Sell Gold? Blizz may have.......

[Mordd]

So Ive been selling gold for awhile. This day and age it actually costs me more to code than the money I get back in selling gold, but it does help. I dont sell alot of gold but when I do it feels great. About a month ago I lost two accounts. Both were farmers and were on the same realm. One ran for 12 hours, the other ran for 12 hours. Simple enough. When I reached 100k in the guild bank I would move the gold to another guild bank where I would sell it. It has worked great for a long time without a single ban. But then I noticed that my farmers got the big ban hammer but the account I used to sell the gold remained untouched. I figured it was player reports and such but it was selling for real world currency. In all the past bans I have had its always for 3rd party.

So this got me thinking. Why would the seller account be safe, but the 2 farmers get hit. Well you could sit down all day and come up with alot of ideas but the one idea I had in my head was how I got the gold from the farmers to the sellers.

1 alt on my farmers would mail the gold to an alt on the same account that was in the gold selling guild and would deposit it. No f2f trades, no invites to the farmers guild, just xfering the gold. So I thought maybe blizzard had caught onto that and started to either auto ban, or investigate gold being moved around alts.

So I did a test. I reinstated a fresh account for farming. Created 2 brand new guilds with a GM account. Created a brand new gold seller account and started off. When I aquired 100k I used the gold seller account (not my farmer) to move the gold to the other guild bank. I then waited. I didnt sell the gold at all. I just sat on it. 3 days later I get an econ exploit on the gold seller account. Keep in mind I did not sell any gold I just moved it from one bank to the other by mailing the gold to the alt on the same account. What this tells me is that blizzard has changed things up a bit to make moving gold through alts a bit more difficult. There is some formula they are using to determine that you moving the gold is a bad idea. While we will never know this formula its just somthing I noticed. I dont know of another way to protect myself but maybe others have some ideas.

 

[StefanKFG]

So I shouldn't mail the ores and herbs from my farmer to my lvl 1 ah char anymore even if they are on one account?

Or is it just about sending gold?

 

[Silvera]

If they are on one account, there shouldn't be any problems. Moving to two different ones, though, is appearantly what they detect and ban for, regardless if you actually sell the gold or just move mats/gold.

To OP, I'm afraid I don't have any ideas on how you could protect yourself, other than only using 1 gbank (but that would probably hit all the accounts if you got banned), but thanks for the information about moving mats/gold will get you (most likely) banned. Now I know that.

 

[xida]

Thanks for the heads up, ill be sure to make it so my mails are in small amounts over a period of time,

Best thing i would say to do is send money every so often, rather than doing it every 100k try doing every 5-10k small mails over the space of a day or so, might not be flaged up as easy

 

[seafunk]

I received a per ban the other week on my main account after selling 100k. Apologized, got the account restored within an hour lol. Then moved 42 darkmoon decks to a new account which I was playing from the same pc. So same Processor ID, same MAC address, same IP, same everything. At the time I wasn't aware that blizz will be monitoring all those things and made up a conversation between the 2 accounts. It should've been 100% obvious what I have in mind. Yet there was no ban. I am also botting on both these accounts for 20h per day. Yet there is no ban.
I created a third account, levelled him to lvl6, went to SW and advertised a new guild named <Goldcap>. Got a ban for trying to sell gold on trade channel lol. Wrote a mail with highly confusing legal mumbojumbo, got it restored, started botting 3 accounts from the same pc, two of which were banned. Yet, I receive no ban! Not sure what's going on in the heads of those gm's.

Tbh, I think they will let me sell another huge chunk of gold and then apply the ban hammer. I will get my realgoldz, they gamers will be able to buy gold cause they don't have time to farm, blizzard will have a couple of new accounts sold, everyone wins.

Really people, we are doing all this stuff on their servers. It is RIDICULOUSLY easy to spot illicit activity. If blizzard would seriously try to do jack about it, it wouldn't exist anymore. I could tell you 100s of ways to filter out the bad guys by behavioural recognition algorithms. Yet this is not what is happening.

Another interesting anecdote: There's an account with 7x85 characters that sells the 100k gold. The buyer uses 6 different EU accounts to trade the gold from the seller. Next day the seller gets a ban, the chinaman lives happily everafter. What happened? Why wait a day to issue the ban, why not forbid trading of large sums of gold to various characters through ingame routines? And most of all: Why oh WHY don't they ban the 6 accounts of the buyer?!

 

[StefanKFG]

And most of all: Why oh WHY don't they ban the 6 accounts of the buyer?!

That's easy to answer: If there are no sellers, nobody could buy.
It's them same as the police do with drug dealers. They try to catch the dealers, not the consumers

 

[fish221171]

Is it not better to transfer gold, mats etc from one account to another just using F2F (no invites). This is what I do. My farming accounts pass over gold, mats, Vial of the sands etc to mains.

I know if you have a shed loads of Whiptail or something to passover this could take sometime

My farming accounts do all the selling, I never sell botted stuff on my main.

 

[seafunk]

That's absurd lol. If i had no buyer, I couldn't be selling. We aren't talking about private buyers here, but 6 highly suspicious accounts with the same owner and lvl1 toons named "Xlyweer" and the like. Just as absurd as drug policy, the trouble begins with the demand for being numb imho.

 

[lostsk8r]

You basically do what I do, I use a gold selling account to take it out of my farmer's guild and sell it.. you just put it into another guild bank. I've only gotten one farmer ban this way, and it was after dumping 400k, but I think it's because I made the gold seller the GM of the guild so he could take out more than 100k at a time, then gave it back.. havent done that since and no problems yet.

That is pretty ridiculous that you moved guild from one toon's guild to another toon's guild on the same account and got banned.. were you the GM of the 2nd account? or was the gold selling account?

 

[Rhainland]

It is really mindblowing to me why you would even mail the gold? I sell gold all the time between my ONE guild bank that has ALL my AH accounts in, when i sell the gold i simply withdraw it with the seller account. If i need to trade the seller account additional gold, i f2f trade it. Never been banned on any other accounts but the account selling the gold

 

[Mordd]

It is really mindblowing to me why you would even mail the gold? I sell gold all the time between my ONE guild bank that has ALL my AH accounts in, when i sell the gold i simply withdraw it with the seller account. If i need to trade the seller account additional gold, i f2f trade it. Never been banned on any other accounts but the account selling the gold

You are lucky, most everyone that does a f2f gets banned. a level 1 toon trading 100k to another level 1 toon is a huge flag. I remember in the BC days when I was banned for trading 5k.

 

[greaterdeath]

So I did a test. I reinstated a fresh account for farming. Created 2 brand new guilds with a GM account. Created a brand new gold seller account and started off. When I aquired 100k I used the gold seller account (not my farmer) to move the gold to the other guild bank. I then waited. I didnt sell the gold at all. I just sat on it. 3 days later I get an econ exploit on the gold seller account. Keep in mind I did not sell any gold I just moved it from one bank to the other by mailing the gold to the alt on the same account. What this tells me is that blizzard has changed things up a bit to make moving gold through alts a bit more difficult. There is some formula they are using to determine that you moving the gold is a bad idea. While we will never know this formula its just somthing I noticed. I dont know of another way to protect myself but maybe others have some ideas.

So after you got the suspension did you contact blizz and get it lifted - since both accounts were yours and you did nothing with the gold?

 

[dav777]

I don't sell anything, I use the gold and mats I farm to empower my alts I have 3 accounts, 2 linked to the same Battle.Net ID and a third not linked to me at all. My question is, how do I get my mats/gold from one account to the other with reasonable safety?

 

[Xanathos]

My question is how stupid do the various gold sites out there think Blizzard is? I mean most of them won't do face to face anymore and require you to do the whole "put up an item on the AH for 2k gold and they will buy it, etc".

It's not like Blizzard can't just look at all of the auctions that are put up for 2k that are for useless items or anything...

 

[jubor]

I had this idea to use a vanilla acc to do the trades. I mean transfer all mats to the vanilla account and let the him do the trades in the market. Before the account is expired sell all your gold in the vanilla acc.You might find it is expensive to setup if you have are farming of more than 1 server but still you can use it for more than 1 server if you think carefully. I have not tested this,perhaps someone can test this method?

 

[Rhainland]

You are lucky, most everyone that does a f2f gets banned. a level 1 toon trading 100k to another level 1 toon is a huge flag. I remember in the BC days when I was banned for trading 5k.

How can i continue to be lucky? Used the method i mentioned for more then 5 months now. Nothing happened so far.