Guild Wars 2

So my question here is can Anet put a CAPTCHA ?

Well long story short version is that i was gathering ori ores today in Orr and suddenly walked by those “farm” event areas.

What i saw was 10 same geared characters with random letter names.This got my curiosity and i stood there and waited the event start and to over.

Those was definitely bots with bear pets (i find it very amusing since all of them create a bear army when they farm)

I know many other games that used this CAPTCHA method and it worked pretty fine.

You would say that there is anti-farm feature in GW2…okey but as far as i remember the bots from my last MMO had a way-point system and if the bots in GW2 have it as well it will totally ruin the Anti-farm feature of GW2 since bots will be rotating to disable it. (i saw some bots near Balthazar Temple on 1 server that was walking on a pre-defined path and botting for 3 days.(i was trying to make the Balthazar event there so i can get my shards T_T thats why i know they was there 3 days even tho i reported them on the 1st day.)

It would take far less time and effort for them to simply log into the game, see these folks acting suspicious, pull up their game logs and see them doing the same thing for 36 hours strait, non-stop.

Substance E.4852:

It would take far less time and effort for them to simply log into the game, see these folks acting suspicious, pull up their game logs and see them doing the same thing for 36 hours strait, non-stop.

Finding a botter and banning them doesn’t solve the problem.

Stopping the bots from working, either through security updates or via the suggested Captha system is the key.

Captcha wouldn’t necessarily fix it either, unless you had it on looting, DE reward collecting, gathering and anything else which could earn the botter items / gold.

And if it ever gets to affecting real players, then you gotta deal with normal players having to take time out of fighting to mash in the confirmation code.

training ‘cheap’ staff to recognize/identify botters (with the help of reports) would be easy and could be implemented right away without any changes to the game (assuming the gms can watch invisibly).
the other option would be paying the more expensive programmers to include a highly complex feature (recognizing a botter with 0 false-positives and still high enough sucess rate. also it has to be adaptable as the botters soon will learn about the triggers for the system) when they actually have quite a full plate with bugs and balancing..

In my book the latter option just doesn’t make sense. look at DE, it looks like a rush-job with all the regular players being affected and the botters don’t even care. once the game settles down, maybe such a thing would be good to decrease the amount of people necessary to monitor the players, but in the short term a few college students working for low wages to identify botters would work a lot better.

a captcha system would simply not work because the regular players would get annoyed if it was to pop up to often, whereas if you only show it once an hour the botters would pay a cheap laborer in some 3rd world country to read the captchas. as long as the botter doesn’t have to solve a captcha so often the cost of the translator would be higher than his gain, a captcha system is ineffective. captchas work great for stuff with only a minor possible gain.

Sigh… captcha… you underestimate the skill of the bot programmers. In the end only the real players will be bothered with Captcha. Captcha becomes unreadable many times and it takes effort and it is just annoying.

If Captcha would actually work, it would be implemented in all MMOs because it has been proposed over and over and over again in every MMO I played. Anet knows about Captcha and like any developer team they wisely skipped it.

Maybe if an account as been reported (for botting) X number of times, they could be prompted with a Captcha box.

To prevent this being used against people who aren’t botting, you could limit it to once an hour (or so), only allow the Captcha to come up when the account is outside of combat or an active event and maybe some other stuffs.

Sure it may not be the best system and something like this should not be permanent, but it’d be a hell of a lot better than nothing.

Clem.2963:

Maybe if an account as been reported (for botting) X number of times, they could be prompted with a Captcha box.

^ This.

So this way human players wont get affected or if they get affected from hater’s report the ratio we calculated is 1/1000 players to type 5 letters is nothing to die for or to whine for.

There already is a thread about botting, and what we do against it, please use it: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/On-Botting-and-What-We-re-Doing-About-It