Guild Wars 2

I’ve seen bots twice today in Dredgehaut Cliffs that seem to only exist for a few seconds at a time before disappearing and reappearing somewhere else a second or two later. Each time, they were gathering from a resource node as soon as they appeared, and disappeared as soon as they finished gathering that node.

Since they disappear so quickly they’re nearly impossible to report. I know this isn’t the place to report bots, but it is the place to report the bug that they seem to be exploiting.

Seems to be a growing thing. I started seeing them sometime last week in Sparkfly and Bloodtide. Hoping to catch the next one in time to report…

I’m glad you posted about this. I was debating doing the very same thing. While in general it is not proper protocol to post about bots, this assumes that we are actually able to report said bots. Unfortunately, as you have mentioned, the current means for reporting bots fail to address the nature of the newest wave of bots. They appear out of nowhere, meaning that we have to have been looking at the node before they even appear. It takes them only a couple seconds to complete the harvest, meaning that you have to move very quickly to complete the reporting process. And they disappear immediately when finished, meaning that its impossible to give the due diligence to avoid accidentally reporting actual players. Perhaps these bots are easily traceable under Anet’s current monitoring and thus our inability to manually report them is not such a huge deal. However, assuming that they only way these bots get caught is through player reports, the current means of reporting them is completely inadequate to combat the newest wave of bots.

I’ve seen these bots harvesting ori in 2 maps of Orr, they probably the reason why omomberries dropped by 70c in 2 days.

I was mining the rich ori in lost shore when a charr suddenly appeared mined the node and then dissapeared again. A friend and I were discussing weather he had this toon as an alt parked there to quick mine it every 24 hours (or what ever the reset is) or if he was using a teleporting bot.

I too have been noticing this lately. So far I have only seen them in Orr over the past two days and I am unsure as to how to report them, since they disappear shortly after I notice them. Other than taking quick screen shots or constantly recording our game footage, I don’t know how we could document them. Hopefully, it’s easier on Arena net’s end to catch and document these bots.

I’ve managed to add and report one.

The funny thing is, it’s an account with only 65 achievement points. I was in Metrica when I saw a level 12 human porting between nodes – Even porting into a 15 area, where he was attacked and killed by several mobs. He did this twice.

I added him at this point, reported, and observed his character’s zone movements – He’s able to instantly teleport from Metrica to Sparkfly, to Bloodtide, Dredgehaunt, Mount Maelstrom at impossible speeds. I don’t know what level his character(s) are, but if the achievement point count is any indication, it can’t be very high.

Keep adding posts people, and keep reporting any spotted bots. I think Anet very much needs to be made aware of this, as they’re definitely going to be affecting the economy drastically.

Somebody in my guild mentioned this teleporting bot thing a few days ago. Didn’t think much of it until I was recently clearing Harathi Hinterlands. Saw two in the space of just a few minutes, both on mining nodes. They suddenly appear — one appeared to be ‘stuck’ in the node itself — minded it and then teleported right on out.

Couldn’t catch it on a bug report or botting report. I’ll try to be quick next time I run into one. But they’re definitely porting around out there.

Good I’m not crazy. I’ve seen this a couple times and was wondering if this was a new ‘botting’ technique. Essentially for anyone that doesn’t know and likes to report botting: The bot will ‘appear’ at a node (in my case, always a male character with no clothes), jump once, gather the resource, then disappear. Since they are there for only a split second, it makes it very difficult to report.

These bots are likely using a recent speed hack exploit to minimize the harvest duration and then teleport.

I’ve heard that if you open their name in a Whisper, you can still report them. I haven’t tried it, so I’m not sure. It’s a bit faster to right click and whisper than to right click, report, select type, send report.

How about you implement a CAPTCHA when mining, this should fix the bot problem :p
If it works well, you can implement it on looting anywhere

Seen a few of these in Southsun Shore waters, killing fish type mobs.
Blink, kill, vanish right on top of next one.
Reported ones I could, not easy though.

I can confrim that. I´ve seen them in same locations.

Just following up with additional details; After getting to watch a few of them move into the zone I was in, I’m reasonably certain that they’re moving underground. I say this because a wave of these bots came into my zone one after another. While most of them instantly vanished, one seemed to be glitching out and kept reappearing. The only reason I could tell that it was the same one was because it was a ranger and the pet would not instantly disappear. The bot also appeared underground one time which I could tell from the location of its name (since obviously I cannot see underground). From what I’ve heard, WoW was plagued by a similar bot which would travel underground from node to node and then pop through the surface to gather. These brief observations seem to suggest that a similar bot is operational here as well.

Xolo that was big bad joke. Here you can read what captcha can do for you http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=36280205765 Main reason why I don’t use facebook anymore. Besides do you think bot who can go around time delay and can teleport would not handle some captcha? OCR is alive for very long time.
So back on topic, let guys from arena net fix it and we can only do as much as find and report bots.

No Captchas, EVER!
Not on front of the game & especially not when doing anything in it, that`d be OTT.
Captchas are one of the worst things ever created, majority of the time they`re not legible.
Took me two hours of kittening about trying to buy GW1 stuff, only to be locked out & having to resort to emailing NCSoft.

Xolo.3580:

How about you implement a CAPTCHA when mining, this should fix the bot problem :p
If it works well, you can implement it on looting anywhere

Bots can defeat CAPTCHA with OCR, unless the captcha uses multiple colors and odd shapes. This would cause more harm than good, because in order for CAPTCHA to truly work, everyone would be affected.

Xolo.3580:

How about you implement a CAPTCHA when mining, this should fix the bot problem :p
If it works well, you can implement it on looting anywhere

That might have worked in 2002 (but, even then, at the cost of annoying 99% of players, so it would still be a huge mistake). These days, automated CAPTCHA solvers have a higher success rate than humans. The only way Arena Net would be able to stay ahead of that game would be to completely change the CAPTCHA format every week (so that the solver coders were kept playing catch-up).

Anyway, detecting teleporting bots should be trivial (as should detecting teleporting players, which is also a hack and a bannable offense).

In fact, it’s weird that the server allows this at all, and it suggests the same method could be used to cheat in PvP and WvW (if a bot can teleport, so can a real player). Server-side code should never trust the data coming from the client; it should always enforce things such as movement speed limits, etc., regardless of what the client tells it.

I actually wrote an article about this before the game’s launch, saying that the lack of plug-in support in GW2 could indicate that the engine had not been coded with security in mind (proper support for plug-ins forces the game’s engine to be designed in a way that prevents abuse of the plug-in system, leading to a more robust structure, overall), and wondering what that would mean terms of future cheats.

If indeed these bots are teleporting at will, you can be sure that some players are using the same trick to teleport themselves around in WvW.

Couldn’t this be solved with changing how resource nodes are spawned? Nodes should never spawn in the same place, they should just be scattered around the area randomly.

I’m not sure if this would help, but it’s a thought.

I’ve come across these as well. I walked up to a tree to cut it down the next thing I heard was a Arhghghgg sound as a bot logged in dead next to the tree and 2 seconds later disappeared again. It was pretty funny actually

MokahTGS.7850:

Couldn’t this be solved with changing how resource nodes are spawned? Nodes should never spawn in the same place, they should just be scattered around the area randomly.

I’m not sure if this would help, but it’s a thought.

Not really because that hack is related to the acutal node – it won’t matter where it is on the map.

I have also seen this happen – twice.

Twitchz.6407:

I’ve come across these as well. I walked up to a tree to cut it down the next thing I heard was a Arhghghgg sound as a bot logged in dead next to the tree and 2 seconds later disappeared again. It was pretty funny actually

haha…I’ve seen this a few times too. just a dead ranger in it’s underwear dropping from nowhere with a death groan. Not sure what kills them, but I smile when it happens.

I saw one today. It was creepy.

I was fighting a veteran mob in Orr and he pops up outa nowhere immediately mutilating a tree gathering node next to me and vanished even faster than it appeared. Was like I saw a ghost.

They’ve been running for a couple weeks now. There was the big ban in early-mid November that hit like 6,000 bot accounts. After that they must have developed and released a new bot that utilizes teleports to make it tougher to catch.

MokahTGS.7850:

Couldn’t this be solved with changing how resource nodes are spawned? Nodes should never spawn in the same place, they should just be scattered around the area randomly.

The server still needs to inform the client about where the nodes are (so the client can render them, show them on the mini-map, etc.), so that wouldn’t make any difference to any bot with decent pathfinding.

The really interesting part about these bots isn’t that they’re gathering resources, it’s the fact that they are teleporting. Because, if bots can do that, so can players with a hacked client. And that has some obvious implications for WvW and PvP.

Proper server design should make this (teleportation, speed hacking, etc.) impossible to begin with.

I encountered one in the most hilarious place possible: at the absolute bottom of the ocean in Frostgorge Sound.

I have seen a bot myself and was lucking enough to report them before they disappeared.

Phew thought I was going crazy. I saw this dead player near a gathering node in snowden drifts and after I ressurected her, she immediately disappeared I thought it was just my imagination … Didn’t know that it could be a bot so wasn’t able to report at least I know now

It’s getting pretty bad out there – I stood and watched a single mining node for about 45 minutes and saw thirty-four bots. Even being prepared, I could only report about twenty of them as some are coming in groups of two or three a second apart. I did manage to get screenshots of most of them, so I’ll make up a ticket later.

EDIT: These were all the teleport (or whatever) bots that pop up and disappear for a second, then pop back up and jiggle in place while they mine, then disappear when finished. There were only two “real” players besides myself seen the whole time.

I can report ones that have seen pretty often. The nodes are all around the skill point directly south of the npc that sells the lemons.

They appear West of the skill point (kill three worms) at nodes there. It is so fast, that I can’t report them.

Seen them there 4x in last few days..

These bots are gonna lower the prices of the materials on the Trading Post. Sadface. sarcasm
I’m just kidding.
Am I?

All these issues that people are noting about bot I have already made in a passing mention in one of the now locked bot discussion threads. Yet only now does anyone notice the underground teleporting gather bots? Mostly like people were more concerned about ‘camp&spam1’ bots back then. Anet has yet to fix this side of the bot problem.

Now that i saw this topic back when the clock tower puzzle was released, i remember farming it a bit for the bags and seeing some people standing on the chest platform, where you had to jump down, loot it and dissappear even when i was ahead of everyone…which left me wondering how the hell they got there and why they dissappeared, this might explain it.

There has to be something going on, I farm the nodes in Dredgehaunt often myself (legitimately) to supplement my income, and the price has really been going down. Soon there won’t be a reason for me to spend my time doing it.

I’ve got a video for you: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky8Y6SYJlMs
Reported as “Botting”.

MokahTGS.7850:

Couldn’t this be solved with changing how resource nodes are spawned? Nodes should never spawn in the same place, they should just be scattered around the area randomly.

I’m not sure if this would help, but it’s a thought.

No this would not help. Because I am sure bot programs are able to read from memory where the nodes are located and port to them. Anything client can see so can a bot program. In fact probably able to see more and further because as in other MMOs the information is there but just flag for distance/visibility etc.

Darkorical.9213:

I was mining the rich ori in lost shore when a charr suddenly appeared mined the node and then dissapeared again. A friend and I were discussing weather he had this toon as an alt parked there to quick mine it every 24 hours (or what ever the reset is) or if he was using a teleporting bot.

Some players like myself have parked alts to farm the node every 24 hours legitimately , but yes there are teleporting bots on the servers.

I’ve seen 3 different kinds of teleport bots. The 1st kind teleports to a node to farm it. The 2nd kind teleports to a point of interest for the xp. The 3rd kind teleports to a waypoint for xp. I’m sure these bots teleport to vistas for xp as well but I haven’t seen any yet. The 2nd and 3rd are practically impossible for a player to report.

Type 2 and 3 are the same. And yes: This type of bot also does vistas. Except that this aren’t bots, those are REAL players who use cheats.

Teleporting in Guildwars 2 is one of the easiest tasks, as the game lacks ANY type of movement validation. The developers did a terrible job.

And it is not new either, this type of bots and cheats is being used since early BETA!

… okay. send a ticket.

I am so glad this thread is here. I noticed last week while running my character up Fireheart Rise and over to get up to Frostgorge for the Dragon, that several nodes were immediately populated with one or two players that just “appeared” out of the ether.

At first I thought I just missed the player running up to the node, but when he totally “poofed” out of existence, I realized it was a bot that just teleported to and from the node.

Glad to know Anet is aware of this. It happened so quickly that by the time I thought to use a screen shot, the character just was not there any longer and all I would have gotten was a pretty landscape.

Now I’ve seen these teleporting bots in various zones..but people need to be careful and think about what they actually witnessed. If the character appears out of nowhere, instantly gathers a node with little to no animation, and then disappears – it is a bot. However, there are people who camp an alt by a node – log in from time to time – gather the node and then instantly log out. The length of time they are actually seen at the node would be much greater than a teleport hack bot, though.

Just something to keep in mind.

CC Eva.6742:

Hello there.

just a quick message to let you know that this issue has been passed on to the team so they are aware of this and working on it. We understand that it is kind of hard to report in such circumstances but we would encourage you to keep trying, if you see some more. You can also make a screenshot and send it along with a report to Customer Support through the ticketing system.

Thanks for your reports and patience!!!

We’ve been reporting this for months now and nothing is being done about it. gZoom has allowed this since beta and you guys haven’t broken it yet.

CC Eva.6742:

Hello there.

just a quick message to let you know that this issue has been passed on to the team so they are aware of this and working on it. We understand that it is kind of hard to report in such circumstances but we would encourage you to keep trying, if you see some more. You can also make a screenshot and send it along with a report to Customer Support through the ticketing system.

Thanks for your reports and patience!!!

If you guys didn’t close every topic on forum with a word “bot” in it before you actually read it, you’d be able to “pass this issue to the team” about a month ago.

I personally made a topic on this forum about this issue soem time ago highlighting the fact that it’s almost impossible to report them via in-game means nor here because they dissapear so fast you can’t right click check their name or account name bla bla bla (and good luck noting character name like Lld hthth).
But you did close my topic with a reply “Please report via in-game means”.
Seriously.

Also, what are in-game means of reporting even there if in-game bug reports seem to be totally ignored?
I’ve reportied multiple bugs these oinly to see a Dev, not a Mod who might not be informed about everything, replying in a topic here 3 weeks later that “they’ve just been made aware of the issue”.

it’s abyssmal what’s going on with your Q&A.

As I have said somewhere before, put a death layer just under the surface of the map. Test to see if current position from previous position crosses the death layer, if so kill player and put them at point of death(on the surface of the map). Since most of the teleports exposed on youtube travel in direct line they will always hit the death layer.

Thats not how teleporters work…

What you did see on Youtube were fly- and noclip-hacks. Teleporthacks get you from one position to another instantaneously, just like when you use the regular ingame teleport system. Only difference: No loading screen for cheaters, so they are actually even faster and it’s free.

Only solution is proper movement validation on server side, mostly a “radar gun” for player movements. All hacks out there have one thing in common, the player moves far faster than it would be possible by normal measures. And the server is so incredibly stupid to accept any type of movement the client claims to have performed…

Technically spoken, “teleporting” is simply telling client and server at the same time “hey, i moved to spot X”. And both will believe.

Hi everyone,

As this issue has been reported and to prevent the thread from derailing we are going to close it. As CC Eva said, thanks for your reports. Be sure that the hackers will be dealt with.