Guild Wars 2

Attacking the sophisticated automation programs.

Hello ArenaNet, I’m sure I’m not about to tell you guys anything more than you or half the people on these forums don’t already know but here it is anyway.

We’ve all been annoyed by the bots running the same path over and over doing their little farming runs and the problem doesn’t seem to be going away. And some of us have been effected ourselves by this anti farming routines ANet have implemented to attack these bots, but to be honest this is attacking the problem from the wrong end.

ArenaNet if you really want to attack the bots here’s how you do it.

Sophisticated automation programs rely on being able to read the GW2 clients X,Y,Z and Heading memory locations for them to work, without this they are useless. Bot developers use programs to read the GW2 memory in real time and search for the memory locations containing the X,Y,Z and Heading information.

Without the XYZ and the heading info a bot will not be able to follow a path or even know which way it’s facing.

So if you really want to protect players from this irritation and you really want to cut back on the botting here’s what you do.

(1) Take one of the above mentioned memory locations and hide it, or build in dummy memory values that make it difficult for bot programmers to find. Some games can be really good at this, others …well not so good!

(2) Every week update the GW2 client and change the location in the memory where the X,Y,Z and Heading information is held. This can be a real deterrent as it forces bot developers to patch their programs each week and deal with the issues of distributing it to their user base.

By both making it hard for Bot developers to find the memory locations and by changing the heading and XYZ location values each week about half of the bot developers and botters will move on to more lucrative and easy to bot games.

Next, if you can detect farming then program a random Champion mob to the farming location instead of diminishing returns. Live players will react to Champion mobs and either avoid then or team up with others to take it down, bots will just die.

Also change where the higher end mats come from, move these mat drops to champion mobs to (one) make champion mobs more rewarding for real players and (two) make the trash mobs (bots feed on) less lucrative.

As soon as you become less lucrative and more trouble to bot then some other MMO’s out there 99% of your botters in it for a profit (selling gold) will move on.

The botters left will be then the “little fish” the players botting to level. These guys are low impact, they don’t have 10 accounts farming 24 hours a day. Strong anti botting bans will keep these guys in line.

Hope that helps

Hi,

As already explained by Mike, we are very commited to fighting botters. However, we are not going keep you updated about this situation every hour, or answer personally to each questions you are asking.

As soon as we will have more information to provide, we will keep you updated here. Thanks