Guild Wars 2

I was going to say something infraction-worthy, but then I read Johanson’s post in this thread, and changed my mind. Communicating with your players is a really good thing. That’s all I want to add to this, now.

Good to hear that there will be improvement within the next few weeks.

I have still noticed some really clear bot groups on Gandara-server. Here is video example of them in Sparkfly Fen (UI disabled due code of conduct rules): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPvr4Sqf5CI

I tried to report as many as I could, but it is hard to notice which ones you have already done.

Suggestion: player names that you have reported appear different color or has small icon for a while. Something to make it easy to see who you reported and who not even when they pile up.

Bots: I’m on record in a few threads as saying I believed bots were a major problem. That said, either because of the bans, or my server transfer some time back, I’ve seen a fraction of their kind.

Racism: zero tolerance is the only answer. One off racist language is the act of a knucklehead and should be dealt with, in the manner it has been. However, giving a guild a racist name, kids goofing around or not, is an aggressively hostile act. Least of which because it involves numbers.

Not dismissing any legitimate problems, but all this talk about botting and such? Yeah botting is a problem that needs to be dealt with, but how on earth is everyone butthurt about it?

500 hours into the game. I’ve received goldseller mails. I tell you what though, after the first 3 weeks i have had ZERO. Botting? Not even noticed any. How would a bot impact gameplay in PVE? Not at all. Dungeons? Nope? WvW i could see it being a problem.

I just don’t see how this many people seem to be mad about bots when in the majority of the game they don’t even affect anything. Yes it’s a problem. The point is though Anet are dealing with it. That’s as far as we should be concerned.

So can anyone actually tell me why not to bot ? I do not say i support this but if you think of it :
1. Bots get tons of gold and can work wile u do other stuff, like , sleep/work/school.
2. Bots do not get removed from game, they are free to farm.
3. Bots , by some count can make 50-100k karma per day and from 100-200g , per bot.
4. Unrelated to boting , some tools let play char port all over world in instant. Even coordinates for all points are there.

So if i wonna get legendary, why not simply let bot do it for me wile i sleep ?

Is this all right with everyone ? Is this common thing now ?
We ALL know this happens, we know ppl having over 20k gold in pack (must be from legit play) and no one is doing anything.

Something is really wrong here and i feel like no one really care.

@kiranslee For the same reason you don’t rob a bank or store to get easy cash.

@Tosha Daydreamer.9251

There is difference, if u rob bank, and take a bag of money with u in middle of town and brag about it, u will PROLLY get arrested.

ah cool..missed this thread and the article…thank goodness its being raised here in forums cause it fills up PVE chat all day and IS a huge issue.

The sheer number of bots makes it so that you can’t even “see” the enemy mobs at times, not to mention affects fps. Local/Map chat has people yelling at other people for res’ing Bots and people upset for not being res’d as ppl though they were a Bot, not to mention numerous racial/nationality based conflicts over who’s behind most the bots.

All in all its a total mess and getting worse….Anet says…

“What we don’t want to do is have someone report you as botting, we ban the account, the bot appeals, and we have no data to prove they were botting on file so we have to give them the account back. Ensuring we have 100% clear data on bots that’s incredibly easy for our GM team to quickly verify, and when an appeal is submitted verify within seconds if the person was truly botting is our most important goal. We don’t want to ban people who were not botting, and we want to keep the people who are permanently locked out.

Bottom line: We’re doing ok, but we know we can and need to do much better on this front and are putting massive resources behind ensuring we have a permanent solution to this issue"

Well if you think you are “doing ok” then you need a quick sharp reality check…try playing the game…you are not “doing ok”, the situation is “Not Acceptable”…nothing “ok” about it.

You have a GM team? whats does your acronym mean? Not what I or the gaming community are used to surely…I have never seen a GM in game, have no way of contacting one in game nor seen evidence of their work in game….we have dozens of bots sitting at locations round-the-clock , sticking out like sore thumbs…be an easy job for a GM to identify them (unless he/she is blind/a bot/or non-existant).

So how about…

(1) Keeping the communication lines open with regular updates on this (and other) cirtical matters

(2) Acknowledge that the situation is “Not Acceptable”, therefore “not ok”, nor are you “doing ok”

(3) Getting a solution in place in a “timely” manner…no excuses around “second guessing” or “ensuring it works in an effective and efficent manner”.

If you as a player haven’t been affected by bots then lucky you..they are causing huge issues for 1000’s of players across the game though , not to mention what they do the in-game economy, the people whose credit cards these people steal etc etc…

Anet say its a major concern, cool! however its their perception on their performance to date and completely lackluster efforts to date that have me worried.

Kiranslee

@Tosha Daydreamer.9251
There is difference, if u rob bank, and take a bag of money with u in middle of town and brag about it, u will PROLLY get arrested.

Oh sorry I must have missed all those botters bragging on official forums they’re botting and not getting banned.

The truth is more nuanced.
1/ I didn’t get a single spam email in the last month
2/ I was late to the party at 80 but I haven’t seen a single bot. Not in Sparkfly Fen, not in WvW, not in Cursed Shore. As far as I’m concerned, bots don’t exist in this game.
That’s Far Shivs.

I do see how botting is a big problem, however don’t forget botting is almost invariably on stolen accounts. The best way to combat bots is to do the following:
1/ get a strong password. There is currently a 100 character limit. Make use of that by using a long sentence from an obscure song or speech, complete with punctuation and capitalization, preferably not english. Polish or French are good because of accent abuse.
1.1/ do not use this password anywhere else
2/ get a unique google email address only for GW2 and set up IP authentication for this account. Have a unique password distinct from the GW2 password
2.1/ have this account 2-factor over your mobile phone.

Next you can accept your local IP for both gmail and gw2 and not worry about it anymore. It takes half an hour at most, but given a dungeon takes half an hour too, what would be more important right now?

I am 99% confident that I could post both my GW2 and gmail password right now and not have my account stolen. That means I just eliminated one potential bot from the game and a potential of 100g that could be sold.

The article is not terribly off the mark, imo. Other opinions will naturally vary.

kiranslee.4829:

So can anyone actually tell me why not to bot ? I do not say i support this but if you think of it :
1. Bots get tons of gold and can work wile u do other stuff, like , sleep/work/school.
2. Bots do not get removed from game, they are free to farm.
3. Bots , by some count can make 50-100k karma per day and from 100-200g , per bot.
4. Unrelated to boting , some tools let play char port all over world in instant. Even coordinates for all points are there.

So if i wonna get legendary, why not simply let bot do it for me wile i sleep ?

Is this all right with everyone ? Is this common thing now ?
We ALL know this happens, we know ppl having over 20k gold in pack (must be from legit play) and no one is doing anything.

Something is really wrong here and i feel like no one really care.

The why not bot argument is just silly. Why do you play according to the rules in chess? Why do play football according to the rules? Games are ruined if you break the rules, fun is spoiled for the people who do like to follow the rules of the game. Like bots inflating the market such that a legit will never be able to collect enough gold to buy a special weapon.

With people using bots, the market and game shift so that the only people that can participate are the ones that follow the same path. I don’t buy games to let the PC play for me (excepting games that are more about AI design..), I buy games to play with or against others.

Those that choose to cheat with bots violate a standing social contract with the playerbase, and violate their contract with ArenaNet. Remember that the USDoJ wanted to make it a FELONY to go beyond access limitations, and in this case being found to cheat in any way could be classified as a felony prosecuted by the government, not just ArenaNet.

Granted, not everyone lives in the US, I understand that, but it’s a sign that people are starting to have enough of this kind of behavior- mainly in commerce, but games and social networks too.

So the fact that u can use bots and hack , and not get ban is completely ok right ? As is fact that to anet, boters/hack users are same as i , who try play legit. Since u all chose to ignore this problems i guess you deserve game as it is .

kiranslee.4829:

So the fact that u can use bots and hack , and not get ban is completely ok right ? As is fact that to anet, boters/hack users are same as i , who try play legit. Since u all chose to ignore this problems i guess you deserve game as it is .

I would hope you had a little more integrity than that. Cheating is an ethical problem in which one is unwilling to play a game fairly. Sure, cheating in a singleplayer game wouldn’t hurt anyone, but when you play in an MMO, you are impacting every other player in the game in every server.

kiranslee.4829:

So the fact that u can use bots and hack , and not get ban is completely ok right ? As is fact that to anet, boters/hack users are same as i , who try play legit. Since u all chose to ignore this problems i guess you deserve game as it is .

Where did anyone say it is okay or that bots and hackers should not get banned? Au contraire, everyone’s complaining. And I did not read anywhere that to anet, hackers and bots are the same as regular players. No, they have recruited an entire team solely dedicated to stopping bots. So either please provide me with some quotes to support your statement or stop putting words in other peoples mouths.

That I am willing to give Anet a little bit more time to solve this problem, does not mean I am ignoring it. (since I know how difficult it can be, having been a game admin for a popular browser game myself a few years ago. Even there bots were everywhere, and whenever a new tool was implemented to detect them, the bots adapted themselves. It’s a never-ending battle).

Posting this here since mod sent me here

Are players getting punished because of bots or was it intended? Yknow, the Anti Farming Code and AoE only hitting a max of 5 people. Was that because of Bots or just because that’s what ANet wants?

ANET’s response to bottling has been absolutely pathetic. Many people I play with and myself included have simply stopped reporting them as that doesn’t seem to accomplish anything. It doesn’t take any fancy software garbage. If they played their own game for 5 minutes they could easily find a dozen bots. There really is no excuse for the state of this game when it comes to bots ATM.

Death.1654:

ANET’s response to bottling has been absolutely pathetic. Many people I play with and myself included have simply stopped reporting them as that doesn’t seem to accomplish anything. It doesn’t take any fancy software garbage. If they played their own game for 5 minutes they could easily find a dozen bots. There really is no excuse for the state of this game when it comes to bots ATM.

I know of a fight between two major guilds that resulted in one of the leaders getting a temporary ban for spammed botting reports. They aren’t even verifying the reports at this stage. “Forty-plus reports for botting on this one character who plays actively with his guild? Those forty-plus reports all came from members of one guild? Seems legit!”

It’s more difficult than it sounds. It’s a problem, but it’s not an easy problem, otherwise it wouldn’t be happening. I wish these people who did cheat had some actual integrity.

Krimpton.4879:

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.

What I hope to happen:

Your idea of “solving” things gets implemented. One of the GMs make a mistake with their reliable Mk1 eye and mistake you for a bot, resulting in your permaban. And when you go to back to cry about the GM being wrong, the only reply you would get is: “But we say you did that!”

Seriously please think before you post…

How difficult is to log GM, go specific report areas and BAN naked ppl running in line ? In old days even private server have no problem at all to deal with this.
And someone said how i think its ok to bot/hack. Well, if Anet does nothing or almost nothing to get this ppl removed, and worse if there are community that support Anet on doing nothing to deal with this, then i am guessing everyone are ok with how it is now.
ONE GM , logging randomly to different server would do a lot more then all this “we are working on it” talk. If nothing , botters and hackes would have some fear of getting caught.
Only reason i care to post about this bs anymore is that i place effort into things like explore map, or helping friends get legendary, just to see that some pricks are getting is in few days without any problems using hacks and bots. Its not fair to all legit players, and by supporting anet on doing nothing about it, is just not helping at all.

I’ve noticed Colin answered about the bot problem, which is very nice from him, but still no official word about those player names and even worse, that KKK guild name. Such a guild name should not even be tolerated in an adult rated game, even less in a “teen” rated one.

Small follow up but after a harvesting run through of frost gorge sound on sorrow’s furnace I can safely state that there are more than 100 bots there alone. They out number real players on in that zone at least 10:1. That is without even looking for them.

@Death yeah, Frostgorge is one of the worse place when it comes to bots. It’s actually so disgusting that I rarely go there anymore, even though I like the zone way more than the Orr areas.

my metacritic re-review:
I reviewed this game previously a 10 after playing since headstart. After this time I am rereviewing and have come to the conclusion this prince of a game has more warts than a frog in a swamp. The main game is fine except for 2 core mechanics that have been exploited. Instanced nodes and a game wide Trading Post. Goldsellers have hacked into the game and botted in the form of what I refer to as the Naked Ranger Conga Line. All nodes can be harvested by each player or bot with impunity. A line of 5 ormore bots hits all the best areas before legit players can have a shot. They tag mobs and take drops and then all these basic mats glut the Trading Post. You would think this would bottom the price to nothing, but the forums cried for and got a barrier keeping the price from dropping below a sell price to an NPC vendor. They said that would keep new players from getting cheated on the Post. Instead it allows a set ROI for all the goldsellers and the armchair Economy experts in the forums never noticed. They are more bent on calling anyone expressing the desire for a free market chance a power mad moneygrubber. So this version of Trading post keeps the goldsellers in business while choking the playablity out of the TP. After spending time trying to handle this within the forums and being accused of trying to gain an unfair advantage by players and having mods and John Smith “you guys got this thread handled” of ANET shout me down as trying to make a ton of money i give up handling this on the inside. The top tier items cost 400g …. who is trying to make a ton of money? almost RMAH-like. The goldsellers illegal influx of money generated from a stable ROI on basic mats has sent gems values up and gold from gems down. Example – I bought one character slot with in-game gold for under 3g shortly after the game got the TP up. Fair and nice…… that same slot would take over 8g now. Crafting is worhtless and a money sink … like its needed.. with only xp having any value. I can farm mats and gain equal exp and more money. anyone who is looking for an enjoyable market experience with free enterprise and the ability to succeed or fail on your own… run fast and far the other direction. This is not your game. The game environment is good. The dynamic events, POI, heart quests etc … are wonderful. thats the 6 … the rest is a zero. sorry to say any who thought GUILD WARS 2 was the no sub solution and successorto WoW will be disappointed. It’s only slightly better in the quest and loses by a landslide in the rest… kitten shame too. I had high hopes — end of re-review

RE: posters comment that he hasnt seen a botter…. they dont have to be on all servers since the gamewide TP serves all server and provides them the full access package.

I second vendetta on this

With all due respect, despite the 10k ban remark, I’ll believe it when I see it. All I see now is hundreds of bots all over the place. On every map. The ones I’ve reported weeks ago are still there, running their same routine over and over again.

While specialized detection software would certainly help to automate things, it’s not needed to identify bots. They are blatantly obvious. It’s not like they’re hiding in the shadows or anything. Either get rid of them or give active players the possibilty to deal with them.

I know that I wouldnt mind spending a evening a week, unrewarded just to become a GM ingame and hunt for these bot’s.

Obviously there would need to me limitations to what the GM could do.

Something needs to happen tho..

@Awesomeluke.9581
Private servers for many games, took players to do same.
Results were in most cases , phenomenal. almost no bots/hackers and such.
Im sure they wont take help of players but would +1 for that call for anyone willing to make game better.
And tbh, GMs do make mistakes but, those mistakes can be fixed, doing nothing is far worse. And to be clear, scripts and hack protection, will never, ever work as close as good as human GM. We can love them or hate them but fact is GMs are needed and (far more then forum mods for that matter) and respected.

could we have some sort of system where the game locks the account temporarily pending investigation if you get reported multiple times as a bot?

that way even players have some sort of control to get the bots out of the equation while CS gets to their case

if you are a bot, you will get 10 reports in no time , wich will ban the account until futher investigation

that would be a great system and would do much to cull the bot plague and peoples rage

Krimpton.4879:

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.

Good old Mk1 human eyeball? Do some good old maths. If a human used the Mk1 eyeball to get a ban rate of one bot every 10 minutes (and that’s generous considering once botters realise what’s going on they’ll sacrifice bot efficiency for stealth), how long would it take for that person to ban 10,000 bots if they worked a 40 hour week?

Now some more advanced maths: A RMT company can get a new account for $60. In order to cut a profit, a batch of x accounts would have to earn a total of $ x * 60 before they all got banned. Say that ANet has 20 people using their Mk1 eyeballs, and there are 5000 botters in China each running x bot accounts. Using the gem store prices and gold/gem exchange rate as a reference, how much copper per second do bots have to earn for the following values of x to cut a profit: 5, 15, 30?

Next, the botters also run levelling services and account hacking. 20% of their bots are unpaid for, borrowed or stolen from players. A further 10% of the accounts are funded by revenue from their levelling service. Recalculate those copper earning rates.

Lastly, in an alternate scenario ANet develop a semi-automated process to detect and ban all the bot scripts. The process uses a neural network which can detect bots with 100% accuracy after 4 hours of training by a team of 15 supervisors. However the neural net needs to let bots run free until it has recorded a total of 100 hours of bot telemetry to analyze. Calculate the copper earning rates required by botters for this scenario.

Well i would assume the good old Mk1 human eyeball approach would ban a hell of a lot more than the…. ‘’2 bots a day’’ that Anet is currently banning.

your fond of math.. do it yourself they say 10k bots banned ‘’in the last few week’’ as someone else in a thread elswhere in this forum pointed out thats less than 3 botts a day across all servers.

An automated system to do it.?
yea great meanwhile the economy is going to hell in a handcart while they set it up.. it is not viable for regular players to farm mats to sell on Tp because of the massive amount the bots drop on it.
Regular players can’t do many DE because of bots camped at the spots so its pointless trying to as you get zero reward or loot.
Regular players can’t do other DE where the bots are not camped Balthazar temple comes to mind. not because that event is bugged but because there is constantly 2 – 3 bott trains running in that area. close enough to effect the upscaling of the DE but not close enough to get involved in killing the mobs, the result being the event is over before it realy begins as regular players cant defeat the massive jump in mob numbers caused.

Realy this whole situation makes me think that this game company never had anything in place at the begining to combat bots. the one red top post in this very thread states ..
‘’We recently hired an entire new team of people with one mission in mind: operation bot destruction.’’
Meaning you never had a team in place before ??
My ‘’the good old Mk1 human eyeball approach’’ is in my opinion the most simple solution to get rid of a whole raft of bots.. RIGHT NOW.
Yes maybe it’s not the most technically advanced form and it doesnt have great ’’techy’’ james bond style programming and all that garbage but it will work.
It will work against the ‘’low level’’ botters the major farmers yea maybe wont work but it will give breathing space.
It will make the game players the ’’genuine’’ non cheating game players see that things are happening and we will shut up about it.
That is why so many posts are made here { and deleted here } it’s because people are frustrated they see the botts.. they report and move on. the next day they see the botts, they report and move on. after a week…. 2 weeks…. 3 weeks doing exactly the same to exactly the same named botts it’s like what.!! why am i bothering.

Actually people are annoyed when they see bots. They become frustrated when the SAME bots they reported 1 week ago are still there. You nailed it perfectly at the end of your post, Krimpton – I still try to report all those I see, but I often wonder why I even care since nothing is done.

I remember , back in days, ^.^, on some overcrowded L2 servers, gms would log randomly and do massive bans for bots and hackers. So many ppl were feared of ban, that even talking about bots/and hacks was not common. Rumors were, if you say “bot” or “hack” on chat , u will get ban.
I really think that one of the problems is that ppl are not afraid of ban at all. And why would they be, they see ppl running with legendary after a week or two (i use this as example coz its one of the things that are not possible to obtain legit in a week or two) or similar, bragging about it , and nothing happens. Same goes for 100% map explorers , and so on.
I find that ppl only can follow the rules if there are hard consequences for not doing so. Sadly , if the fear is the only way to fix things, then let it be so.

Munrock.3092:

Good old Mk1 human eyeball? Do some good old maths. If a human used the Mk1 eyeball to get a ban rate of one bot every 10 minutes (and that’s generous considering once botters realise what’s going on they’ll sacrifice bot efficiency for stealth), how long would it take for that person to ban 10,000 bots if they worked a 40 hour week?

I have (hopefully well placed) faith ArenaNet will sort this out. But Krimpton makes a point. Most examples of botting are not singular bots out in the world. The most egregious violators are in groups, and very easy to detect because of their half naked, circular, magic teleporting approach to mob killing.

10,000 bans is a very good start. Nice job with that. But whatever approach is being/will be taken, it should be multi-prong. And human game moderators, cleaning up particularly bad areas that impact the players, should be one of those prongs. A dedicated botting “company” may be able to implement a software solution to a software style detection system put in place by ArenaNet, but a software work around by these pirates will be harder pressed to beat someone trained to detect flagrant botting.

I am passed the point of caring anymore whether there are bots, hackers or other manipulations going on

Just came across a Huge group of bots all bunched up under the water,
In frost gorge on seafarers rest.

They are so tightly packed how am i supposed to report them???

This is where we need in-game GMS.

As for banning my list of online bots is growing not going down by any means. :/

zogrim.6925:

What I hope to happen:

Your idea of “solving” things gets implemented. One of the GMs make a mistake with their reliable Mk1 eye and mistake you for a bot, resulting in your permaban. And when you go to back to cry about the GM being wrong, the only reply you would get is: “But we say you did that!”

Seriously please think before you post…

Mistakes are made all the time. Mistakes are being made even right now.

Yes. It’s true and you see threads pop up all the time. Some players getting mistakenly banned for gold farming simply because they were the target of many gold-farmer mails.

One thing that a very visible in game GM presence would do that has not really been mentioned is act as good PR. Whether it’s an ineffectual token effort or not, youtube shots of GM’zilla (Dhuum) laying down the smack would go a long way to making the anti-botting community feel something concrete was being done. Perception is indeed part of the war. Whether its value equates with the resources it would take to put “boots on the ground” is debatable but it’s something to consider.

To the people saying they don’t think bots are a big problem, you are probably on a high population server. The medium ones are full of them. Or you have no idea what bots are. I hardly see naked bots though. Anyway.. hope this gets solved soon, I honestly think it’s already too late. I rarely log on anymore, cause most of the people I met hardly play themselves. I’m a member of 4 guilds, and most people have UNKNOWN behind their name so they haven’t logged in in ages. Not all because of the bots, but believe me a lot got so frustrated with it they quit. And the last time I logged in the bot problem was even worse than before. I reported loads of em. I even sent screenshots to support. Most of the bots are gone, but new ones, and more of em, are already in place. Please hurry up :S Or at least allow me to change servers once for free once (including pvp and wvw)

I just hope the war on botters does not make life harder for normal people. It seems the world has become a lot poorer in terms of drops since the botters run amok.

Don’t forget about the WvW hackers are also a big problem! :C

When you report a bot/s there should be a function to attach a screenshot to help speed up the process of removing them. Currently i don’t think there is one. A picture can say a lot. Its not like most of them are even trying to disguise it.

Colin, while I appreciate your response, I’m still dismayed at how little impact ArenaNet seems to have on the situation. After writing my Gamespy column, I put the game down in disgust for the weekend. It was a bit encouraging when someone pointed me here to your response. Yet I logged in today to be greeted by the usual cadre of bots running around with impunity. I reported them and then checked on the bots I’d called out by name in my column. Sure enough, they’re now level 80 and currently farming Bloodtide Coasts.

If outing bots by name in a column at IGN isn’t enough to get an account investigated and subsequently shut down for botting, why should I even bother with the game’s unresponsive and ineffectual reporting feature? Whatever you guys intend to do about the issue, I hope you’ll do it quickly. Because these days I find myself shutting Guild Wars 2 down in disgust far more frequently than I boot it up.

-Tom

Here’s to hoping that the big november 15 update does something about this, not holding my breath.

As I type this the area just south of [Lapatl Grounds] POI in Bloodtide Coast on Henge of Denravi Server is swarming with bots. Many of them have guild tags even. They’re farming the events that spawn right there. All an Anet GM has to do is just come look and they’d be able to ban 25 bots in 5 minutes. There’s no way I can report them all.

Sights like these make me start to reconsider my commitment to play GW2 and buy gems. I’m aware you’re trying Anet, but you really need to try harder.

Good news that something has been done to the rabbit population, unfortunately it does seem like a small drop in the ocean but keep up the good work! Although if we loose the bots we also loose the games of “Kill the bot” leaving even less variety in Orr :P.

It would also be interesting to hear how/when(/if?) Anet plans on tackling issues such as players using programs(not mentioning any names here) to exploit.

you arent really doing anything
this i have from just 1 hour ago
http://i.imgur.com/x7q1T.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/r4VMQ.jpg

just saying

“Botters are basically the same thing as racists and Nazis, right?”

I don’t agree with that statement. I know what they are, botters are the mafia.

I have 3 80’s, I explore cursed and malchors every bounce to find the T6 nodes, I see a lot of obvious bots and bot behaviors (plus see them in every zone my low/mid level alts pass thru).

After weeks of seeing the same bots I am noticing that some of them are gone – dunno if they were banned or just relocated. But the thing is, one bot name might be gone, but there’s yet another bot there to replace it.

I think the supposed recent bannings might have had a little effect. Just a little. You see new bots in the same spots, but I’ve also started to see level 50/60 bots to be in orr zones (which is completely stupid, you should not be able to get into orr zones under 70 or 68ish since there’s no possible good reason you would ever bee there).

So now the bot swarms also involve powerleveling upcoming bots to be. I most commonly see this in malchors kind of up near the beach beneath doric wp. You see the bots pop at lights way point and easily and safely run thru mobs up the beach to get to their bottly destination.

I’d imagine it doesn’t take that long to go from 50’/60’s to 80 tagging mobs 24/7. Probably get event credit for the incessant flipping/contesting of doric too, just for killing mobs in the vacinity.

So anyways. Yeah, maybe ANet is doing something about bots, but it’s really hard to notice, and ultimately, the problem will never go away unless they tackle the real problem, which is the cheaters who use the services of bots.

Remove players who buy 3rd party gold and PLed characters and announce THAT to us (for ex, today we (ANet) closed the accounts of 10000 players that have bought 3rd party data). Make it public. Make a stand. Show that cheating isn’t tolerated.

The only way the bots will every really diminish is to kill demand. As long as there’s a demand for 3rd party gold, sellers will figure out some way to bot and foil anything ANet does. ANet puts together a team…that’s supposed to fight multiple teams from multiple companies going all out to harvest gold.

There are data trails. Cheaters could be deteted. Cheaters could be removed. The game would be better for it all around. Less cheaters, less demand for gold, less gold spam and bots.

I was browsing through the entire forum in this section, is it just me or does anyone else notice that the majority of threads creating on botting issues (which some I saw were legit reasons) were all locked or deleted? An administrator answers the questions and just decides to close it down ending discussion

Anyway, I have been reporting at least 20-30 bots a night (a couple of hand full on the lvl 80 maps) I have decided to just stop reporting. It takes alot of effort and time to click on one bot at a time and send in a report as you try to follow them in game. I hope they come up with some kind of aoe botting report function and so taht we can select the actualy players from a list we see on teh screen – would make it a lot easier xD