Guild Wars 2

Hey guys, forgive me if this is discussed many times, but I do not browse the forums often. I am usually in game having fun. This is also why you don’t often see positive threads on any gaming forum.

As my title states, I feel bots are becoming a huge issue for me and the game. As I have leveled up to 80 and am now farming materials for gear or events for karma, it is becoming very apparent how rampant botting seems to be.

I have noticed this here and there as I have leveled up, reported it, and moved on. Now that I’m level 80, (and so are they) I am seeing the same bots every day despite having reported them many times. I can attend a zone event and see nearly half of the characters involved being bots.

“Just be concerned with yourself and your own play,” say the botting players and overly faithful, but I contend that in our game, they present a very real problem. It’s obvious they are hunting for rare drops and karma to salvage for ecto globs. This drives down the value of the ecto globs while concentrating gold, tradable for gems or externally for cash, into a handful of players botting dozens of accounts.

I’m sure this has all been heard before, so I’ll stop here.

As a concerned fan of the game, Anet, could you please get rid of these? You could find me in game right now and I’ll show you no less than a dozen I have seen in the same spot for a week. Thanks.

Going to go start a new character now so I don’t have to look at them.

they don’t care, i’ve reported plenty as well. They need to have active GMs in game and seek them out when we report. But like i said… they don’t care.

these bot are the gold sellers and their clients. I totally agree that there needs to be online GMs. With as much money they are making for the game and their statement that this is a service. Which online GM are an important part to a service. these needs to be addressed.

i wish i could report them...but i never saw one single botter so far...not at Elona Reach (german server)
and not that much goldseller in the chats and mailboxes either...get max 1 mail per 2 weeks and a goldseller only posts twice in the map-chat usually until he remains silent (for whatever reason)

i don’t know if this is just overreacting or simply THAT bad at the NA servers

It’s all good, guys. They banned like 1600 accounts a few weeks ago, so the botting problem is fixed.

Saw an unusual style of botting in Divinity’s Reach today.
A group of around 8 botters (all identical looking Rangers) were taking it in turns to die, then the rest of the group would all rez him “earning” xp, after being rezzed the dead player would teleport to the back of the group while another player would take his turn to die, I guess to avoid any cooldowns. Other styles of botting include teleporting to their next targets, often long distances, groups following exact paths, and they love to hide out in caverns lol, possibly to avoid detection from being reported. I’m sure Arenanet are doing what they can to stop botting, but this must take time though, each report individually investigated. Also really sure they don’t have Activision/Blizzard like resources too, so that would be another factor in these things taking time.

Who says you need to do each report individually? Seriously. Real live GMs. Log in to a zone, you can easily determine and ban 20 bots in short order. Rinse and repeat.

wauwi.9162:

i wish i could report them…but i never saw one single botter so far…not at Elona Reach (german server)
and not that much goldseller in the chats and mailboxes either…get max 1 mail per 2 weeks and a goldseller only posts twice in the map-chat usually until he remains silent (for whatever reason)

i don’t know if this is just overreacting or simply THAT bad at the NA servers

They aren’t overreacting. The bots are out of control on my server. I see groups of them in just about every zone and they’re always there, no matter how many people report them.

I just reported 10 of them on my server (Yak’s Bend). They were all in Ebonhawk inside the cave with all the skrit. This is actually the 1st time ive ran into a bot since I started playing.

Don’t waste your time reporting them. I’ve reported some of the same bots a dozen times and still see em’ waddling around my farming spots. I’m personally not going to submit another one until I know exactly what is being done with them…because from what I see, they’re likely just becoming a to-do list that ends up as toilet paper in the developer’s office.

All bots are rangers I noticed. I now feel like every Ranger I see is a bot. xD

Well, most of the Bots are naked rangers so the clothed ones are probably not, for the most part, botters…

Saw the funniest thing, though, while my wife and I were in Frostgorge sound near the Yak’s Bend waypoint… A bunch of bots were appearing constantly and running off somewhere, then would reappear and run off again. My wife and I finally got curious and followed them around the southern part of the same area. All 5 Bots were getting hammered repeatedly by Arctodus bears (including a Veteran Arctodus) and they just kept coming into them over and over.
No revives going on.. they just kept getting killed and respawning. The Bot rangers’ bow shots maybe did a few points of damage before the bears had at them.

… My wife and I watched this for a good 5-10 minutes for entertainment… At least, we thought, the Arctodus are not amused by the Bot antics…

Forget banning accounts… Get the MOB AI’s to just gang up on them all and leave us alone. ;-)P

(Okay, don’t forget to ban bot accounts… but this was fun to see.. )

Actually I have seen multiple classes not just ranger. In one instance I saw a bot group with 8 different toons, with 4 different classes within it. Had an elementalist as the anchor at one end of the line and the chest at the other end of the line in the cave at the south end of Wayfares where the SoS are. They were just running back and forth killing the sons as fast as they spawned.

Some of the bot AI is getting rather sophisticated as well. I came across a mesmer a couple days ago. Thought it was a “real person”, I guess the fact that it was naked should have been a dead giveaway.

Anyway, she was downed under a bridge spamming all downed abilities against some normal mobs, so I helped her up, and she went to a different spot and started spamming the same rotation. At the time it didn’t really strike me as as a bot until I came back to the spot quite some time later (~1 hour?) and found her back in the other spot where she was downed and saw the same process. Apparently the AI on this bot goes between 2 separate spots where normal mobs spawn quickly and goes through a predefined skill rotation. It was even in higher level area (~55).