Guild Wars 2

Bots Overrun Guild Wars 2

This article is due for release September 26th. To be fair, I felt I’d like to post it here first just to see what everyone thinks. Before it is released to several gaming websites and reddit.

Now officially a month old, ArenaNet’s Guild Wars 2 has made positive impressions on the MMO market. Good reviews and a healthy player base suggests that Guild Wars 2 may have a good future to look forward to, but just as rapid as its success — Guild Wars 2 now faces a serious threat to that future. Many players who have been a part of the game may be able to tell you about the Black Lion Trading Post, which is the massive and complex auction house and trading system which allows players to drive the economy.

Not even 24 hours after launch the Black Lion Trading Post encountered massive problems and was forced to be shut down for nearly two whole weeks. Players were unable to generate solid forms of income and were forced to utilize other means of money making, which also led to abusive behavior because people had no other way to make money at the time. But once the Trading Post returned, people began to inject items onto the market steadily for about a whole week in hopes to find equilibrium. But even though it was up and running, the Black Lion Trading Post was still unstable and occasionally crashed with violent results to several users of the interface.

Far more sinister things linger now in the game and it’s all because of the Black Lion Trading Post and ArenaNet’s lack of acknowledgement or inability to do anything to stop what is quickly taking Guild Wars 2 down a very dark and very unhealthy road. Far more than just terms of ‘Pay to Win’, players of Guild Wars 2 now have to deal with a sudden spike of hundreds of bots taking over every event in the game one zone at a time. Coming in behind the wave of players who are now progressing to other zones in the game, they may not notice the horde of automated, teleporting, mindless players in their wake who never tire of endless farming.

We look now at the Black Lion Trading Post, which hasn’t even been in full use for three weeks, now drives the game towards a rapidly approaching economic crash. The trends of the game’s current economy follows in the footsteps of Final Fantasy XI, which ignored botters and gold farmers running its economy for nearly three years until SquareEnix finally decided it was time to clean up the system. The biggest concern with Guild Wars 2 players is the lack of official acknowledgement from ArenaNet that the Black Lion Trading Post is not only broken by inexplicably consuming player’s hard earned currency and items without reason or compensation, but that their game is overrun by botters who are quickly gaining full control over the economy.

And it’s GONE! Items and Currency Vanish, Please Step Aside!

Not familiar with South Park’s spoof of the failing economy? Here is a clip from Margaritaville aired during Season 13, which can properly illustrate some the feelings that many players are experiencing when dealing with the Black Lion Trading Post. The official response from ArenaNet has been next to nothing about this current problem and commonly the only responses most people get in return are “We do not have the tools to compensate you for any items or currency lost due a bug”. While a bulk of the population may not encounter problems, those who are unfortunate enough to use the Black Lion Trading Post when it occasionally becomes slow and unstable are forced to face the harsh reality of their items and currency just vanishing. Despite the game showing records of transactions being made on the system, players often never receive either the currency or the items from those transactions.

For many players, this has led to a fear of the Black Lion Trading Post. Some players now insist to trade manually or just independently farm all of their materials and ignore the market entirely. At this point it doesn’t matter as the vast majority of items available on the Black Lion Trading Post lack value. As a matter of fact, most items available on the market are worth below the vendor price. Which ArenaNet consistently insists is just a bug, but they fail to address that many players are putting items onto the market for 1 copper above the stock vendor price. Yet the cost to list the item is often far more than 1 copper not to mention a 5% tax deduction once the sale has finished. Players will find selling to vendors to be a much more profitable enterprise, if not safer because there is no risk in losing money from an NPC transaction.

A Farmer’s Market

Throughout the past week the Black Ligon Trading Post has begun to show signs of a Gold Farmer’s Market. What is a Gold Farmer’s Market? It is a market that subtly drives players to value gold and at the same time find it impossible to acquire or extremely difficult to acquire by their own means and at the same time find that the Gold Seller’s prices to be reasonable. The key is to make the player feel that the idea of buying gold from an outside source is reasonable in the first place, and the first step to do this is to over-inflate the prices of highly desirable items to insane degrees. The second step is to make whatever the player may commonly have on them to be utterly worthless, ensuring that the only way a player can even get enough money to afford the rare items is to purchase from the Gold Seller in the first place.

It’s a system that has proven effective in every game Gold Sellers have been a part of. It’s a predictable system and has reared its head many, many times in several MMORPGs. While many players will tell you that it’s inevitable, normal, and just part of MMORPGs — the reality is that it’s not. While SquareEnix was lazy and ignored the problem for three years, they managed to spend a year harshly cracking down on botters and gold farmers by erecting a brand new in-game police division with the sole purpose of quickly and effectively crushing bots. Furthermore, SquareEnix stepped in and purposely bought and sold items in the economy for several months to normalize prices to a place they felt was more manageable for players. Since NPC venders in the game never offered anything of value to players for trading, the Auction House was the only way to run the economy.

After about two years botters and gold farmers abandoned Final Fantasy XI and sought other games for their riches. But even to this day Final Fantasy XI still openly advertises and displays to all players the number of botters and gold farmers they have successfully removed from the game every single week. That sort of public assurance helps to make a happy and healthy player base and an economy. ArenaNet seriously needs to consider adopting a system like this and quickly, as botting and gold farming has become a very advanced business these days and is much more aggressive than ever before. This really needs to become priority one for ArenaNet and quickly as it’s causing a lot of players to become upset.

The evidence that Guild Wars 2 is suffering from a Farmer’s Market is clear on the Black Lion Trading Post’s very own listing history. Countless items that began to find reasonable value for players and were effective enough to farm and sell on a casual basis, have all now bottomed out in price to become next to worthless in value. A clear pattern emerged in all of these items, no matter what the previous value of the item was, someone injected upwards of 2000+ items at the low, low, low price of 1 silver. This created a barrier which drove the rest of the market in an unstoppable direction.

Price Spikes

The Black Lion Trading Post is a world-wide economy. Not a single-server auction house. The system takes into account all servers. So if a choice handful of Gold Farms create a barrier by placing several thousand items at exactly 1 silver, the rest of the world-wide economy will have little choice but to follow suit and place items at that price. Most people sell rather blindly without searching, so once a sizable enough barrier has been put in place the item will often remain low in price as long as the barrier remains firm enough to overrun the demand of the item. With botters constantly farming and injecting items into the market at 1 silver, the barrier will likely outmatch the demand of any item at any time because bots can farm non-stop while a market can only consume so much at a time.

Meanwhile, rare items are seeing outrageous hikes in price towards 100+ gold, which for many players is not exactly reasonable in price at all. Quickly the economy is starting to become controlled by a small minority of gamers who are exploiting ArenaNet’s lack of ability to stop them from overrunning the system. The engines driving this economic machine are the bots and the countless accounts at the disposal of these Gold Farmers. For many Gold Farmers this is a real life business which is often their one and only income, so they take is business very seriously. They take it far more seriously than most gamers do Guild Wars 2, to the point that if a player stumbles upon a horde of bots in an event — this will likely just encourage the player to stop playing the game because they cannot enjoy the game they’ve purchased the way they intended to.

An Army of Robotic Players

One of the biggest problems right now within Guild Wars 2 is that new players will now find just about every 15 minute event camped by a small army of bots. These bots will quickly smash the event to pieces in a flurry of attacks so fast the players barely have any time to register the event or even have a chance to enjoy it. They’ve become just an endless cycle of NPCs come and to feed other NPCs loot which feeds the economy more and more and more items to devalue them even further as the supply keeps growing and growing.

To a Gold Farmer lack of value means nothing, for they will always have the surplus and be able to profit regardless. They often are in command of five bots or more, multiplying their income rates beyond the margin of profit and loss. Most game economies are based on the idea of one person getting a certain average ratio of loot and that average ratio of loot will equal an average amount of money. But by giving one player 5+ accounts doing the exact same thing, then the average ratio of money they have at once time also increases as well. Simple math suggests that gold is extremely easy to acquire if you have 5 or more accounts. Why? Well most items on the Black Lion Trading Post are 20 copper.

For one player that’s 20 copper, but for a farmer that’s at least 1 silver as they have 5 times the loot of the average player. Let’s also not forget that bots never tire of an event and can go on robotically for hours and hours and hours. While people have to sleep, eat, and get bored of repeating a task… Robots do not. Furthermore, it has been clearly seen that these bots know how to write and send mail. They’ve been sending in-game ads for gold constantly for weeks now. So likely they also know how to manage loot, pack it, and mail it off to a safety account in case the botting accounts are banned. Sort of like sending money to Switzerland, its neutral territory and ArenaNet can’t really do anything about it.

Players have been constantly reporting bots non-stop for weeks, but regardless the same bots are still farming the exact same events day in and day out for weeks now without any action from ArenaNet. Already these bots have had a profound impact on the economy no matter how you look at it. To help counter these bots, many players have even taken to posting these bots on YouTube in hopes to show ArenaNet just how bad this problem is getting. For many believe that ArenaNet doesn’t quite “get it” that these aren’t just a handful of people doing a repetitive task, but a horde of them taking control over entire portions of the game — even World vs World!

Videos of Botters Reported this Weekend Alone!

1. Several Bots Farming Sons of Svanir
2. Several Bots Farming more Sons of Svanir
3. Several Bots Farming Elementals
4. Several Bots Farming Centaur
5. Several Bots Farming Events
6. Teleport Hack Bots Farming
7. Teleport Hack Bots Farming
8. Teleport Hack Bots Farming
9. Teleport Hack Bots Farming
10. Teleport Hack Bots Farming
11. World vs World Borderland Bot Army

Conclusion

Clearly botting is just too easy in Guild Wars 2 and the only people it is hurting are the legit players who will quickly begin to lose interest in the game if ArenaNet does nothing to acknowledge this problem in a bigger, more aggressive way. What is even more discouraging is that any thread posts made on the official forum are locked and deleted when any videos and bots have been mentioned. They simply say, “We proceed to close the thread since the forums are not the best place for this kind of reports. However, we would like to thank the OP for the efforts put into the issue; I will forward this to the team.”

The problem of course is that there is no “best place” to report bots and provide videos of them either. ArenaNet has not made any action towards current bots in the system and doesn’t provide any details on whether or not we will see any action done soon.

They simply have stated they are “Aware of the problem” but that is all they’ve said at the time being. With the growing amount of bots increasing each day since this past weekend, by the end of late September just about every event in the game should be under control by some form of bot. Guild Wars 2 fans and players can only endure so much without word from ArenaNet, and as the economy begins to tank as a result of this influx of over-farmed items players start to wonder if there are any better games to play until ArenaNet gets its act together.

Read it all. Very good read. Sadly, Anet will just lock this thread, which just further discourages people from playing this game. Locking threads like this sends a clear message that Anet doesn’t care.

The audacity of them farming right outside Divinitys Reach confounds me. 3 of them farming weak bloods off the skales there.

I reported them 3 hours ago and they are still going strong.

Blatantly bots. They keep disappearing and appearing at their next waypoint and have been going round in the same circle for hours. I have whispered them and no response whatsoever.

I need those bloods. i went further downstream and theres another one there doing the exact same thing.

Bloods are pretty cheap on the TP but they are mostly being sold by these goldfarmers so I am just funding the cause if I buy them.

Nice article – it’s interesting to read just how the economy is harmed.

And hopefully this article will serve as a shot across the bow. My experience of reading game journalism is when one writer brings up an interesting angle, or uncovers something, it catches fire. Most other sites will be happy to have something to write about that transcends the usual regurgitating press releases, or pouring over release trailers.

With a game this size, and with the complexities of bug squashing and keeping it running, it may just be that bots aren’t prioritized at this point.

I hope articles like this (well written, researched, clearly not a rant) will move this issue up the “fix” list.

Thank you for the article.

We can only hope it catches flame. Right now it is a big problem, and this weekend alone Youtube saw a massive influx of Guild Wars 2 players putting up videos of botters in action. The material is there for anyone to watch and there is a bountiful amount of it too. Watching it does make you feel discouraged of course, but what’s even more discouraging is going back to low level zones in the game to see most of the events camped by these army of bots.

It saddens me, not even Final Fantasy XI was this bad.

Arena Net promised to take a harsh stance on cheating in this game. I’m hoping they’ll live up to their words, though I’ll admit it’s getting frustrating to see the problem so swiftly getting out of hand.

Remeber how serious they were when they banned people for that karma bug, and the food vendor exploit? But completely ignore bots, really now?

There’s one good thing though, the fine crafting mats like claws, totems, vials have taken a nose dive due to the bots getting so many from bags/pouches :S. Small Claw was at 1s a week ago, now is like 20coppers lol

I get infractions for even mentions bots here on this forum. Wish they would spend that energy actually policing the game.

You can buy gems and/or gold. There zero need to buy gold from farmers..

They just need to nail the few idiots that actually buy gold.

Go after the johns not the prostitutes so to speak and you will do better…

The whole post … Waste..

Wow, there are folks that bot or farm gold in MMO?! Amazing. Thanks for 500 pages to tell us what everyone knows and offer ZERO new ideas how to fit it.

Lysico.4906:

You can buy gems and/or gold. There zero need to buy gold from farmers..

They just need to nail the few idiots that actually buy gold. And I suggested taking on the SquareEnix route of fixing the problem.

Go after the johns not the prostitutes so to speak and you will do better…

The whole post … Waste..

Wow, there are folks that bot or farm gold in MMO?! Amazing. Thanks for 500 pages to tell us what everyone knows and offer ZERO new ideas how to fit it.

Did I mention that Gold Sellers are selling gold WELL below ArenaNet’s asking price for Gems?

Oh and I recommended using the approach SquareEnix did.

Can anyone tell me where we left the coffin? This last nail needs to be put in the lid.

I reported a 5 man team of bots in fire heart last night. Still there tonight. posted about lots of client side hacking in WvW as well. Not trying to bring this game down, I’m trying to get them to clean it up before it’s too late. They just delete threads regarding known hacks.

Nice article and spot on…just a note on the TP tax…it’s 5% to list and an additional 10% on the sale for a total of 15% http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Trading_Post#Fees

And yes…I have seen the adverts saying “10G for 11.6 USD” which is more than you can get with gems.

Cheers

Yes they do and what’s funny is, you report the bots day after day and nothing happens. go to meddlers wp on darkhaven in cursed and you will see worric tp botting and some other naked botter. theyll fix stuff that makes them money but wont fix what makes you money. Find an interesting way to make money and others find it also? (refer to grub farming from giant’s) they will disable grubs from dropping because that means you can actually make money. now im not saying it is impossible its just not easy to begin with and then everything getting nerfed. Its not hard to qwell farmers its 60 bucks for a game ban all the bots and any account they send large chunks of gold to. i mean really if someone gets 100g in the mail at this stage in the game theyre buying gold. just trace where the gold came from and ban all the accounts (not by tp selling but the holder accounts and such).

Vicidious.8210:

Nice article and spot on…just a note on the TP tax…it’s 5% to list and an additional 10% on the sale for a total of 15% http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Trading_Post#Fees

And yes…I have seen the adverts saying “10G for 11.6 USD” which is more than you can get with gems.

Cheers

Thanks I’ll make that adjustment.

I didn’t read the article, however i do really think that Anet are just preparing to destroy a large amount of them all at the same time to just completely cripple the companies, to me that’d be better then just throwing a handful of them at a time, not to mention it’d get the point across really really well…

Also…it’s rather easy to make a bot if you have a Razer Naga or any MMO gaming device that allows you to make macros. It’s not as sophisticated as the ones that run around and such, but it can be programmed to spam 1, and loot very easily.

Cheers

Durzlla.6295:

I didn’t read the article, however i do really think that Anet are just preparing to destroy a large amount of them all at the same time to just completely cripple the companies, to me that’d be better then just throwing a handful of them at a time, not to mention it’d get the point across really really well…

I strongly recommend not assuming ArenaNet will do something about it until they say something.

A well presented article, giving voice to the frustrations of many players. Where are the in-game moderators? Where is the bot detection? Where is a single Anet employee saying ‘Yes, we hear you’?

Outrageous all around.

Zantesuken.5318:

Where is a single Anet employee saying ‘Yes, we hear you’?

Outrageous all around.

If you look, there’s plenty of threads in the forums where they have stated that they “know of the issue” and tell the players to have patience. =)

Now whether they actually do anything or not is a different matter…

I haven’t met that many problems with using the TP besides when it’s purposely down.

TemperHoof, you’re indicating that GW2 issues with botting and gold selling (which is chronic to MMOs ) is much more serious than usual? Would that be a fair assessment for you to make?

I can’t say I have payed that much attention to bots when I’m playing, but I haven’t seen more than in other games I played. I have been reporting every single gold selling attempt that I see, but that has been no more unusual than in other games.

People botting clearly take advantage of MMOs when they come out since it’s the easiest time to exploit at its most vulnerable state. But again, I don’t see that as an abnormal exception to the rule. I also don’t see Anet keeping a blind eye about this. It’s just a matter of time for widespread action to be taken.

Did I mention that Gold Sellers are selling gold WELL below ArenaNet’s asking price for Gems?

Well, of course they are. How else could they compete? I hope that’s ruining their profit margin considerably.

Ursan.7846:

Zantesuken.5318:

Where is a single Anet employee saying ‘Yes, we hear you’?

Outrageous all around.

If you look, there’s plenty of threads in the forums where they have stated that they “know of the issue” and tell the players to have patience. =)

Now whether they actually do anything or not is a different matter…

Same song, same dance. For example Gamers First is still playing this same song and dance in All Points Bulletin after 2 years.

Actions speak louder than words.

Lysidian.4653:

Ursan.7846:

Zantesuken.5318:

Where is a single Anet employee saying ‘Yes, we hear you’?

Outrageous all around.

If you look, there’s plenty of threads in the forums where they have stated that they “know of the issue” and tell the players to have patience. =)

Now whether they actually do anything or not is a different matter…

Same song, same dance. For example Gamers First is still playing this same song and dance in All Points Bulletin after 2 years.

Actions speak louder than words.

Oh I’m not disagreeing with you. I think you must’ve misread my post. I’m just pointing out to the previous poster that his assertion that they haven’t acknowledged the problem as being completely wrong. They do acknowledge it. They just haven’t done anything about it.

Ursan.7846:

Lysidian.4653:

Ursan.7846:

Zantesuken.5318:

Where is a single Anet employee saying ‘Yes, we hear you’?

Outrageous all around.

If you look, there’s plenty of threads in the forums where they have stated that they “know of the issue” and tell the players to have patience. =)

Now whether they actually do anything or not is a different matter…

Same song, same dance. For example Gamers First is still playing this same song and dance in All Points Bulletin after 2 years.

Actions speak louder than words.

Oh I’m not disagreeing with you. I think you must’ve misread my post. I’m just pointing out to the previous poster that his assertion that they haven’t acknowledged the problem as being completely wrong. They do acknowledge it. They just haven’t done anything about it.

I can agree with that. Wasnt knocking you, just making it clear ANET needs to get busy with that hammer.

Thank you all for the feedback so far. While you may not see any adjustments done to this article posted here, understand I cannot edit it anymore on this forum. The final product due for release soon will have those adjustments added.

Once it is released, I really hope you all direct people’s attention to those articles and get the mill churning. While some may not notice the problem, understand that there are many servers and perhaps botters may be more active on certain servers rather than others. While zones in your server may not be totaly overrun, at this rate it is only a matter of time before the problem spreads and expands.

It’s pretty naive to assume the plague of bots we’re seeing, is as a result of the instability of the BLTP. You only need half a clue to realize that we have bots because botters are able to get away with it. There is no other reason because no other reason is necessary. We’d be seeing exactly the same problems now, had the Trading Post been running smooth as silk since head start.

All of which doesn’t absolve ANet of it’s frustrating lack of response.

Good work TemperHoof btw.

Blacklight.2871:

It’s pretty naive to assume the plague of bots we’re seeing, is as a result of the instability of the BLTP. You only need half a clue to realize that we have bots because botters are able to get away with it. There is no other reason because no other reason is necessary. We’d be seeing exactly the same problems now, had the Trading Post been running smooth as silk since head start.

All of which doesn’t absolve ANet of it’s frustrating lack of response.

I never suggested that the bots are a result of the instability. Because there is no way to prove it, I’m actually subtly suggested the opposite —- the botters may be the ones causing the instability. They certainly are mucking up the prices of items for starters, and during times of instability may be inadvertently be responsible for people wanting to buy during those periods of time. Notice, I myself tried to buy 264 Large Claws for 1 silver — even though I lost all my money in the attempt, I never saw those Large Claws delivered.

I disagree with the following sections:

The evidence that Guild Wars 2 is suffering from a Farmer’s Market is clear on the Black Lion Trading Post’s very own listing history. Countless items that began to find reasonable value for players and were effective enough to farm and sell on a casual basis, have all now bottomed out in price to become next to worthless in value. A clear pattern emerged in all of these items, no matter what the previous value of the item was, someone injected upwards of 2000+ items at the low, low, low price of 1 silver. This created a barrier which drove the rest of the market in an unstoppable direction.

Can you name some of these items? Without specifics this sort of claim is very difficult to validate. First, as more people on servers reach level 80, naturally, most low-mid tier items and materials used to craft said items will depreciate in value. Second, if you are talking about T6 Fine Crafting materials, most are worth very little because they are not used in creating items that are part of the current metagame. Powerful Bloods, used to create Power/Precision/Crit damage exotics, are worth 10-15x as much as most of the other T6 fine materials, such as Ancient Bones or Vicious Claws/Fangs.

Price Spikes

The Black Lion Trading Post is a world-wide economy. Not a single-server auction house. The system takes into account all servers. So if a choice handful of Gold Farms create a barrier by placing several thousand items at exactly 1 silver, the rest of the world-wide economy will have little choice but to follow suit and place items at that price. Most people sell rather blindly without searching, so once a sizable enough barrier has been put in place the item will often remain low in price as long as the barrier remains firm enough to overrun the demand of the item. With botters constantly farming and injecting items into the market at 1 silver, the barrier will likely outmatch the demand of any item at any time because bots can farm non-stop while a market can only consume so much at a time.

Meanwhile, rare items are seeing outrageous hikes in price towards 100+ gold, which for many players is not exactly reasonable in price at all. Quickly the economy is starting to become controlled by a small minority of gamers who are exploiting ArenaNet’s lack of ability to stop them from overrunning the system. The engines driving this economic machine are the bots and the countless accounts at the disposal of these Gold Farmers. For many Gold Farmers this is a real life business which is often their one and only income, so they take is business very seriously. They take it far more seriously than most gamers do Guild Wars 2, to the point that if a player stumbles upon a horde of bots in an event — this will likely just encourage the player to stop playing the game because they cannot enjoy the game they’ve purchased the way they intended to.

Most of this is patently untrue. Most “rare” items (in the proper usage of the word) sell for below 1g, average 20-30s. The exotic items you speak of that cost nearly 100g are precursors to legendary weapons, and as such, are very hard to get. Most exotic items cost 2-5g, with unique ones costing 7-26g (named armors, destroyer weapons etc.). Extremely expensive exotic items represent a minuscule fraction of the active market – in spite of their price.

There is really only one true way to send a message to a company. Cost them money. Even though this isn’t a pay to play game if large enough player base just striked even for one day on the same day it would send a message that this is not acceptable. One guy could resolve this. Just add another button on the report screen for botting and have one guy investigate and ban. Just that would significantly impact botters. But a company won’t do that unless it cost them more money to not hire that guy. So make it cost them more.

100% agree

i submitted like 20 reports both in game and through the support system.

STILL BOTS

BOTS with teleport hack

group of bots teleport and kill together

And a wonderful picture to go with those botting claims. People don’t think its an issue? Laughable.

Ya know, I find it amazing that when the Karma exploit happened ANet was quick to move in and stop it from happening. Some ppl even got a ban I believe. I’m truly surprised at ANet’s lack of action in this regard. In today’s gaming world you would think that any MMO Dev would have some kind of plan on how to deal with Bots. It’s not like they’re new to the MMO scene. It makes ANet look very inept.

Punishing the player base with an anti-farming code was the wrong solution. A GM police force would be a great solution.

Arenanet has said quite a few times know they know of the issue and trying to come up with an effective fix. Since most bots are probably hacked accounts trying to investigate and shutdown bots on a case by case basis would be extremely resource intensive. They need a better solution to have a good lasting effect.

They cant just ban everyone reported otherwise they would risk banning innocent people getting randomly trolled.

Personally I suspect that Arenanet wrongly expected that the gem/gold market would make GW2 unattractive to gold sellers. This doesnt seem to be the case unfortunately and they have been struggling to deal with it since. They need to come up with an effective way of either undermining botting programs or detecting the use of such programs. Either way its going to take them time to develop.

Another pic. Keep in mind this was in the highlands, right after i just saw roughly 5 groups of patrol botters in lornars pass. Its ruining the game fast for me.

Lutinz.6915:

Arenanet has said quite a few times know they know of the issue and trying to come up with an effective fix. Since most bots are probably hacked accounts trying to investigate and shutdown bots on a case by case basis would be extremely resource intensive. They need a better solution to have a good lasting effect.

They cant just ban everyone reported otherwise they would risk banning innocent people getting randomly trolled.

Personally I suspect that Arenanet wrongly expected that the gem/gold market would make GW2 unattractive to gold sellers. This doesnt seem to be the case unfortunately and they have been struggling to deal with it since. They need to come up with an effective way of either undermining botting programs or detecting the use of such programs. Either way its going to take them time to develop.

LOL…all anyone has to do is go to the areas where botting is prominent and see for themselves. This isn’t rocket science and is pretty apparent. Take a look at the number of videos already posted on these forums. HELLO!

I’ll agree that Diminishing Returns has done nothing to stop the botters and has only punished the regular players instead. I don’t think that’s what Anet intended. I’m guessing they are planning on banning them in one fell swoop. But as for when they will do so is anyone’s guess.

I don’t really know what can be done about all those 1c over vendor price items on the trading post. Perhaps you shouldn’t be allowed to post anything on the TP for less than vendor + 15%? Not like you are making a profit either way, but at least you wouldn’t take a loss. The other thing is there doesn’t seem to be any kind of time limit for how long items can sit on the trading post. Most games that I’ve played with a trading post allow you to post your items for a limited duration, and if not sold, you receive the item back while forfeiting your deposit. I wonder if Anet implements this to their own TP if that would help fix the 1c over vendor problems.

The bots have become sentient beings and are forming an alliance to take over GW2

Interesting article and intelligently accurate. ANet/NCSoft should know by now that the economy is the foundation of any MMO and if they don’t keep control over the economy the game will die.

I would love to see a documentary about the gold farming industry. We all hear stories about Chinese sweatshops with hundreds of people making a few dollars a week in wages to farm MMOs and I am surprised that no-one has infiltrated this world and made a documentary about it yet (we saw it with Walmart, Nike etc.)

The sad fact is that whilst ANet refuse to compete with Gold Sellers (Gems for Gold rate is very low compared to $ for Gold from third parties) the Bots will only increase and the economy will continue to tank.

What a lot of people fail to understand is that yes it cost 60 bucks for an account and if a gold seller is banned they lose 60 bucks but that doesn’t matter because even if they buy every account (and there is a lot of speculation that many of the accounts they use are hacked so not bought) it only takes a couple of sales of gold to make it worthwhile buying new accounts each time they get caught.

Also it is important to note that these companies are doing nothing illegal, which is why it is impossible to shut them down. There is no law which says they cannot sell virtual assets or currency for real world money – only the game company’s T&C which are not the basis of law, merely a contract for which the penalty for breaking is a ban.

All MMOs need to control the economy and if that means seeding it for expensive items to keep the price down or buying massive quantities of low priced items to bring the price back up, then that is what they need to do.

Eve Online have one of the best economies in the MMO world and that is because they take the economy very seriously, if I recall they even hired a professor of economics to manage the economy issues for them?

Bots are killing the GW2 experience and economy – ANet needs to fix the problem before it is too late.

I was there with ya MechanicalMind, watching that army of bots take 80% of the drops as the centaur waves charged in to the killing field. I’ve seen it several times before and since, especially in the Human zones, since they are the quickest run to each major farming zone it seems. I have seen virtually no swarms of bots in other races’ territory that are not humans come over to the starting areas to camp the most common events.

Unfortunately, I know that is is not a simple fix. It would be wonderful if it was, but its not. Squash one bot and another will just pop up. Start banning indiscriminately, you just hurt regular people inadvertently.

As for solutions, I think I have a couple, some simpler than others. The biggest and hardest thing is finding a way to get rid of the macros being used to control the bots. If ANet can do they, they will have essentially crippled almost every bot. For quicker and short-term solutions, a check to see how long a character has been in an area, how many of the same event they have completed per day, and what drops they have been farming are good ways to tell what bots have been going. Also, checking for long play sessions (I’m talking 12 or 24 hours and up here) would be good indicators of which players are human and which are not. Also, the names of players are really a dead giveaway. A check to see if several people in the same area have names identical except for, say, an “aaaaa”, “bbbbb”,etc on the end of their name are 100% guaranteed to be bots. Banning groups like this will result in maybe inadvertently banning one group of friends for every 10,000 bots you quash.

Also, go after those who buy gold (as stated above, mail with 100gp in it is a fairly obvious tell…) to get the “Johns”, those that receive large quantities of materials from multiple accounts to kill the “money launders”, and check those who post massive quantities of stuff on the TP to get the “dealers”

Please use these ideas Arena Net. I love this game, but the massive number of bots is killing my immersion.

Banning people who receive gold in mail is a really bad idea. I play with my fiancée and we frequently mail each other large quantities of gold or materials and we would be wrongly identified as gold buyers using your method even though we have spent over $150 on gems since the game launched and never purchased gold. (We used the gems to buy bank upgrades, inventory upgrades, black lion keys, primeval armor and minis, dyes & boosters).

Having staff dedicated to each server and receiving reports about bots then actually observing those bots is a far better solution. Banning without observing behaviour first hand is only going to get real people caught in the net.

My fiancée and I frequently head to our favourite events to farm when we are not in LA or Dungeons and might do so for several hours whilst we are waiting to get a party for CoF. Furthermore, you underestimate how long real people stay logged on. I work from home and my fiancée is in college (so currently on summer vacation) we are both logged in game from the time we wake up until the time we go to bed (waaay over 12 hours) – that doesn’t mean we are bots.

I’m wondering if there’s any way to translate “We are working on it” into a language that people will actually understand. We see dozens of threads a day on these issues. They acknowledge the issues multiple times a day and ask people to report them using the in-game tools. Do they need to explain using pictures or perhaps a celebrity spokesperson?

I’m sure ArenaNet will flip the “everything fixed” switch now that the official, definitive treatise on whining about bots and bugs has been written. Very kind of you to give ample warning before you post, with what you seem to assume will be devastating effect, on “several gaming websites and reddit”.

At the pace they seem to be going, by the time they are done working on it the economy will have been ruined and many players will have quit. And this was the game that would bring new life to the genre. A game where botters make tons of money, while legit players get punished by the scarce loot and the anti-farm code. Pathetic.

We (the players) are in a tough position at the moment. We can’t farm some of the items required due to bots taking over many areas, and if we buy them off the Trading Post, it’s likely the money is going straight to the botters.

The bots are definitely winning at the moment, I just hope Anet has a master plan up their sleeve on how they intend to sort the problem out, and that they implement that plan sooner rather than later.

I’m just crossing my fingers and hoping Anet will come with a decent reply. Not the “we are aware of the issue” crap, but a decent reply. I’m getting nervous.