Guild Wars 2

Did we really need another thread about this?

They said that they observe the behavior to try to come up with ways to combat it, then do mass bannings.

So just report those you think are botting and move on with your game.

Omega Mayhem.7163:

Did we really need another thread about this?

They said that they observe the behavior to try to come up with ways to combat it, then do mass bannings.

So just report those you think are botting and move on with your game.

How long do they need to observe them for huh?

on my server I’ve seen the same bots for WELL over a week, there all day, all night. countless people mention them and report them, myself I’ve reported them many times.

Nothing is EVER done about it. The game is great but the attitude of arenanet is really going to lose lots of players. a: for not doing a naffing thing about a HUGE bot problem and b: because of their attitude to us normal players. no information or updates for weeks.

I am going to stop reporting when/if I play again, theres simply no point in it, its totally ignored.

I’ve played many mmo’s but I’ve never seen anything as bad as this.

Ok, people. Relax. They obviously know what’s going on, or they would not have created a stickied thread about it, right? We all see it. It looks totally ridiculous when seen in a zone, so it isn’t like it can be overlooked. for too long. The thread has only been opened for about 11 days.
Let’s just take a deep breath and see what happens.
To the devs and ANet; it is unfortunate that people get more upset at you than at the jerks hacking and botting like this. I will be happy to help in any way that I can as a player to combat this kind of stuff. If you need anything from us, I am sure there are others like me who would be happy to volunteer our time to remedy the situation and “clean up the streets” so to speak. There ARE players who are patient and know these things can take time and can be pretty complex problems. I’d rather you take the time and make the best decision for the game instead of rushing a solution out that makes things worse or is ineffective.
Hang in there, everyone!

In 11 days 1 bot can make enough to purchase 8 more bots. So in that 11 days they have let the bots fester.. they lost the game 8 times over.

“Did we really need another thread about this?
They said that they observe the behavior to try to come up with ways to combat it, then do mass bannings.
So just report those you think are botting and move on with your game.”

This is the OFFICIAL thread on the subject… so fairly appropriate place to post it.

Few myths being thrown out making some think the issue is solved…
1) “Anti botting code is in place so they are not effective anyhow.”
FALSE. Diminishing returns is reset by relogging. Watch the botters, they will relog every 3 hours or so. There is currently no effective antibotting code.
2) They are not impacting you so ignore it.
FALSE. Even if you can go play somewhere else, each of those bots are injecting 10+ gold per day (and or crafting mats) at a minimum to the economy that would not otherwise be there. Items you may need to purchase from the BLTC will cost more due to this injection of gold. Server performance also takes a negative hit due to these bots. As spoken about by the makers of EVE Online… there is a very detrimental effect by these bots on server performance.
3) Arenanet said they are doing something so they are. FALSE. They may very well be doing something, but every time they make that statement they are not answering the actual question. The question is "why aren’t you banning these bots using an easily available peice of software who are hunting in a manner that indicates they have ZERO fear of being banned. A crappy bot is henerating 10 dollars a day. In 5 days it has paid for itself. Banning every 2 or 3 months is ineffectual. "Saying there’s a plan, and then letting the bots continue for 2 weeks… indicates that NOTHING is being done for the actual problem complained about. It’s pretty much me telling my kid he needs to get a job, hearing he has a plan for the money situation, and finding out the plan was to sponge off of Dad. Technically correct but not at all what I was talking about.
4) They need time to investigate and seperate the legit players from the bots. FALSE. There are plenty of easy metrics that make it easy to spot a bot. There are plenty of bots no one is even noticing. The bots most are complaining about are scripted with aggressive behavior that makes them detrimental to the game. If you ban a legit player then you have banned someone playing 24/7 for weeks on end grinding the same location over and over again. Let them call you and explain it :P

People are botting because it is financially feasible to do so. If it continues to be financially feasible botting will continue to increase regardless of mass bannings. That we have seen virtually no bannings since this announcement was made (my friends list continues to grow with bots online 24/7) one can safely presume that botting will remain VERY lucrative (meaning nothing is really being done). All the tools in the world do not matter if you don’t actually ban anyone. Maybe it’s an NC Soft thing since Aion was the only other AAA title game I seen with this much flagrant in your face botting.

CAPTCHA’s are used to keep bots from making accounts, but I have always wondered, if the CAPTCHA’s really stop bots, why don’t mmo’s just add random popup CAPTCHA screens to mmo’s that auto kick accounts that answer wrong.

Fix it so that one of these CAPTCHA popups will trigger anytime an account does some number of repetitive behaviors or something, and after the 3rd-ish wrong answer autoban the accounts.

Seems to me that if CAPTCHA’s actually thwart bots, that would put a decent dent in the number of bot accounts running. But I don’t know much about computer programming, so maybe there is some reason why they don’t. I know I personally wouldn’t mind occasionally going through the hassle of filling out a CAPTCHA if it meant that the hackers and botters were being weeded out.

Just a thought.

I for one am not impressed on the Ehmry bay server they are running rampent people are just goin to call this a failed bot WoW clone and unless something is done about this quickly you are not gonna have anyone to sell gems too.

Botting is a huge problem if someone posts a video of botters to show what they look like I have heard that because of the agreement it degrades that person (bot) how can you degrade them if your showing them in a bot group we all can tell them easy they are usually rangers with pets all look nearly the same and names like xoissl come on get real dont threaten people with losing their accounts cause they have a video showing bots at work do something about the bots not the reporter. If you told me that I would get banned for posting a video of a botter I would tell u to take this game and shove it as most people would thats just stupid

I love guildwars series I love anets ideas but i sometimes think you go overboard on stuff like that. Anyway do something about the bots they are getting on peoples nerves and try to trust the reports on them thanks.

Cristian.8069:

It has got so bad that lately i get almost nothing but porous bones in cursed shore due to DR. It’s really sad that Anet is treating their customers like this. They could say “we are working on it, pls have patience” or something but their ignorance/silence is an offense for us players. I waited for 2 weeks but i don’t think i’ll wait 2 more to see this fixed.

I find it incredible that no major gaming review site has started taking interest into this.
I mean, sites lile MMORPG.com and similar, they are so ready to publish the last glitch / rumor about B— games yet something so major and face mashing like GW2 being totally swamped by bots finds no place, no interest?

After putting up with this getting worse day after day after day, and getting several infractions by the mods here for even MENTIONING the botting plague.

I’ve decided that life is too short to waste time on this and hope for anet to do anything.
After reporting the same bots for over a week and they are still there, its quite obvious that anet either don’t care about the problem or they are encouraging it, as a way of generating extra income.

I know I blew my £40 on the game and they have it now but after this fiasco I will never buy another ncsoft/arenanet game again.

The bots are left alone and anyone reporting them or commenting on them gets forum infractions. and I thought blizzard were a bad company.. words fail me.

Goodbye all, its such a great shame to quit a game that is so fun to play.

The fact that they were not prepared for this at all speaks pretty poorly.

Ditto all the above. The bot problem is big and growing bigger. Please get it fixed before it starts costing you a lot of players.

Steve.7926:

After putting up with this getting worse day after day after day, and getting several infractions by the mods here for even MENTIONING the botting plague.

I’ve decided that life is too short to waste time on this and hope for anet to do anything.
After reporting the same bots for over a week and they are still there, its quite obvious that anet either don’t care about the problem or they are encouraging it, as a way of generating extra income.

I know I blew my £40 on the game and they have it now but after this fiasco I will never buy another ncsoft/arenanet game again.

The bots are left alone and anyone reporting them or commenting on them gets forum infractions. and I thought blizzard were a bad company.. words fail me.

Goodbye all, its such a great shame to quit a game that is so fun to play.

What he said ^^^^

Me too i know i have blown my £40 on this game and yes i wont be touching another Arena net or Ncsoft game again after this Fiasco.
They made this thread 11 days ago with the grand anouncement that they had banned 1600 people for botting.
Big deal.!!!! thats on average 33 bots a server.!!!! good work well done well spotted.
Maybe you guys at Anet should stop eating the cupkakes you keep posting pics off on FB and get online and have a look at your game.
EVERY place i go on the server im on 10 tp 15 botts at EVERY location spamming attacks so the reguler players get NOTHING.
All we get for reporting it and coming on forums to air our frustration at it is our posts deleted and a warning.
I havnt been online in a week now just sick of not being able to play the game i PAID for the way i want to play it.
But you know what guys its a waste of time posting here in this thread i bet you it NEVER gets read.
11 days old and still NO further news. the silence is deafening realy.
Cya around { but not in this game anymore}

Frostgorge Sound has a TON of bots just running around in the valley. Botting is getting out of hand in this game.

All the kittening bots have Chinese names. kitten gold sellers.

I’m flabbergasted. In another thread I see an Anet representative saying they are “developing tools” to help deal with the problem. I say again that there are so many un sophisticated bots, tools are really not required. (And will be ineffective against sophisticated bots anyway). Allocate som resource to banning these blatant bots. incidentally I see that GMs are managing to find time to hand out infractions for swearing (for example).

This as bad an infestation of botting that I have seen (and I’ve seen a fair few from Asherons Call on), as others have said it must be getting to the point where GW2 will be labeled as ‘that game that was ruined by botting’ (even if subsequently cleared up).

Anet have impressed me with there whole approach to producing and running games but this just defies reason.

vox.5019:

Is anybody else scared of bringing their lowbie ranger out to play?

No not scared.. Disgusted.. And my Ranger got stuck at 47 due to all this.. First cause almost every bot out there uses a ranger and it’s starting to become a hated class in the game, and second, cause if you get “mixed up” with bots in an area, people will simply report you as a botter, as they won’t be able to tell the difference..

…..Unless of course they start sending PMs to every ranger they see in order to check whether he’s a bot or not… Absurd!

On Sanctum of Rall server, inside the skritt caves adjacent to Ebonhawke citadel, there are something like a dozen bots. There are so many of them and they are warp hacking around so much that it’s all but impossible to report them all. Could someone from A-Net do a quick on-site glance? It’ll take all of 30 seconds to be certain they’re botting.

Today is the first time I really started to take notice of bots. They seem to be getting worse. I was on the TC overflow and there were numerous ranger bots teleporting around the water pump area in Queensdale. I reported 3, then left as soon as the “travel” to the main server option popped.

Today i remembered of Dhuum from Guild Wars.. Hey guys, is he asleep? There are bots he needs to ban out there! Wake him up, it’s an emergency!

I have yet to find something devastating enough for me to publicly complain about it, but I really do feel it’s necessary right now. I love this game more than a lot of things. I feel it was thoroughly worth my money my time, and then some…. however the botting, and the shear abuse that Arenanet is allowing to take upon themselves without reprimand might actually make me quit the game. No, I’m not that type of person to jump ship, especially on something I’ve waited years and years to play. But seriously…the botting that I’m seeing is absolutely ridiculous. I seriously think that a good third of my server is bots…maybe more! Heck, there might only bee 50 actual players on my server, and the rest are just rangers running single file, teleporting, and circle jerking the same spots on a daily basis.
I don’t care what needs to be done, but they need to disappear, because they’re making an already difficult endgame more difficult. Respond to every botting report if you have to, I don’t care. Get rid of them! I don’t even care if I’m reported for botting and get banned, at least I know something is being done about it.

Everyone is glad that we have seen a dropoff/elimination of the gold selling spam, however I think the downside of this is that it is easier to report mail spam, than it is to know that the item you buy in the TP is being sold by a hacker using bots, destroying the player driven part of the game economy.

Also, consider that these bots are the first or second generation, and currently seem to be only running around an killing everything. The possibility of having bots that harvest items is likely to come to pass, if they are not doing so already.

I’m also with the group that won’t report bots anymore. It’s useless. Bots I reported a week ago are still active. At least with gold sellers, I never saw them online again after a day (two at the most)

The silence in this thread by ANet employees is also telling. And not in a good way.

Just so ya’ll know, I saw a bot chopping wood, so it is entirely possible that people are bot farming wood/harvestables and spamming the tp with them. How do I know he was a bot? observation of his unnatural movement patterns eg. walking into obstacles and getting stuck, random dodge rolls when no enemy there, random shooting at thin air. etc..If you’ve seen many bots, you’ll eventually learn to pick out even the more sophisticated ones.

And now, people if you think your server is unplayable because of botting, i suggest changing server. i did. Tarnished coast has relatively few bots and a decent community (from my initial impressions anyway). Leave the bot infested servers and let them play with themselves in the meanwhile.

Gonna have to cry bs on the actually doing anything about it as they seem to just be increasing daily. It’s really disheartening when you’re like hey I’m in the mood for some GW2, log on try to do a quest, and there’s just trains of bots running in circles trying to kill everything in sight or just a glob of them shooting at nothing and every. So you’re like maybe I’ll just switch characters, same thing’s happening to another area. Makes you sick enough to stop playing.

Really, how hard is it to detect a bot when they’re freaking teleporting all over the map or just sitting and shooting at nothing the entire time or running predetermined paths hour after hour day after day. Sickening as hell just logging on and oh it’s just freaking bots everywhere, even the same ones you’ve reported dyas earlier.

All a GM has to do is go to the cursed shore and a number of other higher level areas, some of the starting areas and you can clearly see bots running in groups of 2++++. See them and banish them and their account.

Half of them run around naked copying each other and the other half are camped at events and kill the mobs before they are even spawned for non bot players, ruining the experience.

The best solution I can personally think of so that aNet makes drastic changes is to advertise it. Blog about it, make an honest review, make youtube videos, about the botting that plagues Guild wars 2. As of now, aNet’s ego is inflated as heck, as you can see from their facebook posts and shares, news and such.

Sankofa Jimiyu.1567:

Everyone is glad that we have seen a dropoff/elimination of the gold selling spam, however I think the downside of this is that it is easier to report mail spam, than it is to know that the item you buy in the TP is being sold by a hacker using bots, destroying the player driven part of the game economy.

Also, consider that these bots are the first or second generation, and currently seem to be only running around an killing everything. The possibility of having bots that harvest items is likely to come to pass, if they are not doing so already.

Sorry to be the one to enlighten you brother,but we’ve gone far beyond first and second gen bots in this game.For the most part,the players that are just becoming aware of the problem have still only knowingly encountered the basic leveling/looting bots of mass farmers.

On a personal level of botting,there are now bots that,seen by an ignorant player,will and do go unnoticed,doing anything a real player does.I urge you to even just do a youtube search on the subject and see what these programs are capable of,or even browse some botter forums.

Botting has been made a viable option to usually legit players,because of the need to compete with bots for all types of resources,and to battle the Diminishing Returns code.
Sadly I see more and more bots that,belong to previously legit players,going about there buisness to rectify the resource score,so their ownerwill able to enjoy the game as intended,when they do play the character themselves.

Work this out.
When I started playing GW2,my first and only character always had full inventory bags to sell stuff and upgrades for gear waiting to be leveled to fit into,events gave good karma over and over for the purchase of Karma only items to wear.

Last night I started a brand new character,bought it four standard 4 slot bags,completed queensdale at level 11, and never,ever had to sell to a vendor because of full inventory and practically purchased (with gold) every item that it is wearing(in fact I could have done with just one extra bag instead of four).There wasn’t even enough karma on this character to supply it with all the desired level 16 karma merchant items,when I finished the map.

Not that I got map completion tho,because the beetletun Skill point quest was broke…..again.

Anyway,just thought I’d let you know that,while the staionary and path kill/loot bots are the majority of what most players see,there are far more advanced settings on bots getting around. (bots can be personally tailored by the player to do whatever)

Hi, a lot of people have an opinion about why ANet hasn’t stopped botting yet. Most of the opinions are quite reasonable. I work in the area of automatic classification and inference. So, I find it puzzling as to why botting remains when to me there appears to be enough data to stop this almost entirely.

There are data points with a botter that are wholly different than those of a regular player, and from a classification point of view allow for almost certain classification. Lots of data point. Together these different points give I feel 100% certain classification.

I feel reluctant to communicate in too much detail (if an ANet staffer gives the nod I’m happy to broaden the discussion)… I would have thought ANet had the development experience in house already, if they don’t I strongly suggest they go find themselves a dev with a suitable background. I’m not special, there are an awful lot of programmers to whom this problem would not be difficult. If botting is looking like a hard problem to ANet it is because they haven’t gotten the right experience in-house. Much harder classification problems are dealt with in real time.

In short, with the right programmers botting in the obnoxious form we’re currently seeing can be removed completely, and easily.

I cant help but feel, if it was just a quick easy fix, that the problem wouldnt exist and wouldnt be as wide spread throughout mmo’s as it is.
I think the botters are a little more savy than you give them credit for.

Xericor.9103:

I cant help but feel, if it was just a quick easy fix, that the problem wouldnt exist and wouldnt be as wide spread throughout mmo’s as it is.
I think the botters are a little more savy than you give them credit for.

This is what people don’t seem to understand.

There’s a reason that all MMOs suffer from botting, and it’s not because they are all too lazy to fix it.

Xericor.9103:

I cant help but feel, if it was just a quick easy fix, that the problem wouldnt exist and wouldnt be as wide spread throughout mmo’s as it is.
I think the botters are a little more savy than you give them credit for.

As I say, I work in the area, and the classification problems I solve are a lot trickier. Really they are… As I say, I’m not special, there are many programmers working with the same sort of problems on a daily basis. There are some really really simple and obvious data points here.

I can classify behaviour as that of a botter, in real-time.

I am not a special programmer, I merely have over a decades experience in an adjacent field.

There are many many other programmers as capable of solving this problem as I.

Gaile Gray mentioned yesterday on Guru that they are developing tools to deal with the botting issue. Producing robust code isn’t instant though, so just give them some time and keep reporting bots in the mean time. I expect that repeat reports from different players will help to enable them to eliminate false positives. Also, take a few moments to make sure you are really reporting a bot rather than just a ranger with a bear pet. Mostly it’s pretty obvious, but I can imagine mistaken reporting might be a nuisance.

There are screenshots all over the forums of like 30+ naked rangers running around with an army of bears. Naked rangers and tons of bears. Sounds like a problem, bots or not!

@ “There are screenshots all over the forums of like 30+ naked rangers running around with an army of bears…”

Yes, in those cases I try to report all the bots. That may help to tie the accounts to particular botters, I reckon. It does take a bit of time, but isn’t so hard with the new bot reporting feature – i.e. right click on the bots portrait and select “report bot”. Sometimes the bot trains do subsume players though so you need to be a bit carefull who you click on.

Reposting this here because told so by the moderator:

How comes obvious bots can even make it to level 30+ without being banned?

By obvious bot, I don’t mean the hacked account with a random class and a normal name. I mean rangers (or often groups of them), with gibberish names, running always the same path killing the same stuff over and over again.

How comes those bots are even able to make it past level 15 and leave the starter areas? I can’t believe your in game customer service is so bad that they can’t see what is obvious to us players.

Bots in low level areas, I can fully understand, it still needs some time for them to be detected (even though it gives a really bad image of the game to new players). But in 30+ areas? Come on, you have to react faster. Really.

I saw a circle running warrior leveling from 70 to 80 within one day in Shelter’s Gate.
And he is still running a few hours after the patch.
I didn’t know leveling is so quick.
I noticed the level since he is the only one with grey level number to me.
Reported him and other annoying running bots 2~3 times.

With current drop rate and slower DR, I’m pretty sure the bags of these low level circle running bots are full.

Almost two months of bots and 11 days of this forum topic and it seems each day just gets worse. Can you please do or say something? Fill in the gaps.

Still nothing being done. I will continue to hound, call out, point out, cast out, condemn and even mock Anet.

Around 10 bots (most of the same ones for days and weeks on end) at Penitent Path this morning. They are extremely visible this time of day due to the low number of people online (work/school).

Like was mentioned elsewhere. All you need is 1 employee to login each server daily and go penitent, shelters gate and the other places mentioned 99% of them all use the same script. Get their IP and see how many they are running from it and ban them all. You wont get the private bots/scripts but you will get the 1000’s of script kiddies that are to lazy to make their own(which are the ones ppl mostly see). After posting a screenshot of them all at shelters gate they disappeared quick
Most have given up farming gold and are just lvling to 80 and selling the accounts(a google search will find that info). The DR doesn’t affect bots(not the majority) it affects real players farming mats. Whether Anet decides to believe it or not, that’s their choice.

well, i decided to give Anet the benefit of doubt and wait some longer. After reading their posts more carefully i see that they probably are working on it and very hard,but they have had other issues such as stolen accounts,and ofc that is more pressing than some naked ranger.

Give em some time, and they might surprise us with a spectacular crackdown on the botters.

I would be more than glad to work for anet and pinpoint the botters, or….give me rightd to kill players….I’ll camp em for as long as I can =D

Just wanne mention something positive to the folks of arenanet. Last week i havnt seen any goldsellers adds and i havn’t recieved any goldseller mails anymore. Weeks before that it was every 10 minutes. As a player i notice improvements. Nice job.

Everyone is talking about bots ‘farming’ mobs but is anyone else concerned about the node farming bots? Half the time I go to dig a copper, chop a tree or forage a plant I find a string of naked bots appearing for 10 sec to gather, disapearing, and appearing at the next nearest node. They don’t run in surface (and possibly attract agro) nor wear armor protection. They teleport under the map and swim to the next farming point. I don’t know how they managed such a hack (which sometimes happen to me when using teleport skills, but I never manage to get back up w/o waypoints). I just hope the big delay in Anet’s bot solution has something to do with the under map teleport hack.

heed our cries for help anet!!! </3

I’m still here at Cursed Shore, observing two groups of bots – at least 15-20 of them, total – jockeying for position between two apparently “prime” farming spots.

It’s ridiculous. There’s no point in selling anything on the Trading Post. Buying anything from the Trading Post means you’re giving those bots gold to sell. Attempting to gather your own materials & gold is futile, as there are so many bots farming the high-level maps that your returns are nearly useless.

The only reason I haven’t yet gone back to another MMO is that you’re at least aware of the problem, but the pressure is mounting.

Do something about it – not spew platitudes, not reassure us that there’s something going on behind the scenes, but direct, visible action. It’s not hard to have an ArenaNet employee run around and identify groups of bots – we do it all day. Unlike you, though, we cannot then give them a 72-hour ban (or worse.) At the very least, do something about the Trading Post – legitimate players are being cut off from any real financial progress while these bots destroy the economy.

Last Stand Shelter yet again today has dozens of bots.

After the update they were gone for quite a while but back this morning.

I find it pretty pathetic this activity is allowed to go on past a day.

How many GMs are there per server? There aren’t many servers so you should have at least what, 2 at minimum?

There are lot of these locations in game sadly but I’m quite certain it would only take a minute or two at most for a GM to swoop in and dispatch these bots. And in doing so could clean the whole server in about an hour.

There is no excuse you can make, none at all.

They don’t have any GMs and their support team dealing with botting etc is probably critically understaffed like every other branch of their support system. It’s clear they’re only interested in a long term solution and ignoring the short term, not realizing that that’s a nigh impossible task with even memory scanning wardenesque systems unable to stop it, there will always be bots that leak through an automated system, the only defense is to not make it profitable by monitoring the report system and acting swiftly.