Guild Wars 2

So I have been doing some thinking over the last hour and an idea occurred to me about how to “catch them in the act” so to speak. I was thinking about how Halo 3 collected data for game replay’s so I can download and review my match afterwords and see what I did right and wrong and try to learn from it. How do they do it you may ask? Datapoints. They record data from the game as it streams in and out not from video but from a set of data points. So for example for a 1v1 deathmatch there would be two entries for players (player x and player y) then every 10 to 50 miliseconds they pull location data from the console, server and other players to normalize the data. Video would take up hundreds if not thousands of megabytes of space but even for a 2 hour 1v1 deathmatch, the dataspace taken up would be maybe 100MB if that with proper compression and compensation.

So my thoughts are for Bot Reporting have the game capture the datapoints for the last say 10 mins of data streaming in and out (location, spells used, any other data that may be useful) then when a user submits a Bot Report, that data is uploaded with the report and the ANet Staffer then upon reading the report, loads the data file and watches what happend with the ability to view the action from any angle and would show absolute proof, what happend, why it happened, and with complete accuracy as there would not be any type of player control of camera as it would be a playback of Data and not a recording.

Just my two cents.

That’s actually exactly what Anet currently does. They store every players data compressed and if they find a need to check if some player has done anything rulebreaking they can load his/her data and see what he’s been doing.
Might not be exactly same system as in Halo 3 but they’ll for example see the player’s movement on the map etc.