eBay Gold Sellers: not being stopped?

On November 26th I reported two eBay gold sellers to ANet. They responded with the usual generic message and I proceeded to forget all about it.

I was clearing through my bookmarks today and saw them. I'd saved them to see if they'd get banned or whatever. I went to go look before I deleted them but they're still operating.

Now I don't know the process involved in getting rid of these people, but I thought that if ANet contacted eBay these people would get shut down? And I know cause of privacy policy ANet can't tell us anything... That's a lot of money they made in the two weeks since I reported them.

What I would like to know is if anyone has had a similar experience. Or if anyone knows how long exactly it takes before these guys get in trouble from eBay.

It's kind of discouraging for the people that report this stuff. The message I got from support didn't even say they would look into it. :S

Buy enough Ebay shares to sit on the board of directors, then proceed to kick/ban/block those users yourself.

Otherwise like the rest of us who just crawls around, it just something we have to live with.

An ebay account is not connected to a Guild Wars account. It is not illegal to sell gold on ebay so why would ebay ban the accounts?
If you can connect these ebay sellers to accounts on GW then Anet can do something but otherwise there is nothing they can do.
They definitley cannot force ebay to ban sellers accounts.
Sad but true.

According to the terms of agreement, those Ebay sellers do not own the gold that they are selling as it is data on Anet's servers. And Ebay can get in trouble for not closing the accounts.

Most likely, ANET is tracking down the accounts of those people before shutting them down. Or Ebay doesn't know about it yet.

I think Anet also knows that, yeah they can try to stop people from selling, but at the same time, they know there will always be people doing this.

Kinda like, maybe they don't want to waste there time stopping one or two people from doing something, that they know won't change anything.

Its sad to say, But its true

This point has been addressed in past threads, and yet continues to pop up.

The ebay sellers themselves say that they do not own the gold, and that all intellectual property remains in the sole possession of the company. When you buy ebay gold, you're not actually buying the gold, you are buying a service - specifically, the time and effort it took for the ebay sellers to farm the gold for you.

Take a look around - almost every popular online game has a crowd of gold/item sellers to go with it. I don't think ebay can shut them down, because they aren't doing anything that's actually illegal. The only ones that can do anything about it are the game companies, by cutting off access due to violation of EULA.

Theres only so much Anet can do to shut down outside areas.

The best they can do, is to FIND THE GUILD WARS ACCOUNTS ASSOCIATED WITH THE EBAYER'S ACCOUNT AND BAN THEM

Farm Botting networks are parts of ebay accounts, shutting down 1 account wont help, you need to shut them ALL down at once.

This is a delicate issue since we know that misbanning can occur when mass banning take place.

Our reminders of past misbanning:

-Post Dragon Festival AFK bannings,

-Last mass banning of botting accounts, accidently banning some players who have reported "bot like behaviours".

-Recent case of "Grief Banning" where some guys get their guild/alliance mates to spam support to force a temp ban on someone they are unhappy with.

So before anyone wants to rally Anet into another round of account bannings, please keep in mind to specify the specific problem with specific targeted solutions rather than a vage one.

Not to mention anet keeps trying to shut down the only way casual players have of making gold, so they have no where to really turn to. And no im by far from a casual player.

Look at spirit bond, it was easy for anyone to do. everyone had money then. If anet really wanted to do away with the gold sellers theyd rethink some of the nerfs they did. Now if people aint some what gifted its very difficult for them to make any decent amounts.

The measures so far put in place have had zero effect on the price of ebay gold. I make a habit of checking the prices after each 'update' to see if that finally makes the difference.

Per million gold

Pre factions price was $60
Right after factions it shot up to $100 for about 6 weeks
After factions it went down about $60
After the so called farming nerf and NF it went up to about $80
Now it's down to about $50

If the idea was to make life as difficult for these guys then it's clearly failed, and in the process caused a lot of up set amongst normal farmers and players.

You can only put in so much in game countermeasures(AI changes, nerfs new mobs etc) before it starts to negatively impact ones playerbase. It's a balancing act. Nerf too little and players and bot exploit it like mad, nerf too much and legitimate players will leave as the game is no longer fun. It would be very sad to see GW die out because of over zealous anti bot/gold farm measures.

Bots and Gold farmers have one thing, that a normal player does not.. Time

So, whats the answer? In my view the very best way is for the game to provide stuff that makes the need to buy the gold decline. AN have already started this with rare item rewards for missions and quests . Adding rare skinned weapons as green drops etc etc and that is one of the reasons why I think the price of gold has dropped. Maybe people are'nt buying as much of it as they used to?

Basically, nerf the game to stop the gold farmers and you risk nerfing the game to the detriment of the playerbase and in the end people leave.

Sadly AN now have the reputation for taking stuff away from players, not adding. Which is not the case. They give us loads of updated content, keep things fresh but alas perceptions is a powerful thing.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Anet could easily request these auctions to be removed. You don't know what your talking about.

Anet doesn't seem to give a sniff about ebay gold sellers though. Hell, for all we know, it is Anet selling gold on Ebay.

Perception is indeed a powerful force just as it can often be said that CGI cinematics and not the actual game content may actually help sell the game ie Factions.

Do you mean Anets terms of agreement, because i dont think Ebay had to sign the Eula, nor could they get in trouble for not following an agreement they didnt sign

Im pretty sure ebay can shut down whoever they want on their website, ill bet (and no i cant be arsed to check), they have a clause that basicly says "if we find your material unacceptable or we dont like it well shut you down".

But i dont think its in Ebays intrests to spend 100's of hours monotoring all the gold sellers for all the games and shutting them down, when there are more important things to monitor for like stolen goods.

You make Anet's EULA sound like it is worth more than that $49 box of a "game".

Illegal? Don't think so.

You talk about these gold sellers like they are dumb..they are not. That little paragraph at the bottom of the page covers them against any legal action.

Concerning Ebay and the closing of accounts..they can close all the accounts they want another account will pop up the next day using a different IP address.

On another note there is far bigger gold sellers then Ebay.

In short nothing will be done. The battle against gold sellers is like a very publicated war..just not possible to win.

And guess who gets caught in the crossfire?

Perhaps Anet should rethink their anal retentive mindsets.

Just curious, but why is everyone targeting ebay anyway? I just did a search on google for guild wars gold out of curiosity, and the first page of results doesn't even include any ebay sites. Not that I'm saying there isn't any sites, but still, just wondering why the focus always goes on ebay in particular.

Anet does not reward telltales

Anyway, go ask Blizzard why they never stopped Ebay sellers... They have over 6 years experience in this.

eBay aren't interested in stopping these guys. They make money out of the sales. The only reason they'd ban someone selling on ebay is if they have a legal requirement to do so.

This puts the entire burden on aNet to either: pursuade eBay that the sales are illegal; or, ban the GW accounts doing the selling/buying

Although eBay'd gold is a pain because it seems to be blamed for making some items really expensive as eBayers can throw money at them; i'm not so sure I'd want aNet spending that much time on individual cases.

I'd rather they spent the time handling the in-game fraudsters (and maybe putting a bit of work into spam handling. - just disable the up arrow key in chat, please - let the spammers get RSI)

As horrible as Gold Selling is via Ebay. I'm surprize that GW hasn't considered selling gold via their store. If they offer it cheap enough they could put Ebay sellers out of business. Don't get me wrong I understand this would infuriate some player base - but if gold is being sold on Ebay and people are buying then why shouldn't GW make a profit from it.

Just my thoughts - be it good or bad..

Take Care..