Alt-account farming (Devs read!)

[Neferpitouh.4356]

Right now (been like this for many many years, just indifferent form) doing easy dailies and weeklies on alt accounts translate into 300-400g/h kind of farming.

You can literally get yourself 5000g+ in a day of full gaming if you have 50+ alt accounts.

Dodge 3 times (golem on aerodrome), view a vista, identify 10-100x gear,  gather 100x stuff (you can bring your alts to your full home for giga gains) or even do 1x strike mission (just carry your alts yourself on Shiverpeak) and so on are all very low effort and easy objectives that can be done on alt with ease.

Heck even if you don't do anything, 5AA/daily just for logging into an alt, still translates into tons of gold.

All of these activities are limited to once a day or week.  It is balanced around having a single account. That's why they are super profitable.

If you farm those with 50 accounts and funnel all the rewards into a single main, essentially bypassing those "daily/weekly limits", that's just beyond broken. It feels like cheating, but it is not against ToS.

This is not fair against players who only play their main. You are literally griefing yourself if you play the game with its intended way. The gap is way too big to ignore.

Now this would be a little bit more understandable if people paid full price for these "alt accounts" but...

Most of those accounts are just heroic editions (event keys) that's been bought over blackmarket (g2a etc.) for mere 1 -2$ per. Especially on Twitch event people hoarded tons of them. 

anet you didn't earn a single $ off these keys. These are the keys you handed out for events for free. A portion of players plundered them for a pocket change.

Just because someone hoarded 2$ event keys a few years ago, shouldn't allow them have at the very least 10x income advantage over other players who actually fully engages with the game (meta trains, fractals, strikes, raids etc.)

The most sweaty, tryhard ingame activities with full efficient gameplay usually rewards you with 30h/g max. On the other hand, farming daily Vaults, home instances, infusing quartz crystals, daily JP chests, multiboxing easy infusion metas (chak, AB etc) translate into god knows what. The vault itself alone is 300-400g/h till you cap out on rewards.

I'd hoped that the new daily system would get rid of this, but all it did was making alt-account farming better. You just need to spend 5mins on your alts, instead of just logging in and out and have more gold out of it.

You get away with this because most people are NOT aware of this abuse. And those who aware and are abusing this, usually either stay silent so that they wouldn't lose their gold mine or try to oppress people who try to raise awareness.  This is not how you get new players. This is not how you retain your current players. This is exactly how you slowly kill your already old game. No matter how I look into it, this is straight up ridicilous and unacceptable.

I ask you to provide fairness. You have so many options, but if you keep ignoring the issue I won't buy your upcoming expansions anymore and I will be more likely to move to an another game. It has been years. You had your chance to fix this with the new daily system, but you didn't. I have no intention of doing 20-30g/h metas at best when I know there are many people out there printing gold absolutely doing nothing.

1) Change your ToS. Multiboxing and then funneling resources to single main should not be allowed, period.

2) Restrict trading on accounts without expansions. At this point core game is a demo anyway. All the endgame is tied to expansions. Having to spent 30$ per alt account would stop most of these activities.

3) Remove 5 AA reward through daily login. Remove AA rewards on individual objective completion. All AAs should be rewarded when you complete 4x daily or 6x weekly. Remove 1g bags. Award 2g on daily 10 AP completion, just like before. And then you make sure that 1 daily out of 4 would be very hard to complete on naked alts! Or 3 weeklies out of 8 options! You need to pay attention what you pick as objectives, not just random stuff! Random casual player won't be happy about this, but you need to take that hit.

4) Keep distributing more and more heroic keys. Make them more accessible for everyone. Which will turn alt-account farming another method to farm gold. It will crash the market for materials and inflatiate the gold. But it will be more fair than what we have right now. Eventually its gains will stabilize around regular ingame activities.

5) ? This is your game. Not mine. Figure it out, thanks!

 

 

Edited September 2, 2023 by Neferpitouh.4356
typo

[Linken.6345]

Well 1 heroic edition accounts cant do chak/ab or shiverpeak pass so yea you mix up core and pof/hot accounts in your ramblings but your not wrong about the outcome.

to make a strike on a core account u have to join old lions court and that can be a challenge.

So yea you do need to do more now then before to gain your gold,

[Hindenburg.3415]

14 minutes ago, Neferpitouh.4356 said:

I ask you to provide fairness. You have so many options, but if you keep ignoring the issue I won't buy your upcoming expansions anymore and I will be more likely to move to an another game

And it's an issue why exactly ?

I will remind you that you can literally buy gold with money in this game. Also gen1 and 3 legendary weapons and raids for legendary armour. But it doesn't affect other players in any way.

 

Edited September 2, 2023 by Hindenburg.3415

[Neferpitouh.4356]

Just now, Hindenburg.3415 said:

And it's an issue why exactly ?

I will remind you that you can literally buy gold with money in this game. Also gen1 and 2 legendary weapons and raids for legendary armour. But it doesn't affect other players in any way.

 

Is this supposed to be an argument?

Once you use currency exchange to get gold;

1) You pay $ to devs, so that they can create better quality content for everyone else

2) You make blue gems cheaper for other players

It benefits everyone.

So by all means, please go get your gold through currency exchange instead of abusing alt accounts. It only benefits you and ruins the game.

 

[QueenKeriti.5176]

Tbqh, if someone's willing to spend that long doing dailies/weeklies on 50+ accounts rather than having fun on their main, good for them? At least they're having to do more than just login, right click box, login, right click box, login, right click box, for shiny rewards. They're going to have to eventually decide if it's even worth it, and I think eventually they'll either just swap to the 5AA a day or give up entirely on those accounts. If they're multiboxing using scripts to get multiple characters to do things at the same time, that is a bannable offense.

Edited September 2, 2023 by QueenKeriti.5176
gave up on how to phrase it

[illuminati.8453]

I don't think there is any way to effectively remove this behavior from the game.   No matter how many restrictions they put on the Daily Login, the alt army will always have an advantage.   

In my opinion, they will likely adjust the rewards but I really think they are most interested in selling xpacs and not driving players away (even if they are alts) so I expect that we will see more things like the Legendary Starter Kit next season and future xpacs to get the alt army to buy them.

[Hindenburg.3415]

6 minutes ago, Neferpitouh.4356 said:

Is this supposed to be an argument?

Yes , pretty much.

And you still haven't provided an explanation why it's an issue.

[jokke.6239]

I do agree with most of what you said

But I don't think it's worse with the new system though

You need a lvl 80 (so this will kill the farm for new heroic accounts), you do need to actually play the game, even if it's for a short ammount of time. I don't think most people would do more than 5 accounts a day, but I could be wrong.

It's not as bad as just logging in and out on 100 accounts

Edited September 2, 2023 by jokke.6239

[Neferpitouh.4356]

7 minutes ago, jokke.6239 said:

I do agree with most of what you said

But I don't think it's worse with the new system though

You need a lvl 80 (so this will kill the far for new accounts), you do need to actualy play the game, even if it's for a short ammount of time. I don't think most people would do more than 5 accounts a day, but I could be wrong.

It's not as bad as just logging in and out on 100 accounts

Older alt accounts have tomes in them... Lv.80 is only an issue for new alts. Even then you can get easy levels through crafting or stuff. It pays itself pretty fast.

The point is it translates into 300-400g/h farms. Honestly, why would I farm 10 hours of DF if I can get the same gains in 1 hour doing  easy stuff on alts? 

Edited September 2, 2023 by Neferpitouh.4356

[Danikat.8537]

I agree with the people saying it's better (or at least certainly no worse) than under the old system.

Also Anet must have known players were farming login rewards because it was discussed openly for years, and their own data could probably should them how many accounts logged in daily but never did anything else and they never did anything to stop it. Then when they redesigned the entire system they did it in a way that still allows alt accounts to benefit, it just requires more effort. I assume that means they're ok with it.

(They did a similar thing with Black Lion Key farming years ago, it used to be possible to get a key every time you did the story and when they changed it they only limited it to once per week, so they reduced the farming but no where near as much as they could have.)

[jokke.6239]

3 minutes ago, Neferpitouh.4356 said:

Older alt accounts have tomes in them... Lv.80 is only an issue for new alts. Even then you can get easy levels through crafting or stuff. 

The point is it translates into 300-400g/h farms. Honestly, why would I farm 10 hours of DF if I can get the same gains in 1 hour doing  easy stuff on alts? 

Because doing daily on 50 accounts is not fun

I doubt many would be able to keep that up for long

Alt account was very lazy before, it's not anymore

I don't think many would do more than max 5 accounts

They have to actually play the game now

 

What's the math for 300/400 g an hour?

How many accounts?

[Neferpitouh.4356]

7 minutes ago, jokke.6239 said:

Because doing daily on 50 accounts is not fun

I doubt many would be able to keep that up for long

Alt account was very lazy before, it's not anymore

I don't think many would do more than max 5 accounts

They have to actually play the game now

 

What's the math for 300/400 g an hour?

How many accounts?

 

It is the combination of average value of AA and how long does it take to get objectives done on alts. 

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/166c2id/alt_accounts_are_still_the_best_gold_making_in/

A dude who has a lot of alts there shares his gains. His math seems to be correct. 

[Freya.9075]

49 minutes ago, Neferpitouh.4356 said:

You can literally get yourself 5000g+ in a day of full gaming if you have 50+ alt accounts.

So. You’re claiming each account get 100g a day? Please provide details and math about how to do this. Asking for a friend 👀

[jokke.6239]

35 minutes ago, Neferpitouh.4356 said:

 

It is the combination of average value of AA and how long does it take to get objectives done on alts. 

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/166c2id/alt_accounts_are_still_the_best_gold_making_in/

A dude who has a lot of alts there shares his gains. His math seems to be correct. 

It seems like a lot of effort still

If I were to do it I would stick to like 5 accounts and just do weekly and special objectives on all of them, that way you could still remain sane 

But I'm sort of forgetting a fresh account will need a lot of work to do the stuff in the first place

Yeah, it's certainly not as easy as just logging in and out 

 

Edit: oh right, special objectives are like

complete soto story

new friends achievment

ride a leyline with skyscale, requiring the mastery level up

 

Doing the vista one is the only one that's not too bad, so yeah ...

No way this is a good method either

Edited September 2, 2023 by jokke.6239

[Sobx.1758]

21 minutes ago, Freya.9075 said:

So. You’re claiming each account get 100g a day? Please provide details and math about how to do this. Asking for a friend 👀

Yup, "the guy somewhere did the math, trust me" isn't nearly enough. Post the exact source/math @Neferpitouh.4356

[ShadowCatz.8437]

Quote

Kill a world boss? 6.66 gold per account, and you can easily do this on 4 to 8 accounts at the same time.

From

Honestly it sounds that person isn't just using leggit way to get that calculation to sum up. You can't kill a WB on several account at the same time (6 to 8 ) and not breaking TOS. It means that this person are using third party tools to control several characters at once.

Quote

And this ignores that you also have the opportunity to do daily crafts which can earn you far more than this again. Crafting Charged Quarts for instance, can earn you an additional 80 Silver, per account, per day.

Isn't Charged Quartz actually account bound? You can't sell it directly on TP without converting it into something else through crafting,  so I am a bit sceptical about this persons claim that you get something for "free" like in form of 80 Silver for each Charged Quartz Crystal.

First you need to channel at a Place of Power 25 Quartz Crystal (which you need either farm yourself or buy on TP), so it would be rather time consuming if you would farm Quartz Crystal and then turn 25 of these into Charged version and then you have to craft something that might be sold for that amount that would give some profit (material cost).

I suspect this one of those post people are supposed to be upset without thinking about that this is a baiting post to make players with single account or a few accounts feel like they are missing out on something.

Edited September 2, 2023 by ShadowCatz.8437

[Neferpitouh.4356]

9 minutes ago, ShadowCatz.8437 said:

From

Honestly it sounds that person isn't just using leggit way to get that calculation to sum up. You can't kill a WB on several account at the same time (6 to 8 ) and not breaking TOS. It means that this person are using third party tools to control several characters at once.

 

Why? You can just hit once with all of them and leave them afk, you'll get full credit.  I assume it is 6 to 8 because that's how much his PC handle, otherwise even 100 wouldn't be a problem (theoratically, not considering map limits)

Edited September 2, 2023 by Neferpitouh.4356

[jokke.6239]

1 minute ago, Neferpitouh.4356 said:

Why? You can just hit once with all of them once and leave them afk, you'll get full credit.  I assume it is 6 to 8 because that's how much his PC handle, otherwise even 100 wouldn't be a problem. 

100 alt accounts? 

There need to be someone to kill the boss too though 😄

Edited September 2, 2023 by jokke.6239

[ShadowCatz.8437]

4 minutes ago, jokke.6239 said:

100 alt accounts? 

There need to be someone to kill the boss too though 😄

No, no, boss get shocked to death by the share numbers when an alt account join the fight...those super power alts have should not be undervalued. 😁

[Arianth Moonlight.6453]

so? They pay for their accounts so as long as they don't exploit a bug or cheat/hack, I see no problem.

[Parasite.5389]

this topic has been done to death, please stop

[Danikat.8537]

I've been trying to work out the maths behind this claim that you can get 300g - 400g per hour and I don't think it's accurate. There's a lot of sites and posts that say the average value of AA is quite high, but a lot of that is dependant on either keeping it on the same account, or going through methods which are quite time consuming and have a lot of other initial costs.

For example the Build Template and Build Storage expanders are ranked as having quite high 'profit' per AA on the Fast Farming website (compared to the price of converting gems to gold to buy them from the gem store) but you can only do that on the account you want to use them on because there's no way to trade or gift them so they're useless for an alt farming account.

There's also things like the Legendary Weapon Starter Kit which is obviously very valuable: it contains a precursor, the matching Gift and either a Gift of Might or Gift of Magic. But those are all account bound. To turn it into gold you need to make the legendary weapon, so you need to get the Gift of Exploration, Gift of Battle, 250 Spirit Shards, 250 Obsidian Shards, 77 Mystic Clovers, 250 Ectoplasm and a Gift of Might or Magic. That's going to add a lot to the time required, so if we're measuring profit as gold per hour it goes down dramatically.

There's also things like the 4 Vision Crystals which technically can be sold, but only by turning them into Nightfury. That requires 717g of other materials and a Gift of Ascalon (which requires dungeon tokens), knocking your profit when you sell it down from 1,118g to 401g and considerably increasing the time required. Also it's only 1 item, if many people do it (one one person across lots of accounts) it will swamp the TP and crash the price.

Items which can be quickly sold are pretty limited:

• 90 gold bought directly (540 AA)
• 60 Mystic Coins (540AA) which sell for 1.19g each or 71.4 in total
• 30 Heavy Crafting Bags (240 AA) sell for 0.57g each or 17g in total
• 150 Laurels (1500 AA) sell for 0.69g each (used to buy light crafting bags) or 103.5g in total
  Black Lion Mastery Coffer (300AA) for 1g each or 20g in total
• That's 3120 AA for 301.9g - and each account can only do that once every quarter (76 days in the first cycle).

After that you're down to Large Crafting Bags or gold at 30 AA each. Gold is the better of the two, it's worth 0.0333g per AA (3s 33c). Since we're assuming this alt account has SotO to buy Heavy Crafting Bags lets assume they do ALL the achievements in the first cycle and get the total of 14,760 AA. They spent 3120 leaving 11,640 for gold. 11,640 / 30 gives you 388g.

So in 76 days an alt account can transfer a maximum of 690g to a main account.

Now maybe it's possible to do that within 2 hours total, but it still has to be spread over 76 days. To make a profit from the more valuable items like the legendary starter kit you need to put a lot more time into it and across a wider range of activities (100% world completion for a start) and at that point I think it'd be pretty hard to claim they're just passively farming alt accounts and not really playing.

Edit: I'm not saying alt accounts aren't profitable or worth having. I have an alt account and I used tomes to level a character to 80 and have continued logging in to collect the 5 AA and do any very quick dailies (and even the weekly for opening 100 unidentified gear) and I wouldn't do that if I didn't think it was worthwhile. But I don't think it's as profitable as some people have claimed in this thread (and elsewhere).

Yes it's very quick on a daily basis but reporting that as profit per hour is misleading (even if it was accurate, I'm not convinced anyone could do 76 days of dailies and all the weekly and special achievements in under 2 hours in total) because it's missing the point that there's daily, weekly and quarterly caps. You can't just keep repeating those quick, profitable actions indefinitely to rack up gold.

Edited September 2, 2023 by Danikat.8537

[jokke.6239]

3 minutes ago, Danikat.8537 said:

 Gift of Exploratio

Yeah can't imagine doing a world completion on an alt account

I like doing it, but only because it progresses my account at the same time (besides for legendary)

[Neferpitouh.4356]

4 minutes ago, Danikat.8537 said:

So in 76 days an alt account can transfer 690g to a main account.
 

So 50 accounts would translate into 34500 gold. You just need to spend an hour or two per day for 76 days, doing dailies/weeklies on alts while multiboxing.

That's like what, 1150hours of dragonfall? 860hours of 4CMs+T4s? on single main. Very reasonable. They paid 100$ total for those 50 accounts after all, more power to them 😄

[jokke.6239]

8 minutes ago, Danikat.8537 said:

I've been trying to work out the maths behind this claim that you can get 300g - 400g per hour and I don't think it's accurate. There's a lot of sites and posts that say the average value of AA is quite high, but a lot of that is dependant on either keeping it on the same account, or going through methods which are quite time consuming and have a lot of other initial costs.

For example the Build Template and Build Storage expanders are ranked as having quite high 'profit' per AA on the Fast Farming website (compared to the price of converting gems to gold to buy them from the gem store) but you can only do that on the account you want to use them on because there's no way to trade or gift them so they're useless for an alt farming account.

There's also things like the Legendary Weapon Starter Kit which is obviously very valuable: it contains a precursor, the matching Gift and either a Gift of Might or Gift of Magic. But those are all account bound. To turn it into gold you need to make the legendary weapon, so you need to get the Gift of Exploration, Gift of Battle, 250 Spirit Shards, 250 Obsidian Shards, 77 Mystic Clovers, 250 Ectoplasm and a Gift of Might or Magic. That's going to add a lot to the time required, so if we're measuring profit as gold per hour it goes down dramatically.

There's also things like the 4 Vision Crystals which technically can be sold, but only by turning them into Nightfury. That requires 717g of other materials and a Gift of Ascalon (which requires dungeon tokens), knocking your profit when you sell it down from 1,118g to 401g and considerably increasing the time required. Also it's only 1 item, if many people do it (one one person across lots of accounts) it will swamp the TP and crash the price.

Items which can be quickly sold are pretty limited:

• 90 gold bought directly (540 AA)
• 60 Mystic Coins (540AA) which sell for 1.19g each or 71.4 in total
• 30 Heavy Crafting Bags (240 AA) sell for 0.57g each or 17g in total
• 150 Laurels (1500 AA) sell for 0.69g each (used to buy light crafting bags) or 103.5g in total
  Black Lion Mastery Coffer (300AA) for 1g each or 20g in total
• That's 3120 AA for 301.9g - and each account can only do that once every quarter (76 days in the first cycle).

After that you're down to Large Crafting Bags or gold at 30 AA each. Gold is the better of the two, it's worth 0.0333g per AA (3s 33c). Since we're assuming this alt account has SotO to buy Heavy Crafting Bags lets assume they do ALL the achievements in the first cycle and get the total of 14,760 AA. They spent 3120 leaving 11,640 for gold. 11,640 / 30 gives you 388g.

So in 76 days an alt account can transfer 690g to a main account.

Now maybe it's possible to do that within 2 hours total, but it still has to be spread over 76 days. To make a profit from the more valuable items like the legendary starter kit you need to put a lot more time into it and across a wider range of activities (100% world completion for a start) and at that point I think it'd be pretty hard to claim they're just passively farming alt accounts and not really playing.

Someone with 100 accounts wouldn't worry too much about the currency cap in the vault though

They can just cycle accounts to keep going

But I highly doubt it will get anywhere near 300-400 g an hour