A check of the “Accounts Issues” forum indicates that many players are being falsely reported for activities they are not doing. When a player gets falsely reported and suspended for awhile, this doesn’t reflect positively against the gaming company nor the player-base.
A bot is a computer controlled character where the actions taken by the character are not driven by a player. There are no mainstream MMORPGs that allow bots to run in their games. Source for information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMORPG_bots
A bot in the game will almost always run a pattern over and over. An exact pattern where a path is followed even to the degree where the character can become stuck and unstuck at the exact same spot.
The purpose of this suggestion is two-fold. One, to educate the Guild Wars 2 player-base with what a bot is. The second to suggest a means for notifying a player that is playing the game that they’ve been reported for botting or anything for that matter. The reason for this suggestion is so that the player that is playing the game that was reported can do several things. One, can let everyone know he/she is at the keyboard and not being controlled by a computer program. If the character is not being controlled by a computer program, that character can respond to intelligent conversation and be able to react to human activity. This would allow the player that submit the report to withdraw that report if it turns out they were wrong.
The other thing is the player that was falsely reported could have the option to submit a report against the player that falsely reported them. There is a clause when a report is submitted that the reporter submitting the report falsely can be suspended or banned. However, there hasn’t been any indication that any players submitting false reports have had any action taken against them.
The way it is now, anyone in the game can submit a false report against any player without any recourse. This leads to many account issues which take time to resolve by Game Masters.
With some form of notification to the player being reported along with some sort of rebuttal process, this can help save time that a Game Master would need to look into and investigate the report. It would cut down on players submitting false reports if they are aware that their report will immediately be known by the player receiving the report. It would also enforce players submitting reports to do further investigation before blindly submitting a report because they know there are further ramifications if they submit a false one.
The goal is to keep players happy and honest while playing the game. If someone is not playing by the rules, they should be reported. But if they are playing within the rules set forth by the game makers, they should not be reported falsely because the player-base doesn’t understand the rules. With this method of notification, players will seek to understand the rules and have better observation for how others are playing the game.