Alt-account farming (Devs read!)

[Danikat.8537]

1 minute ago, Neferpitouh.4356 said:

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 😄

Actual multiboxing - using scripts to control multiple accounts at the same time - is against the rules and will get all their accounts banned.

Playing 50 accounts one at a time for an hour or two per day is impossible because there are not 50 hours in a day.

[Sobx.1758]

1 minute ago, Neferpitouh.4356 said:

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 😄

You're making bad assumptions and generalizations in your posts and then post them as facts. You have no control over what dailies you get, so claiming that you just spend an hour a day and clear the bank on 50 accounts is... you know, mainly baseless. Until you prove otherwise, that is. For now you simply didn't.

[Sobx.1758]

1 minute ago, Danikat.8537 said:

Actual multiboxing - using scripts to control multiple accounts at the same time - is against the rules and will get all their accounts banned.

Playing 50 accounts one at a time for an hour or two per day is impossible because there are not 50 hours in a day.

Multiboxing is just using multiple clients at the same time. Multiboxing =/= scripting.

[Danikat.8537]

3 minutes ago, jokke.6239 said:

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

Yeah that's what I'm getting at. I only did the maths for 1 account, but obviously you can scale it up from there but you have to consider the time required scales up as well. I suppose they could focus on only the most profitable items and switch accounts when they hit the cap for those items, but again that reduces the profit per account and so the profit overall.

Another thing I forgot to mention in my last post is that most of this is dependant on selling items on the TP and new supplies of items entering the market will cause the price to drop, so if they haven't already been doing it (meaning the current prices are what we get with multiaccount farmers) they'll hurt their own profits just by selling the items, and if enough people do it then it will become unprofitable in general.

[Danikat.8537]

5 minutes ago, Sobx.1758 said:

Multiboxing is just using multiple clients at the same time. Multiboxing =/= scripting.

But then they still have to play each one individually, which means it doesn't reduce the time required by much (if at all).

I've done it in GW1 (mainly being my own mule and gate monkey in pre-searing) and if anything it made things more time consuming because I had to keep switching between them. I'm sure with practice it gets easier but I'm not convinced it could get to the point where it's possible to do 50 sets of daily achievements in a few hours.

Edited September 2, 2023 by Danikat.8537

[Neferpitouh.4356]

12 minutes ago, Sobx.1758 said:

You're making bad assumptions and generalizations in your posts and then post them as facts. You have no control over what dailies you get, so claiming that you just spend an hour a day and clear the bank on 50 accounts is... you know, mainly baseless. Until you prove otherwise, that is. For now you simply didn't.

Assumptions?? 

My dailies today are;

- Login (guarenteed)

- ıdentify 10 unids (buy/salvage blues, sell result)

- Break 1 defiance bar (very suitable for multiboxing, tag with all alts then break bar, very likely that would work on aerodome golem)

- Participate in a rift run (idk what would I get on a core account)

I could've gotten 150 dailies done on total over 50 accounts today in 2 hours (max) with multiboxing. If you think you can't do that just means you are just bad.

Actually it is so easy that it wouldn't even take me 30mins but I don't want to go hard on you.

Also I got my values from farm website datasets when making my comparisons. They were not assumptions. 50 alt accounts over a seasons literally gives 1000+ hours of endgame farm worth of gold.

Edited September 2, 2023 by Neferpitouh.4356

[Sobx.1758]

1 minute ago, Neferpitouh.4356 said:

Assumptions?? 

My dailies today are;

- Login (guarenteed)

- ıdentify 10 unids (buy/salvage blues, sell result)

- Break 1 defiance bar (very suitable for multiboxing, tag with all alts then break bar)

- Participate in a rift run (idk what would I get on a core account)

I could've gotten 150 dailies done on total over 50 accounts today in 2 hours (max) with multiboxing. If you think you can't do that just means you are just bad.

That's right, today. Now list those every day you get and pretend you're doing them on 4-8 (or whatever number you'll use in your post) accounts at "the same time".

I like how you skipped the questions about the exact calculations you're basing your posts on. If you think you can happily chase rifts on 8 accounts at once, controlling each of them separately then, I guess, go do it. But at that point, do it even without any dailies and you easly multiply whatever event you're doing on your one account.

[Neferpitouh.4356]

17 minutes ago, jokke.6239 said:

Today is kryptis bounty, I think that would be difficult to get all characters there before the rift closes

If only people had SotO on their alts.

I could've gotten 150 dailies done over 50 alts on 30mins today. Maybe not that difficult.

[BlueJin.4127]

So players who invest more and play more make more gold than players who invest less and play less?

Shocking...

[Randulf.7614]

Good luck to them. It doesn’t affect my game.

Anet will have detailed metrics on this (they will be monitoring this already) rather than player theories and concerns which are more anecdotal and if there is any significant issue that affects the game or their income, it’ll get rectified. 

Edited September 2, 2023 by Randulf.7614

[BlueJin.4127]

You know what, Anet? The OP is right.

I just saw a player flying around on the cybernetic skyscale skin that they bought. I don't have it because I'm not willing to pay for it. That's so unfair. Either remove the skin from that player's account or gimme the same skin for free.

Oh, the other day, I was doing WvW for the GoB and some player who spends a lot of time in WvW bragged about how he has a stack of GoB from playing a lot more WvW than I do. I'm not willing to play that much for a stack of GoB. That's so unfair. Either limit his play time, or gimme a stack of GoB for free.

What the? I invested $10 into a stock option and somebody who invested $50 made more than me. I'm not willing to invest more money. That's so unfair. I deserve the same even though I didn't invest as much. I'm going to go complain.

 

Seriously... you want 50 accounts? Go buy them yourself. You want rewards from 50 accounts? Play 50 accounts and earn them. If you're not willing to get extra accounts to do more dailies/weeklies to earn more, you don't deserve the same rewards as players who do.

Edited September 2, 2023 by BlueJin.4127

[jokke.6239]

18 minutes ago, Neferpitouh.4356 said:

 

But having full wardrobe, all infusions, full legendary armory is also fun.

 

The irony is that I think those who alt accounts there way to everything in the game are usually the ones who quit from boredom when they obtained everything they want

Turns out it's not really about the shiny rewards themselves, but journey towards them

[illuminati.8453]

3 hours ago, Neferpitouh.4356 said:

If only people had SotO on their alts.

I could've gotten 150 dailies done over 50 alts on 30mins today. Maybe not that difficult.

You seem to be really knowledgeable about the times it takes to manipulate so many alts.  

[Balsa.3951]

5 hours ago, Neferpitouh.4356 said:

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!

 

 

told ppl a while ago that alt accounts are the top way to make gold.

got downvoted like crazy nothing has changed

not in issue for me tho if ppl alt farm it does not effect my game play so far

Edited September 3, 2023 by Balsa.3951

[DeanBB.4268]

I have to call BS on 30 minutes for 50 accounts to accomplish anything. It takes longer than that just to log in, let alone use a way point, swap to another, way point, etc.

[Balsa.3951]

2 hours ago, jokke.6239 said:

The irony is that I think those who alt accounts there way to everything in the game are usually the ones who quit from boredom when they obtained everything they want

Turns out it's not really about the shiny rewards themselves, but journey towards them

there are ppl work the game. they have multiple computer in one room multiboxing the game on each. no booting just manual labor on steroids

[Darklord Roy.2514]

Bro this has literally always been in the game, it just now takes more time for more rewards. People used to be able to use those 50+ to literally just login for the majority of the rewards, the only incentive they had for doing anything more than that was 2g (which is pennies in the grand scheme of things). Now they can get more rewards, but to *really* cash in on it by doing the weeklies on every account it takes significantly more time.

You're complaining about an issue that has always existed, you're just doing it now because the system to do it has changed. Honestly, if these people wanna devote the time it takes to actually login to ALL of those accounts and actually have to do content, then realistically who cares if they get a payout for it. That just means they spent a large amount of money to activate all those accounts, which benefits Anet in the long run.

Try again.

[DeanBB.4268]

Ok, I was curious. Core account, dailies are

25 gather

3 events

kill 25

This account has 6 characters (yes, I play on my alt accounts). Log them all in, and enough parked at a JP give me credit for the 3 events. One is also in Straits, the mini dungeon with a chest and a rich mining node. My main is already in DR, so only need to take the WP to the home instance. Between the rich node and the nodes in the home instance, I have enough for the 25 gather with one to spare.

Have to click the 2 rewards as well.

That took 3:50, and I did not go kill 25 enemies (I may tomorrow if I have time). I don't know how one could possibly get those 2 dailies faster than that. I have fast computer and fast internet, no issues there.

Just 10 accounts would take over 38 minutes, assuming go-go-go.

 

[Linken.6345]

I have 5 accounts in total and after close to 2 weeks of new dailies.

Starting to feel its not worth itt to do all the dailies/weeklies on them anymore.

Take too much time for to little gain rather have fun on my main.

[DeanBB.4268]

I thought I'd time a core account with 5 characters, similar to the other one. That went south, since it hit the 6th anniversary, so I had to open gifts. I mean, I could have skipped it, but inventory management is real, and if you're gathering and fighting, there are salvage kits and gathering tools to buy, and junk to deal with. I assume alt accounts don't have permanent tools, since that kinda defeats the purpose, right?

The 4 at JP's only gave me 2 events, and I had to go to the guild hall to finish the 25 gathers. Then I got lucky in Metrica since the raptor egg event was waiting for me. Finishing that got me the 25 kills. I didn't time it, but easily 12-15 minutes. That may be the only account to finish today's dailies.

I'll have to take the time on that account to spend some AA as well.

Like Linken said, this won't last. Unless one is a no-lifer, no job, no family, in the game all day, I can't see finishing dailies on 50 accounts happening with any regularity. Short of some "illegal" scripting, where 5 accounts all get input at once.

And note that the time I'm spending on these alt accounts, my main account is getting nothing, no advancement, achievements, etc.

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

they can heavily mitigate scripters by forcing accounts behind a single ip address to have different dailies (as most illegal multiboxing is input cloning). this would also slow legitimate multiboxers down, but it wouldn't prevent them from doing it manually.

Edited September 3, 2023 by SoftFootpaws.9134

[QueenKeriti.5176]

1 minute ago, SoftFootpaws.9134 said:

they can heavily mitigate scripters by forcing accounts behind a single ip address to have different dailies (as most illegal multiboxing is input cloning). this would also slow multiboxers down, but it wouldn't prevent them from doing it manually.

I can hear both a programmer and a network technician screaming in terror at the thought of coding something like that.

39 minutes ago, DeanBB.4268 said:

The 4 at JP's only gave me 2 events, and I had to go to the guild hall to finish the 25 gathers. Then I got lucky in Metrica since the raptor egg event was waiting for me. Finishing that got me the 25 kills. I didn't time it, but easily 12-15 minutes. That may be the only account to finish today's dailies.

I'll have to take the time on that account to spend some AA as well.

Like Linken said, this won't last. Unless one is a no-lifer, no job, no family, in the game all day, I can't see finishing dailies on 50 accounts happening with any regularity. Short of some "illegal" scripting, where 5 accounts all get input at once.

And note that the time I'm spending on these alt accounts, my main account is getting nothing, no advancement, achievements, etc.

My four accounts usually only have 1 overlapping daily, plus I still only do the accounts one at a time. Two accounts had the do 3 events, two had the loot 10 mobs (one account had horrid luck on that and took forever), at least 3 had either gather 25 crafting resources or mine 15 items, at least 1 had the massacre 25 mobs (and I think it was my core account). 🙃Used my main account's home instance for the gathering part for each account that had it. It took me maybe a total of 30 minutes to do all the dailies on all 4 accounts, excluding the home instance part? I'm just doing this to send all those beautiful mystic coins to my main (the way they were before, only now it's  ✨better✨). Gotta fund my next legendary! 

Just freakin' glad it's not a minidungeon or jumping puzzle today. Two accounts had Vexa's Lab yesterday, and I nope'd out on that.

Yeah, one is not doing full dailies on 50 accounts in 30 minutes even with scripting, even if they did the PvP dailies. 😂It's just not sustainable, and doing it manually is a good way to burn yourself out on the game. And then the whole worries about full legendaries and stuff won't matter!

[Hindenburg.3415]

6 hours ago, Neferpitouh.4356 said:

OK, at this point, these replies are just trolls. 

 

6 hours ago, Neferpitouh.4356 said:

I can't express myself any further without involving swears and insults so I'll stop here. I'm done dealing with stupidity for today.

I think it's pretty obvious who is trolling here. Especially considering that you still haven't explained why people having multiple accounts is an issue.

 

6 hours ago, Neferpitouh.4356 said:

But having full wardrobe, all infusions, full legendary armory is also fun.

And this affects your gameplay how exactly ? You sound just like a jealous kid.

[HnRkLnXqZ.1870]

We are aware of the fact that many of those log-in accounts were obtained almost for free. The studio is aware of that, too. We had a couple of really bold farmers in the past, who boasted about the whole system to both normal players and the studio. Some of them do believe, that they own the company, due to their massive wealth of colored pixels.

If the awareness is there, why didn't they do something against it yet?
1.) Their main income is not the account-sales. 
2.) They enjoy having high population and login statistics, even if a good portion of those are fake.
3.) All the questionable elements of GW2, which usually involve massive farming, basically stabilize the market. They only have to take care of one thing: implement proper material sinks to balance out the excessive material overflow. As long as nobody massively exploits the 'system', everything works fine. The lower material prices also help binding new players, as it makes the game significantly easier.

Is this a problem for normal players?
- If you feel treated unfairly, you can always pull the  $/€ => GEMS => GOLD method, which is still the most efficient method for a single account.
- Spending an entire day gaming to farm tons of gold is not something most of us are looking forward to. Some of those farmers probably use 3rd party tools, but you need the proper hardware to pull this off. That is a question of RL wealth.
- If I gave you 50 of those accounts (which I do not have), would you use that method? Doubtfully. If you buy the game to play the game for fun and entertainment purposes, you are not the target audience for those farming methods.

What is their advantage?
This is a question I keep pondering about for ages. The richest of the rich in GW2 are called "barons", which have more wealth than any of us can probably imagine - maybe Mighty Teapod can ^^. They have countless of Mystic Coin Stacks, Draconic Lode Stones, Globs of Ectoplasm and raw gold. But why? You cannot spend that money, even if you try.

I would not ponder about this problem too long. Just ask yourself if those log-in farmers harm you directly. And if they do not, shrug it off and move on. Life is too short to bother with these things imho. I had a different opinion about that topics in the past, but the older I get, the less I care ^^. 

[Noah Salazar.5430]

@Hindenburg.3415 why are you arguing with avg player that have only 50-250g from 4y of playing

thay play different game then you

 

Edited September 3, 2023 by Noah Salazar.5430