Guild Wars dev guidelines on handling real-money trading cases

Real-money traders beware! ArenaNet is cracking down on those accounts who are engaging in dubious trading practices such as real-money trading in its premier MMO title Guild Wars. In our full article, you can take a look at some of the preventive measures the company is implementing to police such activities in the game. Read more on this after the jump.

It seems that ArenaNet is putting its foot down when it comes to players who are caught in real-money trading (RMT) cases in its MMO game Guild Wars. The developers have recently listed down an outline of procedures they plan on implementing to help take care of any possible offenders caught engaging in such activities.

As many know, real-money trading is a breach against most MMO games’ User Agreement and Rules of Conduct. RMT cases can seriously offset the player economy in-game as well as run the risk of many accounts being the target of hacking and other malware intrusions.

Here’s a list of the guidelines that ArenaNet has taken to protect Guild Wars players from the abuses of RMT parties:

• We identify and ban accounts—typically more than 5,000 per week—being used by real-money trading companies.
• We attempt to identify stolen accounts and return them to their rightful owners.
• Our GMs monitor the game around the clock so they can remove botters and spammers from the game, often within hours of account creation.
• When we detect a large amount of abuse from a single Internet address (IP address), we block that address from accessing the game.
• We block open proxies (open Internet servers which can relay traffic from anywhere in the world) from accessing the game.
• We identify players who purchase gold from real-money trading companies, and we suspend their accounts and remove the purchased gold. We also encourage these players to seek restitution from their credit card company. Real-money trading companies are not legally authorized to sell Guild Wars gold. They don’t own the gold – ArenaNet does. Credit card companies know this, so buyers of gold can generally call their credit card companies and get the charges removed.

The developers also advise players not to condone the actions of any RMT dealers they find online because these can serious affect the gaming experience of many players as well as their own.