Guild Wars 2

I am puzzled. Botters seem to be screwing up aspects of the game for everybody. We have loot caps in place, affecting all of us, because a small subset of our population are parasites. There has been a great deal of discussion and yet there does not seem to be a move towards an answer that affects Botters without affecting the population in general.

Why is it that Arena does not simply hire a team to play the game and monitor the bot-heavy areas? I am not suggesting that you can spot all Bots at a glance but you can sure see SOME of them pretty easily, camped out at a DE location, blindly shooting off into space, or shooting/teleporting in a pattern. Give an Arena-employed team the ability to play, pose a human question looking for a human answer if need be, but on finding a Bot simply ZAP the entire account – everything looted is gone, character is gone. I cannot imagine how this could generate a “false positive” on a real player – I don’t sit and fire aimlessly into space or behave like a bot and cannot imagine a player that does. If I am afk my character sits in an idle state.

There are only 48 or so realms, you are not talking about a huge terrain to police. I’d bet that Arena has (or can have) a “radar like scan ability” to look for behaviors likely to highlight bots. If it were my call, I’d just throw them out the airlock and let the live players enjoy a reduced-bot world.

EDIT: typo fix

+1
I believe someone from Arenanet spoke out about this issue. They said that they were in the process of looking for a more permanent solution (studying how the botting programs/scripts work).

However, that is no excuse for letting bots roam free. I have seen bots that were still botting days after reports against them were filed. These bots not only disrupt our ability to do DEs (by killing all mobs before we can get a hit), but also sabotage the game’s economy.

I understand that finding the long term solution is the most important factor, but I am still very disappointed at the delay with which Arenanet handles current bot reports.. As the OP said, it wouldn’t be hard to devote even just a single person to catching botters. On my server, you can go to the Cursed Shore at any time of the day and see at least a couple bots at every popular DE location. I hope Arenanet is not intentionally allowing these botters to stay for data gathering purposes, because the massive amounts of items they sell on the TP are greatly driving down all market prices. I am a huge fan of following in-game economies and this issue going unresolved is game-breaking in my opinion.

I suggest that they implement a program that once the player is reported these things happen:
#1 A menu (that can’t be closed) comes up with one of those pictures we all see when we sign up for accounts. (those ones that say “type what you see here”)
#2 Implement a time limit. Ex 1 minute or so
#3 If they don’t type in what the “picture” says then they get kicked from the game.

That keeps normal players from being wrongly reported and bots off the game ^-^

This is becoming more and more an issue for me as well. :/ Not just because of the economy but mostly because it feels like I can’t do any of the DE’s without getting screwed because of all the bots in the area… Seeing as there are only a few 70-80 zones and one 80 zone, it is a little hard to find a place to go that would be challenging for my level but also give me a good amount of credit for taking part in the DE’s… I used to really like Orr’s Cursed Shore DE’s until I realized a bunch of the people there were bots. It’s horrible because these botters ruin the experience for those of us actually playing the game…

I’m also confused as to how they’re able to start new accounts so easily. was this something to do with the verification problem we had at launch? I don’t understand how they’re able to make new accounts so easily.

But at any rate I agree with the OP, surely there’s some way to have a live GM in-game at the known problem areas to monitor what’s going on. It’s pretty easy to tell who’s a bot and who’s a player. I just feel something more can be done about this issue, as it’s really quite frustrating for everyone who’s here just to enjoy the game. :/