Guild Wars 2

i’ve seen posts like this from ncsoft employees for years in ncsoft mmo’s. when i see something postiive and constructuve that doesn’t hurt legit players more than botters and 3rd party rmt’ers come from it, i’ll have some hope.

in the mean time there’s about 20+ bots teleporting around 24/7 at pentitent path related events on borlis pass. they’ve been there about 2 weeks now. maybe posting about it here will be more effective than the prior reports we’ve all put in several times.

Recently we have also hired a team of data specialists who will be helping us create more effective tools for analyzing reports of ‘botting.’

This is the part of the post that has given me some hope. There is very sophisticated business intelligence and data mining software available that can be used to combat bots, gold sellers, and gold buyers.
The issue of hacked accounts often gets used as an excuse as to why bots can not be combated. If my account was hacked and I did not notice, I personally would want my account closed ASAP. No matter what happened to my account after being hacked I would still have to go through the process of calling ANet and getting it back. They can tell if an account has been hacked once reported by the actual owner. Getting banned would get me an email of closure.
They could eliminate a great deal of these hacked accounts if they stopped forcing players to use their email as part of their log in. Like it or not there are a great deal of people who do not have multiple emails (children whos parents are responsible as an example) and people who are not computer savy. Email address should NEVER have been part of peoples log in. In the end it will come down to will power of ANet. they can eliminate a majority of the bot/gold seller issue

I’m here with another person on Fireheart Rise in Sumaria Ruins watching four people botting. They’ve been doing it for 24 hours by all accounts.
They are totally automated killing Minotaurs then going to exactly the same position. Tried chatting to them, no response.

Will Arenanet ban these people or not?

I watched these 4 ppl yesterday,and they are still here today, they move in pattern and its VERY obvious its gold farmers who might exploit the high drop of Blood in that area..Plz look into it..

How about instead of banning people and deleting the items people abused with the karma glitch, you give back some of the missing items caused by your glitches.

Take some freaking responsability ArenaNet. #WorstCustomerServiceEver

Adding a specific “report for gold selling” option to the in-game chat/mail report options would be nice too. I see a lot of people asking which is the right option to pick when reporting them. I usually pick spamming, but I feel that “gold selling” is quite worse than that, but I can’t accuse them of scamming since I can be 100% sure they’re actually scamming their “customers”

i’d also like to note that when a guildie was hacked with 90 ectos and 30 gold due ot the at launch bug with email authentication and validation, although his account was recovered in a timely fashion(less than 24 hours- which is very good turn around)…

in the worst sort of victim blaming i’ve seen to date in this genre, none of the stolen items were restored to his account, and we was left to restart with 0 gold and 0 tradeable assets.

he’s lucky he got his account back before his gear broke, vendored and then relegated to ad spam bot.

as a guild we’re lucky he didn’t simply give up at that point and quit the game.

I decided to take a break from my lvl 80 Asura engineer and create a Human ranger and I have came across and reported atleast 30 botters so far in 2 days.

World: Devona’s Rest
Zones: Queensdale and Kessex Hills so far.

That’s great to hear! I was getting a little bored of logging in and only getting mail from spammers/RMTs

Thanks for the update.

This is a bit off topic, but I’ve come to GW2 from SWTOR, and it seems like the community here is from a very different, much nicer planet. The tone on the SWTOR forums and sometimes in the games online chat is just toxic; it’s refreshing to see that MMOs do not have to be that way.

EDIT
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I’m very happy you added “report gold sellers” as a specific option for reporting abusers. As Gathbard.6907 says, it is hard to decide whether unsolicited offers to purchase gold are scamming or spamming, but they are sure annoying.

Gathbard.6904:

Adding a specific “report for gold selling” option to the in-game chat/mail report options would be nice too. I see a lot of people asking which is the right option to pick when reporting them. I usually pick spamming, but I feel that “gold selling” is quite worse than that, but I can’t accuse them of scamming since I can be 100% sure they’re actually scamming their “customers”

This option is actually on the report options now. It’s been there for a couple of days now.

Absolut great !!
Because its real bad to open the mail and get 3-4 mails per day from goldsellers
Thanks for these good news !

Good to have a post on this subject I was getting sick of being spammed by gold sellers

Thanks I guess, but what I see IN the game is increased bot activity, not decreased, and I see blatantly obvious bots teleporting around for days. I have a fantastic memory and the same bot names continue to exist.

I also see certain blatantly obvious bot behaviors at the same types of spots over and over.

Like it’s getting to be that any outpost in Cursed Shore that has trickles of mobs that attack or that are nearby, where guards will fight, you have an army of bots parked and attacking everything that moves, often teleporting around a very small circuit.

On alts, out and about, anywhere there’s open space with neutral mobs and no events or aggro mobs around, you can be sure there’s bots teleporting around mowing down mobs.

It really takes away from the enjoyment of the game both seeing so many bots everywhere, and knowing that somewhere some scrub of a player is getting ahead by cheating (either by buying gold from 3rd party or by botting themselves).

A lot of the bots I’m seeing are tagged with guilds that I recognize as active on my server so I don’t think ALL bots are related to 3rd party gold farming or powerleveling.

It’s sickening.

The bots also show flaws in this game’s design. The combat in this game is supposed to be about dodging, being active, and thinking, but look how freaking easy it is for many classes to thrive without even having a human in control!

My main is an elementalist. I have NEVER seen an elementalist bot (except maybe at the bridge in kessex, which is bot mecca). You couldn’t bot an elementalist in cursed shore, because an elementalist can’t take hits, can’t sit still, and way too many of their attacks require precise placement or execution to do any damage.

So many other classes can either take hits and/or take on multiples with ease, like warriors or guardians, or have multitudes of distraction/absorption mechanics (mesmer clones, necro pets), that even with horrifically sloppy play they can get by in the supposedly brutal orr zones. Then there’s rangers with tank pets that can easily survive regular orr mobs – you see tons of ranger bots blowing thru mobs in orr.

You often see bots operating in pairs to ensure there’s more than one inefficient attacker on these mobs, or it’s a bot fest at some spots where the bots are fighting each other to tag mobs before they die.

It’s getting to be where I don’t want to rez people in orr anymore who I find sitting for a while, because they’re probably a bot. I surely don’t rez anything I see that’s naked since it’s usually a node camping bot. And anybody who’s just attacking random mobs in orr, a zone where there’s so much aggro, fast respawn, and hassle just moving around, seems like they’re probably a bot since few sane people do this.

Bots are ruining the game.

5 stars given for the serious efforts! Bots should just die a horrible death, aka perma ban!

Yes, get rid of this plague, it’s like every 16 year old kid in the US and Korea are running a Gold farming business. So annoying. Do something about spam mail too if it is no trouble.

What happens if we accidentally report a non bot person for botting, when all they were doing was wandering around in the bot mob looking at it?

The most recent location for bot activity I’ve found was Provatum Castrum. Here there were around 50+ Asura all moving in sync, with levels between 41 and 70+

thats great news)

At this stage ide rather have bots and spammers running rampage than being crippled because of them. They’ve won.

They have already made it so that players cant farm anymore thanks to the rediculous restrictions on token and item farming. I dont see why im not allowed to play the way I want to, instead of logging on for a quick session then logging off once I start to get nothing.

I dont have a clue what the design philosophy in ANet is, but making items require hefty amounts of farming and then removing the ability to farm makes no sense to me. Its more irritating than the bots that MMO’ers have gotten used to over the years.

Very big thanks for that, it destroys literally the dynamic events system.

Is there a special email where we can report hacks and bots to?
Seen many of them lately advertising in the interwebs..

Thank you so much! Keep up the goodwork Anet! Cheers!

Appreciate the update, thanks Mike.

Really glad to hear efforts are being put forward to reduce/eliminate this kind of stuff. cheers!

This is what is annoying.

I did a gathering sweep in orr last night before I logged. I’m running around gathering in orr again this morning. And I see the same bots running the same routes that I saw last night.

Utterly blatant bots that I reported, and that I’m sure others reported.

I’m sure I’ll see them the next time I pass thru too.

Reporting them and seeing it take days to deal with the most blatantly obvious bots is why players who don’t cheat get frustrated.

Thank you for update, yet on Sanctum server I have seen same bot names at Shelter’s Gate and Penitent Waypoint for weeks now. They happily teleport all over the place while being reported hundreds or thousands times a day. I truly miss the days when GMs would roam the games to see so obvious aspects of the game that average players see.

One more thing.

A lot of the blatant bots I see, especially camped at outposts in orr, are guilded, with some belonging to what I know are huge and active guilds.

IMO, guilds that condone cheating in from their members should be disbanded.

As someone who’s been a GM and very active/addicted player of MMORPGs for ages, it’s always pretty obvious to me when someone in my guild is cheating, since it’s not really possible for real players to be online 24/7 and nobody sane stays in the same spot 24/7 or returns to the same spot every single moment they’re not doing something else (and are actually playing).

This is awesome. While I’ve only seen a single instance of this issue thus far, it was on a grand scale. It was actually 6 bots all following the same pattern and they were all rangers with bear pets. They following in a line and with six of them, they just owned everything. Looking back, it was probably less of a bot and more of a multi-boxing player, but still just wrong. I try to report each one but it was honestly hard to click through them all with them running around and all bunched up.

I’m glad ANet is putting zero tolerance measures in effect. Ultimately, it’s this kind of crap that ruins a game.

Want to fight against the gold sellers?
well… sell your gold at a price less than them!

If you keep to sell the gold at that price, and a chinese farmer will give us the same things 3 times cheaper, i’m not surprised if some players prefere third-party gold sellers!

10gold = 5 dollars
No more gold sellers. Trust me.

Maybe im kinda blind when i’m playing xD But I think I never saw a player botting.
I have seen a lot of gold sellers, they even spam my Mail.

Gathbard.6904:

Adding a specific “report for gold selling” option to the in-game chat/mail report options would be nice too. I see a lot of people asking which is the right option to pick when reporting them. I usually pick spamming, but I feel that “gold selling” is quite worse than that, but I can’t accuse them of scamming since I can be 100% sure they’re actually scamming their “customers”

That’s been implemented apparently as of today, saw it earlier when I was reporting someone spamming

Leeain.2431:

Want to fight against the gold sellers?
well… sell your gold at a price less than them!

If you keep to sell the gold at that price, and a chinese farmer will give us the same things 3 times cheaper, i’m not surprised if some players prefere third-party gold sellers!

10gold = 5 dollars
No more gold sellers. Trust me.

Exactly, the reason they’re here in DROVES is because Gold means everything in the game.
Increase the output of funds game wide by at most 10%
Increase Karma gains at levels 40+ by 2x current levels (since you can’t trade Karma)
Make Karma used for more things than current Coinage currency
Watch Botters, Farmers, Sellers go poof

good stuff anet. those blinkers are getting bothersome:-/

I am extremely active in reporting both “botters” (ones I’ve watched for a while and am 99.9% sure are botting), and also reporting “gold spammers” in map chat. I am really glad to hear that Anet is taking this seriously, and perm. terminating these accounts. My only issue with this is if Anet is only working one side of the issue (the sellers). It alone will not stop the problem, as the gold sellers will simply make new accounts. It’s worth it for them, as any profit over the $60 purchase price of the game with that account turns a profit, and if it gets banned after that, well… still a profit.

My question is, what is being done to the accounts of people who BUY illegal gold from 3rd parties gold sellers? Are those accounts being perm. terminated too?

Because the best way to stop gold sellers realistically is to make the risk way too high vs the reward, and scare people away from buying illegally. If the gold sellers have no customers, then they have no reason to “bot” gold and loot.

I’m glad the team is taking this seriously as it definitely takes away from the player experience. I have noticed more gold spamming emails in the past few days and have been reporting them as they come in.

Pleasure make special option “Gold seller” in petition form.

Anet doesnt need GM’s running all over the maps. They have “heat” maps of where people are on the map and all sorts of other data tools at their disposal in order to find these people.
Anet does need a summon GM button though for all the bugged out events.
Seems they are more worried about punishing people that want to run their dungeons than anything else at this point.

Its sad that they want to charge an arm and a leg for repairs and teleports in hopes that people will buy jems and convert to gold in order to avoid mob farming. I thought they wanted players to enjoy the game, but that’s impossible unless you play a tanky class that has a low death rate.

Thank you for making the playing experience better without the Gold Sellers and Botters, I as a gamer really appreciate your company doing as such.

Leeain.2431:

Want to fight against the gold sellers?
well… sell your gold at a price less than them!

If you keep to sell the gold at that price, and a chinese farmer will give us the same things 3 times cheaper, i’m not surprised if some players prefere third-party gold sellers!

10gold = 5 dollars
No more gold sellers. Trust me.

That’s not a solution. That would inflate the economy with tons of gold, as then more people (who choose not to buy illegally), would buy gold. This would make the value of everyone’s gold lower and hurt everyone. Also, the farmers could always just lower their price too to stay competitive. So then what, does Anet just keeping lowering their price until we can buy 20g for $1, where everyone in the game just buys their gold?

The only solution is to perm. terminate accounts of people who’ve been xfered gold from confirmed gold sellers (people who buy gold from 3rd parties should get insta-perma-banned. This is easy to do as they have logs of all the gold xfer’s and when they confirm and terminate these gold sellers, seeing who’s bought gold from them is easy as pie.

It would be nice to add ‘botting’ and ‘Gold selling’ as subcategories in the report option as well. I’ve been reporting both under scamming.

guyvernk.4786:

Pleasure make special option “Gold seller” in petition form.

There is man. On the ingame reporting system.

Once you pull up in-game support (through options), and choose REPORT, there is a GOLD SPAMMER option. Also you can just do this in game, right click the name of the gold seller in MAP CHAT, and hit REPORT, GOLD SELLER.

Easy as hell, and well worth doing. If everyone did this we’d really help remove this problem that is seriously destroying this game. If you don’t think it is, just try turning any real profit using the TP and tell me that GW2 has a viable economy.

Logging into the game and between one and three spam mails… we should really get a title for reporting those guys…

nice, thanks for the hard work

Awesome! Thanks!

I’m frustrated that I’ve been reporting the same bots for 6 days with no change, and they’ve been in the same godforsaken spot the whole time. A mentally handicapped chimp could probably tell that 5 players teleporting around in tandem isn’t natural behavior.

If you give me a report button, for the love of all that’s holy, you’d better make it feel like that button does something or you’ll lose the most valuable reporting tool out there – YOUR LEGITIMATE PLAYERS.

Kincaidia.3192:

I’m frustrated that I’ve been reporting the same bots for 6 days with no change, and they’ve been in the same godforsaken spot the whole time. A mentally handicapped chimp could probably tell that 5 players teleporting around in tandem isn’t natural behavior.

If you give me a report button, for the love of all that’s holy, you’d better make it feel like that button does something or you’ll lose the most valuable reporting tool out there – YOUR LEGITIMATE PLAYERS.

The problem is that like you there are thousands of other players making the same report and only so many Anet employees investigating all of them.

You’re not the only one reporting bots, be patient.

Solution to gold sellers : Don’t allow gold/gems to be traded (via mail) between players.

Each player has to work for his own gold or purchase it with his own real money

Problem solved…

None of these player suggested solutions are viable. Not without destroying the game.
its hard to track people who buy gold. if i send 20 gold to my alt, will i be classed as a gold seller?
All these quick solutions are terrible ideas and i will give Anet credit for going about this the correct way, slowly and methodically, rather then charging in and making more of a mess

To everyone complaining about bots being in the same area for days on end after being reported: calm down.

You do realize that Arena Net is likely working through a report list of hundreds or even thousands of bots, correct? I’m sorry but if you are expecting the bots you report to be insta-banned you need a more realistic outlook on life. These things take time.

I remember GW1; I played for years. It had its issue with gold sellers and bots, but these days those things are extremely rare. So rare in fact that I haven’t seen a bot nor gold seller in literally years. Give Arena Net time; they know what they are doing. As soon as it is made clear to the bot masters that there is no profit here –such as by making them spent more time setting up bots than actually profiting from them- they will leave.

darkehawke.1269:

None of these player suggested solutions are viable. Not without destroying the game.
its hard to track people who buy gold. if i send 20 gold to my alt, will i be classed as a gold seller?
All these quick solutions are terrible ideas and i will give Anet credit for going about this the correct way, slowly and methodically, rather then charging in and making more of a mess

Transferring gold between characters should NEVER have existed.

Puffin.5436:

darkehawke.1269:

None of these player suggested solutions are viable. Not without destroying the game.
its hard to track people who buy gold. if i send 20 gold to my alt, will i be classed as a gold seller?
All these quick solutions are terrible ideas and i will give Anet credit for going about this the correct way, slowly and methodically, rather then charging in and making more of a mess

Transferring gold between characters should NEVER have existed.

Why not?
transferring money between characters has been a staple of mmo’s as long as i can remember. take that ability away and thats a crap load of content for me removed too