Bot fighting is an ongoing fight. It can’t be prevented, only delayed. Adding tools to detect only means bot creators have to develop their own tools to circumvent the detection. It’s like security.
This is very true. The only way to actually stop bots is to remove the incentive for people to make them in the first place, which is very difficult to do because if requires drastic changes to game dynamics that legitimate players would not like, and that game developers would find fiscally detrimental. Additionally, such changes would frequently solve one method of exploitation, but leave others either still available, or create new openings for exploitation. For example, you could get rid of gold farmers to a large extent by completely removing the ability to exchange in game currency and items. Without any means of moving “farmed” goods between accounts, it would be impossible for gold farmers to use bots to generate gold and other in game items that could then be transferred to other accounts for real world money. Players, however, generally like having the ability to share items with their friends, and game developers DO generate a significant amount of revenue off of the sale of the botting accounts (and from banning then banning these accounts, thus forcing the gold farmers to purchase new ones in a constant cycle). It is easy to cynically push the blame onto game developers and assume that they don’t stop the practice because they are making money off of it, but one must admit that if the players were not purchasing the illicit bot generated gold, then the bot farmers would not find it lucrative enough to invest the effort into their end of the cycle. And at the end of the day, eliminating the ability to trade gold and other in game goods between accounts would not truly solve the problem, because then the sale of the accounts themselves would become an issue. Plenty of people would be willing to shell out real world money for an account that had a fully developed end game level character with a nice pile of gold tossed in in the bargain. Changing the game dynamic would only have shifted the problem into a new track, not solved it.
The truth of the matter is that computers, the internet, and all the associated technologies, are a still an industry in its infancy. I would not expect a solution to the problem of bots, and MMOgaming exploitation in general, to be solved any time in the near future.
), and I would see what appeared to me as a player logging in, chopping a cypress tree, and then logging out. Odd. But then it became apparent this wasn’t the case because of the prevalence. So, these bots know how to go invisible and farm mats? You can tell much fewer of them kill mobs, but I saw at least 8 do this over the course of ~40 minutes on a single cypress tree, so they still much have an impact on the game’s economy. The problem I see now is how this new form of botting will get banned. Without players being able to report them, what will anet do to stop them? Obviously, this “hack/exploit”needs to be fixed first.