Guild Wars 2

OPTION I – Captcha like automated response sent

Why not allow players to send in a botting ticket which flags the person in question?
You send an auto response to the “perp” and have them go through a series of actions that require human interaction not scripted. You note who sent the botting ticket.

I was thinking something no bot could do with some kind of calculative response.
A challenge like catpcha “google ReCapthca” or image based captcha where you ask the perp a question and they select the correct image etc.

If no response you log them out. They log back in…challenge them again ..etc..
x5 strikes you ban them for an hour etc..send an email to the account blah ….

At that point you can assume they are probably bots – investigate and solve.

You take them out of the system in an automated fashion. And the trigger for this behavior was the players original report.

If the person was afk…they could log in answer done. If the reporter is just being belligerent and flagging everyone you could ban them as well for said period for being mean

OPTION II – flag and kill
I like this one personally. In this model you report someone they get flagged so that they are now vulnerable to human attack. Arming this flag would require again something like a captcha failure. Or some other failure with a countdown.

If the perp failed to respond in a timely manor they would be now vulnerable to kill.
Players could take them out ..or my personal favorite “other bots!”. LOL

Again if the perp account did not log in and correct the “I am human” challenge response..every time they came back same result “flagged for termination”.

Just some thoughts on how to handle this in an automated fashion while saving the real Ban Hammer for real people to handle at Arena.net.

p.s. as one of my guild mates informed me “XP or better some Karma say 20 for bot hunting would be a nice benefit”. XP or karma could be granted only once per bot or player found instance. Kill 5 you get some in game “Witches” hat or something.

Players would actively seek and destroy bots but be careful about reporting belligerently because they too could have issues with flagging needlessly.

One note is that if a player used OPTION II to pvp flag you would have to note that.
Like x number of times you are killed you are removed from the game for x amount of time. One would think players would not do that.

I don’t think a catchpa would work, apart from it completely breaking player immersion and reducing the quality of the game for human players, I don’t imagine profoessional botters leave their bot farms unattended. There’s likely a bot farmer watching over a lot of machines, who might be able to configure the bots to alert him to fill out any “are you human?” challenges.

Flag and kill, again, breaks immersion and is wide open to abuse.

If there were a good, easy way it would have happened already.
My favourite idea so far is to subtly modify gameplay slightly in a way that would make it more difficult for humans and bots alike. Like a behaviour catchpa, an event in gameplay that demands an intelligent response. I can’t think of anything like that though, it’s hard.