold at all

fusa · Mar 19, 2008, 03:17 PM // 15:17

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ctb

I can't believe there are still ISPs that don't match up MAC addresses o_0

On my connection, if I change my modem's MAC address, I can't get on the network until I call the ISP because they lock the connection down by valid MACs.

I don't know where you are, but I'm aware of no U.S. laws to this effect.

It's not the modem's mac address you need to change, its the router's or computer's mac adress. Both of which are very easy to change. The router can be changed in the configuration page, computer by changing hardware, and probably other methods. Although if you're on a router you need to change the router's mac address, not computer. You're right that if the modem's mac address isn't recognized it won't allow the connection.

VOTD · Mar 19, 2008, 03:43 PM // 15:43

what are they going to do, ban account or just ban ip. and for how long

Ctb · Mar 19, 2008, 04:38 PM // 16:38

Quote:

It's not the modem's mac address you need to change, its the router's or computer's mac adress.

This doesn't make any sense.... if your ISP is MAC filtering, it doesn't matter how it sees the MAC, if the MAC changes, you're blocked out of the network. Whether the MAC being presented to the ISP upon connection is cloned or simply the static address of the cable modem, if you're ISP is filtering it, and it doesn't recognize it, you're never going to even get past layer 2 communication to GET an IP.

If your ISP not MAC filtering, yes, you can change the MAC of the ethernet device being monitored all you like to constantly get renewals. However, I would point out that part of the motivation behind pulling a router or NIC MAC rather than the modem MAC was always that you could effectively restrict less technical people to a single machine network, so if you have cloning going on, you're probably being filtered.

Chthon · Mar 19, 2008, 04:43 PM // 16:43

Quote:

Originally Posted by lorazcyk

You're missing the point, gold sellers don't really *buy* their own accounts, they hack, keylog, etc etc. It doesn't cost them what it cost you and me to buy the game.

I find it very hard to believe they can keep enough accounts running through theft alone. No doubt they steal accounts whenever they can, but surely they must be buying a majority of the accounts they use for farming purposes. (The spam accounts were, until recently, trial accounts.)

Quote:

Hello?! A bot is not a human, it's a computer program.

Doesn't matter.

For farming: If you use human farmers (which some RMT companies do), then you need one account per employee or you're losing money. If you use bots, you need account per PC at your facility or you're losing money. The principle is the same. (Even if you're running multiple instances of GW on each PC, you need one account per ability-to-run-an-instance-of-GW or you're losing money.)

For spamming: If there's populated districts that don't have a spambot in them, right now, you're losing money. You need one account per populated district.

The point is that a RMT company is always going to be less profitable when they can't harmonize their supply of accounts with their supply of other resources (employees, PCs, populated districts to spam, etc). A-net has forced them into a situation where they will always have too many or too few accounts for their needs, and that's going to put a dent in their bottom line. Alone, it's probably not a fatal blow, be we can hope that, in combination with other initiatives, it makes the RMT business too unprofitable to continue.

fusa · Mar 19, 2008, 04:53 PM // 16:53

Quote:

This doesn't make any sense.... if your ISP is MAC filtering, it doesn't matter how it sees the MAC, if the MAC changes, you're blocked out of the network. Whether the MAC being presented to the ISP upon connection is cloned or simply the static address of the cable modem, if you're ISP is filtering it, and it doesn't recognize it, you're never going to even get past layer 2 communication to GET an IP.

If your ISP not MAC filtering, yes, you can change the MAC of the ethernet device being monitored all you like to constantly get renewals. However, I would point out that part of the motivation behind pulling a router or NIC MAC rather than the modem MAC was always that you could effectively restrict less technical people to a single machine network, so if you have cloning going on, you're probably being filtered.

There's a difference between a cable modem and a router. A router will share a network connection with other computers. A cable modem connects to the isp. Changing mac address of cable modem will just likely diable your connection. Changing the mac address of the router will make the isp think that a different computer is connected to the isp, and assign a new ip to that connection. A router does not need to clone the modem's mac address or a computers mac address, it can use its own mac address or be assigned one. As long as the mac address is valid the connection will succeeed. If no router is present, some nic's allow you to assign a mac address, or hardware can be added or removed to the computer, or programs such as smac can be used to spoof a different mac address. Whichever meathod you use a different mac address connected to the cable modem will make the isp think that the computer connected is different and assign a new address. If you dont believe this try it, and stop trying to explain something you don't know anythign about.

Fril Estelin · Mar 19, 2008, 05:02 PM // 17:02

Quote:

Originally Posted by Inde

I can only speak of my experience with banning IP's here on Guru but it does have a measure of effect. If banning the user name doesn't work we change to banning IP's, but always first verifying that it's not connected to another forum users' account. I wonder if ArenaNet will be doing the same perhaps? It's fairly easy for us though to see if the attached IP happens to also belong to a legitimate user based on their posts. Or if it's a university or library IP for instance. For the large gold sites that persistently and constantly change IP's we have to implement other measures such as email bans. So while there are certainly a lot of variables I find that it only slows them down, makes the registration and posting process harder instead of stopping them. Maybe that will be enough though here.

Don't forget the proxy detection and banning (much more important when you have to manage hundreds and thousands of accounts on the RMT side). It's going to take some time to rollout, we can imagine that RMT companies will buy ranges of IP addresses and collude with ISPs to find new schemes (providing a reward for them of course). The point, as mentioned by a few people here, is to put them out of business by making the cost of running a successful RMT in GW higher than the benefit.

Email ban would be useless, as the cost of creating an email account is nill, zero. IP remains the best option, as MAC is mostly useless due to the low usage by ISPs (more and more, but I guess that in Asia it's still very open).

I liked a lot the mention in the last bullet point of Anet's statement of the gold buyers, though they're a bit gentle on them (Anet avoids a moral stance here, they're customers ready to pay for Anet products), and also the funny mention of reclaiming the RMT expenses via their credit card companies (will never happen

).

My fear is that RMT companies may become more aggressive on the security side of things, trying to steal accounts rather than buy them. There are still accounts with weak passwords (and I read somewhere that there was no brute-force attack detection on the server side, I hope this was wrong). I'm feeling that there may be more "3rd party programs" coming for the naive players and hope no one will fall prey of these sharks.

Spread the word: RMT companies should not survive, you should not buy virtual gold for real money and secure your computer and your accounts. Sorry for repeating it, but SOE article on EQ II is really nice on security advices (that is unfortunately no longer online, but here is a glimpse:
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/171064 ).

Inde · Mar 19, 2008, 05:50 PM // 17:50

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Meth

Let's say you own a store, which is at risk of being robbed by a local gang. The gang members all wear blue. Does that mean that not allowing anyone wearing blue into your store will keep you safe? No, any gang member who wants to get in will just wear different clothes. Meanwhile you turn away numerous customers who don't know about your no-blue policy. The gang is mildly inconvenienced, while an unlucky customer will get punished.

First off, well there is no first off... I have no idea what you are talking about and this analogy relates nothing to what I said. We implement email bans in a large variety of ways. And Fril, last sentence applies to you as well. I'm not sure how exactly you think we do email bans... but there's a number of ways and options we can do these. You might be surprised how many use an email address from the gold selling site. This is also just 1 method we use. We use a variety of different bans and ways to control the gold spam and ad spam on these boards.

I'm sure Anet is in the same position we are, they know that IP bans are not the answer-all. But if it can slow them down or give them a higher cost as Fril pointed out, then there's a possible benefit and reduction in their numbers.

Lem · Mar 19, 2008, 05:59 PM // 17:59

The whole situation is a bit like the "war" on drugs. So longer as there is a buyer out there, someone will find a way to sell to them, regardless of what measures you put in place to catch/stop them.

I agree the new measures put in place will help slow down the rate of propagation the only way to eliminate it entirely is to close the servers, and that is obviously not a sensibly solution.

Fril Estelin · Mar 19, 2008, 06:02 PM // 18:02

Quote:

Originally Posted by Inde

I'm sure Anet is in the same position we are, they know that IP bans are not the answer-all. But if it can slow them down then there's a benefit.

If by email ban you mean banning email addresses based on some filters, it doesn't help one bit (see gmail and hotmail). But I guess that for the safety of everyone, we should stop discussing this (no, it's not "security by obscurity", it's simply to avoid creating script kiddies). I believe Anet is already using an armada of methods to ban botters, at the packet and programs level. IP is just like a big hammer on the head of RMT companies, it won't kill them for sure but may be push them to the point where they say "we're not making enough profit in GW, let's reallocate our resources to MMO X instead".

As I mentioned in a different thread, the MMO companies should unite against RMT companies, because they won't be able to sustain the pressure individually (in my previous example, if MMO X closes due to the RMT companies moving away from GW, they'll have to find new preys and possibly come back to GW in much nastier ways).

Lem · Mar 19, 2008, 06:05 PM // 18:05

Ultimately they will never leave entirely, because they will just push the price up so they are making a profit, however it is possible to drastically reduce the effect of bot farmed gold on the economy.

MithranArkanere · Mar 19, 2008, 06:43 PM // 18:43

I can only say one thing:

At last.

Oh... those where one or two things...? I think that... hm... two words but one thing. Yeah.

c0c0c0 · Mar 19, 2008, 06:54 PM // 18:54

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Meth

Changing your ip address is really that easy. Google search it, you will see 5 seconds is an overstatement.

Heh? Changing your local IP address is easy. Changing your external address? Not so easy. Either you have purchased a block of static IP addresses (expensive) from your ISP that you have to keep switching, or you have a dynamic address provided by the ISP that is changes at their convenience (not yours).

Nothing is made impossible. Just more expensive (time or money).

N1ghtstalker · Mar 19, 2008, 06:59 PM // 18:59

very good idea
by blocking the IP's instead of the account itself they'll be able to disable more sellers at once

Ctb · Mar 19, 2008, 07:12 PM // 19:12

Quote:

...stop trying to explain something you don't know anythign about.

Quote:

...stop trying to explain something you don't know anythign about.

Mm hmm.

I'm not going to argue with you about this anymore. If you change the MAC you had to register whether through cloning or hardware replacement, and your ISP filters by known MACs, you're not going to get a new IP, you're going to get locked out of your connection until you re-register the new router, NIC, whatever the hell you initially used when you set up the connection in the first place. That's why, on those ISPs that lock things down by MAC, when you change out a router you have to clone the address of the old router on the new one.

The conversation is over. The fact that you are unaware that the way your ISP handles MACs is not universal doesn't mean I "don't know anythign (sic)" about the subject.

Also, I had to register my MODEM'S MAC address, not my router's, because my ISP doesn't care if I use a home network.

fusa · Mar 19, 2008, 09:11 PM // 21:11

Quote:

Mm hmm.

I'm not going to argue with you about this anymore. If you change the MAC you had to register whether through cloning or hardware replacement, and your ISP filters by known MACs, you're not going to get a new IP, you're going to get locked out of your connection until you re-register the new router, NIC, whatever the hell you initially used when you set up the connection in the first place. That's why, on those ISPs that lock things down by MAC, when you change out a router you have to clone the address of the old router on the new one.

The conversation is over. The fact that you are unaware that the way your ISP handles MACs is not universal doesn't mean I "don't know anythign (sic)" about the subject.

Also, I had to register my MODEM'S MAC address, not my router's, because my ISP doesn't care if I use a home network.

Registering your modem's mac address just allows you to connect. Many ISP's assign IP's by the mac address connecting to the network. That mac address either comes from the computer that is connected directly to the modem or the router. Both of these can be changed easily, and when done the isp assigns a new ip since it thinks a new computer has connected to the isp. ISP's only filter by known mac's of the modems that were registered to connect to the isp. They don't filter mac's of computers or routers. You still have absoluetly no idea of how this works or anything you're talking about.

The Fox · Mar 19, 2008, 09:16 PM // 21:16

Quote:

Originally Posted by Stockholm

The Bot's finaly made the BIG MISTAKE

They stepped in to the the Dev's "favorit child" territory and they decided to act.
Don't mess with the PvP area or you get the nerfbat around your ears.

lol... PVP, the sacred grail; highly coveted and guarded by the twin nerf bats of fire and brimstone!