Guild Wars 2

Is it just me or are all the bots severely reduced/gone from the game at the moment as if A-net have just done a wave of banning.
Any official response available from a dev on this??

Hi everyone,

Our teams are daily combatting bots in the game, many thanks for your reports!

As a reminder you can report bots either by using the in-game tool or by submitting a ticket to the support.

Thanks for your help!

Lots of bots are just teleporting around gathering nodes now so they’re only visible for a few seconds at a time.

Check out this blog to see what they’ve been doing. Good stuff!

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/mike-lewis-on-the-war-against-the-bots/

Sorry, but Mike Lewis did either not know what he was talking about or he was simply lying.

There are still tons of bots out there, and just as many gold sellers. They only changed their behaviors to be either less suspicious or to be more efficient. The first type of bot is hardly distinguishable from a real player (and therefore gets rarely reported), the second type of bot uses all kinds of hacks to get maximum profit so it can pay off before it gets banned. (Especially the teleport bots pay of for the botters within less than a week, and Anet takes much longer to ban them.)

Only the number of gold sellers dropped a little (I’m NOT talking about the amount of advertising, that really went down), but less because they were banned (you know, they just make new accounts…), but because the prices for GW2 gold went down and they are still falling (a gold costs as little as 0,22€/$ nowadays (0,35$ in December, 1,50-2,00 at release) and it is still falling).

And that is for two reasons, fist of all the bots got more efficient, so it is possible to sell the gold for less. But the second cause had an much larger impact: The GW2 community is breaking away, and with the community also the potential customers for goldsellers. So many botters consider GW2 now unprofitable as there is an overproduction of gold.

On the behalf of Anet: They did fail to implement any of the automated bot detection methods they announced at release.
The only thing which ever worked (at least partially) was the gold seller detection, but nowadays only real players get caught while the goldsellers found ways around long ago. Another example was the JP at Wintersday, heavy botting, a quick and dirty “bot protection” and yet all the bot protection did, was punishing real players. The bots adjusted to both versions of the protection within less than 6 hours each and continued farming. Anet is even unable to detect such obvious things as teleport or speed hacks.

There are tons of bots in Cursed Shore still! The difference now is that they are “teleporting” to different nodes in scripted and programed manner beneath the map now. Every once in awhile they pop up at random places or their pet will so the only what to report them is when they pop up at a node and you gotta be quick about it.

I have no doubt that bots are getting more complex in nature, having said that ArenaNet has banned A LOT of accounts.

The thing is, the more complicated the bots have to be, the less likely people will be able to implement such bots. But you will never completely eradicate bots from the game.