Guild Wars 2

Instead of implementing a code which prevents players who are actively playing the game from getting lewts, why not implement a code to stop the “bad” farmers aka botters. It’s incredibly depressing to see botters that me and my guild-mates report continue to bot the next day, in the same spot doing the same thing…. making easy golds, destroying the market. Given the monetary cost associated with keeping game information server-side most gaming companies make the information client-side. Although I’m no expert in this field I would assume hacking a client would be infinitely easier than hacking server, while it would be unreasonable to ask a gaming company to gear their game more towards a server-side setup to help curb botters there are a few things I think the company can do to prevent botting.
So in light of the forum subsection I offer a few suggestions….
1) In-game GMs to monitor players getting repeatedly reported for botting, not the most elegant solution nor the solution I suggest again to to the monetary obligation associated with the salary of said GMs.
2) During beta surveys would occasionally pop up to ask you various questions about the game… My suggestion is to bring these back but have them ask the player to complete an incredibly easy, non-discriminatory, task. Such as click the red square, if the player fails to complete the task they are logged out and must log back in. By having the object the player is supposed to click easily identifiable in several ways this would alleviate some players inability to complete some tasks, such as a player being colorblind. Some exceptions should be added such as increased number of chances in WvWvW, and maybe even not having the system queue in dungeons. While it might be a minor inconvenience to players to have to complete mundane tasks in order to continue to play I think this vastly outweighs farming legitimately and not getting loot due to an anti-farming code. Also this, I believe, would carry the least amount of financial burden on the company.

Thanks for the amazing game ArenaNet, and thanks for taking the time to listen to my two cents.

i like the idea of surveying the gaming community – i liked when during the beta, after every quest, they asked me about it and i could give them some opinion on it. at least it would help compile some of the common issues.

since the launch, it has been pretty quiet in game, aside from the gold sellers and spam emails.

I notice that you and many other people seem to be under the mistaken impression that the anti-farming code is to deter botters. While botters are indeed farmers, the anti-farming code is to prevent *farming*—be it attended or not.

ArenaNet has made their stance clear on this (see the recent botched dungeon adjustments,) it is not their intent to incentivise players to simply speed-grind the same content over and over; they want players to play the whole game, roaming around zones instead of camping spawns, etc. At the moment, there are some conflicts with this (dungeon-specific tokens for one,) but that’s a whole different matter.

Also: Interrupting millions of players with a captcha every x minutes is a horrible idea.

First of all any form of captcha style input would not stop botters. This is because the RMT companies pay (most likely slave labor rates) people to monitor the machines the bots run on for this sort of thing to circumvent bot detection methods. Second as has been mentioned already anti-bot/farm code is not there just for the bots but for anyone who manages to pull of the very same crazy rapid gain that the bots can manage to do. The dungeon thing is a prime example. Players found a way to speed clear a dungeon so that they could repeatedly do it in a very short time amassing way more gold than they are intended to be able to amass in that amount of time. This sort of thing causes massive economic problems in MMOs.

Unlike the real world there is no treatment of players different based on their level of wealth. So item X doesn’t cost any more for the person with massive amounts of gold than the person with a small amount. But the ones with the massive amounts will end up regulating the prices because they have the power to do so. But as long as you can implement a way to keep the gap between the riches and average player low then it is the whole of the player base that has the power to control the pricing of stuff. Otherwise some system would have to be implemented to take advantage of those who had more wealth to charge them more because of it, like they do in the real world. Around here the cities where all the rich people are it cost significantly more to buy the same stuff you can buy in my city. Example a whopper combo here is around $7 but in one of the rich people cities it is like $10 or $11 for the same combo. But there just isn’t a good way to do this in a game so the only solution is to prevent the much smaller portion of people from being able to amass more than they are supposed to be able to.

They didn’t stop it soon enough in GW1 and it had dire consequences to the average player. Making just about anything in the game an elitist market until the gold was more evenly distributed. The time it took for that to happen was well over 3 years where only the really hard to get stuff was what fetched the 100k+ and everything else was priced to fit the actual average wealth. Of course the lack of any quality trade system didn’t help the problem any. By that time they had already announced that in order for them to do what they wanted to with GW that they would have to build the game from the ground up. Which meant just doing a whole new game and so we got the announced GW2. I’d go on about the road from GW1 to GW2 but that is another topic and would take away from the point of the thread.

No, I don’t like farming that is boring or botting.

If I have to be super rich by repetitively farming the same monsters again, I have to do it because otherwise I’ll behind the economy.