Something which doesn’t get mentioned often enough.
Anet has done something which no other MMO appears to do properly: takes exploiters and botters seriously and ban them. The big trains are completely gone. This is a major achievement.
Even in WoW there are constantly bots in BGs making your team lose, bots farming gold, exploiters everywhere, even at the top of the arena ladders. Blizzard has failed to ban them and continues to allow bots to impact on other players.
So here’s from me:
A kudos to ArenaNet for doing something that is very important for legitimate players, thanks for banning all those bots that plague the MMO and general online gaming world.
i havent seen bot trains indeed…but i have seen something else
a player gathering a tree\node\herb then disappears, then appears near another to gather then disappears again and so on
I dunno if this is a bug, exploit, new hack or me becoming crazy…i’ve seen it more than once though.
Anet bans a metric butt-load of bots; the market begins to recover all is well. Then you start to see more and more of them re-appearing, the market starts to deflate again…
All the traders start getting nervous and groan at this…
…then suddenly BAM. All the bots spontaneously combust and we’re back to bot-free sweetness again, at least til they hack more accounts/level up new accounts
You will only be able to congratulate them on getting rid of bots when 3rd party sites no longer exist because they no longer have gold to sell. So, it’s a bit premature to congratulate them as the sites are still bustling and there will be no positive impact on the economy though anything they have done to date.
You will only be able to congratulate them on getting rid of bots when 3rd party sites no longer exist because they no longer have gold to sell. So, it’s a bit premature to congratulate them as the sites are still bustling and there will be no positive impact on the economy though anything they have done to date.
What the hell ? I hope you are’nt serious.Do you realize its not anets job to take down those sites,nor is it in their power ?.Those sites are legal to exist.Anet certainly deserves to be praised how they handled the bot situation,they sure are still here,but not in the massive amounts i used to see them and they were quick with handling it.
i havent seen bot trains indeed…but i have seen something else
a player gathering a tree\node\herb then disappears, then appears near another to gather then disappears again and so on
I dunno if this is a bug, exploit, new hack or me becoming crazy…i’ve seen it more than once though.
Yeah, I saw a train of generic rangers load into Wayfarer and disappear just after loading the other day (could be instantly waypointing, no idea where they went). Bots are still here, they’re just harder to see.
They zapped away so fast I couldn’t report them (yes, the only evidence I have that they’re bots is that they’re all human rangers with bears, there were lots of them, and their names were the usual bot names).
Every problem I have seen, from hacked accounts to Bots has been dealt with.
I have no doubt its going to be a constant war, but one which Anet is taking very seriously.
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+1 to anet. they are taking things seriously. most gamers are just too impatient and demand results NOW. things don’t work like that in real life…why should it happen in a game?
realize that even though it’s a game, people still have to run it and maintain it. you can’t separate fantasy from reality so easily. it’s not a perfect system, but it’s what we have and I think for the most part, anet is doing an admirable job.
You will only be able to congratulate them on getting rid of bots when 3rd party sites no longer exist because they no longer have gold to sell. So, it’s a bit premature to congratulate them as the sites are still bustling and there will be no positive impact on the economy though anything they have done to date.
1. Those sites service more than one game, and as such, no amount of cracking down will cause them to shut down.
2. If you actually looked at TP supply graphs, you’d notice the impact the ban has had on the economy. Whether the impact is positive is another question altogether, but most of the market supply vanished post-bans. Problem is, part of the player population wants cheaper materials to craft with (the bans caused prices to spike), and another part wants to be able to make gold easier (spiked prices = more profit, but with prices higher across the board, it’s a moot point). No amount of banning will ever generate the kind of “positive” impact that everyone will be happy with.
They don’t deserve to be praised when 1000 of accounts are being hacked while they can’t do anything about it.
Of course they can do something about it.
Just force players to change their passwords. Either weekly or monthly.
They already check your new password towards the known password lists these botters use for stealing accounts. So at least they are learning slowly.
No amount of reasonable password changing (changing passwords on a weekly basis is not reasonable, especially since ANet puts your old passwords on the ban list as well) will ever solve the issue when most people do not practice safe computer usage. I don’t know how many times I’ve had to explain to people who’ve repeatedly had fraudulent purchases made on their online accounts that cancelling their credit cards and changing their passwords do nothing when their computers are compromised to begin with.
Bots are still in game just moved to new areas out of plain sight into caves farming bats etc, I’ve reported 10 in the past week.
There will always be bots — the question is how many. If the situation is still as dire as you make it sound, then please explain what those “bots” do with their spoils? If they’re still pumping massive amounts into the TP, then we have to conclude that the real player base is either completely inactive or too incompetent to sell mats on the TP.
We really appreciate that you take the time to give us your feedback about this situation. However, I would just like to make some quick reminders here:
- Do not post any screenshots/videos/names of suspected botters
- Stay constructive and polite
As long as those simple rules are respected, we will let this thread open.
Bots are still in game just moved to new areas out of plain sight into caves farming bats etc, I’ve reported 10 in the past week.
There will always be bots — the question is how many. If the situation is still as dire as you make it sound, then please explain what those “bots” do with their spoils? If they’re still pumping massive amounts into the TP, then we have to conclude that the real player base is either completely inactive or too incompetent to sell mats on the TP.
Actually everything is dead outside of LA on my server and as i heard pretty much every server has the same issue except the highest populated full ones, so without people to farm and the increasing demand caused by new gears the prices will grow endlessly.
I’m on a middle-population server and the areas I’ve been in are still relatively populated.
There are lots of people doing fractals, but there are also lots of people doing other dungeons, and last night I saw one dungeon group form in about 20 minutes outside of LA. I’ve noticed that 90% of the server doesn’t care about WvW at all, so they stay in PvE and we get curbstomped in WvW every week. I guess all the competitive/gotta-get-the-best people got weeded out by the continued WvW ROFLstomping?
Before the ban system went live, I did see bots in several places and gold sellers in chat / mail. Since that time, I’ve only seen a few maybe-bots, and gold selling only a few times. The ban system obviously needs to be fixed to have fewer false positives, and the support system needs to be better managed to get people their accounts back quicker, but the bot system is obviously having an impact.
i havent seen bot trains indeed…but i have seen something else
a player gathering a tree\node\herb then disappears, then appears near another to gather then disappears again and so on
I dunno if this is a bug, exploit, new hack or me becoming crazy…i’ve seen it more than once though.
Bots are still in game just moved to new areas out of plain sight into caves farming bats etc, I’ve reported 10 in the past week.
There will always be bots — the question is how many. If the situation is still as dire as you make it sound, then please explain what those “bots” do with their spoils? If they’re still pumping massive amounts into the TP, then we have to conclude that the real player base is either completely inactive or too incompetent to sell mats on the TP.
10 bot reports in week isn’t dire, now if it was 30 or more than it would be dire situation. Now that is just what I’ve came across just myself on my server world, no telling how many I haven’t seen. From what I’ve seen so far the bot situatin isn’t as dire now as it was few weeks ago.
Game Security Lead “Closing this thread,
your account,and your 384 other accounts”
GG Anet
for some, farmer=botter when it is not necessarily so. this game require intensive farming for high end gears. i have heard case where legitimate players wrongly banned because they are mistakenly thought as botters by ANET.
i myself sometimes farm in certain area in a particular moving pattern because it is the most convenient way, usually i move in circle. this may pose a bot-like behaviour, but does that necessarily make me bot ? no.
this makes me worry that i would get banned one day for playing the game the way ANET want us to play it, i.e. farming items for high end gear.
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Yes, thank you Anet for taking care of bots and gold sellers.
I really hate to see them in all MMOs, so I appreciate your anti-bot mission is being successful.
Yes removing most of the bots is definitely a very good thing. I never noticed all the bot trains were actually gone until I saw these topics in this forum. Hopefully prices on everything will go back to normal now that the bots are gone.
I do wish though guild wars 2 had the henchman from guild wars 1 to make getting a group easier because a lot of zones are empty since I am not 80 yet so the events are hard to do or find.
It’s an improvement on the situation from a few weeks ago but I think that has more to do with general game populations crashing than anything else. It isn’t worth it to bot 10+ accounts now because the game’s population is only about 10% of what it used to be.
I am sure ANet is working hard and does ban a lot of bots but I think the drop you’re seeing is just a general drop in population more than anything else. I see at least a bot or two every time I go into a higher level world zone for any length of time. The difference is that I and everyone else do that much less often because people simply play the game a lot less than they used to if they still play at all.
OK, can we remove or adjust DR now? Some of us with level 80s have only a few places to farm (sarcasm mode) and would prefer to be able to collect mats for crafting without being forced to change zones every hour – its not like we have much choice of level 80 zones.
GW2 mods can fuck it up their cock sucking asses – Sieg heil you nazi fuckers
OK, can we remove or adjust DR now? Some of us with level 80s have only a few places to farm (sarcasm mode) and would prefer to be able to collect mats for crafting without being forced to change zones every hour – its not like we have much choice of level 80 zones.
Change zones? Try just a different spot in the same zone. Some of those places are pretty big.
I don’t believe I’ve ever seen the DR system kick in, but maybe I’m just too ADD for that. I start in one area, get caught up in an event, and end up on the other side of the zone. Then I somehow get turned in another direction because I like the scenery, and pretty soon, I’m about as far from where I started as I could go without leaving the zone. It’s fun, but I’m not intentionally farming materials, so maybe I’m missing out on that. Personally, I’d rather have the fun than the “everything but the precursor” action, but to each his own, and it takes all kinds…
And for my part, I’ve only seen a couple of gold-sellers in overflow servers, though I did see quite a few more during the invite-a-new-goldselling-accountfriend weekend thing. And I personally haven’t seen any of the ranger (+ nameless pet) trains that were so ubiquitous a few weeks ago.
“It is the stupidest children who are the most childish
and the stupidest grown-ups who are the most grown-up.”
- C. S. Lewis
i havent seen bot trains indeed…but i have seen something else
a player gathering a tree\node\herb then disappears, then appears near another to gather then disappears again and so on
I dunno if this is a bug, exploit, new hack or me becoming crazy…i’ve seen it more than once though.
There’s a popular cheat tool players are using that allows them to teleport to nodes, jump puzzle chests, and just about anything else you can imagine. I hope these little kitten are next on the hit list.
The root cause (for bots, hacked accounts, gold seller spam, …) are players who are buying gold from those sites.
ANet has become quite good at detecting and eliminating bots, but this is actually fighting the symptoms and not the cause.
The player base can and should do more by simply talking to friends who bought gold or are thinking about buying and convince them that this is not the way to go.
Also using exploits (e. g. tools that can teleport you) should not be considered “clever” but “cheating” and players who are known cheaters should be treated as such, i. e.
report them (even when it’s a friend), kick them out of guilds, etc.
OK, can we remove or adjust DR now? Some of us with level 80s have only a few places to farm (sarcasm mode) and would prefer to be able to collect mats for crafting without being forced to change zones every hour – its not like we have much choice of level 80 zones.
Change zones? Try just a different spot in the same zone. Some of those places are pretty big.
You don’t even need to do that. Just find a nice cosy place to sit out for 15mins until DR is gone. Think of it as ANet’s new “You have been playing this game for 15 hours. Please get a li… err.. take a break”* message found in the old GW.
*May or may not be entirely correct.
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Not luck and credit cards.”
And I saw a bulk of 20 bots today, so I guess they are coming back in swarms. Did not see any for some time after the banning though.
You cannot completely ban out the bots. As long as money can be made by it, people will try to circumvent any rules in place to stop them.
The problem I had with the bots before was that I reported them and a week later, they were still busy at botting. It made you feel like reporting was futile.
But now, if I see a bot, and I report it, I noticed it will be gone very quickly. And that is good enough for me, because this is a sign that they do take the problem seriously. A visible sign, and not just a post on a forum that they are working on it.
So, you should keep reporting those bots, and help keep the world clean!
You will only be able to congratulate them on getting rid of bots when 3rd party sites no longer exist because they no longer have gold to sell. So, it’s a bit premature to congratulate them as the sites are still bustling and there will be no positive impact on the economy though anything they have done to date.
What the hell ? I hope you are’nt serious.Do you realize its not anets job to take down those sites,nor is it in their power ?.Those sites are legal to exist.Anet certainly deserves to be praised how they handled the bot situation,they sure are still here,but not in the massive amounts i used to see them and they were quick with handling it.
He actually has a point there, if those sites still offer gold at almost the same prices, that gold must have been farmed somehow, so the bots cannot be gone. It probably just takes them more effort than just the usual bot trains.
The botters have just moved to another method using hacks to transport where they are going instead of running in trains, nothing has changed other than the long line of botters, this wasn’t done by anet it was done by the botting company to lower bans of their users. Just because you can no longer see the problem doesn’t mean its not there.
Love how you bash other games, but the real truth of the matter is that botter/exploiting here is far worse than in wow or most other MMO’s, on anets server there are people using real hacks, not just bots, people no cliping etc it’s a very sad thing to see that anet cannot stop live hacks from working on their server.
i havent seen bot trains indeed…but i have seen something else
a player gathering a tree\node\herb then disappears, then appears near another to gather then disappears again and so on
I dunno if this is a bug, exploit, new hack or me becoming crazy…i’ve seen it more than once though.
I would do what you can to report these users.
I’m trying, but it’s really hard, they’re only visible long enough to do the gather animation and the times i saw i was only “wtf just happened here”, only able to identify a thief and a warrior doing this and in diferent areas.
i hope anet takes a look into this quick, or the economy will be affected again
Something which doesn’t get mentioned often enough.
Anet has done something which no other MMO appears to do properly: takes exploiters and botters seriously and ban them. The big trains are completely gone. This is a major achievement.
Even in WoW there are constantly bots in BGs making your team lose, bots farming gold, exploiters everywhere, even at the top of the arena ladders. Blizzard has failed to ban them and continues to allow bots to impact on other players.
So here’s from me:
A kudos to ArenaNet for doing something that is very important for legitimate players, thanks for banning all those bots that plague the MMO and general online gaming world.
Wow has banned more botters/exploiters than there are GW2 players your comparison is invalid. You’re naive to think they are completely gone just because theyaren’t in Orr doesn’t mean they’re gone.
i havent seen bot trains indeed…but i have seen something else
a player gathering a tree\node\herb then disappears, then appears near another to gather then disappears again and so on
I dunno if this is a bug, exploit, new hack or me becoming crazy…i’ve seen it more than once though.
This is indeed a serious problem and I’ve seen exactly this several times now. They are hard to spot, so they are hard to report. I hope they are investigating this issue.
i havent seen bot trains indeed…but i have seen something else
a player gathering a tree\node\herb then disappears, then appears near another to gather then disappears again and so on
I dunno if this is a bug, exploit, new hack or me becoming crazy…i’ve seen it more than once though.
Oh thank god, I thought I was going crazy… Saw this happening too, and the guy appeared / disappeared so fast that I couldn’t even report him. Some sort of Teleport hack or something. Going node to node….
The bots are still around. I saw a train in Gendarran Fields just circling and hitting the skelks just outside the big camp that the centaur attack. Admittedly there aren’t as many as there were. Just keep on reporting, that’s all we can do.
About 1 month ago I was seeing bots in almost every map in the world, as well as in WvW, now it’s been a while since last time I saw one, so ANET did a really good job!
Stemare ~ Guardian ~ lv80 ~ Far Shiverpeaks
Ci Assediamo Da Soli [SIGH] ~ Officier
