Why we crack down on real-money trading

Real-money trading and related activities such as botting and spamming are breaches of the User Agreement and Rules of Conduct. These rules help protect the entire Guild Wars community from abuse by providing a set of guidelines for fair play that allow all players to enjoy the game. Real-money trading activities negatively impact the fun of many players.

For example, real-money trading companies set up networks of computers to constantly spam players. Message spamming in cities and towns can be irritating to many players who wish to use the chat channels to legitimately buy or sell items, look for a group or a friend, or get advice on some aspect of the game. These messages clutter the chat screen, upsetting regular players because their own messages get lost in the clutter or scroll off the screen too quickly due to all that computer-generated spam.

Real-money trading also upsets the game's economy. Many players spend countless hours of game time earning gold so they can purchase skills, weapon upgrades, or runes to improve their characters. However, regular players cannot compete with the huge bot networks run on hundreds of computers that real-money trading companies use to constantly farm the game. These bot farms can make it nearly impossible for casual and hard-core players alike to reap the benefits of the time they spend in the game. Players may find that the value of their hard-earned items has dropped due to a glut of bot-collected items, or they may find that the cost of their upgrades skyrocket due to all that purchased gold flooding the market.

There is also a shady side to real-money trading that players may not realize exists, but which has a serious impact on many players. Real-money trading companies hack into and steal legitimate accounts, often by distributing keystroke-logging malware to steal passwords. In fact, simply purchasing gold from these companies may open you up to a later hacking attempt. These hacked accounts are then stripped clean of any valuable in-game items and/or used for botting.

We are concerned that this kind of illegal activity happens more and more often in the games we all love to play. Ask any player who has had an account hacked (or fallen prey to a fraudulent scheme in the game) how he or she feels about it, and you will surely begin to understand how this growing problem affects the game. http://www.guildwars.com/support/rtm/rtm-en.php