Guild Wars 2

I’m always skeptical about exploiting/hacking/cheating by players in this game but for the first time I encountered a definite cheater.

It was obvious to everyone chasing him that something unusual was happening and so I assumed after being reported he would be banned.

2 days later….I see this same Guardian still in game and using the same cheat.

At first I wasn’t sure if he was lag switching or using some stealth exploit to make his Guardian disappear. However, he made the mistake of inviting me to group using yet another exploit I assume since he is the enemy.

I accepted his invite and won’t go into details of the conversation but this did provide the opportunity to observe things that are only available to group members.

So for 10-15 minutes I watched his character status bar and noted his blue dot teleport great distances across the map (from within map view) whenever his health got low and/or had a lot of CC on him.

I love this game and have been playing since release but one thing that will drive me away is allowing obvious cheaters to continue to play the game.

Not only that but cheaters generally have their own forums and once a game gets a rep for poor enforcement it is open season on that game for more cheaters/griefers to join in.

So are cheaters banned?

Why doesn’t the Report Tool contain an obvious choice for reporting cheating as other games do? ( I ended up using ‘Scamming’ and ’Botting")

Why can’t we request a GM for in-game support? (It would have taken a GM less than 5 minutes of observation to determine he was obviously cheating)

Keep having people report him.

He may not get immediately banned because ANet is monitoring his activity and client to datamine how to better detect and counter the hack code.

Sometimes you have to put up with a cheater for a bit for them to develop a solid counter action.

What he is doing isn’t destroying the economy, making him 100’s of gold or single handedly winning the weekly match. The impact is very annoying but nothing where they have to slap him down when it would be better served to observe and create a solid plan of action.

Sounds like you had a premium opportunity to record or take lots of videos. You could have then sent those to Arena Net support (exploits@arenanet.com), and he would have probably been banned.

Maybe a lot of trouble to get a dude banned? Sure, but if the personal satisfaction of knowing he got banned isn’t enough then I don’t know

P.S. inviting enemy players is easily done through targeting them and typing /invite. Your credibility drops because you think this is a hack.

P.P.S. this thread will be locked in a bit.

From what I can gather, Anet doesn’t seem to want to hear about hackers from the report tool, but from a detailed report sent to them via email. Seems like a lot of effort tbh.

EFWinters.5421:

Sounds like you had a premium opportunity to record or take lots of videos. You could have then sent those to Arena Net support (exploits@arenanet.com), and he would have probably been banned.

Maybe a lot of trouble to get a dude banned? Sure, but if the personal satisfaction of knowing he got banned isn’t enough then I don’t know

P.S. inviting enemy players is easily done through targeting them and typing /invite. Your credibility drops because you think this is a hack.

P.P.S. this thread will be locked in a bit.

Yea and that I assume is part of the problem. It is putting a lot of additional burden on the customer to maintain the integrity of their game.

Seems to me the burden should not be placed on the customer and we should have more efficient means for reporting cheaters.

I just worry that word is going to get around on those cheater forums that players are handicapped when it comes to reporting cheaters and GW2 becomes a cheaters paradise.

PS – I didn’t say the enemy group invite is a hack but rather an exploit of something not intended by ANet. I mean I assume they do not want enemy players to be able group up and see their dot locations on the map view right? Hell I’m not even sure if the teleport thing is a hack or an exploit. Could he have figured out how to exploit the legitimate teleporting that exists in-game or did he write code to alter the client or is it a hybrid of both? I don’t know but I do know it is unintended and a cheat.

I should probably be more clear and just label all of it as cheating. Exploiting is not the same thing as a hack but both are forms of cheating.

PSS – If this thread gets locked then I will have my answer as will any cheaters and hackers following this thread.

I’m curious. How far exactly, did he teleport?

EFWinters.5421:

I’m curious. How far exactly, did he teleport?

I don’t know the exact distance and it seemed to vary. The observed instances occurred on an enemy borderland map.

When actually fighting and trying to kill him he teleported far enough that he was out of line of sight. At this time I wasn’t sure he was teleporting and thought maybe he was stealthing or perhaps lag switching.

However, when I grouped with him I was able to observe that he was indeed teleporting vast distances by watching his blue dot on the map view.

Once I saw his blue dot teleport from the area directly outside of our starting area all the way to the far side of the closest keep close to the lake banks.

Another time from an area in front of this same keep to an area on the far side of the ruins again near the lake banks.

There seemed to be a pattern with the lake area that could be just coincidental or perhaps he chose it as the area less likely traveled and thus less likely to drop himself into more enemies. I’m inclined to believe the latter.

Edit: I also observed him teleport himself back into the area he teleported out of after he was back to full health and conditions cleansed of course.

sostronk.8167:

From what I can gather, Anet doesn’t seem to want to hear about hackers from the report tool, but from a detailed report sent to them via email. Seems like a lot of effort tbh.

It is a lot of effort. Sorry but if I am in wvw no way I am going to switch windows and fill out a detailed report, especially if in mid-battle. There HAS to be a way to do this in game quickly and easily- as suggested by allowing us to chose something other than botting or scamming and allowing us to type a very brief description of what we saw.

Just right click on the dude’s portrait, choose report and select scamming.

If enough ppl do that, ANet will look into the matter. No need to write long reports. It can be done midfight, as I have done that already several times. It is hard, if the person moves away quickly or stealths, so you won’t have time to do what has to be done, but some will be able to do it. Also, report such ppl, even if they are on your own server. Such hacking ruins the game for all of us.

Hacking and Botting are both issues, that are no real issues, if the community just keep an eye open.

File a support ticket on the guy, under “violations.” It gets faster results:

https://en.support.guildwars2.com/

What they want to know:

*What time this happened/date
*The abuser’s account name
*Your server/the abuser’s server
*Details of the exploit
*What map it was in
*What toon you were on when you witnessed it

While Anet can’t tell you what they do to players when they investigate, this ticket creates a paper trail on that player’s account and is the better way to help them help you.

No, cheaters and griefers are very welcome!

Jayne.9251:

File a support ticket on the guy, under “violations.” It gets faster results:

https://en.support.guildwars2.com/

What they want to know:

*What time this happened/date
*The abuser’s account name
*Your server/the abuser’s server
*Details of the exploit
*What map it was in
*What toon you were on when you witnessed it

While Anet can’t tell you what they do to players when they investigate, this ticket creates a paper trail on that player’s account and is the better way to help them help you.

I did record the guys account name and I did report him under ‘scamming’ and ‘botting’.

I would prefer an in-game option to report ‘Suspicious Behavior’ or ‘Page a GM’ as found in other MMOs. If I could have paged a GM they could have observed this guy and determined cheating in under 5 minutes. I’ve done this in previous MMO’s and is far more effective than a paper trail.

My biggest concern is that this guy is still in game after several days have passed of my first observing it along with many other players. So something somewhere is obviously broken or not working well.

I don’t want word to get around on the cheater forums that you can get away with cheating in GW2 because:

A) The current in-game tools are not effective at allowing the legitimate gaming community to report cheating.

B) ANet is simply lax or slow about enforcement

C) Both of the above

As it stands right now this is the only instance I’ve encountered since release where cheating was obvious so I’m not overly concerned at the moment but the future….

I honestly think they get so many in-game reports that it’s hard to sort through the legitimate ones and the ones where players just don’t understand the game mechanics. Doing the actual ticket helps get a real body looking into it. But it’s your call. All I know is that four different players that were causing issues in the past on my server stayed there for weeks on end, and only wind up never logging in again after the formal ticket was written up (I kept them on friends list to monitor because they caused a lot of disruptive behaviour).

Also, be sure to include any photos/video links you took to support the claim .. upload your images to a site like photobucket and include the links because Anet’s system rejects images over a certain size.

But it’s up to you. All I’m saying is this method appears to work and solve the issue.

I think the answer to the question is, “yes, they do, but it shouldn’t require quite so much effort from the players as it does now.”

-ken

You can elaborate and put screencaps in support tickets. I use tickets when the situation is not obvious. It’s worked well in my experience.

After day 1 ban, snowflakes ban, 3 times they banned a mass of people for reason they didn’t say about 4 months of them going after bots. I’m sure they can miss some people if its not an over blown game breaking issue.

I have an update. Last night this same character was in the same area performing the same blatant teleport cheat.

However, this time chat was a buzz about him. Here is just a sample of the chat:

- That guy is still around?
- How do you report cheating I dont see an option
- It’s a waste of time to report

So yea the report system is not effective and ANet appears very lax about banning cheaters.

I’m going to look for him tonight and if he is still on doing his blatant cheats then I’m going to have seriously reconsider my commitment to the game. Gem purchases s are definitely out at this point.

Edit: I removed the answer because at this point it does not appear that ANet bans cheaters.

Valin.4527:

Keep having people report him.

He may not get immediately banned because ANet is monitoring his activity and client to datamine how to better detect and counter the hack code.

Sometimes you have to put up with a cheater for a bit for them to develop a solid counter action.

What he is doing isn’t destroying the economy, making him 100’s of gold or single handedly winning the weekly match. The impact is very annoying but nothing where they have to slap him down when it would be better served to observe and create a solid plan of action.

I started asking myself the question why wouldn’t they ban him given he is so obvious and blatant about it and I came to the same conclusion as what you state in your post. It is the only logical reason for him still being in the game.

If they are learning valuable insight on the cheat that can be applied to a countermeasure for the future then I’m all for him remaining in the game.

there’s another reason why ArenaNet might not want to ban exploiters right away.

if you ban a couple of exploiters as soon as you see them using a new exploit, two things happen: those few exploiters get banned, and people who are considering using that new exploit will know not to use it because it’s easily detected.

when cause and effect are close together, people can figure out pretty easily which exploit is unsafe to use.

but if you let the exploiters continue for a while, they’ll start to think it’s safe and more exploiters will use it (both alone and in combination with other exploits). then when you hand out the bans, you hit a lot more targets, and the people using multiple exploits can’t be sure exactly which one got them banned. that makes people mistrust all of them.

when cause and effect are far apart, nobody is sure exactly which exploit is the one that they got banned for, so all of them become suspect.

-ken

Teleport hacking started in the game early in its release. How long do they need to wait until they are going to get “the bulk” of players who are reluctant to use these hacks. There is a reason why most AAA games don’t have these issues like Anet does. Because they use Anticheat detection and put effort into detecting cheats without relying solely on detailed and time consuming community reports. Anet only seem to care about botters and truth be told, IDGAF if players bot as long as it does not mess with my PvP and my WvW.

sostronk.8167:

Teleport hacking started in the game early in its release. How long do they need to wait until they are going to get “the bulk” of players who are reluctant to use these hacks. There is a reason why most AAA games don’t have these issues like Anet does. Because they use Anticheat detection and put effort into detecting cheats without relying solely on detailed and time consuming community reports. Anet only seem to care about botters and truth be told, IDGAF if players bot as long as it does not mess with my PvP and my WvW.

It’s all about they money is why they only care about tackling the botters than getting cheaters that break this game. Maybe ArenaNet will wise up to this issue, just maybe or let us know more about their process on this issue.

Basically no
Theres plenty of well known cheaters and hackers on our server that have been reported in various forms by dozens of people on the server for months. They’re still there, most of us dont bother anymore
Presume for every time we’ve seen and reported them people from other servers have reported them many more times.

They’ve had video’s taken of them hacking, they’ve had party coversations admitting to hacking ss. People have been in touch with support by phone, email, thousands of in game reports …

If they gave a rats kitten they’d have been banned months ago.

Erm anyone can invite you to a party. This is not an exploit in fact if it was me and 90% of my buddies from other servers would be banned. Mind you Arenanet are currently too busy banning people for using swear words because that is really important!
There would be an option to report hackers if they cared about stuff like that.