Hardware Ban the Cheaters/Wintraders. Fire Any Colluders. We need to Reset PvP

[Shao.7236]

Any signs of integrity from Anet in PvP would be a net positive for anyone but the bad blood the mode has.

Edited July 7, 2023 by Shao.7236

[Essence Snow.3194]

On 6/28/2023 at 3:44 PM, Essence Snow.3194 said:

What is a  gizmo btw?.....Feel like I need to post that Chris Pratt meme

Admittedly after over 10k matches...I didn't know these were a thing as they are Tourny rewards. After discovering what they are, I find it crazy and absurd ppl would pay for them.

[Ronald McDonald.8165]

2 hours ago, MasterMind.3267 said:

Well, despite the fact that you're partially right, that's not entirely my point. Yes, I am also quite sure that wintrading is probably never going to affect me personally. But there's more to it. If top players are hacking and don't get banned, everybody can do it. If account buying and gizmo selling is not a problem, at some point buyers will ruin my games, or people smurfing to get their next account ready. And the latter isn't a small problem either since people who painstakingly track alts of top players estimate that there are several dozen alt accounts on the top leaderboards alone. The list is much longer but you might get the point. More importantly even is the fact that it will definitely affect me personally in a more general sense because it ruins the reputation and attractiveness of the game mode itself. With no new people coming in, it messes with everybody down to the lowest ranks. You said these are the forums - but I was not talking about the forums initially. Not exclusively, anyway. When I tried to learn about PvP in general, not looking for problems specifically, I immediately encountered all of those subjects - here, yes, but even more so on Reddit and YouTube (because of Google's prioritzation I guess). If you're a completely ignorant casual, indeed you're probably never going to hear about this. But if you're actually interested, maybe like an "ambitioned casual on their way to intermediate" or whatever, you cannot avoid learning about the stuff. You WILL expect to be affected by some of it, be it wintrading, hacking, ladder gatekeeping, personal harassment for criticizing this behavior, or even just afking and botting. Those two are not directly related to certain people's actions, of course, but if PvP was in a more respectable state, those issues would for sure get attacked by ANet so there is some sort of realtion.

Anyway, you can obviously resort to just telling anyone and everyone, "Don't overthink it, you will never get good enough for this to be an actual problem for you," but in the end, all best players have to start as noobs. Even if it's just a small percentage, you do deter all of those who actually want to get to the top from even trying to improve and that's the literal nail in the coffin for the upper ranks. What I'm trying is to is that yes, most people don't need to worry about their experience being ruined by top players wintrading. But there's much, much more to it that you cannot simply ignore if you want PvP as a whole to survive at all.

By the way, I would guess that if there was any motivation for new players to actually grind getting good so that we had at least somewhat of a sizeable population at high skill levels, all this "Cartel" and clique and gatekeeping and night queuing and match manipulation stuff wouldn't even be possible. In my noob guild alone there are like 10+ people who said they were willing to actually practice and organize stuff for PvP until they learned about what's going on. And that's a noob guild that existed for a couple of weeks. With a bit of care and incentives, PvP could easily gain multiple thousands more active players over night. But it would require some sort of purge, I guess.

 

Thank you for all the kind words. I think if PvP in this game finally falls, it will rise up in a different game maybe but not here 😄 I'm not sure about the collusion thing. It's tempting to think of something like that because it's really hard to come up with any other explanation for what's going on but I personally hate jumping to "some sort of conspiracy" conclusions. Moreover, I'm on the fence concerning the people who actually organize and do all this stuff. I've briefly chatted with someone who knows a lot of those people personally and it doesn't seem like all of them are bad human beings or something in any way - though several definitely are, as is common knowledge, I guess. Still, you can see some of the accused people uploading videos of (fairly played) matches with voice chat, class or technique guides or stream. They seem to be friendly and nice. But then you see chat logs of a third party talking about them saying how they negotiated for mAT wins and stuff. I would love to hear why they're doing this. Are they just so incredibly bored where they're at? Do they think that if there's no competition anyway that they can just make the best (as in $$$) of it? The person I talked to just said, as ANet didn't care when some people started doing it, everyone else stopped caring as well. Now if you're a new player getting really good, they approach you and you either join them in their endeavour or some of their more malicious members are going to make sure PvP becomes hell on Earth for you. But from what it sounded like most of those who make it that far simply feel good about being allowed to profit from it as well.

I have to say, this response is kind of wild. You're spending all this time making excuses for not trying instead of just playing and having fun. You are just regurgitating things you have heard without any experience of it yourself. There are plenty of streamers who are near the top of the leaderboards that you can watch stream for hours on end. And you're not going to see a single match wintraded in a 3+ hour stream. 

NotoriousNaru - Twitch

Boyce's Videos - Twitch

Grimjacke - Twitch

Shorts_Gaming - Twitch

Here is hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of top level matches. Show me all the wintrading. Show me all this terrible stuff that is going to happen to you when you reach their level. 

There are people in this very thread here who will instead of taking responsibility for not winning matches come up with any excuse they can to validate their placings on the leaderboard. People who I have played against and people who I have watched streamers dumpster in matches as if they were any other gold PUG. 

[MasterMind.3267]

2 hours ago, Ronald McDonald.8165 said:

And you're not going to see a single match wintraded in a 3+ hour stream.

That's very low effort for a trolling attempt

[Ronald McDonald.8165]

27 minutes ago, MasterMind.3267 said:

That's very low effort for a trolling attempt

Keep crying about things that have no influence on you. I just posted hundreds of hours of high level gameplay for you. Go find all that wintrading. It should be super easy to find right? I’ll be sitting here waiting.

Edited July 7, 2023 by Ronald McDonald.8165

[Azure The Heartless.3261]

On 7/6/2023 at 10:28 AM, MasterMind.3267 said:

Hi. I'm new to PvP. I tried it out, I loved the gameplay. I'm also part of a guild that almost entirely consists of noobs. A lot of them joined me in trying out PvP - they loved it as well. There is a lot of potential. After just a handful of unranked matches, we decided we wanted to "get good" at some point. But then I went researching. What I found was a community almost devoid of any transfer of knowledge, full of very aggressive people and when I googled how to get the basics straight and improve, what I found first were stories about "wintrading", "gizmo selling", "leaderbord gatekeeping", literal harassment of people through alt accounts. It was like a trainwreck, I couldn't look away. "ANet refuses to do anything", "convicted cheaters, RMTer, etc. got unbanned immediately" (and re-partnered, it seems like). But it got even worse. "Team USA Has Monetized Anet Partner Exclusive Rewards", Teapot practically gave away the most exclusive thing to sellers, ANet deletes all mentions of perpetrators from the forums, tries to censor Reddit instead of f-ing doing something. I could continue, the rabbit hole is deep.

This is what we as aspiring PvPers see when we try to learn about the game mode. It's catastrophic. And I personally got the impression that ANet by now actually supports it being that way. Not only talking about the personal connections between "certain people," but overall. (Edit: Meaning I think they know exactly who does what. They know of the account sharing, of certain figures hiring people to farm them AP because they're mentally ill and can't stop investing in the game, they know of the account name changes before something gets dropped onto sites I'm probably not allowed to name. You can't tell me with a straight face that they don't know about that stuff. That they could be fooled by changing account names. That's ridiculous. Of course they can track all of that back. I feel like they decided that they do not want this to end - for whatever reason! - and that honestly makes me angry.) And I get that a lot of people can't hear the complaints anymore but if it wasn't for some person mentioning this on the forums or on Reddit every few days, I would have given up on the community. So, please don't stop these posts. Even if it's been the same content for years.

And the worst - or best? - of it all is that all the above stuff aside, it's still simply an enjoyable game mode with loads of gameplay potential. Even after all those years of neglect and deliberate damaging. It would be so incredibly easy to fix and I guarantee you, with just a little bit of care and attention the PvP player base would multiply in a heartbeat.

 

Absolutely true.

[Azure The Heartless.3261]

3 hours ago, Natedog.7549 said:

Let's not forget when content creators said that us talking about these issues was worse for the game because more people would see that there are problems. 

And on that note, never feel bad about talking about problems. There is a lot of good that the game can bring, but "just shuddup and play along" is infinitely worse than any kind of backlash actively attempting to fix the problem would bring. 

If any of these content creators or developers are in a 'secret chokehold' because of issues like this, it would be infinitely better for everyone to do the right thing and make sure that the game mode is a solid foundation for the community you want to grow here. 

[Paradoxoglanis.1904]

13 hours ago, Trevor Boyer.6524 said:

You want to know what's terrifying?

You could tell ChatGPT to start making f2p GW2 accounts and learn how to play it, and that AI could seriously learn to play the game like ultra efficiently with lightning reflexes and run thousands of accounts at once.

If it isn't being done already, this is definitely something that is going to happen to gaming in the very very near future.

As an AI language model, I don't have the capability to play games like Guild Wars 2 or any other video game. My purpose is to assist with providing information and answering questions to the best of my abilities. If you have any questions about Guild Wars 2 or need help with game-related information, I'd be happy to try and assist you.

[Anvar.5673]

3 hours ago, Ronald McDonald.8165 said:

Here is hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of top level matches. Show me all the wintrading. Show me all this terrible stuff that is going to happen to you when you reach their level. 

You know that the concept of selling accounts in exchange of real money isn't done with main accounts, right ? They will obviously not sell their main accounts which are used for streaming and representation. Alt accounts out of hours are here for that.

Never forget (especially for NotoriousNaru):

Quote

As many of you are aware, we received many reports that the winners of July’s Monthly tournament were not played by the owners of those accounts. After a thorough investigation, we have found that these accusations are true.

We are taking this very seriously. The following 10 players listed below have been given permanent dishonor.

Naru and alts
Nos and alts
Wakkey and alts
Toker and alts
Zeromis and alts

Asuna Proxy
Forever I Promise
Love Them Boons
Jolly Karen
Makus

In addition, we have removed prizes gained by the winning players and have cleared the statues. They will retain the titles for a short while until we can remove them in the future.

We will be continuing to monitor tournaments in the future.

The Guild Wars 2 PvP Team

 

[Eddie.9143]

If Omegle can hardware ban through IP resets, modem resets, and vpns, there's no reason GW2 shouldn't be able to do the same.

[Azure The Heartless.3261]

3 hours ago, Ronald McDonald.8165 said:

Here is hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of top level matches. Show me all the wintrading.

There is an easily observable example of one of the people on that list actively not facing the repercussions of their actions. What point did you think you were making here? 

 

[MasterMind.3267]

1 hour ago, Ronald McDonald.8165 said:

Keep crying about things that have no influence on you. I just posted hundreds of hours of high level gameplay for you. Go find all that wintrading. It should be super easy to find right? I’ll be sitting here waiting.

Maybe we could start with you reading my actual post instead of ignoring all other things I mentioned. Maybe you should stop shitting on people on the forums like a 12 year-old because that's all I've ever seen from you. Maybe you shouldn't accuse the streamers you value so highly of being stupid enough to break TOS while streaming. If I was them, I would feel insulted. I mean, that would be the most idiotic cheaters on the globe. This is my last reply to your posts.

[MasterMind.3267]

14 minutes ago, Eddie.9143 said:

If Omegle can hardware ban through IP resets, modem resets, and vpns, there's no reason GW2 shouldn't be able to do the same.

Guild Wars 2 does have hardware bans afaik. I've read an article somewhere that said the above list of players  (Okay, that doesn't make sense. I'll see if I can find it.) or maybe someone else did actually get hardware ID banned.

Edit 2: I can't find it right now. I think it was a screenshot from an old news article in "one of those" videos. But I've found something else. Seems like ANet used to handle cheating a little bit differently back in the days, lmao.

Edited July 7, 2023 by MasterMind.3267

[Anvar.5673]

1 hour ago, Ronald McDonald.8165 said:

Keep crying about things that have no influence on you. I just posted hundreds of hours of high level gameplay for you. Go find all that wintrading. It should be super easy to find right? I’ll be sitting here waiting.

I will not deny there is some high level in the streams you shared.

However, if those people didn't contributed themselves to destroy the PvP since years with toxics behaviors, windrating, goldselling and many other bad things, there would be a lot more of competitors to put them from top 10 to top 250.

They could leave Guild Wars 2 today that most of the community wouldn't care. As in any high level sport, there will always be new generations to take over, certainly in a more ethical way.

[Ronald McDonald.8165]

1 hour ago, Anvar.5673 said:

You know that the concept of selling accounts in exchange of real money isn't done with main accounts, right ? They will obviously not sell their main accounts which are used for streaming and representation. Alt accounts out of hours are here for that.

Never forget (especially for NotoriousNaru):

 

That is honestly sad if a 6 year old forum post is what influences your enjoyment of this game. When I play against Naru in a match, my thought isnt "Oh no he sold a gizmo" its, I gotta watch out cause he is gonna kick my kitten if I don't. Cause I'm playing the game, which seems to be a hard thing for people to do these days. 

58 minutes ago, Azure The Heartless.3261 said:

There is an easily observable example of one of the people on that list actively not facing the repercussions of their actions. What point did you think you were making here? 

 

Maybe you should follow my posts to see what my point I was making was. 

57 minutes ago, MasterMind.3267 said:

Maybe we could start with you reading my actual post instead of ignoring all other things I mentioned. Maybe you should stop shitting on people on the forums like a 12 year-old because that's all I've ever seen from you. Maybe you shouldn't accuse the streamers you value so highly of being stupid enough to break TOS while streaming. If I was them, I would feel insulted. I mean, that would be the most idiotic cheaters on the globe. This is my last reply to your posts.

Oh buddy, I've read your posts. You've drank the cool-aid. You're literally quoting video titles from Miaz as your reasoning. The person who is the most infamous cheater in the game. Proven to use photoshopped images in his "expose" videos. A guy who has made it his full time job to start kitten in an online video game because he has absolutely nothing better to do in his life. Maybe you should learn to think for yourself. How about playing the game and coming to your own conclusions instead of being a forum lemming? You said it yourself, you're a noob. You've experienced none of these issues yet you're writing essays about them. Think about that. 

 

 

Edited July 7, 2023 by Ronald McDonald.8165

[Anvar.5673]

13 minutes ago, Ronald McDonald.8165 said:

That is honestly sad if a 6 year old forum post is what influences your enjoyment of this game. When I play against Naru in a match, my though isnt "Oh no he sold a gizmo" its, I gotta watch out cause he is gonna kick my kitten if I don't. Cause I'm playing the game, which seems to be a hard thing for people to do these days. 

What is sad is that a such a rotten guy can go around today in Guild Wars 2. A permanent dishonor should stay permanent. As I said, if those people didn't contributed to destroy the PvP since years, we would be a lot more to be able to spank him as it deserve it. It's not hard to be the king of a kingdom in ruins.

Edited July 7, 2023 by Anvar.5673

[Multicolorhipster.9751]

36 minutes ago, Ronald McDonald.8165 said:

That is honestly sad if a 6 year old forum post is what influences your enjoyment of this game. When I play against Naru in a match, my thought isnt "Oh no he sold a gizmo" its, I gotta watch out cause he is gonna kick my kitten if I don't. Cause I'm playing the game, which seems to be a hard thing for people to do these days. 

You make ignorance seem like a weakness rather than the strength that it is. If you want to play with a bunch of McCheats; more power to you, go right ahead. There shouldn't be any surprised McPikachu faces when there's nobody else with any desire to play with.

5 hours ago, Ronald McDonald.8165 said:

I have to say, this response is kind of wild. You're spending all this time making excuses for not trying instead of just playing and having fun. You are just regurgitating things you have heard without any experience of it yourself. There are plenty of streamers who are near the top of the leaderboards that you can watch stream for hours on end. And you're not going to see a single match wintraded in a 3+ hour stream. 

NotoriousNaru - Twitch

Boyce's Videos - Twitch

Grimjacke - Twitch

Shorts_Gaming - Twitch

Here is hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of top level matches. Show me all the wintrading. Show me all this terrible stuff that is going to happen to you when you reach their level. 

Shorts is probably the only clean streamer you just listed and in one of his previous streams he caught one of the wintraders teleport hacking from impossible no line of sight spots on Foefire. It has become his most popular clip of all time on his twitch. https://www.twitch.tv/shorts_gaming/clip/NurturingSmellyLaptopTBTacoLeft-5PfTxBPJLGBznSDL

So when you say that "you're not going to see a single match wintraded in a 3+ hour stream" you could very well be wrong, but I'm fairly certain that probably doesn't bother you at all.

Furthermore when the wintraders stream; they do so on their accounts, when they wintrade they're usually playing on someone else's and usually not in front of their audiences, because the hope is that if someone blatantly streamed themself cheating and account-sharing, then Arenanet couldn't ignore it.

1 hour ago, Ronald McDonald.8165 said:

Oh buddy, I've read your posts. You've drank the cool-aid. You're literally quoting video titles from Miaz as your reasoning. The person who is the most infamous cheater in the game.

You asked for proof of wintrading, Miaz has it. Would it be fair to ask you for proof of Miaz cheating?

1 hour ago, Ronald McDonald.8165 said:

Proven to use photoshopped images in his "expose" videos.

That's the weakest argument you could possibly make. There's 0 proof of this happening and its usually the first thing people say to backpedal when they've been caught.

1 hour ago, Ronald McDonald.8165 said:

A guy who has made it his full time job to start kitten in an online video game because he has absolutely nothing better to do in his life.

Better than making cheating in an online video game a full-time job.

1 hour ago, Ronald McDonald.8165 said:

Maybe you should learn to think for yourself. How about playing the game and coming to your own conclusions instead of being a forum lemming? You said it yourself, you're a noob. You've experienced none of these issues yet you're writing essays about them. Think about that. 

You criticize Miaz for what he does then suggest someone do the same so that they can arrive at their own conclusion. Its damned if they do, damned if they don't with you. And you're right here with us, the only difference being simping for cheaters and clout-chasers instead of simping for the one that exposes the lot. If you're as invested in the game as you say you are, you should really just be off playing it, no?

[stormemperor.3745]

No, you need a job

[Multicolorhipster.9751]

3 minutes ago, stormemperor.3745 said:

No, you need a job

Just don't have it be cheating in a mostly dead and hidden gamemode in an online game. Make sure its a productive job that people will respect you for engaging in and that would do your momma proud.

[MasterMind.3267]

19 minutes ago, Multicolorhipster.9751 said:

That's the weakest argument you could possibly make. There's 0 proof of this happening and its usually the first thing people say to backpedal when they've been caught.

Don't get me wrong, I do think Miaz is a bad person. No idea if he changed at all since the time that he did his things. I also believe Noody saying Miaz faked some screenshots. (Noody's no angel either for milking an obviously mentally ill dude, btw...) But that's a salty guy trying to mess up someone who he had completely unnecessary personal beef with. All of this kind of makes him the perfect candidate to know how all the other stuff works, though - where to look, who to talk to, how to manipulate them to leak information etc. Throwing a bunch of ad hominem arguments at him doesn't invalidate his findings - aside from the fact that it's simply not the only evidence out there. A lot of what he does is even reproducable so everybody can go use his techniques and track accounts and show this stuff doesn't happen. There's literally zero reason to make up a strawman by posting stream VODs, lol. But those people didn't even bother denying the allegations anyway (as far as I know), so I guess that's that. As for Miaz, he probably knows there's no coming back from what he did and he's trying to take down the entire house of cards with him. At least nowadays he admits that he's an kitten and what he did was wrong. Apparently that's the kind of person it takes to dive as deep into that rabbit hole as he did. 🤷‍♂️

[Yerlock.4678]

On 7/6/2023 at 1:59 PM, Stand The Wall.6987 said:

ip ban < vpn

MAC address banning gets around pesky vpn’s. That’s why I said hardware ban

[Kellyyyy.7068]

9 minutes ago, gmmg.9210 said:

MAC address banning gets around pesky vpn’s. That’s why I said hardware ban

Never heard of a hwid spoofer?

[Stand The Wall.6987]

20 minutes ago, gmmg.9210 said:

MAC address banning gets around pesky vpn’s. That’s why I said hardware ban

ah cool then yeah f em all hardware ban it is

[Ronald McDonald.8165]

6 minutes ago, Multicolorhipster.9751 said:

You make ignorance seem like a weakness rather than the strength that it is. If you want to play with a bunch of McCheats; more power to you, go right ahead. There shouldn't be any surprised McPikachu faces when there's nobody else with any desire to play with.

Shorts is probably the only clean streamer you just listed and in one of his previous streams he caught one of the wintraders teleport hacking from impossible no line of sight spots on Foefire. It has become his most popular clip of all time on his twitch. https://www.twitch.tv/shorts_gaming/clip/NurturingSmellyLaptopTBTacoLeft-5PfTxBPJLGBznSDL

So when you say that "you're not going to see a single match wintraded in a 3+ hour stream" you could very well be wrong, but I'm fairly certain that probably doesn't bother you at all.

Furthermore when the wintraders stream; they do so on their accounts, when they wintrade they're usually playing on someone else's and usually not in front of their audiences, because the hope is that if someone blatantly streamed themself cheating and account-sharing, then Arenanet couldn't ignore it.

You asked for proof of wintrading, Miaz has it. Would it be fair to ask you for proof of Miaz cheating?

That's the weakest argument you could possibly make. There's 0 proof of this happening and its usually the first thing people say to backpedal when they've been caught.

Better than making cheating in an online video game a full-time job.

You criticize Miaz for what he does then suggest someone do the same so that they can arrive at their own conclusion. Its damned if they do, damned if they don't with you. And you're right here with us, the only difference being simping for cheaters and clout-chasers instead of simping for the one that exposes the lot. If you're as invested in the game as you say you are, you should really just be off playing it, no?

Buddy, thank you for proving my point. If the best you can do to show all of this cheating and wintrading is a 10 month old video of Pheonix (who has been rightfully banned) hacking, that proves my point. If this was widespread problem that was destroying the quality of gameplay in a consistently meaningful way (as you said, its his most popular clip) with the hundreds of hours he has played since then there would be 30 more clips just like it. Of the hundreds of hours Naru has played, there would be dozens more clips just like it. But there aren't. Maybe you should Mckittening think about that for a second?

 

 

 

[JTGuevara.9018]

7 hours ago, Ronald McDonald.8165 said:

I have to say, this response is kind of wild. You're spending all this time making excuses for not trying instead of just playing and having fun. You are just regurgitating things you have heard without any experience of it yourself. There are plenty of streamers who are near the top of the leaderboards that you can watch stream for hours on end. And you're not going to see a single match wintraded in a 3+ hour stream. 

NotoriousNaru - Twitch

Boyce's Videos - Twitch

Grimjacke - Twitch

Shorts_Gaming - Twitch

Here is hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of top level matches. Show me all the wintrading. Show me all this terrible stuff that is going to happen to you when you reach their level. 

There are people in this very thread here who will instead of taking responsibility for not winning matches come up with any excuse they can to validate their placings on the leaderboard. People who I have played against and people who I have watched streamers dumpster in matches as if they were any other gold PUG. 

So in other words: