Guild Wars 2

I’m a bit skeptical about the ‘permanent solution’ because not even WoW after 7-8 years has dealt with the botting / account security issues completely. It has made a lot of progress but no way is it close to being free from bots / account security issues.

Then again, it still has long maintenance and server queues which GW2 rarely has…

Why does it take an Article for them to reply to a thread? It has been clear that the botting has been an issue and they have neglected the Bot Reports sent in by players. Why do I know this? Because bots are in the same spot 24/7 for weeks and weeks and they don’t do anything about it, even though they get reported by hundreds of players. Listen to your players and stop acting like you are doing something behind the scenes.

/iknowillgetflamedforthisbutthetruthhurts

The game being mostly bot free is considered a success since we know its impossible to ever completely stop. Its good to know they have plans to do more then they have so far because it can be painful to see the same bots for 2 weeks in a row.

I don’t know, I saw a string of a half dozen or more high level ranger bots + juvenile bears tearing across the landscape tonight in a tight pack in the Bloodtide Coast zone on the Tarnished Coast server. Then, in the hour that followed, I received at least 5 gold seller in-game emails. On top of that, I blocked a ridiculous amount of gold spammer chat advertisements in various zones today.

So, I didn’t walk away tonight feeling like a lot of progress has been made. It’s hard when you see X, despite the ban numbers claiming Y. I’m sure there are bans happening, it’s just the impact doesn’t seem obvious enough.

Oh come on…

10,000 bot accounts banned in the last few weeks? Am I to believe this? EVERY zone I go into is FILLED with groups of ranger bots running all over the place.

Great to see a dev response on this. Over 10k is an impressive number, but it’s a big game, so keep up the good work! I think I can speak for many players when I say we’re rooting for you guys to get on top of this problem.

“I’m a bit skeptical about the ‘permanent solution’ because not even WoW after 7-8 years has dealt with the botting / account security issues completely. It has made a lot of progress but no way is it close to being free from bots / account security issues.
Then again, it still has long maintenance and server queues which GW2 rarely has…”

Well, one thing that goes in favor of GW2 is the lack of montly subscription. WoW has EPIC number of bots, but those bots must pay the subscription to even step into the game. So, a permanent solution would actually mean money loss for Blizzard – IF there are more bots than players leaving due to excessive botting happening in the game, which I believe is the case, actually.

It looks like a reply is finally given in the form of damage control. Long live the power of Media.

Please increase the visibility of GMs in the game.

All the bots I have reported are still there for weeks. It feels like nothing is being done, and we never see an ArenaNet employee in-game.

And it is also disheartening to see players that have been reported many times by many people for verbal abuse, are still running free and causing hassle.

Please take these things more seriously.

Last few weeks…not the last week.

if ppl keep buying gold from goldfarmer,bot will be around…

send a mail to all that say something like “our policy about gold farmer have change, all suspicious transaction will be checked and both the seller AND the buyer will be ban. We remind you that you can buy Gems on official website and sell them to other players, wich also help support GW2 !”

and send it once a month ^^

less customer for farmers = less farmers = less bot and even more money for GW2 ^^

the problem ender is that gold sellers offer 5 to 1 rates compared to the gem store, a whole lot of schlubs are willing to go that way because there’s no middle ground in this game. Either somethings ridiculously easy to get or it has a 1 in 10000 chance of coming from the mystic forge. This means if you buy gold you need to do it in bulk making the better rates worth that much more of a risk.

This just in. The bots on Darkhaven have started using krytan warhounds. Those tricksy devils. Don’t let them fool you!

Dear Colin

Let me point you the major difference in your as Arena Net approach.
When I reported bots with screenshots via email in Guild Wars 1 I received:
1. email with information my message was sent to investigation and information it will take about 48h;
2. After those 48h I received email like “hello, we have checked all reported players. On x accounts we have found bots. Those accouns were permanently banned.”
3. Three days later I saw no bots in their farming spots (I checked all the districts).

Now lets take a look at the email I receive in GW2 – blah blah blah use in game system.
Sweet. That’s NCSoft approach of telling me politely to GTFO. I know it well from Aion and definately I don’t want ANet which I respect to get the customer approach from the NCSoft. NCS was capable of making quite huge amount of Aion player base to vow not to touch anything with NCS logo.

The group of bots I reported a month ago is still farming same two mobs in exactly the same place. I know cause I run past them almost every day while gathering materials.

Please don’t tell me my respect for Arena Net as a group of artists, designers, authors (and so on) with real passion for creating games was a mistake.

What really needs to be brought to light, for the sake of all MMO’s, is that the majority of gold sellers are going to take your CC info and either sell it off or use it to buy more accounts. In-game economy impacts seem far more trivial when put in that light. Most MMO companies really need to resort to slander, basically, since after all, it’s only a game.

Thanks for the update Colin. What is being done about gold buyers from 3rd party sites & people who abused early exploits to put the economy in its current state? I.E> Precursor exploiters

Thats good to hear. I just stumbled into the this merry gang of 3 naked
groups of bots with a nice mix of what I presume are hacked accounts
since they have normal names. Never seen a group this large,
must be 40+ bots. I guess they need to that many since they farm a veteran
thats keeps respawning.

DING!…… we got a problem….. many account (like mine) were banned for action involved in gold-selling.

The only thing I did was reporting a mail with inside one copper (in that case the mail was not deletable), I did not took the copper and left the mail inside the box…. now I have the account perma banned.

I can not express my self now.. I’m too much enraged.

So the number 10.000 is pumped of unjustified banned account… I have already opened a ticket, and now I have to wait..

Thank you ….really much…..

seem that the problem is spreading :

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/account/If-your-account-has-been-blocked-suspended-terminated-Read-this/page/3#post565508

@Thesaint – You need to contact support if what you say is true. We have no way of telling and many people will try to justify their actions with stories such as yours. That’s one thing that makes Arenanet’s job in eliminating bots/gold sellers harder than it looks.

@Oceanless – It’s best that the whole forums aren’t taken over with threads about bots. Especially, since nearly all the posts say pretty much the same thing with little comprehension of the real difficulties.

If you have some constructive criticisms or interesting things to discuss about the game, you will find your posts will be fine even if they are critical. But, your above post is neither constructive or likely to lead to interesting discussion, is it?

Anybody who thinks botting isn’t completely out of control come to Borlis Pass for a little while. Pick any random waypoint in a zone above level 20 and I can guarantee you have at least a 50/50 chance of finding the typical rampage of rangers and bears.

I played WoW on and off for years and never saw anything like this. Aside from dead body spam, which was just annoying, this is the worst botting problem I’ve ever seen in a major MMO by a looooooong shot.

Roqoco:
On the other hand, if the forums are flooded with similar posts (no matter if they are constructive or not), that is a statement in it’s own. Yes, it would be great if forums are not taken over with threads about bots – the perfect solution is not to have bots:)

I mean, forums get flooded ONLY when something is critical and important, you won’t see two threads about “why the sword of x is blue, it needs to be green”, let alone ten.

Black Regent:
Have you tried to enter BG’s? To be honest, WoW has more problems with bots than GW2, which doesn’t justify anything of course, but thought I should mention it. I mean, that’s a no brainer in my book, I am actually surprised you put WoW after GW2 in botting.

If truly 10,000 active accounts were banned and still the same DE events and various locations are continually farmed to death by automated or farmer controlled Bot armies and the exact same locations are still staked out by the single character Mob-to-Mob zone-phase-jump-to hack-bots we are in trouble. Greater effort is needed.

Doolio.1865:

I mean, forums get flooded ONLY when something is critical and important, you won’t see two threads about “why the sword of x is blue, it needs to be green”, let alone ten.

I’m not going to mention some of the things that have lead to hysterical reactions, since I absolutely wouldn’t want to reignite those controversies. In this case, though, we all know that it’s annoying and it should be obvious that Arenanet are working on it as quickly as they can. There just isn’t anything to be gained by spamming the forums with identical complaints. Just give them time to fix the problem and then we can all move on.

For every successful bot identified by players… reward with a small amount of gold. Having the community moderating bots won’t be a sure fire solution but it might help to stem the tide a bit and at the very least make players feel more comfortable in the report scheme. I’m sure there are more than enough people who play several hours every day that would be more than willing to jump through a few zones and tag possible bots in exchange for a few gold (for successfully identified bots) rather than actual real world payment. Issues with abuse can be dealt with by only making a handful of players moderators per world. Post the moderator names so that everyone can have access to them and tell them where they have seen bots through whispers/mail.
It’s a pipe dream and unlikely to be implemented but something to think about all the same.

Let’s assume the last few weeks = 3 weeks. Given what 51 servers or so, that’s less then 2 and half botters per server per day that have been banned. That’s not impressive, that’s subpar. The difference between what players are seeing in game and the so called hard stance on botting are obvious. It’s literally impossible to zone into Cursed Shore without finding a bot, if not a whole horde of naked characters doing terrible things with brown bears.

I’m glad botting is getting serious attention. Back in the text-only MUD days, it wasn’t hard to have a script that would bring botting actions to GM’s attention. The botters are generally using a small area and their actions are easy to tag as botting by players. I’m convinced programmers could come up with something that would recognize botting so that there would be no innocents accused.

10k may be an impressive number, but I want to hear that code is in place to catch botters, and I don’t want to run into them every day like I currently do.

Great game, btw ^^

DING!…… we got a problem….. many account (like mine) were banned for action involved in gold-selling.

The only thing I did was reporting a mail with inside one copper (in that case the mail was not deletable), I did not took the copper and left the mail inside the box…. now I have the account perma banned.

I can not express my self now.. I’m too much enraged.

So the number 10.000 is pumped of unjustified banned account… I have already opened a ticket, and now I have to wait..

Thank you ….really much…..

I still have a mail sent to me by some gold farmer that has 1c attached in my inbox as well.

I had it since the 1st week or so. Never touched it so ANet can’ t accuse me of anything.

If they banned you for that situation and if they ban me for that I will REALLLLYY get pissed off.

I can take it only to a certain degree. If companies start behaving like j-a**es I’ ll just leave.

Let´s hope it doesn’t come to that.

I find it entirely unfortunate that no one from ANet found it a worthwhile use of their time to speak to their sluggish response to names which are clearly Racist, anti-Semitic or otherwise. It shouldn’t take months to be dealt with, and it shouldn’t go ignored when formulating a response on the forums either – it just shows poor form, and bad PR.

Everyone needs to understand that Anet is seriously working towards a fix on this issue. not only does it affects players but also the company’s economy. This nightmare will end soon…

Aden

I can’t speak for everyone but for me, gold seller spam has dropped off both in local chats and in-game mail. I’m grateful for that.

ArenaNet admit they have a lot of work to do and that I also agree with (not just on botting but glitching/hacking). We’re 2 months into live, I can wait a little longer.

With all do respect ColinJohanson, have you even read the gamespy article ? What does your numbers mean to us, players, if we login to see samo old names on same spots day by day week by week ?
And im sorry but i have no idea what GM team we are talking about here, since, even if there is 1 GM per server this would not be this big issue as it is now.
Even if you start tomorrow, what about broken economy ?
Lastly, i can understand its hard to deal with bots issue, but i highly disprove how by far more effort is invested into closing anti bots topics (or any type of complain to Anet) and making sometimes silly infractions to posts, then on real issues GW2 have.

Seems to me that you care less for legit players then for boters and hackers. Im sure also you are aware of tools for porting (with locations now) flying, speed hacking, yet still nothing is done ?
You are also aware there are many players with over 10k gold , legendary weapons (i say this coz we all know whats needed to make one) running around , even bragging on lfg , yet they all somehow did made this solo in 2-3 weeks ?
And how this look to others ? I see it as , go hard way and be legit, or google a bit and finish some things “easy” way, no harm will you face.
Im sorry but really i think its time to be true, and deal with this issues.
Ill just quote something :
“You’ve made a grand, grand game……”
Why are you so willing to let it go down ?

It seems like having a few GMs playing the game on each server and hanging out in areas that constantly get reported on these forums for having bots might help. Bots have to have a strategy; it can’t be completely random because that isn’t efficient. I’m sure screen shots help a lot.

Thanks for the update, either way. We’re looking forward to a few weeks from now when your changes are in place!

For more that I love GW2 and I see and respect CM response to this thread, it is indeed a serious problem and Anet took far too long to adress it properly.

If bots were hiding it was one thing, but they are everywhere at 80 zones in plain day light.

I’ve seen more bots than ever recently, so I’m not sure how effective Anet has been. You hired a big group to deal with it, great. You only let us report it in game, which is terribly hard when there are so many in one tightly packed group, any forum post regarding it is quickly locked.

Want a personal tip? take one person out of the new group of people you hired and have them jump around to certain areas where they are prominent and go to town banning. It’s not hard to spot them, takes all of 10 seconds to see they are botting. Now they could “appeal” the ban and that’s fine until you get a system set up for more evidence, but in the mean time you’d be banning 100s if not 1000s of bots in the mean time on a daily basis. I’d even volunteer my free time UNPAID to doing this.

Long story short, you can throw out all kinds of numbers about the amount of bots you banned but when I see more now than before, forgive me if I’m skeptical and don’t believe you.

I really like the advice given by all the excellent “developer wannabe’s” in this forum.

“You only have to send one guy there to get rid of the bots I’ve seen ! It’s not like there are dozens of farm spots on each of the 25 maps on 52 servers to be watched 24/7 lolnubs ! Listen to me I have so much experience in MMO developpement and maintenance !”.

If you guys could see a bit further than the end of your nose you’ll realize that the number of gold selling mails dropped significantly the last 2 weeks, and that the farm spots exploited by the bots are spread in the entire world and are changing all the time. It means accounts ARE banned but there are so many possible locations that it’s too easy for them to avoid IG detection, at least for a while.

And I don’t know why I would bother explaining this to an uneducated public who won’t ever have a clue about the complexity of this topic but automatic bot detection is not something that you can implement in one day, even in one week. You first have to understand the farming technique, then find a way to detect it, imagine a detection algorithm, implement it, and finally test it extensively. Any true negative of your algorithm is an undetected bot and any false positive is someone banned wrongfully, so you better be sure of you.

TLDR ; Be patient omg, it’s an incredibly complex subject for a game like that.

@TheSaint Had such an email also, just 1 copper and the delete button got deactivated. I e-mail them I reported the mail. I asked them via support to please delete the mail. Nothing happend. Didnt get banned either. After months I tried, in my desperation, to return to sender. Didnt work, user was banned probably. So, eventually I took the copper and deleted the mail, just yesterday. Hope I won’t get banned later today.

I suggest Anet to delete messages you report as spam. @TheSaint Did you return to sender?

You can take the copper and delete the mail.

A GM posted it a while ago.

Reihert.1509:

You can take the copper and delete the mail.

A GM posted it a while ago.

Oh thanks for the info, didnt read that. Would be nice if they at least give an auto mail for these kinds of issues.

@Conncept
"

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."

You’re kidding right? This is one of the worst communities ever. Tera is the worst, this would be 2nd worst imo. WoW is nowhere near as bad but does have a lot more kids who talk a lot but for the active subs vs GW2, GW2 is by far worse.

Personally, I’m dubious about the potential success of any automated system for bot detection. People learn how to beat AI all the time and what is a bot detection system but a specialized AI for categorizing players behaviors. I think in the end, you need server cops. They’d be over worked and underpaid most likely, but I think a handful of in game GMs per server and you’d have an anti-bot system that has the potential to adapt as fast as the botters with an army of vengeful angry gamers for spotters. Give them scary in game avatars and people who aren’t botters will run like hell as soon as they seem ‘em while the robots keep running in circles and and GM’zilla crushes them underfoot.

Every big game will have bots… Saying A.Net is imcompetent for not being able to instantaneously block thousands of new accounts being created for this purpose, every week is unfair.

Blizzard has huge resources and yet, I see half of my bg teams being bots every single bg I join. People who come here saying it’s easy, clearly have no clue.

Keep the good job, A.Net. I’m sure you will eventually fix things up. There will always be people with a lack of patience and huge issues with self entitlement. As long as you keep doing your best to have things working up as smoothly as possible and keep communication lines with players open, you will be fine!

I think it would be great if once a character(s) is tagged as botting, they could become targetable, with a big red target shown on the map and could be hunted and killed for all the money and loot they are currently carrying, the catch being, they can’t target you… You could even make it an event worth experience and karma!
Just think how crazy mad the botters would get if they lost everything they were carrying; it would defeat their purpose and perhaps drive them from the game.

The personal blog post linked in the OP seems totally blind to any actual issues the game has.

Bot banning and naming policy? Really? This is why I don’t bother with gaming sites. None of the writers are worth reading.

Maniacal.7384:

10,000 bot accounts banned in the last few weeks? Am I to believe this? EVERY zone I go into is FILLED with groups of ranger bots running all over the place.

What server are you on? I’d like to see a some screens of all these zones you claim are filled with bot herds.

I play on Sanctum of Rall and I only saw one of these ranger/bear herds once and that was a few weeks ago. I haven’t run into any since.

That’s not say the problem doesn’t still exist but I have yet to see any zone ‘filled’ with bots herds.

It would be a nice if they put the impaled bodies of bots (with the banned names) at the Black Citadel or Lion’s Arch or maybe Orr, but that would be a pointless laugh.

Here you go,love. I’m on the Jade Sea server.

Seafarers rest.
In the last 24 hours i’ve been finishing world completion on my latest favourite class.

Whilst doing these i have personally seen near 150 bots in Bloodtide coast, sparkfly fen, cursed shore, frostgorge sound and a few others.

Mainly ranger and warrior, but some have been necro’s, thiefs, gaurdians (i see these bots in WvW water bubble gangs often with rangers) and the odd elementalist, it makes me think that some of these may now be bought/sold accounts.

While i endeavoured to report them all, selecting each one in a group is a pain (and the sheer number of repeated name variations).

Its starting to annoy me that bot removal is so slow that its profitable for the bots to be using exotic weapons…

Not to mention the groups of bots in cursed shore that run around naked obviously botting day in/day out.

Wish there was a way to for them to “proove” 10,000 bots banned because where I and MOST of this community stand there has been NO noticeable difference in decline of bots in this game, in fact. I would say just from observation the exact opposite is true..

If we are so “valued” as customers why don’t you put some “boots” on the ground or rather in the servers… a few Gm’s on for just 8 hours a day could ban enough bots in the heavily exploited DE areas to actually make a NOTICEABLE difference until this “BIG” bot annihilation process gets started.

I mean we all know there is huge unemployment issue in this country…do the country a favor hire a few people and take care of this problem the old fashioned way…a caring helpful Gm community…

This must be a hot topic, 3 pages of reply. I did read the initial GameSpy writeup and remember the first time seeing a train of scantily clothed rangers, seemingly melted together with what seems to be random letter names and brown bear pets. I too was like.. huh.. what the h… One of my guild mates then mentioned that these are bots and explained what they do.
This was a few levels ago but I have to say that since then the gold chat spam and frequency of these bots has diminished somewhat. I am sure A-Net is doing what they can to resolve this. After all, it hurts the games economy and their income.. I see bots still around and do my duty in reporting them, every time. Also, I am not a good money maker in game but refuse to buy gold from them because I love the game and I want it to be around for a long time.
I don’t get too hung up on the ‘blemish’ seeing these bots. Sooner or later we will get rid of them if we all do the right thing..

Ouroboros.5076:

I really like the advice given by all the excellent “developer wannabe’s” in this forum.

“You only have to send one guy there to get rid of the bots I’ve seen ! It’s not like there are dozens of farm spots on each of the 25 maps on 52 servers to be watched 24/7 lolnubs ! Listen to me I have so much experience in MMO developpement and maintenance !”.

If you guys could see a bit further than the end of your nose you’ll realize that the number of gold selling mails dropped significantly the last 2 weeks, and that the farm spots exploited by the bots are spread in the entire world and are changing all the time. It means accounts ARE banned but there are so many possible locations that it’s too easy for them to avoid IG detection, at least for a while.

And I don’t know why I would bother explaining this to an uneducated public who won’t ever have a clue about the complexity of this topic but automatic bot detection is not something that you can implement in one day, even in one week. You first have to understand the farming technique, then find a way to detect it, imagine a detection algorithm, implement it, and finally test it extensively. Any true negative of your algorithm is an undetected bot and any false positive is someone banned wrongfully, so you better be sure of you.

TLDR ; Be patient omg, it’s an incredibly complex subject for a game like that.

Bott detection algorithm’s testing and blah blah blah what else…?

What wrong with the good old Mk1 human eyeball….

You know its an amazing thing the old Mk1 if you use it to ‘’look at things’’ you spot things like BOTS… Speed hackers….. flying hacks…. CHEATS.

You go oh look a guy flying in the game…. teleporting from mob to mob. did we program that into the game.. Hmmm no i don’t think we did… = BAN HAMMER..

Oh look 20 naked rangers all running in a line in a circle path around Orr.. hmm hello rangers.. no reply = BAN HAMMER.

Im sorry but i dont believe a word of what Anet says right now, it’s a horrible thing to say i know and i will apologise if im wrong. BUT…
When i see MORE bots now running around than i did before, and they claim to be baning 10k every few weeks… sorry but i dont believe it.

Get some Mk1 human eyeballs on the ground in the game Anet.

Bots are not the only issue, WvW exploits are starting to ruin it also. I have reported numerous players inside fully upgraded (we have held it for hours) keeps destroying siege. Have noticed players teleporting to bases that are under attack with no waypoint in them. It’s always fun having a queue time in the middle of the day yet when you finally get in there is no one to be found because it’s all bots. It’s to the point now where most of the people have stopped playing WvW on my server because it’s just to rediculous. There was 4 people from the same guild instabuilding 2 superior rams and balista’s cause they were xyz’ng back to camps to grab siege. Reported same group of people about 3 weeks ago when we played against them before and still live and kicking.