Guild Wars 2

sadly its anet own fault to some degree that these guys gain might every day.

to many things are currently heavyly gold based. legendarys beeing one of the big examples. cultural armors another one.

get rid of this stupid gold dependant mechanics and it will remove the need to buy gold to ever get something like a legendary. there are definitly better way to make items gettable without them beeing a gold grind.

Relax. AN a doing what most MMO companies now do – collate data on where, when, how and who is botting and who is conducting RMT.

Once AN have all the data they need they’ll slam the door shut on thos botters and life will return to normal.

C.

I’m not discouraged at all by botters.
I just do my duty, report them and signal them in the /map chat.
Guilty and stolen accounts used for botting must be identyfied with the collaboration of the fair playerbase.

Cailais.5180:

Relax. AN a doing what most MMO companies now do – collate data on where, when, how and who is botting and who is conducting RMT.

Once AN have all the data they need they’ll slam the door shut on thos botters and life will return to normal.

C.

Could you provide a quote on that? Perhaps you have an internal source? As of right now, we have no idea what they are doing. Even if the do a massive ban, they’d still need to intervene directly to get the economy back on its feet.

There would be no botters if there was no market, Stop buying gold! ban the buyers and sellers. And every game I have ever played at launch has had this problem or even worse…In Rift everytime I opened my mailbox I would have at least 10 or more spam mails. Sorry, not too impressed with the article, more doom and gloom crap trying to russle up hits for your silly little web sites…no thanks

Gauradan.8361:

Cailais.5180:

Relax. AN a doing what most MMO companies now do – collate data on where, when, how and who is botting and who is conducting RMT.

Once AN have all the data they need they’ll slam the door shut on thos botters and life will return to normal.

C.

Could you provide a quote on that? Perhaps you have an internal source? As of right now, we have no idea what they are doing. Even if the do a massive ban, they’d still need to intervene directly to get the economy back on its feet.

No quote needed, its just standard practice now across most MMOs. If a dev bans at the point of offence the botter learns what caused the ban and modifies their botting programs accordingly. To counter devs now tend to implement wide scale bans weeks (or even months) later.

Its also great for promoting your game and getting cheers from the fan base as ’thousand’s’ get the ban hammer.

Its coming – just be patient.

C.

I don’t know if I should be amused or sad that a Google search for "guild wars 2 report botting" returns both threads like this and sites where bots are discussed and distributed. Hopefully that can be used to help block them, but for now I’ll content myself with reporting folks like the ranger bot teleporting/farming in the Shiverpeaks this morning.

The same thing happened 10 years ago in Asherons Call, the devs ignored bots for 4 years, an it killed the game. Same thing is gonna happen here sadly. We cant even kill the bots. Hell I spent days training on them an got an email one day telling me I was reported for “griefing” lol

Now, that doesn’t scare me in the slightest, but it shows just how unafraid they are of devs.

CCP could teach the GW2 devs a few things about bots. They crushed 10s of thousands of bots recently in EVE an blew away trillions an trillions of sik (gold) out of the economy. It has improved the game tremendously.

I have not played GW2 for a week now, an honestly, have little incentive to. The bots are swarming on Sea of Sorrows, an getting worse day by day.

Who, after reading this thread, does not understand that Anet hires these goldsellers? I can see no other reason for Anet to allow this.

Mastermind.3169:

Who, after reading this thread, does not understand that Anet hires these goldsellers? I can see no other reason for Anet to allow this.

Do you also believe farmaceutical companies promote cancer to be able to sell more medicines?

No, I do not believe Anet would hire goldsellers. Every developer with an IQ>80 knows it is one of the best ways to get a crappy economy and unhappy player base.

About the Diminishing Returns thing: by altering the game to make it more difficult and/or tedious for players to acquire the things they want has Anet created a situation in which players are more or less likely to seek alternative means of acquiring the things they want?

If indeed Anet is working diligently behind the scenes on some means of wiping out vast hordes of botters in one fell swoop, it seems to me that taking a more direct and visible hands on approach in the meantime might work wonders for player morale.

But I am just a player of games and know little of the ways of developers.

@ Mastermind….Really? Tin foil hat much, to what advantage would it be to Anet to hire them? they are undercutting Anets own gold selling

Just encountered 7 bots running the broken bridge event in Kessex Hills. Sad stuff.

Tosha Daydreamer.9251:

No, I do not believe Anet would hire goldsellers. Every developer with an IQ>80 knows it is one of the best ways to get a crappy economy and unhappy player base.

Yes, but Anet isn’t trying to get a happy playerbase. And a bad ingame economy where everything is too expensiove is good for converting people’s time into monetary gain through selling gold. Ofcourse they would never advertise that they openly sell pay2win.

And no, I do not think that Anet or anyone else for that matter causes cancer for monetary gain.

Mastermind.3169:

Tosha Daydreamer.9251:

No, I do not believe Anet would hire goldsellers. Every developer with an IQ>80 knows it is one of the best ways to get a crappy economy and unhappy player base.

Yes, but Anet isn’t trying to get a happy playerbase. And a bad ingame economy where everything is too expensiove is good for converting people’s time into monetary gain through selling gold. Ofcourse they would never advertise that they openly sell pay2win.

And no, I do not think that Anet or anyone else for that matter causes cancer for monetary gain.

Happy playerbase = loyal players = more players spending time ingame = more players willing to buy gold
Unhappy playerbase = losing players = bad reviews = say byebye to your company.

So why would Anet not want a happy playerbase?

Engage the playerbase to help. Just allowing players to report isn’t enough. There are many ways to do this. I would volunteer to do more if I knew ANet would actually listen.

Tosha Daydreamer.9251:

Happy playerbase = loyal players = more players spending time ingame = more players willing to buy gold
Unhappy playerbase = losing players = bad reviews = say byebye to your company.

So why would Anet not want a happy playerbase?

Say hi to Guild Wars 3..

sadly bots will be a problem in almost every video game released. But it is easily countered.

Blizzard added a code, when botting became a problem in WoW, that they could track what is running on your computer while you are playing WoW. If you are reported for botting they open it up and see Workspace macro running they could easily tell if your botting.
Or you get the MMO glider and it re wrote some of the code for WoW. They couldn’t trace it as easily but they still knew. To stop this they wrote a program to find the new or re written code and track the accounts.

Sadly Anet doesn;t have the funds blizzard or WoW has so its going to take them some time. But all they have to do is watch the people for a few min to see if their botting.

This will continue to be a problem for a long time my friends.

I would love to hear ANets plans to stop this nonsense. I remember back in the day while I was playing Tibia, that Gamemasters were actively hunting botters. A player could simply report the botter ingame and 5 minutes later a Gamemaster would show up, and quickly decide if the player was a botter. Also with every single update they implemented safety features that rendered all AI scirpts.

Tibia was run by a small company and had few Gamemasters at the time, yet they managed to keep the game clean for years and years. I’m sure that a company like ANet will be able to do atleast the same or even better.

Oooh and maybe we should just spam there facebook/twitter/whatever crap currently is “hot”, with the question what they will do about this situation.

Humposaurus.5764:

I would love to hear ANets plans to stop this nonsense. I remember back in the day while I was playing Tibia, that Gamemasters were actively hunting botters. A player could simply report the botter ingame and 5 minutes later a Gamemaster would show up, and quickly decide if the player was a botter. Also with every single update they implemented safety features that rendered all AI scirpts.

Tibia was run by a small company and had few Gamemasters at the time, yet they managed to keep the game clean for years and years. I’m sure that a company like ANet will be able to do atleast the same or even better.

Oooh and maybe we should just spam there facebook/twitter/whatever crap currently is “hot”, with the question what they will do about this situation.

So true, one days work by one person normally moderating this forum would totally annihilate the botters. 2 weeks work would make them think twice about purchasing another gw2 copy. A few handpicked days per month after that would keep it very very low.

Tachenon.5270:

About the Diminishing Returns thing: by altering the game to make it more difficult and/or tedious for players to acquire the things they want has Anet created a situation in which players are more or less likely to seek alternative means of acquiring the things they want?

I see this is as one of the main problems – there are quite a lot of things in GW2 which are relatively expensive in proportion to the rate of income during regular play, which means the demand for gold is almost always high.

While players can buy gems directly from Anet to swap for gold with other players, this doesn’t prevent people from still buying from goldsellers because they offer a much better deal. Goldsellers have a big advantage in this situation, because they use bots, which don’t get sleepy, hungry or bored. The bots also don’t care about their time investment, so aside from basic operating costs there isn’t a very high price tag on the time spent acquiring the gold, unlike there is for real players who are fueling the official gold <→ gem trade.

They overrun it? I’ve completed 72% of the map and have never seen one.

Someone thinks way too highly of themselves and their “fans” on reddit (the only place that this “article” will be posted other than guru and here lol) and phew, what a lot of work to say the same thing that’s posted 200 times a day on all three.

It’s true though, I think it’s almost too late. They were woefully unprepared for this games launch, and now I think they’re consumed with technical glitches and balance. By the time the game works and is mass-marketable, it will be overrun and dead in the water.

Yes. The game is dying. It’s over. Take your DVD and set it on fire. In two weeks, there will be ten people playing it.

eyeroll

Whilst I appreciate the time you took to right your article.

I have yet to see a bot. Your sweeping statement about it being overrun is grossly exaggerated.

We need to remember despite ArenaNet’s lack of response they want these bots gone more than anyone, just keep reporting the bots and i’m sure we will start seeing results soon.

Keep the faith…

TemperHoof.6438:

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.

I may be level 80, but I do run a lot of alts, who range in level from 10 to 30. In roughly 200 hours played, I’ve yet to see more than 1-2 players who I even suspected of botting, let alone could easily confirm. This, along with your assertion that “rare” items are spiraling up to 100g in price (when it fact it is only specific items needed for legendaries, actual “rares” are available for a handful of silvers), smack of hyperbolic and lazy journalism. I don’t deny the existence of bots…some of those screenshots and videos are pretty conclusive. And I fully applaud an article meant to light a fire under Arena Net and make sure the problem is dealt with as swiftly and harshly as possible. I just don’t think the best way to accomplish that is with alarmist claims and questionable, nebulous data.

There’s a lot of “many” and “lots of” and other vague, undefined terms in your piece. If you have data on bots, share the data. If all you have is anecdotal evidence in the form of youtube videos and screenshots, then change the language to support that. Video games in general are already frequently the subject of yellow journalism without yet another frothing jeremiad adding to the noise.

A call to arms on bots? Fantastic. Information about a gold sellers economy? Good stuff. You just need to tighten it up. By any real journalistic standard, this is an unacceptable piece.

I’ll just leave this here, this recording is from the first week of launch but there are still some in that spot.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFfJ6usuYkY

I’ve been fighting this wave since the game went live. Both in the game, here and on third party forums. The silence from Anet has me worried more than anything.

Hyperbole: The desperate attention seekers’ volleyball.

ArenaNet has been anything but silent. They post in almost every one of the dozens of daily threads about bots and bugs. They know about it, they are working on it. They aren’t going to tell you their plans or specifics on what they are doing, because that would be idiotic. Hopefully you know why.

I would like to thank ANet for not locking this thread and allowing us a place to discuss and bring up our concerns. It is clear we are being heard, hopefully the right steps are taken.

Mastermind.3169:

So true, one days work by one person normally moderating this forum would totally annihilate the botters. 2 weeks work would make them think twice about purchasing another gw2 copy. A few handpicked days per month after that would keep it very very low.

…yes, definitely, just one day and one person would totally be able to annihilate all the bots rollseyes.
Let alone that it is not the community managers’ job to ferret out bugs and botters.

You do realize we have quite a handful of worlds, each of whom houses a massive map with way more than a dozen “popular botting spots” (at least according to this article) ?

And believe it or not, but most of those botters you see have likely NOT bought a copy of this game. What did you think they hack accounts for?

If people didn’t buy the gold they would have no business in Guild Wars 2. Apparently not everyone hates their presence as much as us…

I just think that our server is lucky, as I haven’t seen this massive influx that you have shown here. Though I think it is just a matter of time.

ArenaNet can’t ignore this, unless they want a game filled with bots and not gamers… and bots don’t buy gems..

Though I would still give ArenaNet some time to figure out what to do about the whole thing. Maybe we will see some action later, as you yourself said, the game is only a month old.

This action could also be removing said items posted by said bots from the actionhouse and let the economy stabilize itself slowly. After removing the botted accounts of course.

I’m also for the in-game police force, but it would still be a massive thing to create, as you would need to cover all time zones with co-workers on every server. That is a lot of money and time.

I hope they read your post!

Have you guys forgot about the bot army that haunted WoW in the beginning? Lets hope ANet cleans it up. The popular games always have the bots and hackers. This is nothing new.

I encourage everyone to post in or subscribe to this thread. This is something we need to be engaged in. If a dev posts here we need to know. If the thread is moved or deleted we need to know.

I’m finding bots everywhere I go so I thought it might be fun for us to share our videos of funny bots in action. I had to chuckle at the way this one was moving.

Please share your video links. will give me something to break from gaming.

Bots take far too long to remove all their clothing…

You have assumed they have done nothing, but the diminishing returns (DR) that frustrates players ever so much, is something. You speculate that bots are impacting the economy, but you do not know this as you cannot peek inside their inventories or trading post sales, and see how much they are actually contributing to the economy and how much DR has affected them. I’m wondering how you’ve performed your economic impact study and where the data can be viewed that allows you to make statements like:

“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.”

“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.”

“the economy begins to tank as a result of this influx of over-farmed items”

It’s not unfeasible to have learned the mechanisms of DR through experimentation, done a legitimate analysis of the bot to player ratio, analyzed how much players have contributed to the trading post on average through random survey, and then conclude with a reasonable estimate of bot contribution to the trading post based on the reverse engineered DR mechanics, the ratio of bots to players, and known player behavior when it comes to the trading post. I just doubt you’ve done that.

Edit: Alternatively, to the above a much more simpler experiment would be to just download a bot and try it. Report your results of how much gold your bot gained per hour. Then do a cost analysis based on a good estimate of bot to player ratio.

As another experiment, you can also create a bot and report it on another account and see if something is done about it. Those would be articles I’d like to read from a gaming journalist.

I do feel that Arenanet need to be more vocal with the playerbase on this issue, and I will be surprised if they don’t release some info about a mass ban wave sometime in the future. The gold sellers will buy new accounts (or use any number of prepurchased/hacked accounts), then there will be another ban wave. Its just something that will continue as long as Arenanet don’t keep on top of it, as they have failed to do so far. They should have started instantly with the bans to at least create a little deterrent and send a positive message to the playerbase

Lots of good info in the OP anyway, just want to comment on one particular aspect

I think its a shame to imply that the rarity of some items fuels the need for players to acquire gold via real life money transactions. Just from playing you will have your full exotic gear set as you hit 80 very easily. There are even ways to completely bypass Gold by getting functionally identical armour/weapons through ingame currency, and can mix/match (some 80 karma pieces with some armour from TP, all with your own choice of runes to create your own max level armour). Legendaries are supposed to be extremely rare, and even then they are just a fancy skin. Without this extreme rarity some players would not have the long term goal there. You don’t need to rush for a legendary, and most players will never get one and thats just fine imo. Not everyone needs to be a crafter either. Part of the reason some players may be broke is that they don’t sell their ingredients and insist on being one of the thousands of crafters. There is absolutely no need for everyone to craft and you will save a bunch of gold by simply buying what you want after selling all ingredients, unless you plan on selling items you make and are prepared to compete with the entirety of the GW2 population of crafters

As for gems for convenience. I bought 2 bank slot upgrades and 1 player inventory slot, all from converting in game gold to gems. Anything else is up to the player to buy for their own convenience or for cosmetic variation

So I don’t think its right to suggest that players need to acquire this ultra rare stuff off the market and botters are creating a need to purchase gold by inflating prices. This is mostly to do with people realising the true value of items. Early on in an MMO it will take time for the true value of things to level out. Anything at stupidly high prices on the TP you don’t need anyway. Anything you grind for ingame is probably not something you need to have imo. If you just play and have fun you will get all the gear you could ever really need

ummm, FYI every MMO has gone through that and they are still there. And all those MMOs have the same timeline on when it occurs the most…at the time of release. The more popular a game is the more hackers will be interested. Hackers(or bot spammers, same thing) only want one thing- Your money!
If you honestly beleive that Anet is not aware of this, maybe you should read this article…
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/mike-obrien-on-account-security/

Just ignore those dam hackers n protect your account. In time it will die out!

I have stopped bothering to report them after I saw the same bot I reported 5 times in the exact same spot.

ANet needs to do something. Hopefully MoP launch will ease a bit of them back to get some WoW $$$. Though I doubt it since they bot multiple games.

I usually like your articles, Temperhoof, but honestly this one seems like nothing more than a piece of sensationalism.

A month into the game and you somehow know enough about economics, in particular MMO economics, and enough about how botters work in MMO’s to come to the conclusion that the game is somehow teetering on the edge of doom.

MMO economies even after major patches take several weeks to settle down let alone an entire game launch. What makes you think whatever trend you think you have identified is going to continue in the direction you think? What makes you think that it’s not easy to resolve? (The GW2 economy is balanced a lot different than those of games like WoW)

What makes you think botters are causing issues for the economy? What makes you think they even cause issues for other players? I can run the same event as bots and still get my loot just fine. They can’t stop me gathering and they can’t stop me making money via other means.

I dislike this post because it reads like a cheap tabloid. It brazenly states information as fact without any evidence to back it up, and it is over sensationalized rather than just stating the facts plainly. But then there aren’t many facts to be found behind your conclusions

I think you went wrong in a few places in your reasoning as well

First of all are you sure that the prices being close to vendor value are actually being driven by gold farmers or do you perhaps think that people offloading items at vendor value while out and about to free bag space might be huge contributor to that? What about the fact that there is perfect market information available to the player base complete with trend graphs for each item? What about people who would rather convert one resource/item into another without going via the TP and losing 15% of their wealth in the process? (This effectively makes people hesitate about converting their items into gold and decreases supply on the market)

Do you believe that the gold selling companies have enough market power to suffer the loss they do on the vendor priced items on the BLTC? They aren’t market PvP’ing against a few people on each server, they’re doing it against millions. Why would they list items 1c above the vendor value? People will notice they will take a loss due to the listing fee and tax and not sell their item. Surely if you are looking to force prices low you would be pricing stuff at the bare minimum needed to actually make it profitable for the player to sell to you rather than vendor something. It’s more important for items to be barely profitable at best and have them selling constantly at that artificial price level than to try convince people to sell to you at a loss.

Why would the botters be trying to force prices low rather than high? They can take items out of the system easier by farming them and preventing other from farming them thus decreasing supply. They list a controlled amount of items at an artificial price point and buy out everything that is significantly below it, once people start buying they keep dumping their excess into it at a controlled rate to not bottom it out too soon.

As for the botters ‘taking over’. It’s been less than a month. WoW and other games don’t do ban waves often, they usually wait until the moment they believe they will wipe out as many as possible for several reasons and those reasons have been covered previously not only by botters themselves but by other companies as well.

Spawn.7014:

sadly bots will be a problem in almost every video game released. But it is easily countered.

Blizzard added a code, when botting became a problem in WoW, that they could track what is running on your computer while you are playing WoW. If you are reported for botting they open it up and see Workspace macro running they could easily tell if your botting.
Or you get the MMO glider and it re wrote some of the code for WoW. They couldn’t trace it as easily but they still knew. To stop this they wrote a program to find the new or re written code and track the accounts.

Sadly Anet doesn;t have the funds blizzard or WoW has so its going to take them some time. But all they have to do is watch the people for a few min to see if their botting.

This will continue to be a problem for a long time my friends.

I don’t know if you know this but the guys who founded ArenaNet basically created battle.net for Blizzard before they left. They’ve got patents on the patching tech used behind GW1 and were (And im still pretty confident they are) light years ahead of the competition when it comes to the back end systems they are using.

I’m pretty confident that adding a program similar to Warden would be trivial for them to do. The problem is that it doesn’t work because there are some relatively simple ways of getting around it. Why do you think they sued the guy who made MMO Glider?

Frotee.2634:

Mastermind.3169:

So true, one days work by one person normally moderating this forum would totally annihilate the botters. 2 weeks work would make them think twice about purchasing another gw2 copy. A few handpicked days per month after that would keep it very very low.

…yes, definitely, just one day and one person would totally be able to annihilate all the bots rollseyes.
Let alone that it is not the community managers’ job to ferret out bugs and botters.

You do realize we have quite a handful of worlds, each of whom houses a massive map with way more than a dozen “popular botting spots” (at least according to this article) ?

And believe it or not, but most of those botters you see have likely NOT bought a copy of this game. What did you think they hack accounts for?

Yes, in an 8 hour day one person would definitely find about 50 accounts per server that was botting and or trying to sell gold for money if they would spend a few minutes on each (Goldselling is 98% of all chat on my server for example, by about 20 or so bots). And for hacking (which isn’t hacks anyways, just people using the same credentials when buying gold or black market cdkeys and the like), the sooner they ban the accounts the sooner the owner of the accounts becomes aware of what has happened.

But this is not likely at all to happen, because Anet earns nothing from stopping this, except some bandwidth on their forums. They will probably keep posting once a week or so that they, sometime in the future, will try to stop it, but state that it is impossible to read the goldselling peoples messages in chat or watching character behaviour or even just plain asking them.

I believe all that players are wanting is an explaination as to what action they are taking on bots. Will they be mass banning or are they looking into it day by day. I do not see them letting us know their intentions as effecting anything at all. A we are looking into it isn’t telling the player base anything especially when they report them and see nothing happening for weeks/days.
To players saying they do not see many. If your not leveling 80 you probably won’t. Bots don’t go complete hearts or grind mobs. They set them up on key events (Centaur bridge) as well as others. So that they level as fast as possible to 80 so they can farm in Orr. (Gold sellers do this) Bots you see running around are most likely players who bought one or made one. Gold selling is a business they won’t waste time they do things more efficient and cheapest.
On my server i’ve reported bots in Orr usually there is around 10-15 of them and are at 3 main locations as most Orr karma farms know those locations. The same name bots are still there and that was 2-3 weeks ago. Since then i just stop reporting bots as nothing from my point of view was happening.
I can’t believe they are not doing anything about it. I believe they are taking small steps. I do not think they have a very big team to handle all the issues. They where not ready for the huge influx of players. They are putting fixing all the game issues first bugs missing skill points etc.
I believe the devs/mods should give an official response on it. A we are doing the best we can at the moment our team was not ready for the mass influx of things; or a we are gathering as much information as possible making small bans as we see necessary for a larger ban at a date not to be determined.(GM’s online at the main farming spots or at least Orr even just one per server would help tremendously).
I will say that I love Guild Wars 2. The visual aspects of the game are absolutely stunning. I love the story-lines and very much appreciate all the time your team put into it(would have went different way on cut scenes lol; but they are different at the same time). Not to mention the PvP and WvW. I expect more mmos in the future to use the WvW concept. I am trying to get into the gaming industry and really take the time to look at all the details put into games more now than I would have in the past and not just play through fast to beat it or get to end game.
In the end I understand the players frustration as I’m one of the ones trying to farm Orr :P. As well understand Anets side of things to. So guys be patient like me wait for more patches to go through then see what actions are taken on the bots!

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.

Yep. I’ve reported teleporting bots on those skales for days. I go there to get bloods I need for crafting since I’d rather gather mats than buy them.

I reported teleporting bots there days ago and haven’t been there for days. Went last night on a lowbie alt (also a good place to burn a kill streak booster) and saw the exact same bots I reported days ago still bouncing up and down the river.

One can only hope that ANet is documenting and chasing data streams to ultimately not only shut down bots but to punish any cheaters who buy gold. Perma ban them all.

But this is little consolation if it ever happens. I’m sick of seeing bots everywhere.

What I would rather see is that when bots or gold spammers are reported, that those accounts get destroyed within a few minutes, and that ANet shuts down these types of accounts faster than morons let their accounts get hacked to feed the bot/gold farming machine.

The problem with the solution:

The sheer level of fine detail poured into of this game seems to clearly say that Arena cares about every aspect of their creation. And, I have faith that, at some point, a more lasting solution than simple banning is what is holding up the purge – anti hack measures, or whatever the solution may be. But what we can’t know is how high up on the list these measures are, or how much time they will take to implement. The bot infestation has certainly snowballed and is a much larger problem this week than last by what looks to be several fold (observationally, and anecdotally speaking only). And with the more recent appearance of bots using common Chinese surnames, it just feels brazen, just short of taunting.

Unless short term solutions interfere with the effectiveness of long term solutions – and maybe they do – I think people concerned about bots are having a hard time understanding why short term solutions aren’t already in play, particularly in light of how quickly other exploits were squashed. The botting is so obvious, so blatant, that players can spot scores of bots in the course of regular game play, and wonder why can’t someone ban those same number with better tools at their disposal. Or, at the very least, clean up event spots where game play is seriously impacted.

The really sad part of this is the fact that AreaNet has our money and they likely could careless at this time because they know we are not going to cancel our subscription for the game are we now? From outward appearances it seems that fixing little bugs are more important than bots, if you don’t believe that look at the recent list of build notes and the majority of the fixes would be miles below on a list of important things to fix. As long as they can continue to drawn new sales they likely will just ignore the cries for help with this matter.

I did a search for sites that were offering bot scripts or selling them this morning and the list is huge and plentiful. Some I am sure are a ploy just to get your money. I mean you are looking for a way to cheat and then the salesman rips you off. Should that surprise you at all?

I think you will find those defending the bots an arguing against the op’s post are “possibly” botters themselves. I know for a fact the botters are not remotely scared of Anet, an take every chance to wave it in their face.

As I posted early on, in Asherons Call the dev’s were same as Anet , an let it go for too long. Once in place you have lost the battle.making the game misserable for the playerbase in the faint hopes of annoying bots isnt the way to go because it doesnt work.

In all seriousness, Anet should talk to CCP about it. EVE bots just got smashed recently, with thousands of Rssian an american bots (an others) banned. Not to mention the wonderful tactic they have of debiting your account if you buy isk(gold)

EG: If you buy 500 gold,the Mods would take the gold off you, give you a 2 week ban, an debit your account for same amount you bought.
Now in EVE this is a big deal. Because you need cash to do basically anything.
You cant buy ammo, you cant repair, you cant buy an sell, you cant do alot of anything except rat in local (grind).

Some sort of system like this should be looked at for GW2