Guild Wars 2

As many of you may already noticed that there has been a dramatic decrease of bot numbers in past few days (past 2 updates).

I’m really grateful to Anet and all their efforts to remove those as a bot reporting player.

Past 2-3 days i was unable to find a single bot to report while i do my daily Ori Ore grind which made me smile and made my day better.

So i want to thank Anet for the great job and keep it up guys !

P.S. Somehow the overall culling in ORR and WvW has decreased for me with all the bots gone.

Yes indeed, I noticed a lot of bots got nuked recently! Go go Anet.

True that. But i also noticed that some of them got a lot smarter. There are several bots, monitored by players, so they do have pattern, they farm for hours on same spots , but also they do respond when contacted (not regenerated responses, but real person response) Orr is classical example.

The game is better with out bots. but now it just feels empty.

Luna.9640:

As many of you may already noticed that there has been a dramatic decrease of bot numbers in past few days (past 2 updates).

I’m really grateful to Anet and all their efforts to remove those as a bot reporting player.

Past 2-3 days i was unable to find a single bot to report while i do my daily Ori Ore grind which made me smile and made my day better.

So i want to thank Anet for the great job and keep it up guys !

P.S. Somehow the overall culling in ORR and WvW has decreased for me with all the bots gone.

I’ve only seen an increase. Yesterday I created a new character and in the very first part after tutorial ran 4 new bots.

Don’t know about Orr, but I am still seeing bots on my server in the lower level areas (Ebonhawke area is the one that immediately comes to mind)

Still seeing bots all over Yak’s bend. Queensdale, bandit farm is 24/7 of them.

Not saying Anet is not working on it, just have not seen a reduction.

You will never completely get rid of the bots. Bots just get more sophisticated as time goes on and become less noticeable. Bots have gotten to the point in certain other p2p games where they will level via quests and run instanced dungeons.

Yea, bots are getting smarter.

They farm alone, they have a guild, they look like normal guys, but they just do the same thing again and again without responding. The only solution to this is to be able to detect such programs, not to search teams of clones.

Still seeing the same 5 bots in the same spot they’ve been for 3+ weeks now. Still reporting them daily.

its simple, ban the gold buyers too, and make the gem to gold exchange so ridiculously good, that they simply cannot compete

that will take care of the botter problem almost entirely

Luigio.3265:

its simple, ban the gold buyers too, and make the gem to gold exchange so ridiculously good, that they simply cannot compete

that will take care of the botter problem almost entirely

Hey, gems for gold are expensive enough… I’m not a gem buyer so don’t make my life harder :P They should just try to make gold less important in this game, instead of trying to sell more.

Seen a huge improvement on Darkhaven. there are still a few bots poping around, but nowhere as many as before. patience! the bot hammer will come to your server some day soon!

Keiran.1896:

Luigio.3265:

its simple, ban the gold buyers too, and make the gem to gold exchange so ridiculously good, that they simply cannot compete

that will take care of the botter problem almost entirely

Hey, gems for gold are expensive enough… I’m not a gem buyer so don’t make my life harder :P They should just try to make gold less important in this game, instead of trying to sell more.

….

exactly my point….make the gem > gold exchange rate so ridiculously cheap gemwise, that asian/chinese/philipine/whatever botting farmers simply cannot compete

also, it wouldnt make your life “harder” if you dont buy gems, in fact, its going to make it easier for you because people will have more money to buy stuff you might put up in the trading post, so win-win for you

as for making gold less important in game, its " importance" ends up being purely cosmetical, since 90% of the gold sinks in this game are legendaries, cultural gear and pretty much graphical customization for your character , or wvw (you can spend a lot of cash there actually) so gold’s importance in-game is equivalent to how important it is for you to have T3 cultural / legendary gear

I wish I could say the same for Fissure of Woe (aptaly named). Almost every zone is overrun with bots, groups respawning, repairing and back to the bot group areas over and over.

New low level bots being created constantly and sent out to Orr, yes level 5 bots in massive groups in Orr.

Train after train of bots running the same routes through Orr are just examples but every zone I visit has them in small trains, large grouped up bunches and single players running the same routes. Most of them have a level 80 player watching over and rezzing them.

I report over 200 a day now up from over 100. I moved to Fissure of Woe from Piken Square in an attempt to get away from bots but that was a mistake as the problem is roughly 10 x worse on FOW.

I always report bots, every one of them, even if they are in a large group and it takes me 15 – 20 minutes, but it’s worth the effort imo.

One thing I have never done in the five weeks of playing this game is buy anything off the trading post and I never will as long as bots exist in the massive numbers they do atm. As far as I can see buying their gear just supports their greedy and game destroying efforts.

Rather than playing the game which for me is abysmal while they exist, Ijust go every where I can bot reporting.

The only time I actually enjoyed one bot group is when they were bunched (32 of them) under a bridge, there was a fire bomb on the ground above the bridge which gave you three aoe fire shots. I spent two hours having a greast time throwing this bomb in a circle pattern around the bots watching risen being burnt alive before these lvl 10 – 65 bots could kill much at all.

Luigio.3265:

….
exactly my point….make the gem > gold exchange rate so ridiculously cheap gemwise, that asian/chinese/philipine/whatever botting farmers simply cannot compete

also, it wouldnt make your life “harder” if you dont buy gems, in fact, its going to make it easier for you because people will have more money to buy stuff you might put up in the trading post, so win-win for you

as for making gold less important in game, its " importance" ends up being purely cosmetical, since 90% of the gold sinks in this game are legendaries, cultural gear and pretty much graphical customization for your character , or wvw (you can spend a lot of cash there actually) so gold’s importance in-game is equivalent to how important it is for you to have T3 cultural / legendary gear

I mean, if you offer more gold for gems, I’ll have to give more gold to get gems. Last time, I wanted to buy a new character slot, it costed me 7 gold! An entire day of farming and doing nothing else! Now I have the feeling that I farmed for a gold seller – actually for Arenanet – so I’m not sure I’ll ever do this again.

At release, it was 40 silver for 112 gems.
Now with 40 silver you get like 50 gems and it was 30-40 gems during Halloween.

To me, there’s no difference between Arenanet and chinese bots selling gold. I mean, bots did nothing to me, both are making this game P2W. The only good thing with Arenanet is that I can get gems in exchange… now if it’s 3 gems for 3 gold, I’m not sure I’m so interested.

I see some blatantly obvious bots that should be easy enough to detect. This one bot just teleported next to an ore I was mining, mined it, then teleported to a tree not much further away, harvested that, then disappeared again.

How hard is it to check if a character has moved way more than they should be allowed to, really now?

Saw a huge reduction in the last 2-3 weeks, but then yesterday the map I was in was swarming again. They are now using a method where instead of trains of equal level guys they have maybe 5-6 lvl 30s surrounded by a another 5-6 of say level 60s in a level 60 area, the lower levels act as a magnet for aggro pulling in more mobs and I may be wrong but if I remember rightly do you not get better loot for being lower level.

Keiran.1896:

Luigio.3265:

….
exactly my point….make the gem > gold exchange rate so ridiculously cheap gemwise, that asian/chinese/philipine/whatever botting farmers simply cannot compete

also, it wouldnt make your life “harder” if you dont buy gems, in fact, its going to make it easier for you because people will have more money to buy stuff you might put up in the trading post, so win-win for you

as for making gold less important in game, its " importance" ends up being purely cosmetical, since 90% of the gold sinks in this game are legendaries, cultural gear and pretty much graphical customization for your character , or wvw (you can spend a lot of cash there actually) so gold’s importance in-game is equivalent to how important it is for you to have T3 cultural / legendary gear

I mean, if you offer more gold for gems, I’ll have to give more gold to get gems. Last time, I wanted to buy a new character slot, it costed me 7 gold! An entire day of farming and doing nothing else! Now I have the feeling that I farmed for a gold seller – actually for Arenanet – so I’m not sure I’ll ever do this again.

At release, it was 40 silver for 112 gems.
Now with 40 silver you get like 50 gems and it was 30-40 gems during Halloween.

To me, there’s no difference between Arenanet and chinese bots selling gold. I mean, bots did nothing to me, both are making this game P2W. The only good thing with Arenanet is that I can get gems in exchange… now if it’s 3 gems for 3 gold, I’m not sure I’m so interested.

/facepalm…i think anet stated somewhere that it doesnt work like that…but i may be wrong on that count…

that said however, its very lovely and all that you want to get everything without spending a dime, but yes, it should take time, and yes it should be tedious and hard, otherwise how the hell do you expect Anet to cover the overhead to run servers,staff to fix bugs, create new content etc. ? they need to sell gems and gold

ZOMG A WHOLE DAY OF FARMING FOR ONE CHARACTER SLOT THAT IM GONNA BUY JUST ONE TIME ZOMG!!! A WHOOOOOLE DAY

srsly? you can farm 7-8 gold in one day and your complaining about the cost?

so a one time fee for a lifetime extra slot to make a sixth character (you already got five if you needed an extra slot) of 7 gold is that big of a deal? come on…are you seriously trying to justify to me buying gold from farmers/botters as oposed to from arena net? then you sir, are the reason there ARE bots in game ruining the market and the events for everyone else..

bots are like ear wax,they need to be cleaned every week

Xandax.1753:

Luna.9640:

As many of you may already noticed that there has been a dramatic decrease of bot numbers in past few days (past 2 updates).

I’m really grateful to Anet and all their efforts to remove those as a bot reporting player.

Past 2-3 days i was unable to find a single bot to report while i do my daily Ori Ore grind which made me smile and made my day better.

So i want to thank Anet for the great job and keep it up guys !

P.S. Somehow the overall culling in ORR and WvW has decreased for me with all the bots gone.

I’ve only seen an increase. Yesterday I created a new character and in the very first part after tutorial ran 4 new bots.

Bots get banned. They make new accounts with new ip address. The fact that they were in tutorial area shows they were brand new.

Koreans/Asian bots and the people and the gold selling sites can find work arounds faster then they few people at anet can find them.

Will diminishing returns be removed now there’s less bots?

Bots are banned in Waves. This gives the company(in this case Anet) time to gather useful statistics regarding bot behavioral patterns and ban en masse. The resources it would take to detect and ban every single individual bot would probably require the gross national income of a small country.

Additionally, banning too often, in small increments will push bot farmers to advance the bot technologies much faster, thus making it much harder for future bans.

From my meager knowledge in AI, Anet is doing a fantasic job. Well done

If you can’t see/haven’t seen the huge reduction in bots in the last week or so firsthand, all you have to do is take a look at the prices of the mats and rares they were farming on the tp. There has been a massive reduction in supply – which is great because the bots are gone, but terrible because crafting is 2x as expensive now :\

Do we really need to lump the bots and ethnicity together in these discussion? I’m Asian and I find it quite offensive as there is no proof that all / majority of the bots are Asian / Chinese / Korean / Filipino. Bots are bots. Please stop making it sound like we’re the only group in the world that will break any rules for profits.

Luigio.3265:

/facepalm…i think anet stated somewhere that it doesnt work like that…but i may be wrong on that count…

that said however, its very lovely and all that you want to get everything without spending a dime, but yes, it should take time, and yes it should be tedious and hard, otherwise how the hell do you expect Anet to cover the overhead to run servers,staff to fix bugs, create new content etc. ? they need to sell gems and gold

ZOMG A WHOLE DAY OF FARMING FOR ONE CHARACTER SLOT THAT IM GONNA BUY JUST ONE TIME ZOMG!!! A WHOOOOOLE DAY

srsly? you can farm 7-8 gold in one day and your complaining about the cost?

so a one time fee for a lifetime extra slot to make a sixth character (you already got five if you needed an extra slot) of 7 gold is that big of a deal? come on…are you seriously trying to justify to me buying gold from farmers/botters as oposed to from arena net? then you sir, are the reason there ARE bots in game ruining the market and the events for everyone else..

Hey dude, yea I got a life, I got parents, and everything, so yea, one day of farming like a zerg without time to go to the toilet is a lot. Wasting 7 gold and a day when you also need gold for your legendary and your cultural t3 armor, just for a character slot, that feels bad. Especially when most someone are doing the same with a few dollars.

Not sure you’d be happy to lose your sunday for a character slot.

Look at conversion rate real money – gold in game from Arenanet.
Look at most goldseller websites and see they sell golds way cheaper.
People will buy golds from goldsellers and not gems from Arenanet.
Goldsellers have moneys to buy new accounts or ways (user/pass) to steal accounts to use as bots.

If Arenanet will lower the price of gems from shop to a lower price than goldsellers, there will be less bots. But they are greedy…

redlance.1840:

Look at conversion rate real money – gold in game from Arenanet.
Look at most goldseller websites and see they sell golds way cheaper.
People will buy golds from goldsellers and not gems from Arenanet.
Goldsellers have moneys to buy new accounts or ways (user/pass) to steal accounts to use as bots.

If Arenanet will lower the price of gems from shop to a lower price than goldsellers, there will be less bots. But they are greedy…

1) A-net is not greedy, they built a product, invested the man hours into that product to deliver it to us the consumer, and set the price they felt was appropriate for that product. This is business, and I think they deliver pretty decent value for the $$.

2) Gold sellers are not a market competitor. We’re not talking about a free market competing product. Rolex watches are expensive…. Timex watches are not. If I don’t want to spend the $$ on a Rolex, I can buy a Timex… that’s competition. Me buying a Rolex from a thief because it’s cheaper isn’t a case of be sticking it to Rolex because there’s a competitor with a lower rate, it’s a case of me buying stolen goods. A-net does not need to compete with gold sellers, they need to work on removing their ability to function, which is exactly what they’re doing, and cheers to them for it.

3) By removing the bots, A-net can restore a more natural market value for goods that we as players can farm… which means more gold for our legitimate work, and that translates to us having more gold to buy gems with.

Cheers to A-net, time for me to head back to Orr and get some work done, been too long since I progressed my dreams of T3 cultural armor

I don’t know why some people seem to think gold sellers are the only people who run bots. I am sure a ton of bots are also just players who don’t feel like farming, want to see what they can get away with, like having a program play the game for them while they sleep or go to work, enjoy getting in-game wealth with minimal effort, etc.

Altering the price of gems isn’t going to make bots go away.

redlance.1840:

Look at conversion rate real money – gold in game from Arenanet.
Look at most goldseller websites and see they sell golds way cheaper.
People will buy golds from goldsellers and not gems from Arenanet.
Goldsellers have moneys to buy new accounts or ways (user/pass) to steal accounts to use as bots.

If Arenanet will lower the price of gems from shop to a lower price than goldsellers, there will be less bots. But they are greedy…

Hardly. There isn’t a thing in the gem shop that prevents you from playing the game. For the longest time DDO FREE format required you to buy an item from the cash shop or farm a ridiculous amount of gold to level past a certain point.

You get 5 character slots at creation. If you need more then that you can buy gems are convert gold to gems. By the time you hot 80 on 5 classes you will have enough for the next slot.

So really they are far from greedy requiring nothing from the gem store ever to advance in this game.

No gems need to access content, events, zones are character races/classes.

So go away with your ANet is greedy bullkitten.

what server? I been through 3 different servers already and all’s I see in most place are bots. I just reported 6 the other day, and I still see more. It’s like I report 4 one day and I will see 6 the next day. I sware they multiply when I report them.

is it safe to play ranger? i have not been playing my fem-norn ranger because i am scared i may get picked out while leveling.

i am working on my guardian right now, but almost ready to start on my ranger.

I’d say as long as you don’t run in a circle in one spot all day and don’t have akfgawkga as your name you will be fine.

Hrm, in my opinion Anet wants DR to remain so that if a player gets desperate enough rather than grinding for that nice weapon they will buy it, if they don’t have the funds for it they might entertain the idea of buying gems and exchanging for gold, and thus they make money…course this is just my opinion as to why I think they won’t touch DR and leave it the way it is. No DR they lose a profit margin.

Make everything free. That’ll completely annihilate the gold sellers income, and hopefully they’ll all get their cars repossessed.
It would also make all the hard work the hackers did, coding those sophisticated botting programs, for naught! Then we can point and laugh at those guys too.

I know this would never happen, but it’s still fun to imagine just how bad it would pork the botters and gold sellers.

Keiran.1896:

Yea, bots are getting smarter.

They farm alone, they have a guild, they look like normal guys, but they just do the same thing again and again without responding. The only solution to this is to be able to detect such programs, not to search teams of clones.

The only way to get rid of bots is to destroy the motive behind thier creation. Bots exist because developers design content that rewards the player through time. Time is probably the most precious commodity for us all.

There may be plenty of time for person A but, not enough for person B. That alone creates a market for time.

Keiran.1896:

Luigio.3265:

/facepalm…i think anet stated somewhere that it doesnt work like that…but i may be wrong on that count…

that said however, its very lovely and all that you want to get everything without spending a dime, but yes, it should take time, and yes it should be tedious and hard, otherwise how the hell do you expect Anet to cover the overhead to run servers,staff to fix bugs, create new content etc. ? they need to sell gems and gold

ZOMG A WHOLE DAY OF FARMING FOR ONE CHARACTER SLOT THAT IM GONNA BUY JUST ONE TIME ZOMG!!! A WHOOOOOLE DAY

srsly? you can farm 7-8 gold in one day and your complaining about the cost?

so a one time fee for a lifetime extra slot to make a sixth character (you already got five if you needed an extra slot) of 7 gold is that big of a deal? come on…are you seriously trying to justify to me buying gold from farmers/botters as oposed to from arena net? then you sir, are the reason there ARE bots in game ruining the market and the events for everyone else..

Hey dude, yea I got a life, I got parents, and everything, so yea, one day of farming like a zerg without time to go to the toilet is a lot. Wasting 7 gold and a day when you also need gold for your legendary and your cultural t3 armor, just for a character slot, that feels bad. Especially when most someone are doing the same with a few dollars.

Not sure you’d be happy to lose your sunday for a character slot.

im intrigued…do tell me….wich legendary is that?

the one for one of your other 80s ?

you are telling me that you dont have time to farm for days on end yada yada…

and in the same paragraph you are telling me that you NEED A SIXTH CHARACTER SLOT ……

and then…hehe, then you proceed to tell me that it “hurts especially because others are doing the same for JUST.A.FEW.Dollars”

lol does anyone else see the insanely comical irony here?

You wanna screw with the bots? Pick up some novelty items like fireworks, and drop them in the bots path, they will pick them up, and you haven’t seen funny until you see a train of bots armed with fireworks trying to kill mobs :P

ALSO if you see any bots close to where a champ spawns, lure the champ mob to them, wait for their party to get wiped out…DON’T leave…wait for their “human” handler to appear which they usually do aka the guy monitoring the bots, Report him and BOOM, you seriously screw with their operation.

Fayte.1803:

You wanna screw with the bots? Pick up some novelty items like fireworks, and drop them in the bots path, they will pick them up, and you haven’t seen funny until you see a train of bots armed with fireworks trying to kill mobs :P

BRILLIANT!
time for some epic lulz

This may be just me, or the time, but when I popped in to CS to try out and farm, I saw considerably less people over at pent and shelter wps. Rather happy as it’s easier for me to tag mobs now, and I get better loot. Kinda sad at the price increase again, but I guess it was to be expected. But still annoyed I get terrible gameplay at Orr. (lol at all the OTs XD)

I still see a metric ton of em so not sure why you got lucky.

I’ve had about 20 bots in my friends list for about 3 weeks I did report them at the time I added them to my list.

Then didn’t see them online untill tonight when suddenly 2 reappeared on the account with similar names to the ones I reported (jklsnht/jpklmner, not their real names but like that).

I just have a suspicion Anet MIGHT be giving out week bans, or whatever, not perma bans, for botting, so those in my list are starting to be able to log back in.

Bots are far from gone, they just all moved elsewhere. I don’t see them in starter zones anymore, they are all in orr.

Finaldeath.1059:

Bots are far from gone, they just all moved elsewhere. I don’t see them in starter zones anymore, they are all in orr.

Ah, so thats where they all are. I recently re-installed the game but always read the forums. I hadn’t seen a single bot after hours of play. I’m not saying they don’t exist by any stretch of the imagination but never seen any of the naked ranger/bear trains in the time I’ve played since I re-installed.

I still tend to avoid Orr if possible so been doing DE in lower areas for my karma. I still have an unfinished story in Orr so no doubt I’ll get to see them eventually.

rgrwng.4072:

is it safe to play ranger? i have not been playing my fem-norn ranger because i am scared i may get picked out while leveling.

i am working on my guardian right now, but almost ready to start on my ranger.

My ranger is kind of just hanging out in Black Citadel at level 4.
I figure since he’s not human and as long as I don’t tame a bear, he might be safe, but we’ll see.

haha I kid.
Mostly.

Question: Are players buying gold from 3rd party sources being banned along with the seller acccounts when a ban wave happens?

I am convinced that they cannot stamp out the botting by just banning the bot accounts every other week. Many hacked accounts are abused for botting and even the loss of their own accounts is planned for by the bot owners. But imagine if every other week many gold buyers would be banned too. That would make gold buying to risky for most players very quickly, and when the demand dries up the botting will go down as well simply because it is less profitable.

The downside is the loss of actual customers instead of just bots, I guess, but since the buyers are the true reason for all the bot problems I say good riddance. Maybe if a permanent ban is considered too severe they should get a 1 month suspension. Suspending an account for 24 or 72 hours just doesnt do it, if that happened to me I would just do whatever else in those 3 days, and I might not even notice a 24h ban before it is lifted.

I haven’t seen any gold sellers lately, haven’t pve much so can’t say if there is any change in bots numbers but I do see something being done which makes me really happy.

This is the first ever day I have played all day without seeing a single bot, only good and real player farmers upping their crafting or whatever.

I just hope it stays that way and for me any way the game is 100% better and more enjoyable.

I was wondering if I would ever say this but well done indeed!

You guys also notice after the big banned on the bots, that the prices in TP has went up? You bots can no longer farm the mats you buy at a cheaper place,lol. But I wanna thank Anet for bring out the bann Hammer!! Good job guys :P

Yea love what ANet is doing. I might just not be looking in the right places but I haven’t seen a bot on Jade Quarry in days.

And while I’m sure some are still around, smarter bot AI, and constant human monitoring cuts into their bottom line, and reduces how many bots there are thanks to fewer botting outfits having the resources required. Bots becoming less profitable makes me a very happy person.

Thanks ArenaNet!