Guild Wars 2

Botting seems to be on the increase in GW2 so much so that in most areas there are more bots than players. The team at Anet are working hard to stop this after all it doesn’t benefit there profit margin if these bots are grabbing all the gold and drops for Illecit Gold Sellers to make a profit of the back of Anet.

It occured to me yesterday that like myself and many other legitmate players would gladly help to illeminate the issue of the troublsome bots and the answer is simple really.

In the good old days of gaming and i’m proberbly showing my age now but i’m from an era of Doom, Mohaa, Quake and BF2 and all of these games had some kind of facility to kick players or even ban from the Server. One of the better programs to do this was called Counter Intelligence, if you know what it is you will have some idea of what i’m talking about.

So my suggestion is that Anet could choose dedicated players who are trustworthy to monitor and maybe as an inccentive offer jewels but i would gladly do it for free to have a better gaming experiance to be honest. I know there is a big differnce as Anet own the Servers and mange everything themselves and eventually the process of getting rid of bots will be automated but in the meantime it’s something worth considering.

Botting seriously spoils my game and many others infact I counted 300 yesterday alone and I heard many players yesterday say “whats the point i’m giving up on this game” It seems to me that the process of reporting bots and them actually being removed is to long why not just keep kicking them or ban until Anet can investigate rather than investigate and then ban.

I suppose an argument Anet could use for this suggestion is that it could be open to abuse the power of god so to speak but I say the serious dedicated player wants to enjoy the game interact with other players and make it a better community rather than abuse it like these bots and illecit gold sellers are doing.

Bots are easy to spot, they have random letters as names i.e hdgdhd, they run around in groups in circles killing everything in sight, they all dress the same the tell tale signs are so obvious and its so frustrating that there is not thing you can do aout it but report which could take a couple of days before it is actioned.

Anyway its just a suggestion and me letting some steam off.

A game like Quake had a locally administered game server hosting small groups of players. A /kick command that required half of the players present to agree or something like that was easy to implement because you were dealing with a controllable population in a small environment. If someone was wallhacking or aimbotting you could usually tell pretty easily. In the case of fully private servers, being able to kick was often as easy as being friends with an admin.

An MMO is a completely different environment. If I find a bot, chances are not everyone’s seen it. A /kick command that would require voting would require a lot of good faith or for other people in the zone to come around and check. Giving ‘trustworthy’ players the ability to do so is even more of an issue. Technically speaking, nobody around here knows anyone else. You people just live inside my computer screen.

In both events, I’m not sure if the risks outweigh the possible benefits.

Mind you, I can fully understand your frustration. Utterly. Remember that some less sophisticated bots can be tricked with Fireworks bundles. Report. Train monsters on them. It helps me a bit.