Guild Wars 2

Thank you for sharing! Glad to hear that something is being done about it!

1600 worldwide? There must be 1600 on each server with the amount I report each night.

I understand you say your actively working on this, but have you thought of bringing in players willing to volunteer to assist if it is overwhelming, or that may be able to assist with other issues to open up room for this to be further addressed? I know many games provide some of their trusted members the opportunity to help out, many of us would gladly volunteer our time I am sure, I would. Because it has been almost 3 weeks and the same bot keeps showing up?

On a side note can you perma ban the IP as well?

Dawthus.4630:

Can’t remember the name of the zone, bot standing there swinging; 2 players came around the corner kiting a champion troll over to the bot, got it to engage and slaughter the bot-er. Is it bad I was cheering for the Troll?

Now that is a great example of quite literally trolling the gold sellers!

Good news everyone!

=D

Well, that’s a good news. At least they acknowledge the problem and take some measures to fight it. I am rather skeptical at this moment about how effective these measures will be, but we can always hope for the better.

It was stressed several times already that our help as players regarding this is imperative. If we do not assist ArenaNet in fighting this plague, then we surely cannot expect them to win the fight alone. Even though it might seem that your actions remains unnoticed, you should continue to report abusers. I suspect that currently the volume of reports is so huge that it takes very long to sort it all out. Hopefully with the planned optimizations this process will speed up significantly and we’ll see swifter response to our actions.

Yay!, Can finally start to remove the 20+ players on my ignore list who were spamming in chat about gold selling websites

I’m with a few others here, I’ll believe it when I stop having my personal progress slowed or even stopped by bots that are still around 2+ weeks after being reported (a couple even 3 weeks.)

I really hope you guys aren’t relying purely relying on automated systems to determine if a reported bot is actually a bot. Kinda seems like that right now, and I’m sure the botters are more than used to coding detection avoidance into their scripts. Don’t make it an “our programmer vs. theirs” thing because you will lose. Keep some eyes on the ground and you’ll be 1000 times more effective.

ooh ooh, I’m on whiteside ridge, and I’ll help anyone kill bots via kiting if they like :P I consider it a noble and gentlemanly pastime :P

@mike-Anet:

Thank you so much for the update it’s always reassuring to hear that the ball is beginning to roll and you’re instead of just dealing with the issue, innovating new ways of speeding up the bannings etc

oh! one other thing i forgot to mention! when we report for gold-selling, or really for ANYTHING, we’re saying to you, “this person has in some manner or other offended me.”
now, this especially becomes a big deal with mail — if i have said, “this person offends me,” then most likely i do NOT wish to hear from this person again. can you PLEASE institute something that will auto-block those whom we report? again, it’s especially difficult with mail to block people, due to the way the name has to be entered, and the fact that sometimes the mail glitches … etc ad nauseam.

thanks!!

Thanks. Please keep posting statistics so we know youre being responsive.

Thanks for the update, and you better believe I’ll keep on reporting botters!

Did not know where to put this so if I put it in wrong place, sorry. Just wanted to tell you that the bridge event at Greyhoof Meadows is LOADED with bots.

Getting reaaaal tired of the “Power Rangers,” and glad to hear you are diligently working on what will, unfortunately, be an ongoing task. I do agree with the comments above: immediate steps should be taken in high traffic bot areas by having community managers or these new hires regularly scan these areas for obvious bots. Their MO and locations are pretty obvious by now that it doesn’t necessarily require people reporting them to make scanning the areas routine until a proper solution can be found. It’s becoming very frustrating trying to complete something only to have the botters swoop in and kill everything before you can raise a finger. Thank you (and good luck!).

“I have already noticed a huge drop in gold spammers and gold scamming mails in game. Thank you so much for all the work you put into this Anet!”

You’re lucky then; I’ve been getting 3 times as many.

“Here´s the ultimate solution to botting and gold sellers:

Just remove the capability to send gold through the ingame mail system.

If someone wants to trade gold between his characters, the person can use the personal bank.

If someone wants to help out a friend with money, they both could use the guild bank. One is putting the money in the guild bank, the other takes it out right away.

If you want to sell something, use the BlackLion Trading Post."

The increased difficulty of transferring gold to their customers would decrease their business, but it wouldn’t eliminate them entirely. As long as Anet is letting them stay profitable they will always be around. I came up with a suggestion to remove their profits all together as well as create mistrust with their customers

“On a side note can you perma ban the IP as well?”
This doesn’t work due to dynamic IP addressing. However if a certain network has produced a lot of botters they can block the entire network.

“Again congratulations on an amazing game… you made a lot of good decisions community wise until the game was released… lets keep them good.”
This. You did a good job of listening to the community during beta; don’t quit on us now!

“Don’t make it an “our programmer vs. theirs” thing because you will lose. Keep some eyes on the ground and you’ll be 1000 times more effective.”
Exactly; they may not want to hire people to search for bots, but it’s probably cheaper than losing money to gold sellers and it would be a big help to the community.

Can we just stop player-player item/gold transfers all together? There is a trading post. No trade window is a step in the right direction now remove mailing of gold and items and close the loophole of guild banks and you effectively remove gold sellers means of getting gold to customers. An example to prevent gold sellrs using guild systems to sell gold, require x amount of influence be earned for the guild before you can use the guild banking system.

horrible idea in fact i think there should be proper trading system like in gw1. if they remove the mail system i quit.

MikeLewis
Security Coordinator
“In short, we are fully committed to keeping this community free of bots and illicit gold sellers, and we very much appreciate your assistance in identifying and eliminating them.
Thank you for your understanding and patience as we continue to improve our ability to deal with this issue.”

THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!!!

How about on the spot banning GM’s? An ingame ticket for botters would be enough to handle this. With the help of the society its really possible to keep botters/farmers to a minimum.

US – 11 GM’s
EU – 11 GM’s
French – 2 GM’s
German – 3 GM’s
Spanish – 1 GM (with English or any european country as 2nd option to help on spare time)

In total 28 GM’s for banning them on sight. Just to keep spots open for real players. Whether if its for WvW or just to get in your own server instead of overflow etc.
One last idea. EU GM’s would also be responsible of US servers. So that the US servers wont be full of botters at night. And vice versa.

Lets say couple of EU GM’s start early in the morning around 6 AM GMT +1. At that same time US GM’s are finished working and EU is taking over.

Darnit i really would like a job like this.

Any feedback on this guys?

I feel the review process makes a lot more sense. If a botter wants to complain about being banned, a pile of evidence would cut their complaints faster than leaving it up to a short selected representative that you would have to standardize and justify to the rest of the player population of their effectiveness.

Somna.5168:

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.

Yeah, my bad. I Just noticed (and used it to report a mail spammer é_é) and it is awesome.

There are bots in Heart of the Mists that automatically send mail to players they see. Step into HotM and you automatically get spammed with 3 gold selling mails.

Guys, I’ve posted here a few times and I have been trying my best to monitor how many bots are springing up. I have taken 10-15 minutes of every time I log in just to go around reporting any new bots I see and taking screen shots, but I have been seeing the same bots for a month. It’s really demoralizing when the same guys are just patrolling or tping around. I haven’t seen any of the common bots banned… in fact, there are now more bots on kaineg than ever before. Don’t get me wrong, I love my server and this is a great game and all but watching all of the bots spring up day by day is a little much for me. powerful blood is at an all time low, and don’t tell me it’s not because of the bots… 2 people selling over 200 of them? yeah right. What I did is I sent in a support ticket with the screen shots of every group of gold farming bots I could find in the most common areas. I hope by spending some of my time we can clean up this server and make this a little less ridiculous.

Very nice to hear. I’ve been impressed with the expediency of Arenanet on dealing with issues such as this and commend your stance on such matters.

Now if we could just get an android authenticator it would seem as if, as a company, you take the security of your players seriously.

I have a question… These bots, are they the ones that are ruining the Market as well. I was thinking perhaps they are the ones that are selling everything at 1 copper above merchant price. It makes rare drops so hard to sell…

I have been reporting bots like crazy since last night, in Harathi Hinterlands on Devonas Rest server. It is rediculas how many bots are at one particular event spot.

Also, is there a way for volunteers to become GM’s. I would love to be able to help people in game and help take care of this botting problem.

Everytime I log into a city I get 1-4 emails from gold spammers, which I immediately report.

I get so many game mails now saying about buying gold from their website and it’s really annoying so i was going to start reporting all of them, but i noticed when i go to report it, it has a warning with something along the lines of if they are not found to be gold sellers that i could get banned, or something like that.

That kinda worried me a bit, if they some how don’t get found to be selling gold or delete their account then could i get banned for wasting time?

I don’t want to report someone i get mail from, then they get away with it and i could potentially get banned for trying to help out.

What ever happened to the human GM back in EQ and WoW we would volunteer to be GM just go around and talk to the players. If a complaint came in we would go to the area and check it out. I would gladly become a GM for any server and fix issues like botting and gold sellers. Also I believe you are tripling your work by terminating the accounts of the botters because most of those accounts are hacked. Maybe you should have a function to freeze the account so it can not be used untill the real owner connects with your company.

Actually it’s not a bad idea IMO to lock out accounts that haven’t been logged into for a week, sending a verification e-mail when someone tries to log into it like they do for logins from different IP’s atm.

Whitey.6185:

I get so many game mails now saying about buying gold from their website and it’s really annoying so i was going to start reporting all of them, but i noticed when i go to report it, it has a warning with something along the lines of if they are not found to be gold sellers that i could get banned, or something like that.

That kinda worried me a bit, if they some how don’t get found to be selling gold or delete their account then could i get banned for wasting time?

I don’t want to report someone i get mail from, then they get away with it and i could potentially get banned for trying to help out.

You won’t get banned… I reported about 30 -40 people today alone for botting. And EVERY gold selling mail should be reported. This is a massive problem and the anet team is aware….

I also would like to suggest allowing people to apply to be GM’s with some powers to at least kick botters and things like that. These bots are literally EVERYWHERE on the server I am on. To be honest, It’smaking me not want to play, and I am addicted to this game!

Michael

I remember back in the vanilla WoW days where each server would have a GM or 2 always active and when you reported a bot they where banned within 5-10mins.

And sometimes to make fun of them they would park them outside of Ironforge or Org and turn them into critters so we all knew they where bots. LOL

But now instead game companies have silly systems like Diminishing Returns where it hurts the normal player and doesn’t stop the bots……. Ya I like the old days better!

Jnaathra

Do take note that this post makes no mention about action against gold buyers. So the end result here is going to be the same as all other games. The bot population will go down, but no go away. They will ban bots and the ones still making money will steal or buy new accounts. As long as buyers are allowed to exist, there will always be sellers

This looks like an obvious solution but I have seen it fail miserably in other MMOs.

1) The gold sellers send (they are already doing so!) small amounts of money to lots of players, so many accounts get “tainted” by their illicit gold.

2) I have been in a MMO where people would purposedly buy gold sellers or even duped stuff and send it to their adversaries. And the latter got perma banned with endless issues to get their accounts back (I am talking of like 2 months to get accounts back).

“Made a new law, found a new workaround”.

I think people are expecting to much, seeing other bot posts. that anet can snap their fingers and all bots poof. they work as much as they can bots/gold farmers are apart of MMO’s and they don’t go away overnight. people need to accept it and let anet continue on with getting rid of them.

I was pleased to notice that there are now two new reporting options. “Gold Seller” and “Botting”.
Gold sellers are a pain and you should just do the following:
1. Report
2. Ignore
3. Continue with your gaming fun.

Bots are usually easy to discover.
If you come upon a naked player (naked as in only wearing underwear), who is laying dead and you raise the player. Then if the player right off the raise rushes to attack the nearest target, then take a few and watch the player die and raise the player again, if same happens. Rushing to attack, then you can be sure that it is a bot.

I for one am glad that the GW2 team is fighting these two problems. Bots are just for shaking your head at them, but gold sellers are annoying, mainly their mails.

Keep up the good work guys.

I just wanted to mention that I’ve started getting gold seller emails in-game with 1 copper attached so that they are not as deletable (Report > Take All > Delete). I hope there are no complications with us “accepting” the copper from such mails, because I’m certainly not going to let them fill up my inbox.

Yeah, thanks a lot for implementing systems that affect real human players in such a punitive way for the sake of catching some Chinese gold farmers.

You’re cutting off your nose to spite your face with this one and all the backlash in the forums is firm evidence of this.

Sorry, but you’ve gone about this in a really really bad way and the fact all the places I visit in the Cursed Shore are still full of bots tagging everything I’m trying to tag and taking loot away from me, means that it’s not even working as intended or very well.

vanAndesen.6728:

I was pleased to notice that there are now two new reporting options. “Gold Seller” and “Botting”.
Gold sellers are a pain and you should just do the following:
1. Report
2. Ignore
3. Continue with your gaming fun.

Bots are usually easy to discover.
If you come upon a naked player (naked as in only wearing underwear), who is laying dead and you raise the player. Then if the player right off the raise rushes to attack the nearest target, then take a few and watch the player die and raise the player again, if same happens. Rushing to attack, then you can be sure that it is a bot.

I for one am glad that the GW2 team is fighting these two problems. Bots are just for shaking your head at them, but gold sellers are annoying, mainly their mails.

Keep up the good work guys.

That’s a ridiculous thing to tell people to do.

It’s not my priority to work as a “bot detective” on ANet’s behalf. I spent money to have leisure time here, I’m not going to waste my in-game time putting all the bots I come across through your version of a Turing test.

If I did do that in the Orr areas, I’d be there for a few hours at least.

Not to mention the fact that people misinterperet this information and use it to report people that are actually innocent and not a bot.

ANet should be responsible for keeping this game a bot free environment (alright it’ll never be 100% free, I accept this.)

They should not implement a blanket system to catch bots that effects all players in punitive ways. That’s totally wrong.

Bots are affecting me right now. They’re making me not want to log in, except with GW2 it’s a double-whammy.

1. I get punished by being made to play/farm how ANet dictates to me, as that’s their cost-effective way of removing botting.

2. It isn’t working very well and the bots are still here and very very prevalent and obvious in somewhere like Orr (specifically Cursed Shore) and their presence means I can very rarely tag the mobs before they die.

It’s such a mess.

I appreciate that ANet is looking into our reports, but its a little discouraging when i see the same bots at the same spot, doing the same action for weeks now and even tho ive reported em, and i sendt a map where to find em they are still there, and sadly one more Bot has appeared in that spot now. This place has a high droprate of potent blood and im sure they farm this and flood the marketplace with this bot blood :S

Every day i go to that spot hoping the bots will be gone, and every time i get a little dissapointed to see that they are still here,and now even increasing in numbers.

Ronin.8095:

1. I get punished by being made to play/farm how ANet dictates to me, as that’s their cost-effective way of removing botting.

If they think it’s cost-effective they’re dead wrong. It’s not working at all and in the long run they’re losing more money due to competition from gold sellers and player backlash than it would cost to deal with the problem properly.

Botting is not being stopped, or you do not have the personal to deal with it.

So far today I peronally have seen 20+ bots. 8 of those in the same area.

Every bot i’ve seen is at least level 30+, that is INSANE and UNACCEPTABLE they are allowed to even get that high level.

Look, every MMO that comes out, the developer says “we are aware of the bot problem and are working on it”. In fact, almost every MMO i played even put that same “we are working on ways to detect it”. That is unacceptable in this day and age to not have proper ways to detect this faster and eliminate it.

They bots know they won’t be bothered, they don’t even try to hide the fact they are bots with names like haldjhsada, jdadja, zozjsdoa, etc. Random gibberish names. The instantly warp to the mob that spawns and kills it, completely ruining events in game.

The program they are using for botting is WELL KNOWN, its been around for ages, easily detectable, FPS games have detection for this for years. When AION came out its the same program for crying out loud. Sure its updated, but its also easily to remove every update. Its not like these people are using custom made form scratch software. Its been around since the 90s.

I reported 1 person about 5 times for botting. It was clear and obvious botting. He/She was there all day standing in the same spot auto constantly firing. Whether there was a mob to hit their or not.

Now I’ve just seen this person with Commander Status in WvW.

His name is [Edit] . Its very annoying to see that this high status item is being used by this kind of person. Please solve this, He was reported several times and still he’s walking around sporting this high-end status.

[Edited by CC: Name removed]

I applaud for the issue being noticed but the issue itself seems to have intensified in the past few days that I have been on and playing since this announcement. I see bots all over the place where there has been none before and the gold seller e-mail spam is on the fast track to being a daily experience instead of odd rare one that it was before for me.

So far the only customer stratification I am getting from the situation is watching this particular bot warrior running around, naked, from repeatedly getting defeated from all the critters it attracts.

The gold seller spam, at least I can ignore and report. But bots are a whole other matter. They are obvious, they are there; the big elephant in the room. Its time to bring out the live white mice.

(aka, actually live GMs on the scene to handle them)

The bots I’ve been reporting for weeks are not being ban which leads me to think you guys really are not doing a whole lot or anything for that matter about the bots.

Then I read in the logging info page this article about how you guys are focusing on accounts being hacked, well those accounts wouldn’t have been hacked if people didn’t buy gold, power leveling, and knew how to use a different password then the same one as their email address.

Why exactly are you guys at Anet catering to people that get hacked, while letting your “game” your “baby” go down the crapper.

I bought this game because GW1 was AMAZING and thought by the way you guys were talking about this game your “baby” gave me high hopes for your company but between the diminishing returns on event rewards and loot, your really starting to lose my respect for your company and your developers.

sincerely A Player sick of being punish for playing legitimately.

Anet I don’t understand whats taking so long to ban bots. I reported a slew of them 4 days ago yet they are still there. All it would take is to send 1 GM there with the ban hammer and wipe them out and I would be a very happy camper!

Thank you, ANet! My guild and I myself all appreciate your constant support. We love you!