Guild Wars 2

Date: 24 / July / 2017
Time: around 14:25 UTC
Map: Eternal Battleground (Gandara vs Augury vs Seafarer matchup)

I reported a thief using well-known (but still not fixed) shortbow 5 movement exploit to get into otherwise normally unreachable locations in WvW game mode, but i have to use inaccurate “botting” option, which i thought was the closest report option to exploiting.

BTW:
Do I really have to write such forum topic like this one EVERYTIME i reported some exploiter to avoid me myself being punished from Arena Net for not precisely selecting the proper reporting reason? Do i really have to write this forum explanation (and screenshot it as a proof for eventual future lawsuit action in court if some Arena Net dude really ban my account for inaccurate reporting option) that i did not actually reported botting, but exploiting, and precisely explain why i used the wrong “botting” report option?

Cannot Arena Net just simply add “exploiting” option to report dialogue window even after 4 years? Or, even better, add a small text window where player can explain a little bit more about the reported action?

No one is going to get banned for using the ‘wrong’ option in reporting. Every /report gets reviewed; if it’s misclassified, the worst that happens is that they can’t figure out what you were reporting. The best that happens is that it gets re-routed to the right people.

The only time someone is going to get punished for making a report is if they do so repeatedly to grief someone specific or if they are part of a group effort to grief someone.

If you don’t think you issue is sufficiently covered, submit an actual ticket or mail exploits@arena.net (which ultimately has the same effect). That allows you to include screenshots and explain what you saw, instead of relying on someone to figure it out.

Incidentally, to us, there’s a big difference in “botting” versus “exploiting,” but it’s just cosmetic — internally, the same group of people investigate the situation in the same way. Adding more categories to /report might make us feel better, but it’s almost certainly not going to result in quicker action (and there’s some chance it might slow things down).

tl;dr /report suspected exploits as often as you need to, without fear of suspension. Ideally, also create a support ticket or email exploits@arena.net.

Yes, that’s how Illconceived mentioned and also, in fact, what could get one in trouble isn’t using the “wrong” category in the reporting, but by using the wrong tools to do so.

An example, reporting exploits in the forums isn’t allowed and event discouraged, doing so is something that could really get one in trouble (not that you did it here, but worth bringing it up). The proper and best way is to do that through the email mentioned by Illconceived above.

The forums aren’t “wrong” per se, you just can’t be specific, because that would count as unverified naming and shaming. I’m sure the OP is sure; ANet needs to be sure and it’s up to them to publicize or not (and they only do in response to public statements by the alleged violator).

Thanks for these answers.

About the matter if my issue was or was not covered enough – yes, for any average programmer it was covered really well enough. The game server should cache all things – positions, all text anyone anytime write in any game chat and all skill actions – for some time (or even indefinitely) in a database (like it is in other MMOs), and when a programmer write script which will search that database and mark all timestamps when “shortbow-5 skill” were used by this and that character between this and that time interval (that’s reason why i wrote an roughly estimated time when the exploit happened), they can quickly checks starting and ending locations of that skill, so catch that abuser very easily and quickly.

Personally, this was a very rare situation when i report someone, because if a famous game developer of a world-wide known MMO don’t create an easy method for reporting (or even informing enemies that they are using non-allowed ingame interactions), its for me a clear sign that the developer actually don’t care much about exploits being reported. For example in the MMO “Planetside 2”, im almost everytime whisper the enemy player like this : “hello, you are using an exploit, shooting through our spawn room energy shields is abusing a bug, stop that or i will report you to gamemasters”. Actually, two times they stopped that, so its a proof that even informing enemies about the fact of their exploiting can be better and more effective than just straightly and immediately ban them without any thinking about situation.

On the other side, in GW2, i cannot whisper enemies (well, it was possible once, an year ago in EotM map, didn’t tried that again anymore) – so again, it seems like ANet don’t care much about abusing exploits anyway. Well, so i should probably go back to my usual habit of not report anyone, even these speedhacking/blink-porting (basically the same effect as “lag-wizards”) warriors distracting ppl from our compact zerg, personally its not worth those 20 minutes of checking universal UTC time, location, describing situation etc – they even dont kill anyone after all, just distract ppl, so not that much harm to gameplay .. not worth to lost time to reporting.

Anyway, i thank both of you again for your time to reply to my post.

I can understand you choosing not to report. It’s a lot of effort.

On the one hand, that is bad, because it means fewer legit reports. On the other hand, it also means fewer reports being use to grief someone. I don’t know if there’s any good way for ANet to balance that.

Regardless, thanks for taking the time to file the reports you have.