Guild Wars Chat and Trade Spam

The Local channel spam and unsoliticed trade offers and guild membership invites in all major outposts and towns of Tyria have become unbearable.

The guild advertisement spam is completely unproportional to the amount of guildless players and thus annoying for other players, confusing for the guildless and tedious to the advertisers, who often spend hours advertising their guilds to no avail.

The trade spam is not restricted to the Trade channel and can thus not be avoided either. As spamming has become the only way to get any recognition of one's offers in the face of a mass of spammers trying to compete or advertise their own products, the only barrier preventing a spam treadmill has become the flood prevention timer, which was most likely never intended for this.

The spam is annoying for new players and experienced players alike and blocking both Local and Trade has become a common countermeasure, all communication being restricted to Guild, Team and whisper messages. This harms not only the communication between guilds and the public, or traders and their customers, but also makes it more difficult to form parties on the spot (other than through the Guild chat or the friends list)

Although the Terms of Service forbid this abuse of the chat system, ArenaNet lacks the resources to put an end to it by punishing this behaviour.

Consequently we, The Undersigned, ask for the means necessary to put and end to the chat spam that makes normal communication in Guild Wars impossible.

Specifically we ask for the prevention of this abuse through other means than the flood blocker, which more often than not harms conversations (especially on non-public channels) than not.

Harsher consequences for offenders will not solve the problem at hand, thus we ask for an alternative to the existing means of guild and product advertisement (i.e. spamming Local and Trade) such as
- player stores or NPC re-sellers (as established in other MMORPGs, e.g. Horizons, Ragnarok Online, Ultima Online, etc)
- an in-game guild list and recruiting (or advertising) platform (e.g. in-game bulletin boards)
- an extension of the trade NPCs that makes them more useful as a trading platform (e.g. less discrepancy between buy and sell prices of materials, thus allowing players to create more realistic NPC prices through the actual supply and demand).
- seperate chatrooms or channels (like the current Team channel) that can be accessed easily by other players without being intrusive (thus allowing for a better platform for in-game auctions) and optionally restricted to invite-only, hidden from the public or password protected (thus allowing for an additional (persistent) community layer between the Team/Friends and Guild)
- or anything the professional game developers employed by ArenaNet can think of to improve the situations for all parties involved. Other and older successful MMORPGs on the market should surely provide all the inspiration needed to fulfill this task.

We feel that the current situation is harmful to the Guild Wars community and urgent enough to warrant even the major changes of the existing system and user interface possibly required to solve the issues at hand.