Guild Wars 2

We have all seen the amazing “pop in/chop the tree/pop out” botters. The only purpose behind this is to farm mats to sell. This rapidly devalues in-game currency and keeps material prices artificially low. Economy nerfs in order to try and prop up the currency value only hurt the non-botting community, perhaps forcing some on the borderline into botting just to keep up. In essence, its as if there were a currency wherein widespread counterfeiting were permitted.

Speaking personally, I feel highly disinclined to buy most things from the auction hourse or ANYTHING for gems because of the inherently unfair nature of the economy.

ANet needs to make stopping bots a high priority (as in halting new content, etc., until the bots are stopped) the problem will only grow worse. It won’t take much more for large numbers of people to get disenchanted (myself included) and move on.

Actually ANet has come down pretty hard on bots lately. A good many of them have been removed. Just wait a little while and the next batch will be gone too.

So if they’re tapping the nodes, the solution is to nerf drop rates of materials from mobs rather than more lessening the number of active node spawns and making them spawn more randomly?…

Bots banned, and now you can enjoy your Lodestones 5 gold per each.

Soulcheg.5048:

Bots banned, and now you can enjoy your Lodestones 5 gold per each.

Seriously… though I think the OP is talking about the botters that log in, hit a node, log out, and then wait for a certain duration before essentially rinse & repeating. The suggestion of nerfing drop rates across the board makes no sense though if the complaint is merely about the nodes.

Nycthemeron.7690:

We have all seen the amazing “pop in/chop the tree/pop out” botters. The only purpose behind this is to farm mats to sell. This rapidly devalues in-game currency and keeps material prices artificially low.

devalueing in-game currency and keeping material prices artificially low are inconsistent with each other.

From what I see in game, mats prices have not been kept low.

Those bots aren’t just hitting nodes anymore. There is one that farms the Barracuda underwater at the Dimotiki waypoint on the Dragonbrand server. Blinks from mob to mob, and I’ll bet it rakes in T6 scales while killing around the clock.

the biggest users of bots are goldsellers. so they best way to combat bots is to not use gold-selling sites, encourage others to not use them, and challenge any who justify them

Bruno Sardine.2907:

Soulcheg.5048:

The suggestion of nerfing drop rates across the board makes no sense though if the complaint is merely about the nodes.

Yeah. ANet did a great job of banning bots (at least in Orr), which obviously made prices go up. But I do not understand the nerf in rare droprate. I imagine they would do that to COMBAT the bots, but now some items sky rocketted in price AND they’re harder to get for the legit player.

It sucks.

In my opinion mat prices are to high in TP. Cost more for the mats than the product they make sells for. I also think Arena has done an awesome job controlling the gold farmers. I hardly see any bots anymore.

While Anet has done an admirable job banning botters, they will always be present in a successful game, i.e., one with players playing it. Just life in the online gaming lane.

The only unacceptable answer is nerfing legit players because of them. Games are supposed to be fun for players. And, absence of gold making opportunities in a game is one of the primary motivators for people to buy gold. The only game I’ve played where botting was not a large problem had an economy where gatherers and crafters could make sufficient gold through playing the game. That is the answer, make the in-game environment such that there is sufficient reward for playing the game, then there is no need for outside sources of gold. Problem largely solved (see first paragraph).

However, this easily gets messed up when you mix in RL currency. But that is the current method of generating revenue, so we live with messed up economies in games.

Edit: To be clear, what I am saying is the problem is not the botters. With an in-game economy that worked, they would be present for lazy players, but not be gamebreaking. The problem is in a game design that penalizes players and rewards botters/gold sellers.

Actually, it’s kinda ruined by the lack of bots.

Ever since they cracked down on the bots, the prices on the trading post have gone up by about 900% (a little exaggeration, maybe). I remember the Abyss dye being somewhere around 5 gold. Now it’s, what, 17 gold? LOL! What these greedy kitten fail to realize is that no one is going to pay those outrageous prices. Money doesn’t grow on trees, especially in this game.

I used to hate bots, then a whole bunch got banned and the prices on TP rose very high and realised that the comfortable prices of materials etc. was down to them. Now I miss them lol

I enjoy things not costing much as it gives me more freedom in what I want to do. I know others disagree and really it’s difficult to get a price right when people want to spend different amounts of time on the game.

Anet nerfs drop rates, includes diminishing returns (random, not explained exactly how it works except in vague terms), nerfs drop rates a bit more. Bans bots, does not increase drop rates… ahh, perfect troll

Anway, it’s useless to complain about bots one way or the other. Drops rates are controlled by Anet. If (for example) lodestones and dye drops are crap…it’s Anets drop rates, not the botter ones. So better make a post with stuff listed that you want to see dropped more often and title it: Anet, raise drop rates for X items nao!

mulch.2586:

devalueing in-game currency and keeping material prices artificially low are inconsistent with each other.

From what I see in game, mats prices have not been kept low.

Actually that is not so in this case. Unlike the real world where there is a finite amount of copper/silver/gold, the ‘coin’ minted by the game is ‘fiat’ currency. It comes from nowhere when created. There is no physical limit to the amount of in-game currency. So, the more that is farmed then the more that there is resulting in the relative devaluation of all the in-game coin. This effect shows most clearly when you watch the value of the in-game currency versus the gems over time.

Likewise the creation of mats via farming. The same ‘tree’ is harvested over and over with no cost of production (other than the need to replace the harvesting tool once in a great while). Bots that repeatedly harvest mats and put them on the AH flood the market, saturating what little demand there is for mats. The non-bot farming of mats right now is not an economically feasible activity. (Yes, you hit the odd node that you come across while doing other things, but it’s not really something that you do as a focused activity.) You can make much more doing events and killing critters. If there were not these bots, then the AH price of mats might make non-bot farming an economically rewarding activity.

Nycthemeron, real world money is also fiat currency, which is why the economy in the U.S. is sliding down the tubes. It’s called Fractional Reserve Banking, and it’s a scam. But, as I recall, a developer blog stated that they wanted the in-game economy to be the same as the real world economy. Congratulations on a job extremely too well done, I say.

Here’s a perspective from a fairly active player that plays 3-4 hours per day on average.

Anet definitely nerfed the drop rates hard. The same amount of MF and mob tagging in groups nearly two months ago yields no rares at all over six events in Orr compared to when I was getting 1-2 rares on average per event.

Now I can’t even afford the stuff on the TP because things have inflated to the point where it’s inaccessible to me in the quantities that I used to enjoy. It’s only going to get worst.

To be honest, after all this senselessness from the players playing the market and killing us as well as Anet nerfing the drop rate to completely unenjoyable, and inhumane levels, I have to throw in my support for the bots coming back and being successful. Whether or not the developers wants to admit it, or how they want to spin it, grinding in Guild Wars 2 to reach the goals you want to achieve has reached a level where a fairly active player like me can no longer handle.

Rhanax.8314:

In my opinion mat prices are to high in TP. Cost more for the mats than the product they make sells for..

That’s a problem with the crafting system, tho. Agreed, anything should sell for more than the cost of it’s component parts. Unlike the real world though, where manufactured products cost many multiples of the raw materials, in game there is so very little cost associated with the manufacturing process as compared with the real world.

My personal solution would be to drop the vendor price (the de facto price floor) of basic mats and greatly increase the vendor price of at least some crafted items. One idea might be a class of crafted items that have little use other than taking less expensive materials and crafting them for higher vendor value (butcher knives, barrels of salted meat, other household goods). But, unless the bots are stopped this would just lead to bots pumping out these goods. Again, until wide-spread botting is stopped the in-game economy is going to be flawed.

Yes, I am quite aware that the dollar is a fiat currency. I was just showing how when you have fiat currency and, for intents and purposes, fiat goods that massive overproduction leads to the devaluation of both.