Fight the Bots!
Completely agree. When someone bots it is beyond obvious and no nerf can stop them, literally none, hell in terms of profit they actually get buffed because a computer is more flawless than a human, so really it just seems like salt on the wounds. Adding a strict bot reporting feature like in GW1 is what is missing, although i do not remember ever seeing it have real impact, i would still see the same people leech over and over, what was missing was a live team addressing the issue. I am pretty confident that there are “free of charge” live surveillance moderator material type people available in this community , so money should be no option.
Stop the bots? Why would Anet do that? The T5/T6 mat drop rate is so low you risk brain death if you deliberately attempt to get them, and Anet takes a nice chunk of change as “tax” when you give up and purchase the items on the trading post which are sold by the botters. Sales tax is a huge gold sink for Anet. Lack of loot tempts people to pay real cash for gems so the can get the gold to buy the mats they need.
Anet has no incentive to remove bots.
That’s actually a good point Neural but I seriously hope you’re wrong! I am working my butt off trying to finish my legendary and I know I am going to have to buy some of the T6 mats too. If Anet doesn’t fix this, I will make a decision shortly to quit playing altogether. And when I see the name “Anet” in the future, I will not be buying. This game is a blast but not when there is nothing but ‘Cheating’ going on constantly and nothing being done about it. I want a live team to come look right now and ban them right now. This will fix the bots. Anet needs to put a team together and deal with this!
Sorry Neural, but your logic is a little off, and Anets stand on bots is very clear..
see previous news from Mike Lewis Security Co-ordinator…
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/mike-lewis-on-the-war-against-the-bots/
Wow! Mr. Lewis’s article sounds powerful and convincing. I have difficulty with some of the statements in the article however. I have observed and reported the same 6 bots in HOD Cursed Shore and after 24 hours, the bots are still running around. This does not sound to me like the reports are responded to in short order. I also have a hard time believing that world-wide the number of bot reports has been reduced to 20 per hour when I, myself, witnessed at least 10 between Jade Quarry Cursed Shore and HOD Cursed Shore in the past 24 hours. To be fair though, I have not seen very much botting since starting the game until the past few days. Has something possibly changed with how Anet is dealing with botting or possibly new botting software being developed recently that has allowed an upsurge?
Yes, there is a recent program that allows multi-boxing, auto-boting and a few other features in it on a website with which I forgot the name. It was just recently opened to the public for a price, but I’m just surprised that Anet hasn’t gotten wind of it as the website has been posted on their own forums.
One of my Guildies is a home-all-day housewife. She plays a lot, and is into crafting in a big way, so she harvests a lot.
She is also colorblind, and generally plays with the sound off or low.
A player observed her running around doing very little except harvesting. He tried to whisper her, but naturally got no response because she didn’t hear the ping and she can’t see the purple-on-dark text. The player made the assumption she was a bot, and reported her. It resulted in her being banned for two days before her daughter could get her reinstated.
ANet should never have taken the player’s word. I don’t know why they would ban a real, harmless player without gathering some more evidence first. Summoning an in-game official might have been able to prevent it, if they had some good attention-getting ability. Like maybe teleporting the player along with the Official’s toon to a private instance where they could have an uninterrupted chat.
It would probably mean new employees for ANet. Around-the-clock policemen for each server. And warnings / penalties for abusers of the summons.
Set a man on fire, and he’ll be warm the rest of his life.
– Unknown Fire Elementalist
^ How do you know it was only one person? How do you know she really wasn’t botting? How do you know so much about the story?
If she truly was colorblind and played with sound low/off and was just farming herbs. She would have had to have gotten multiple reports to have been banned. One report will not ban anyone.
You talk about not taking a player’s word, yet you’re taking this seemingly unknown person’s word for it. Heck, it could be a made-up player for all we know.
Sorry Neural, but your logic is a little off, and Anets stand on bots is very clear..
see previous news from Mike Lewis Security Co-ordinator…
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/mike-lewis-on-the-war-against-the-bots/
LOL, that post is 7 months old….botting is totally useless in Orr right now…DR is so horrible, botting is simply not profitable there right now they way i see it…but yes…they do have a hard stance on mobs.
In fact…I was spending some time in Orr last night, its my favorite map, and pent/shelt popped(miracle) and I would get zero loot from some waves…its the same from fight single mobs…DR is just so horrible
what website is that Esplen? I would like to possibly report it to ANET. And Ham, the bots never harvest so that is a huge clue that she really wasn’t a bot. ANET should have been able to tell the difference. I would totally love that job if it were available! An online bot manager. Take the reports, find the offendor, bring them into an instance, deal with the problem, ban the account if it is a bot. LOVE the idea!
You’ll have to find it yourself, Harry, I’m not going to throw out a name of a botting website on the forums.
^ How do you know it was only one person? How do you know she really wasn’t botting? How do you know so much about the story?
If she truly was colorblind and played with sound low/off and was just farming herbs. She would have had to have gotten multiple reports to have been banned. One report will not ban anyone.
You talk about not taking a player’s word, yet you’re taking this seemingly unknown person’s word for it. Heck, it could be a made-up player for all we know.
She is a real-life friend and wife of another Guildie. She is not a seemingly unknown person. Her daughter that got her reinstated is another friend and Guildie. I have known them all for over 30 years. If you choose to think I’m lying, that’s your (wrong) decision.
I do not know for sure what made ANet come to their conclusion. But I do support the OP’s suggestion that a live in-game “Officer” may have been able to help avoid all the unpleasantness she experienced.
Set a man on fire, and he’ll be warm the rest of his life.
– Unknown Fire Elementalist
Arena.net already has a team doing just that, and it’s working. The bots are very few compared to several months ago. If people keep reporting them, they’ll get banned as well.
I have observed and reported the same 6 bots in HOD Cursed Shore and after 24 hours, the bots are still running around. This does not sound to me like the reports are responded to in short order.
They used to ban bot in swipes, not on a per-report basis. I don’t know if they changed their modus operandi recently, as I haven’t seen a bot in ages, but yeah, expect them to take a few days to a week to ban them.
“You can’t have more than 10 HS decks because that would confuse people”
“30 fps is more cinematic”
Have any of you bothered to Google the subject?
It is algorithmically possible to determine with an extremely high level of certainty, based on the heuristics of key and mouse entry, whether the player is real or a bot.
What a bot report should (if it doesn’t already) do is queue up the recent movement history of the character being reported for analysis using the above mentioned algorithms.
Want to read something that will turn you off even using a clickbot?
http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/faculty/robertsd/papers/aiide12-signatures.pdf
i have been reporting the same group of bots for 6 weeks now (every single day i report them).
i know that anet bans them in waves but 6 weeks is a lot of time to destroy the market.
i really dont understand why they ban in big swipes anyway, if they gonna wait this long every time the bot will have payed for himself and they will have new hacked accounts to fill his place after the ban.
while if they just log in ones a day for 30 minutes and run around the popular bots places (malchors leap and cursed shore (SO MANY)) and ban them everyday they will run out of accounts or make any profit from doing that.
ofcourse they will look for different ways but still the bot trains will be gone.
I doubt that all movement is logged, so reported individuals are probably monitored for a period of time to do an effective analysis of their activities.
Sorry Neural, but your logic is a little off, and Anets stand on bots is very clear..
see previous news from Mike Lewis Security Co-ordinator…
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/mike-lewis-on-the-war-against-the-bots/
Yes, because Guild Wars 2 is so ermergerd awesome that Arenanet must be perfect. Every word that flows from their mouths is truth and brings light to the world. :roll eyes:
LOL, that post is 7 months old….botting is totally useless in Orr right now…DR is so horrible, botting is simply not profitable there right now they way i see it…but yes…they do have a hard stance on mobs.
In fact…I was spending some time in Orr last night, its my favorite map, and pent/shelt popped(miracle) and I would get zero loot from some waves…its the same from fight single mobs…DR is just so horrible
DR is complex and ambiguous. In order to figure out how it works in order to make the most of your time in game would take weeks of farming. Players can’t gather enough data and details while playing to be able to determine how to properly work around DR. You’d need a program to run it constantly for several weeks to .. oh wait.
My inventory full of white level 80 armor after an hour in Cursed Shores, doing only single time runs through Plinx, Penitent, Shelter and Melandru, and tells me DR is over the top. The value in the runs is getting the bags, which aren’t affected by nearly the same amount.
(well, maybe when there was heavy botting it had value, but that day has passed)
Determining how DR works and being a bot are mutually exclusive. I’ve been here since the evening of pre-launch, and I still don’t see the point. There are far too few bots in Crystal Desert to warrant such loot limitations, especially after fighting a billion and two spiders for 6 minutes at Verdance.
ArenaNET is not perfect. No company is perfect. ArenaNET TRIES to do their best, and I give them credit for that.