Guild Wars 2

Hello!

With the current line of bots largely relying on teleporting and nonsense names, they’re kinda tricky to pin down and report – making a note of intrepid adventurer ‘nnmknmjkas’ in time to report them can be tough when most of the time I can’t see them or I only spot them when it’s too late.

This suggestion is simple enough, I suppose; at the moment, we have the option to show emotes in Chat, presumably only in an immediate vicinity (otherwise I would be inundated in LA every time I wander in). If the act of mining, chopping or harvesting also came with an emote or something similar, it could give players a record to refer to via Chat in case they stumble across a bot but aren’t able to report them before they blink away.

Naturally, I hope that the underlying teleportation issue could be cleared up, and this is only really a minor suggestion to promote and otherwise encourage player involvement in reporting botters and those using teleportation hacks. False positives will always be an issue while players are involved in reporting bots, but I’d presume that a higher volume of reporting would generally involve a proportionate signal-to-noise ratio. Making gathering ‘emotes’ a separate channel to regular emotes could also stop players being inundated with messages that they might not wish to see.

I’d be curious to know what other people thought about this. Maybe there’s something I haven’t thought of?

I think its a good idea, but instead of it appearing in chat perhaps it could appear in the combat tab?

An idea I though of, to at least reduce how quickly these bots can farm and to give players time to report them, would be to put a cooldown on gathering (say 10 seconds?). As these bots teleport to each node, a cooldown would force them to wait there for a few seconds before gathering and teleporting. Giving the player who just saw them teleport in a chance to get their name and reducing the efficiency at which they farm.

Both interesting Ideas.

I think something has to be done, there are a lot of these types of bots around these days. A lot. And it’s very difficult to get them with all the blinking in an out they do.

Can’t Arena Net spend 10 minutes looking in a zone and see the bots for themselves? Just start banning them. If they were really concerned with bots they’d take a more hands on approach.

Rin – Well, each tab has a series of check boxes you can use to display certain information, so technically you could have the default ‘Combat’ tab display only map chat and the ‘Main’ tab display only combat information. This is unless you feel that these gathering emotes should be tied to combat info (via the combat check box)? I rarely use that option as it is, so I think I’d rather it be tied to something that people don’t use as often in areas with gathering nodes (emotes) or for it to be its own check box. I do appreciate that no-one would want any sort of unavoidable spam added to their chats though.

A gathering cooldown is also an interesting idea, though it could hurt legitimate solo farmers in places like Orr, where efficiency and mobility can be important. It’s preferable to simply making gathering take longer, however, as at least players are free to move in-between nodes. More ideas to add to the pot are always good :]

Flopjack – I feel that ANet is concentrating on gathering data on bots before banning them in waves, hence why people often see the same bots for days (or maybe weeks) and then a large number are removed at once. Banning them on an individual basis actually hurts the effort to learn about their methods and behaviour in order to set up defences against them for the future, and employing someone per server to check zones for bots might be considered inefficient in the long-run. There’s also the issue that many bots run on hacked accounts with legitimate-sounding names, which complicates the issue. I understand it can be frustrating to not see an individual directly intervening with bot behaviour, but ANet seems to be going about this is a way I think is pretty sensible. Prevention is better than cure, etc, and you can’t prevent a disease unless you learn about it.

Thanks for the feedback, all!

proxy.7963:

Rin – Well, each tab has a series of check boxes you can use to display certain information, so technically you could have the default ‘Combat’ tab display only map chat and the ‘Main’ tab display only combat information. This is unless you feel that these gathering emotes should be tied to combat info (via the combat check box)? I rarely use that option as it is, so I think I’d rather it be tied to something that people don’t use as often in areas with gathering nodes (emotes) or for it to be its own check box. I do appreciate that no-one would want any sort of unavoidable spam added to their chats though.

A gathering cooldown is also an interesting idea, though it could hurt legitimate solo farmers in places like Orr, where efficiency and mobility can be important. It’s preferable to simply making gathering take longer, however, as at least players are free to move in-between nodes. More ideas to add to the pot are always good :]

This is true, I just feel that it should be possible for players to filter this in which ever way suits them best. So long as it is an option, that does not interfere with the current set up (possibly separate from emotes?), I would be fine with this.

As to the gathering cooldown, it only needs to be say 10 seconds, or perhaps it can vary depending on the type of node. Unless you are in a field of herbs or something, I think 10 seconds is plenty of time for you to run between two nodes and gather without having to wait, and at the same time will give players a few seconds to report someone if they suspect a bot. If 10 seconds is too long then this can be adjusted, so long as it delays the bots long enough for players to report them.

@Flopjack – I agree with proxy. I feel Anet is being very sensible in the way they are tackling things and feel employing people to ‘watch’ the zones would be less efficient than watching data and analysing it. If they can design code to detect patterns, they can then write code to stop and potentially ban bots the moment they start displaying certain behaviour.

Adding in extra measures to help players report them, and maybe even slow them down, would be good additions to contribute towards reducing this problem.