Guild Wars 2

Respond to this recent Gamespy article. I think the writer of it was kind of sensationalizing the problem. I also believe ANet is due some criticism on the handling of the bot and racist jerk problems, but this writer makes it sound like there’s going to be a planetary collapse if these problems aren’t addressed in some meaningful way.

Anyway, article link: http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/guild-wars-2/1226506p1.html

I really want to refute what was written in that article, but sadly I can’t. I have seen the exact same stuff happen on my server, though I haven’t found any racist guilds. I love this game and think Anet/NCSoft has a wonderful game, and it’s a shame that despite all the reports those exact same bots are many levels higher and continuing to do the same exact thing weeks after reporting them. It’s getting to the point, of why bother.

Racism? What server is he playing on? This is the nicest group of people I’ve ever played with. If he thinks this game is full of racists and bigots, he better never set foot in any blizzard-owned game as he’ll likely die of shock. Problems with botting on the other hand cannot be denied, but ANet is adressing them, slowly, like they do just about everything.

Honestly , I can’t say I see anything wrong with this article. It addresses issues that players on many occasions have brought up. The difference being ANET can’t close/delete his article. I would recommend ANET also check out this article. I don’t need a response here. From a PR standpoint they can live up to the stance of making a game for their fans to enjoy or they can slide down the same slippery slope Diablo3 did and claim there is no fire while choking on smoke fumes.

The writer of this article must be new to games run by NCSoft because all of their games have these exact issues for the duration of their existence.

Honestly , I can’t say I see anything wrong with this article.

I think the writer of the article is blowing it way out of proportion. Not the problem itself, because it is a big problem, but that it’s like the world-ender of game problems.
I think ANet should also be keeping us abreast more as to what else is being done.

Finally!! I was wondering how long it would take the gaming press to stop kissing Anet’s kitty, and start reporting on the utter mess they have turned this game into.

All you “go play another game…” ostriches will be the downfall of this game if Anet doesn’t stop listening to you soon and start taking care of the problems that are driving MOST of us away in greater numbers day by day.

I don’t see how incompetence isn’t a “world-ending” problem. They’re woefully incompetence and a new player is immediately introduced to it/Existing Players are entrenched in it/Returning players are reminded of it.

Only response you will get is “Please continue helping by reporting bots. Just to remind you, there´s the in-game tool to do so.
Thank you very much for your help.”

I honestly don’t think it’s incompetence. These guys aren’t the rest of NCSoft and everything I’ve seen and read makes me still believe that, but I think we, the community that has bought this game and put faith in their words, should be kept better informed. Developing solutions isn’t always fast, but a ‘yes, we know it’s getting bad, but we’re working on it’ would be nice.

@tasaunders (Because the quote button is missing)

I wasn’t taking about JUST the bots/lack of guild filtering but about all the issues- the bots just happen to be a very visible one.
One that really grinds me is the amount of necro bugs (way over 100 with skills/traits that did/do nothing aka completely broken). It bothers me because I have worked in software development in the QA side of things all my life. It boggles the mind that they released something in that state and weren’t even aware of it.
Ok, personal rant over.

tasaunders.3746:

Respond to this recent Gamespy article. I think the writer of it was kind of sensationalizing the problem. I also believe ANet is due some criticism on the handling of the bot and racist jerk problems, but this writer makes it sound like there’s going to be a planetary collapse if these problems aren’t addressed in some meaningful way.

Anyway, article link: http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/guild-wars-2/1226506p1.html

The author is wise. There is a reason for the insanely high failure rate of MMORPG games and the story goes something like this

• Game studio spends millions of dollars and several years developing game

• Game studio spends nine months testing game and believes they have ironed out critical bugs and exploits

• Game releases to high sales volumes and balancing issues and exploits surface very quickly.

• Game studio is still riding high from the praise revived from positive reviews, puts a sizable number of resources on fixing the problems. Their confidence remains high in the product they delivered. So exhausted from just getting across the finish line they don’t pay attention to or simply don’t have enough resources to deal with the huge problems at hand.

• Hackers ramp up as well. Creating new exploits as soon as old ones are patched. They exploit critical parts of the game such as PvP.

• Players in the meantime find non-exploit general balancing issues the game studio didn’t find during beta testing, they begin using these combination which start to dampen the fun (e.g. what sPvP meta has become) this forces the studio to tap additional resources

• General bugs continue to be a problem

It is critical that a game not ship before it’s ready. It critical in the same way it’s critical for an ocean liner not to go out to sea before it’s construction is complete, because when the water starts to come in from the cracks you can only fly in so many engineers. The level that water is rising at becomes out of control and it the ship can’t be saved. This is what happens with so many MMORPGs. There are a lot of signs it’s happening now with GW2. I assume the author wrote his article hoping to sound the alarm

Actually no, its not critical in the way an ocean liner not go to sea before construction is complete because games bugs don’t kill people.

@Dibrom – I see what you mean now. Funnily enough I’m leveling a necro now. The class had to grow on me but yeah, there’s some problems with it.

@SamTheGuardian – I don’t disagree with you, or the author. I just didn’t feel it’s as tremendous of a problem, but now that you put it that way, yeah…maybe I’m just getting numb to it. I really hope the devs aren’t leaving us to drown.

Goldsellers, botters, speedhackers are everywhere. If you played the game for a decent amount of time, you’ll realize that it isn’t just a problem that you can ignore. Well at the least I can’t, I’m not sure if aNet thinks the same way I do.

I have heard reports that 40% of the pop use a bot. (some say higher). Even if you think it is lower 1/3 is a bot having an unfair advantage in gaining mats,money,kills ect.
It has gone the point of no return unfortunately. This started with Anets poor security and they allowed all those hacked accounts to run. It took them 1 month to get set out and add a slightly more robust security log in then of course they blame us Lol.

They have shot themselves in the foot and since they put all their time into Spvp and esports stuff and didnt bother about the hacks I wonder what is left. You cant have a viable esport when your game is hacked by mass minority.
My solution is to legalize it and remove the market or turn the gem pricing over to the players so we can price the goldsellers out.

It has gotten to the point now that I will just move on to another games and make sure I never buy another Anet or NC Soft product. There was such praise for GW1.

The person writing this article must never have played Runescape. The botting problems in that game make GW2’s look like nothing. It was the same story there except worse…streams of bots running around in groups farming materials, etc. People were reporting them and the problems kept getting worse. Frustration was at peak levels with posts all over the forums. To their credit Jagex finally got the bot situation under control in Runescape and are continuing to stay on top of it. Botting is big business … companies exist to create, market and update their bot programs. Botting programs are used by many people. As soon as a gaming company puts an anti-bot program into the game, the bot programmers are hard at work on updates to circumvent the games anti-bot program. The worst part is that it’s often difficult to bring any legal action against the bot programming companies. So what is a gaming company to do? The solution is not a simple one. Banning botters only gets rid of them temporarily. They always come back. So there’s no permanent solution.

I agree that ANET needs to stay on top of this issue or it will get much worse. I’m sure they must be working on an anti-bot program. But from what I saw with Runescape, it will take a while to develop an effective program that’s not easy to circumvent. In the meantime ignore the bots and enjoy the game because it could be worse.

Narkosys.5173:

I have heard reports that 40% of the pop use a bot. (some say higher). Even if you think it is lower 1/3 is a bot having an unfair advantage in gaining mats,money,kills ect.
It has gone the point of no return unfortunately. This started with Anets poor security and they allowed all those hacked accounts to run. It took them 1 month to get set out and add a slightly more robust security log in then of course they blame us Lol.

They have shot themselves in the foot and since they put all their time into Spvp and esports stuff and didnt bother about the hacks I wonder what is left. You cant have a viable esport when your game is hacked by mass minority.
My solution is to legalize it and remove the market or turn the gem pricing over to the players so we can price the goldsellers out.

It has gotten to the point now that I will just move on to another games and make sure I never buy another Anet or NC Soft product. There was such praise for GW1.

the price of gems is already in control of the players. did you not notice the spike as haloween started? that was caused by people buying gems for keys.

@tasaunders:

It’s called sensationalism/nerd baiting. By making the problem sound worse then it is, they encouraged people to talk about, direct others to the artical, whitch means more ad revenue for them.

I don’t care about bots at all. Its a strange sight for sure but bots don’t affect me in the least.
Using a bad server community as an example for a game being bad is just moronic. Maybe the customer support is slow to deal with bots and racist idiots in the USA, thats an issue with customer support not the game itself. In addition I can’t share his experience playing on a european server at all.
Germany being one of the few nations worldwide banning racism and deeming it unacceptable, there isn’t much racism either. So far, in my online gaming time, the most racist people were from other contintens than europe and especially not other germans.
Although I don’t understand why ArenaNet won’t utilize datamining to spot such unusal behavioer. It should be the simplest thing to write a software pointing towards the pattern of behavior botted gameplay has. Once pointed towards a dedicated CSR could ban the account.
In fact this article is so biased and lacking in logic, one might think hey was paid to write it by companies fearing ArenaNets quality product.

It is crazy that the cases of racism have been ignored. No excuse for that.

As far as the bots go, yes it makes ANet look stupid, but it also doesn’t affect me at all. Their existence doesn’t decrease the amount of loot I get, they don’t HARM my game experience, etc. The game economy is completely borked with overpriced gold sinks all over the place at the moment, so the TP/economy issues stemming from bots are inconsequential at the moment to ME.

What’s really surprising to me is that ANet hasn’t done more about the botting in light of the fact that they stand to lose a lot of income from gold sales as a result of the bots being able to produce it for so cheap.

However:
I think the more important thing for ANet to be worried about is their lack of addictive end-game. I RP so that’s a massive end-game all its own, but the vast majority of players don’t. If it wasn’t for RP I would, without any doubt, have long ago become tired of the game and moved on to something else. I have spent well over 50% of my game time RPing since the day after launch, and yet I’ve still managed to obtain an entire set of exotic armor, and every exotic weapon that my main is capable of using.

Running the same old cycle of events in Orr holds no interest of mine at all.

It takes time to ramp up customer support and the number of issues this close to launch is likely to be much higher than it is when the game settles in. In any case I’ve seen a lot less offensive names in Guild Wars 2 than in many other more established games.

Recently, I needed to contact support with a minor issue and they were very responsive, friendly and fixed my problem extremely quickly.

I was about to try this game again bought it played to lvl 8 stopped everytime i login i have spam mail and i dont even know anyone in game yet i stil l gold spam..

once i saw that screenshot i was like holy kitten botting is that bad ya there is bots in WoW but it is no where near as that bad and obvious….

the main number 1 problem and solution to fixing botting for all MMOS is China they are the Number 1 reason all these bots exist greedy chinese always trying to do anything at all to make some money it really is sad and the chinese goverment could care less

I think mmos should just block china from connecting at all tell they get these kitten gold companies shut down… but ya that will never happen and i now think guild wars 2 will just die bots will take over the game and no one will play anymore

Lets all be honest no matter what game you play or what company are running it they have the same issues.

Having played the blizzard game i know for a fact they still have major bot issues and ingame gold selling it has been since it started. And as for rift they have the same issues to this day.

We all know that yes the majority of gold sellers etc do come from china or that area and even trying to stop them by geo locking them out of the game wont help as they will find a way around that.

This is not game company related it the players who buy the services from these people that are the issue, me personally i feel they should be banned when found just the same as the bot or gold seller and let them cry after if the proof is there then let them try and sue they would lose.

As for the racist issue i have not seen it in game yet but would not hesitate to report anyone for racist remarks names etc as this is not needed in this day and age.

Personally I haven’t encountered any bots yet, but I can’t peak for others so we’ll leave that for now.

When the guy started whining about someone being called Goebels, though, it just started reading like a Daily Mail article and I lost interest.

BAN THIS SICK FILTH.

Sure this is a problem, and it should be adressed.

But Guild Wars 2 is not the only game with this problem.

The writer is exaggerating this a lot. Even though it is a problem, it’s not as bad he’s making it out to be, and Guild Wars 2 is far from the only game, or even the game with most botters in it.

One word for that article: sensationalism.
Who cares about bots, it’s not like they can do anything to me; anet will deal with them in time.

Red Falcon, so bots won’t be able to farm items into oblivion and reduce the value of your drops/collectables to almost nothing? I’m joining your server. No wait, the TP is global, doh! :P

I don’t think this problem is specific to GW2 though, I mean look at BF3! That game was ruined for so many honest gamers because of the scumbag hacks (and EA’s greed) like aimbots etc. We seem to live in an era where kids unwilling to get better and put time and effort into games and improve will instead use bots, hacks and aimbots. Sad state of affairs.

I blame the X-Factor lol

Red Falcon.8257:

One word for that article: sensationalism.
Who cares about bots, it’s not like they can do anything to me; anet will deal with them in time.

Agreed, they are putting their resources into a permanent solution. Saying that, i saw a fresh new wave of bots farming at shelters gate in cursed shore… went back there last night and they were all gone.

“Lets all be honest no matter what game you play or what company are running it they have the same issues.”

Lets be more honest and realize that not all games have these issues to the same extent, that it does matter how widespread these problems are in a particular game, and that GW2 has a large number of bots.

Since its accurate, what is there to discuss? And farmers running bots are for the most part coming from Asian regions. So what’s there to say? I’ve never seen the trains of bots but I have seen plenty of Rangers named “ghdurksms”, who run mechanical circles endlessly.

A solution? No shared TP and region restricted servers. It also solves the WvW debacle.

To be fair not all servers are plagued as the article describes, I play on Desolation and I consider myself lucky because I’ve never seen so many bots.

I know it’s impossible to completely eradicate bots from a game, I certainly hope that ANet will find a way to hold their numbers, but I think that the problem starts with players, precisely with some naive player.

The article addressed only the tip of the iceberg, the visible side of the problem, what lies behind the “scenes” is described in one of the latest comments made by FM_Staalker:

These gold farmers advertise, and some stooge is tempted. He visits the site and buys. More than half the time, he won’t get his purchase, and even if he does they have his CC info. Now they use that info to buy as many accounts as they can at once without setting off red flags.

Now I cant know for sure if he’s being honest or not, but what he says sounds very likely to me.

My personal experience as a netgamer is almost 20 years long and I’ve never had an account security problem, on the other hand I had several friends whose accounts were stolen and consequently banned shortly after they bought gold online.

I can understand the reasons who pushed some of my friends to buy gold, being a student with heavy schedules, a full time job and/or a family can annihilate one person’s free time.
I understand that, but I never did it myself, I allways thought that I was playing games for fun, if my time was not enough to partecipate on some of the activities then it was time to find some less time-consuming. Vanilla wow riders will know what I’m talking about (yes I played wow, kitten me, right?:)).

What I will never understand is how people decides to buy gold from a totaly unsafe service when they have a scamfree Gem Shop.
Yes they might save 1 dollar/euro, but that’s nothing compared to the money they lose from getting their account and possibly CC stolen.

I think ANet is overwhelmed with bugs and fixes going past betas only to surface once the game went live thanks to the higher number of players, but I am confident that they can halt bots spreading because i’ve heard they had a particulary aggressive philosophy in GW1.

In the meantime I wont hold my breath, i’ll keep reporting bots and from now on I’ll take screens too as FM_Staalker says in his comment on GameSpy’s article:

For Guild Wars 2, make sure you take a screenshot every time you see these bots, and report them. You can attach screenshots to your report, but you might want to post the screenshot on the forums too, and list the link to it in the report.

I will keep reporting, but ANet has to to know that my patience is limited: any time i see the same bots it shrinks a little bit, it will take quite some time untill I run out of it, but that amount of time is not endless.

Wise game publishing company once said…

Piracy is a service issue, if you provide better service people will come to you instead of the pirate – Valve.

Look at they’ve become from lowly Half Life to now…

Anet… lacks.. customer service.
Sorry to say but it feels that way.

Undocumented nerfs.
Updates go up on reddit first then on Guildwars2.com

Hellkaiser.6025:

Ignore the name

There is a sizable difference between someone calling themselves AdolfH or AdolfHIT (which is still in very bad taste) and an entire guild running around with the name kitten Slayer/KKK

Sure it’s likely a bunch of kitten kids ‘getting away with it’ and giggling to themselves but that sort of crap should be squashed.

Had ANet jumped on it immediately, that article wouldn’t have had that portion in it and X number of readers would have been LESS upset.

All aside from the fact that its socially offensive. I don’t stand on the proverbial soapbox but if a company won’t/can’t address something like that decisively, I won’t play it. If I and the other 5K people like me don’t play it, there are 5K less potential gem sales on any given day.

Our team is working on anti-bot tools and we hope that this sort of issue will soon™ be greatly reduced if not eliminated. In the meantime, please click on the bot and use /report to submit a report. Thank you.

Only answer you’ll ever get.

What’s this I’m hearing about rascism??

The LZ.7891:

What’s this I’m hearing about rascism??

Read the article linked in the OP on gamespy.

Can’t say it bothers me.

While botting and racist nonsense definitely exist, I can’t say either of these does anything to impact or somehow “ruin” the experience. It’s just a minor annoyance now. It’s not like ANet is inactive either – you’ve seen their reports, they ban these people by the thousands each day.

I consider narrow FoV (which they’re on route to fixing) to be a bigger issue than this. Because, you know, it’s much more annoying than some naked ranger somewhere having [censored] with a bear [censored] for gold that I get just for [censored] as usual.

Conncept.7638:

Racism? What server is he playing on? This is the nicest group of people I’ve ever played with. If he thinks this game is full of racists and bigots, he better never set foot in any blizzard-owned game as he’ll likely die of shock. Problems with botting on the other hand cannot be denied, but ANet is adressing them, slowly, like they do just about everything.

I personally reported a lot of users using n***er pretty frequently the first week or two on map chat, but haven’t seen any issues like that since. I’d guess anet is either doing better filtering or has dealt with the problem sufficiently well.

For what it’s worth, slowly addressing the botting issue isn’t good enough. It ruins the economy and causes players to quit playing since it’s not a level playing field. They can fix the problem a month from now, but it could be too late by then since half the pop (or more) will be gone and the value of most things will have tanked.

There is definately some hyperbole in this article. HOWEVER, I can’t argue with the premise of it at all. The bot situation will drive many away including myself. Every game has them, but NCSOFT titles are notorious for being the worst at getting a handle of large populations of bots. Do something soon, or do not—that will determine how long I play this game along with content updates that are worth my time.

100 % Right ! ! ! !

In fact I think I have a better chance of getting banned way before the bots do . Every post I’ve responded to on this subject has gotten me a infraction. So this will be one more added on .

I’ve spent hours of my game time reporting bots instead of playing and nothing ever changes beside getting a infraction having fanboys tell to shut the f up that you’re a lying newbie who can’t play .

I just don’t get it? On other mmo I’ve played players and server all worked hard trying to weed out these scum from the game . But seems to be the other way around ?

Its a the subject Anet does not want spoken about ! So shhhhhhhh if we pretend its not there it will go away !

That other game uses the warden system. Wonder if Anet has it within themselves to come up with such a system for this game? Will help go a long way towards longevity and health of GW2 imo.

The author’s main point, the botters does indeed still seem to be growing strong. But there was a comment in the article that makes sense that there is a due process, and that these botters often manage to make 3 accounts (with stolen cards) in the time it takes for them to kill one.

To deal with the botters I’m thinking ANet needs to take a more extreme measures.

Put moderators ingame. Either players that can be trusted, or the employees that already play the game (note that many take their arenanet tag off to not be bothered). Give them the ability to either outright ban a player, or make reports that go to the top of the report queue. While otherwise being normal players.

I have played MUDs where that kind of setup worked wonders, a mini-mod could enter a room, see some mechanic or another being exploited and issue a temp or permanent ban right then and there. It worked great even when the offender could just change their IP to circumvent it, imagine if they had to shell out $60 every time. Due process is good in a general sense, but there are times when it just gets in the way. These bots aren’t even trying to hide from the ’law’, we need a few Judge Dredds around to skip a few steps in due process.

---
The author also mentions racism though. I saw a bit of that back in the beginning, but it was only on the level that still permeates WoW to this day. And I haven’t seen anything I recognized as being racist since then. That harsh wave of bans near the beginning that everyone freaked out about was a godsend.

summary: Botting is a problem, bigotry is pretty much gone or very subdued. Arena Net can ban who they want when they want and everyone playing has agreed to that. We need Judge Dredd.

“There is a sizable difference between someone calling themselves AdolfH or AdolfHIT (which is still in very bad taste) and an entire guild running around with the name kitten Slayer/KKK

Sure it’s likely a bunch of kitten kids ‘getting away with it’ and giggling to themselves but that sort of crap should be squashed.

Had ANet jumped on it immediately, that article wouldn’t have had that portion in it and X number of readers would have been LESS upset.

All aside from the fact that its socially offensive. I don’t stand on the proverbial soapbox but if a company won’t/can’t address something like that decisively, I won’t play it. If I and the other 5K people like me don’t play it, there are 5K less potential gem sales on any given day"

The guild name is a different matter, KKK is not inclusively the racist organisation the Klu Klux Klan, otherwise aside from the juvenile laugh one can derive from it we’d all be held accountable and possibly banned from replying “kkk” in chat meaning ok times three that is. If they’re promoting racial hatred then by all means get in there and shut them down, and if there are laws being broken make sure the authorities are notified, but I always tend to focus on the HATE and not the RACIAL motivator behind it if ya get me? the monicker KKK might to many incite racism, but only as long as we as a society allow it to and given it’s simply an acronym I’d leave it be unless it was blatantly populated by names synonymous with race hate crimes and thus a big ol fat obvious troll guild.

I’m not defending those with these attitudes, I despise them as much as the next guy, but it’s attention seeking and pathetic as well as juvenile and should be dealt with QUIETLY, QUICKLY and in a manner that gives it as little attention as it deserves.

Reporting this KKK/* SLAYERS named guilds is all you need do, giving them attention which they clearly crave wasn’t exactly very clever as that’s clearly what they’re trying to achieve with the guild.

edit: I fail to see how my first and now deleted post, was in any way less “contributory” than 80% or more of the other posts, the mind boggles…
I dunno, try and steer people towards the best possible alternative to giving juvenile trolls attention and you get infractions…

As for the botting comments, I trust A-net to deal with them and have never stated otherwise, but the message they are sending to the community is not one of trustworthy transparency and that NEVER comes across as good in between stages of dealing with the problem, take a good luck at the D3/Blizzard debacle to see just HOW much rubbish it generates. That is an opinion based from experience take it or leave it Mods.

I dont think Anet minds them all that much. They find them, they ban them, they get another 60 bux when they buy a new box. How much money do you think Anet has made off these guys buying boxes everytime they get banned?

Assuming they dont have some way to get free accounts without buying the box, beyond hacking a buyers account.

A recently released Harris Interactive study confirms that a bad customer service experience with your company is enough to make a majority of consumers run for the hills. The study reported that 80% of 2,049 US adults surveyed decided never to go back to a business/organization after a bad customer service experience. The study clearly indicates that an organization’s customer service level is a defining factor that will make or break a company.

Consumers have increasingly higher expectations of businesses and are willing to walk away quickly from a majority of businesses if they are not met. Although a business may be attracting new customers the key to growth is being able to retain your existing customers while attracting new customers. The Harris study reflects how great customer service can significantly contribute to a company’s growth. Its
findings indicated that 51% of consumers cited outstanding service as the reason that they continued to work with a company

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/820862

Gamespy’s article just points out what everyone else has discussed in the forums. The longer ANET decides to sit on their collective thumbs, the more likely the above article and excerpts will apply to them.

I don’t understand why Anet doesnt have ppl to patrol the zones looking for bots or hackers. EQ had GM and Guides. You never knew if they were near by. And if someone reported something, it was generally handled soon. Thats just one example of things some games have done to deal with issues like these.

Bots by themselves wont kill the game…but it sure will contribute to it.

KKK is the equivalent of LOL in portugese from what i was reading. The fact that this game has people from across the world makes it easy for people to have a misunderstanding of the language differences. KKK, for the ku klux klan, is really only an american thing.

The fact that the author mentions they were probably chinese is based on statistical facts. Gold Selling companies, who are the main employers of bots, are most often based out of china. It’s not racist to assume the people being botting are based it china. It is racist if they said they’re chinese, so they must be botters/gold famers.

The worst part about the bots, and the reason it is so hard to stop them, is because 90% of those accounts are bought with stolen credit cards.

It’s true. When I was working as online security consultant for Atari in reference to Star Trek Online, just before the PWE sell, I found evidence that well over 90% of the accounts reported for “gold spam” were actually bought with a stolen credit card.

In less than half of the instances, the charges that activated the accounts were never reported as fraudulent. And the way that credit card investigation works, the account will be set up and authorized for months in many cases before the charges are reversed. Some CC companies don’t even contact the vendor about the fraud, they just write it off.

I know with STO, getting ahead of the fraudulent accounts was like getting ahead in a footrace with your laces tied together. Everytime you shut down an account, three more appeared in it’s place.

These gold farmers advertise, and some stooge is tempted. He visits the site and buys. More than half the time, he won’t get his purchase, and even if he does they have his CC info. Now they use that info to buy as many accounts as they can at once without setting off red flags.

Some of these vendors, like Atari, didn’t have tracking software that flagged it when someone bought multiple accounts at once. Many companies, like Blizzard, do have tracking for it. You buy three or four accounts at once and see if you don’t get an email for verification before they activate. You should.

I agree that bots are a nuisance. But they aren’t exactly easy to stop. A-net should make their first effort to inform players that you can buy gold in game using gems. And that buying gems from A-net is going to be cheaper, and 100% safe compared to buying from some gold seller.

That would do a lot to start. When players don’t buy gold, the gold spammers/farmers are easier to shut down. First, they won’t have new CC info to use to make new accounts. Second, they get reported and lose the accounts they do have, because there will be fewer of them to sift through.

You can never get rid of them completely, because honestly there are too many idiots out there who just give out CC and personal info without a second thought.

But you can do much to reduce it.

For Guild Wars 2, make sure you take a screenshot every time you see these bots, and report them. You can attach screenshots to your report, but you might want to post the screenshot on the forums too, and list the link to it in the report.

That usually helps them see visually without trying to sift through data to prove someone is a bot or not.

Screenshots work wonders, in most cases, and make it much easier to “prove” the guilt that just a report.

I too hope that A-net gets this under control. Not only because of the reasons the author listed, but because the longer it goes unchecked, the more likely that accounts get stolen and more and more security incidents begin to happen.

quoted from the page’s reply,really informative one

Awesome reply on the botting issue!

10k bots banned last week is a great track record, keep it up

Honestly, there is botting in every game out there, and especially MMOs – and Arenanet definitely does more to fight botters than Blizzard.