Guild Wars 2

Hey guys, it’s Blurry again. Coming at you today with a suggestion that i think is absolutely necessary.

We all know there is a huge issues with botting in the game. Botting this, botting that, botting here, botting there, botting EVERYWHERE. Well today i was trying to farm for Corrupted Lodestones and i was finding it VERY hard to because there were 4 bots there with speedhacks getting to the enemies before me and killing them. They have been there for 2 days no with nothing being done to them. I was thinking to myself, how could we bots out of an area within a hour or so? It hit me! Every other MMO has GM’s (Game Masters) that you can call to a problem and they will do their best to fix it. An example. I remember a while ago i was playing Final Fantasy Online, i was young and swearing at other players. Within MINUTES a GM teleported me to a private area and gave me a warning and had a 1 on 1 talk with me. I was scared to ever do it again.
So how about we apply that to this game? But in this way instead. We find a bot or a pack of bots in an area. We call the GM, he comes, looks at the situation and decides whether to back right there. Now i now sometimes it would be hard to tell. But when bots have speed hacks it is 100% obvious that they’re hacking and botting. So. If the players were found to be bots, the GM would remove them from the game, terminate their account and VOILA bot free zone within the hour!

If you all would, i’d like you all to say “I support this idea” in the comments if you like the idea. Lets get rid of bots and get some GM’s and make ArenaNet hear us!

Absolutely. I’m amazed that I’ve never seen an in-game GM.

I had this problem with BOTS too. I reported them as soon as I saw them. When I came back to the same place about 2 hours later I found they were still there. This way people are able to make profit trough botting because they can just farm enough money before getting banned. I do agree that these bot reports should be handled faster.

So you want a GM at every possible farm spot on every possible server? Good luck. Even one guy patrolling these areas would be prohibitively expensive in terms of man-hours. If the entire GW2 team was on bot duty, they still won’t have the manpower to handle all bots. The only way to do this properly is by having a good community effort in people reporting these guys.

On the more cost-effective side, a.net develops automated bans. In general this would need to check many reports, actually in the range of hundreds to eliminate false positives. Next patterns have to be found to prove this is actually a bot and not a legit player farming his kitten off. These patterns could be crazy names and no guild, however bots are starting to circumvent those patterns. Because of that, instant bans aren’t possible because good patterns would be known immediately. Thusly, bots are banned in huge waves once every few weeks.

This means you will keep seeing the same bot for a few weeks before he gets banned along with 10 000 of his other friends. All transactions have to be tracked so gold buyers are also banned but not legit players.

If only you’d imagine the scope of the game, and not just the scope of one player reporting one bot, you will realize this is slightly more complicated than you may think.

marnick.4305:

So you want a GM at every possible farm spot on every possible server? Good luck. Even one guy patrolling these areas would be prohibitively expensive in terms of man-hours. If the entire GW2 team was on bot duty, they still won’t have the manpower to handle all bots. The only way to do this properly is by having a good community effort in people reporting these guys.

On the more cost-effective side, a.net develops automated bans. In general this would need to check many reports, actually in the range of hundreds to eliminate false positives. Next patterns have to be found to prove this is actually a bot and not a legit player farming his kitten off. These patterns could be crazy names and no guild, however bots are starting to circumvent those patterns. Because of that, instant bans aren’t possible because good patterns would be known immediately. Thusly, bots are banned in huge waves once every few weeks.

This means you will keep seeing the same bot for a few weeks before he gets banned along with 10 000 of his other friends. All transactions have to be tracked so gold buyers are also banned but not legit players.

If only you’d imagine the scope of the game, and not just the scope of one player reporting one bot, you will realize this is slightly more complicated than you may think.

Not in every area, a few on every server. If it works so well for other games, why not on this one? Why is it such a bad idea for Guild Wars?

I don’t even think it would take that many people. 1 person to waypoint to the bothotspots and ban each one. Shouldn’t take that long. And apparently they have sophisticated technology to identify and ban bots…

You could take volunteers to do it for you. We have already been submitting reports endlessly.

Good idea mate
if there are GMs they can respond much faster and bust the bots on place instead to waste much more time investigating logs etc.

I remember one time back in Britannia I was walking through the woods kind of lost because I was really new to the game and a giant newb to mmos generally. Suddenly a gm gates to me and honestly asks me if I need any help. Those were the days!

There is no denying the effectiveness of GMs. I can never really understand why Anet doesn’t have a single one. My personal experience with GMs in other games have been rather positive. Hell some of them even do crazy stuff for lols, like summon a giant boss that can’t be killed and sic it on an offender.

If they had GMs from the start then the Bot issue would not have gone so out of hand like it did in the beginning of the game. however, in the face of the fact that they Have over 25 servers (still think the number of servers is absurd in this day and age), even if they had GMs it may be a pain to deal with reports. But i’ll give credit where credit is due the number of bots has gone WAY down. I don’t run into them no where near as much as i used to anymore, so we know for sure A-net is doing something about it, they just don’t keep us u to date with their bot stomping.

How do we know we don’t have GMs?

A good GM is a GM that doesn’t draw attention to himself after all.

GM’s were very, VERY strict in FFXI (good game though, before abyssea). I liked how they maintained the community and did their best to solve customer issues in game rather than through a ticket system on their website. The thing is, we have GMs around Tyria, they just don’t reveal themselves. They are constantly watching things happen like major events and keeping an eye out on what the community has to say about certain aspects. I think the only problem is they don’t go far enough. They need to whisper players who are harrassing(or even teleport them to a Lion’s Arch court ^^) and warn them of their behavior. Also to go around populated botter zones and do what they can. It isn’t practical but 1 step at a time, so you don’t need to send or hire enough people to send 1 to every server of orr.

No thanks enough policing, if you see bot report them.
Peace,
Volted.

I definitely miss having GM’s in game. I don’t mind submitting a ticket when i encounter a bug etc as i definitely don’t need to speak to someone directly about it. but for other issues like completing a dungeon and not receiving any reward for example that’s something that i would like a GM to confirm so they can fix the issue. I’ve posted on the forums and submitted many bug tickets and I never receive any sort of reply for those issues. If you miss a reward you miss a reward. There’s no getting it back.

Another example is if someone purchases the wrong dungeon gear from the vendors in LA etc and need someone to refund the tokens and fix the mistake. Post all you want on the forums and submit a billion tickets, nobody is going to get back to you. Its a huge gap in customer service that’s missing there. GM’s aren’t necessary for every little thing but they sure are helpful. Having played MMO’s for over a decade I can tell you this is one major “feature” if you will that’s missing

It’s nice to see the variety of opinions about the matter.

Agree we need them

Unfortunately, I don’t think GMs are feasible without subscriptions. Being a GM is a full time job. For bare-minimun, unrealistic 24 hour coverage you need 3 people minimum. Let’s be stingy and say 1 GM per server. There are 52 servers right now. 52 * 3 = 156

That’s 156 new employees for each GM on a server. Let’s be horrible greedy corporate types and say they all made $10 an hour. $80 a day. 156 * 80 =

$12,480 per day.

That’s a generously cheap estimate for the daily upkeep of single GM on each server round the clock. And that’s just the upkeep.

I’m going to take a leap of faith and say that since there aren’t any GMs available, there’s no pre-existing mechanism in place FOR a gm to function. So, in addition to that, the developers would need to spend cycles developing a GM interface for our GMs to use. It’s more complicated than it sounds. They need to be able to interact and control many elements of the game that wern’t designed to be manipulated that way. It would take months at the very least, and would likely cause more bugs than the GMs could fix.

On top of THAT, these GMs need to be hired, trained, and managed. That’s more full time staff right there.

I could go on, but I think you see my point. The cash shop would have a lot of trouble bearing the extra upkeep.

We don’t need them. GMs are not developers, they are customer service representatives. Lets be clear about that. A GM is a CSR that interacts through the game client. Interacting through email is a more versatile solution than in-game contact:

• Real-time contact has a lot of downtime built in; you have a faster response using email-based systems.
• In-game communication cannot be used to resolve connectivity issues.
• Most people cannot access the game client at work, but can access email.

Lets assume they could interact through in-game mail. What would they do?

You think somebody is botting, so you call in a GM and they right click and report so that the activity logs can be pulled and evaluated. What did this accomplish?

You don’t just ban an account for botting because a player said to or because it looks like botting. Invalidating a $60 purchase without cause can get you in legal hot water, EULA or no (they are not enforcable in all regions), you need to have proper evidence of activity in violation of the ToS ready to go.

Also, what makes you think the botter owns the accounts that are botting? How were the accounts compromised? Who is the one running the bots? Aren’t answering these questions so that you can provide a solution to the problem instead of covering up the symptoms more important than keeping the lodestone prices low?

The most common causes of GM intervention in other games:

• Loot disputes
• Accidentally lost/deleted items
• Chat moderation

A GM team doesn’t add anything to the game when the first is a non-issue, the second has no fix, and the third is accomplished by filters + reporting.

how can you report something so fast you can’t even target?
some weeks ago i found a pack of female norn rangers, all with their bear, speedy as super heroes, farming the hell out of orr, named ahgfsjafgkjsfgpaijf so you couldn’t even try to remember the exact name for the report, and i didn’t have even time to realize what was happening they dissappeared in the horizon and never had the chance to click on 1 of them again… not to mention the bears adding confusion to the targeting attempt.
how easy it could be if i could open a gm or even a live report and write, hi, i am in this map at this waypoint, i saw a bunch of suspicius female norn with their suspicious bears, running like there is no tomorrow named in such impossible fashion. could you check please?

Fildydarie.1496:

The most common causes of GM intervention in other games:

• Loot disputes
• Accidentally lost/deleted items
• Chat moderation

I agree with this completely. Most of the time these 3 issues cover a lot of what a GM does. Unfortunately for us were literally hooped when we encounter issues like bugged loot or buying the wrong non refundable items etc and it sucks that there is no way to fix it. Submitting a report or posting on the forums yields 0 results. I enjoy interacting with a CSR / GM when these issues pop up. It sucks to be ignored now when these issues creep up. I don’t like the too bad so sad mentality

As the previous poster mentioned I would also assume its budgetary limitations that prevent and will prevent GM’s from ever being part of the game. I’m sure games like WoW have entire call centers dedicated to customer support. This game has nothing at all to mimic that level of support

Xriah.5743:

For bare-minimun, unrealistic 24 hour coverage you need 3 people minimum. Let’s be stingy and say 1 GM per server. There are 52 servers right now. 52 * 3 = 156

That’s 156 new employees for each GM on a server. Let’s be horrible greedy corporate types and say they all made $10 an hour. $80 a day. 156 * 80 =

$12,480 per day.

How about giving the GM free server transfers. 2 GMs during the busiest parts of the day will make a heck of a lot of difference. A wait for help is better than the current S.O.L. situation people are in now.

Why not it might be a good improvement.
GW2 does the same as every other MMO and needs to be better or it will shutter so money shouldnt matter.

To Take down WoW money cant be an object and I mean look at TOR for where we are going.

GMs against bots – count me in. I think it is not so difficult to make some mechanism as evidence to give ground for Arena Net and ban those players for botting.

This is old video but still if happens gain in PvE or PvP it should be removed from the game. I personally don’t prefer WvW but some players do and can’t get in because of these.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD7V86Zik3E

YES! But not only for bots. Also to get help when a dungeon or something bugs. Got all the way to the end of CoE the other night, and it bugged. Then there was not GM available to help us. So no reward, waste of an hour