Guild Wars 2

First, I lurk, and when severely bothered, I post. I don’t complain.
tldr: this isn’t complaining.

Bots -> Inflate economy

Higher lvl players -> Negligible inflation relative to the number of bots everyone sees, per area, per server.

Gems -> correctly priced if bots didn’t exist. (But BLC rates leave something to be desired, but would be fixed with items gained from Mad King Chests, if those items were desired and not readily available in the economy already.)

On a private test server, EVERYTHING would seem to work well. (assumption I know, but try it for yourself with nothing to lose…have a test server run under certain conditions) No bots…

Botters are causing damage…If it isn’t ALL the damage it is some…

Solution examples:

Report(s) for botting -> Unable to trade until account meets a condition.
Overview of players holding > 1000 gold (or w/e amount)
Ingame voluntary team/guild who can expedite the botting reports quicker.
The anti-bot team/guild could be made of people who have successfully (and correctly) made many accurate bot reports already.
The infamous captcha timeout thing on random time intervals. (Though even I am sure there would be a workaround)
Just have one guy teleporting to the known/obvious botting locations, with a banhammer…and a dhuum animation ^.^

I know you are banning some of the botters…But the players are hurting as well as your income. We are willing to help you…Help Me, Help You.

Fallacies in your proposed solutions:

1. Easily abused. By how many reports do you expect to see for this solution to be in effect?
2. That’s not how bot accounts work. They spread the gold over many accounts to avoid exactly that.
3. Handing down power like that to players? That will never work out. Just imagine what happens when someone gets on that guild’s bad side.
4. Same as #4.
5. No for two reasons. For one that would severely annoy players and two, those are easily bypassed.
6. That could work and probably already happens however, one thing ArenaNet has never done and I doubt will ever do is banning possible botters on the spot.

Explanation for #6:

Senario A: 2 botters. One is found and banned the other continues on without being found.
Senario B: 500 botters. Find them all, ban them all. By allowing them to continue botting, more potential botters will use the same exploit/script allowing ArenaNet to find many more of them then ban them in a sweep without alerting them that the exploit/script has been discovered and move on to a different exploit/script.

How do these bots spread the money? They can’t send mail with 100g, that would be too suspicious. Do they use TP? Is this why some items are so insanely high-priced, to move gold around?

Is it so hard to track all money transactions? When a bot sends money to a mule and that mule sends it to a gold buyer, is it so hard to track ALL the money-tranfers from that mule and ban all gold buyers? And all bots that send money to it?

It seems like Anet doesn’t have this sort of log, because lse the botting problem would be much lower. Why not? Sure, there are alot of money transactions to track, but a log like that would certainly help the problem.