Guild Wars 2

Never posted on the official forums before and I mostly just follow reddit, regardless everyone is tired of the bot issue. It’s even made its way to IGN now and I’ve always figured once that happens ANET might actually start doing something more extreme to stop this problem which IMO is the biggest threat to GW2’s future. Whether or not you like my idea, I mostly wish to start a serious discussion on how the players can solve this problem. No matter how many employees ANET has they are undoubtedly overwhelmed by how large our GW2 community is when dealing with bug reports to botting while still trying to give us updates to improve the game. It’s time for ANET to implement a system that allows us “good” guys help them solve this issue.

So, originally this idea came to me while seeing a post on the reddit forums where someone posted pictures of a whole group of 10-15 bots continuously attacking a trash mob Chicken stuck in a position where he became invulnerable. I thought it was quite funny and then BAM!!!

If players were given the option to drop some kind of trash mob IE “chicken” anywhere in the game that could not be killed and only be attacked by PC’s (player characters) it could then be used to grab the attention of botters. Then once the chicken is attacked it activates some sort of timer and notification. The notification would have a pop up that asks for you to click “ok” within 2-5 minutes of receiving the pop up to prove that you are actually playing. So any real player who is actually there would be able to remove said timer and be ok. While on the other hand the botter is most likely not actually anywhere near their computer, the timer will complete and the botters account will be removed from the server and permanently banned or even just removed from the game temporarily until the action is reviewed by ANET.

Now this is just the basic form of something I think could really help deal with the bot situation. If something like this can realistically be implemented, IDK. If you plan on just crying and saying something like this is dumb please don’t bother commenting. I only wish to start more ideas from the community on how we could be used to help clean up the game. If you have more ideas please post them and lets start this discussion or if you have an opinion on how my idea should be implemented for example if this trash mob “chicken” should need a requirement to be used. Similar to that of when a guild drops a karma banner. Maybe the chicken is limited to guild leaders who have access to purchase the chicken in their guild upgrades so you dont have 10,000 chickens and constant pop up’s in areas like Orr.

Great idea, but it can easily be avoided by bot makers. The problem is that once they figured out the counter-measures to botting, they can simply have a screen-reading bot click away the message once it pops up. It’s a no-good situation.

What I suggest instead is having your idea with the attack-able “chicken”, but instead have a picture letter puzzle, where you have to write in letters from a picture. This will stop bots IMO. They could have like 5 minutes to write in the puzzle or they would be logged off.

And then it leads to people greifing.

I disagree with the “griefing” issue, as a player at their keyboard can simply choose not to attack the “trap mob” where bot groups just pop attack anything that spawns near them, and if a player accidentily attacks one they are right there to correct the situation

give the “trash mob” a randomized name like the bots use so they can’t program them to be ignored. and it will be obvious to an actual player what it is. “sdghsgh”

if the timer expires, have the system autolog the toon (not autoban), and send a report to system for botting pending investigation.