Guild Wars 2

Yeah, I wish there were a way to turn them all off. It’s extremely difficult for me to even see my own cursor a lot of the time.

“so, out of curiosity, would you rather have a 3 minute warning on an instant restart with no down time, or a 30 minute warning about an hour long weekly maintenance?”

Or an hour warning about an hour long daily maintenance?

ANet has the bot situation under control.

Danikat.8537:

I guarentee you at least one historical figures descendants would be highly offended that someone was running around “pretending to be” their ancestor in a game.

Good for them?

MikeLewis.7496:

Setting the account name in the QR code to something more readily associated with GW2 is a great idea. I’ll make sure we do that, thanks!

Yeah… Thanks for getting right on that -_-

Jalie.1356:

If you’re also using Google Authenticator for your Google account, make sure you enter the secret manually and choose a different name. Otherwise, your Google account’s secret will get overwritten and you will have to set everything up again, including application-specific passwords.

OH kitten

sigh

Yet ANOTHER reason not to ever, EVER use e-mail addresses as account names.

Paladine.6082:

What I find particularly interesting from a legal standpoint is the state of play with regards to anti-trust. From a legal perspective it is more likely that ANet/Blizzard et al are in breach of anti-trust laws by banning gold sellers than the gold sellers are in breach of any laws. I suspect it is only a matter of time before a group of these gold selling companies band together their resources and file a lawsuit against one of the big MMO companies on anti-trust grounds.

And speaking as someone who knows the FTC and the EU Commission very well indeed, I suspect that any such challenge would stand a very good chance of succeeding.

Realistically? No. I’m not sure about ANet, but Blizzard can definitely afford legal immunity the best lawyers.

Besides, the boilerplate EULA for practically every online game is that the publisher/developer reserves the right to terminate your account for any reason*. While I’ve heard it gets trickier in the EU, at least here in the US, that’s good enough for just about any judge.

* And I see no problem with that. Do we really need a substantial burden of proof for banning bots?

There really isn’t any reason for them to give us more Black Lion Keys for free. They drop just barely enough for you to try a couple and think, “Hmm… I wonder what’s in the REST of these chests.”

I imagine the keys are a large part of their business plan.

The only way ANet will do a kitten thing about the bots is if it affects their bottom line, which is the gem store.

Who says you need to do each report individually? Seriously. Real live GMs. Log in to a zone, you can easily determine and ban 20 bots in short order. Rinse and repeat.

It’s all good, guys. They banned like 1600 accounts a few weeks ago, so the botting problem is fixed.

This keeps happening to me in jumping puzzles. VERY frustrating, considering it nerfs your speed/jumping distance.

Stratzvyda.3921:

Loke they have a very good economist on hand. People playing the game puts strain on the servers and therefore some cost. By not rewarding people for playing more, there are fewer hours logged and therefore less stress on the server and less cost. Their actions make perfect sense if you look at them from the perspective of the real world economy. We just naively assumed they cared about the game itself or the players.

I hope you realize your post makes absolutely no sense.

How are 40+ bots per zone putting LESS stress on a server than humans?

“On Botting and What We’re Doing About It” — Summary: “Basically nothing.”

Craven.5468:

Gehenna.3625:

Craven.5468:

In one day a single person could:
log into every server for 30 minutes
ask every map chat if they see any bots
verify they are bots visually (it is obvious)
drop the hammer on every one.

If this happened each day, the results would be impressive.

A single employee. Everything else, is just an excuse.

A very simplistic view and wrong. I could give arguments but I am thinking you wouldn’t be open to them anyways.

So I will keep it simple: It’s not that simple. Everything else is just fantasy land.

It is that simple. I personally, have performed this task in the past. If a direct interface does not exist in game to perform the kick and password reset on the account, then it could be handled via a hand-off or by using the external tools or database (I had to write SQL to perform account reset or IP ban after kick).

There is no advanced fancy magic to this. You observe/test a bot and once proven you nail them. Long term detection algorithms can be developed alongside the ban hammer operations.

Stop making it sound more complicated than it is.

Off-topic, but I never understood the dev-apologists with no programming experience who always assume “If it’s not being done, it’s because it’s REALLY SUPER HARD to do!”

Not bothering to read the whole thread, but I don’t think anyone who’s thought this through is asking for an arms race. That’s kitten and will never work against bots.

We’re asking for GMs. Real human beings who can respond to bot reports and do something about them.

But the arms race idea is cheaper, so in the end, that’s going to be ANet’s route, if they decide to take bots seriously at all.

ColdSpyder.9082:

“If a server wins the first few days it’s over and nothing is worth doing.”
Again, rankings will balance out.

Definitely not true for us on Borlis Pass. We drop down to the lowest bracket, we dominate apparently… Hop up to the next bracket, and Northern Shiverpeaks is the big winner. I mean, can you honestly say the system isn’t broken when we’re, what, 4 days in and the point spread is 180k to 37k to 32k?

Craven.5468:

The integration of water combat into the game is nearly seamless. I love the implementation. Love it.

This is sarcastic, right?

I hate that half my skills are inexplicably unusable underwater… And that I go from having a modest choice of weapons to a total of TWO. (Neither of which, as a condinionmancer, are very good)

Tyops.5894:

The situation is just terrible. I wanted to play an alt in queens dale last night and I had to chase after mobs to get to them before bot swarms. (centaur camp near vineyard north of beetletun).

OK… I’ll go look for dynamic events nearest dynamic event is bugged and cannot be completed. (DE near the fields east of beetletun farms).

OK I’ll go get the next skill point….. skill challenge in beetletun is bugged.

Screw this. log out and try another alt. Different zone (gendarran fields) same issues. Bugged events and bots everywhere.

This is worst in the low level areas. As it is, I could not in good conscience recommend anyone buy and start playing this game. The quality of game play at the early levels has gone down by a drastic am mount since release. I understand ANet probably wants to collect data and mass band but the prolonged inaction in the mean time is having a terrible effect. Please by all means work on a long term plan, but the need for short term drastic action is quite significant.

Won’t be playing alts any time soon…

I had the same experience a couple days back trying to start an alt. The bots are slowly infesting everywhere, though, but it seems like the starting areas, bots outnumber real players almost 2 to 1.

You can go ahead and add the video I recorded a few days ago of teleporting bots to that list.

I’m sick of having to alt-tab and go to the wiki to figure out what half this s**t does. Especially consumables.

Working on my storyline today, I come across a vendor (Agent Varbb at Waste Hollows Waypoint in Malchor’s Leap) who sells a “Power Matrix.” Mouseover description:
“Double-click to consume. Consumable.”

It seems half the consumables in this game have that description. At least the wiki explains: “Summons an environmental weapon that will detonate at your location.”

You mean like these dudes?

Kimhyuna.1035:

Soulwatcher.2604:

Lets not kid our selves here try as they might there NEVER going to rid the bot program. No game has done it in the last 13 years. But what they CAN do is drop the stupid DR system that punishes regular players and make a human bot banning team that looks into bot reports and bans the botters.

Writing a bot ban program is a stupid Idea, people make a living off these bot programs. They will circumvent the bot program in 2 days tops and were going to be back to square one!

THIS EXACTLY.
What SUCCESSFUL game currently on the market has an Anti-bot-code that effects normal players for playing the game? Is innovating the industry implementing a system that clearly does little to stop the problem it was created for?

The main fact is that Anet made this game and would want to keep its playerbase fairly happy (look at what complaining did to the dungeon token system), if they kept this DR system, people will NOT STOP COMPLAINING. This is a fact. If they removed it, how many people would actually be complaining?

I don’t know how successful DR has been at fighting bots, but it sure is discouraging me from playing the game anymore. If I hadn’t made friends in my current guild, I probably would’ve left already. At this point, GW2 is a shiny chat client to me. I mean, even with full magic find crap on my 80, I can’t find decent gear (ie, anything that sells for more on the market than to an NPC) from any of the dragons, and I’m not farming them. I only do them once a day, if I even bother with it at all.

Just so everyone knows:

“Our monitoring of ‘bot’ activity has already resulted in over 1600 account terminations world-wide in the last week alone”

We have 48 worlds. That’s a whopping 33 accounts per world banned. Clearly the ranks of the botters have been decimated.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they already do this. I know CCP (EVE Online) does for sure, but the problem with money laundering (which is essentially what this is), is that when it’s done well, it’s almost impossible to trace.

Androcore.7615:

I am curious about the differences between alienware and handbuilding my own pc. I have heard some pretty bad issues came when Dell bought Alienware and given some early posts wonder if it would be better to handbuild. If so can anyone offer suggestions as to what parts? I am in the market for a new machine and a bit overwhelmed with the sheer number of options. I want to stay with Nvidia and Intel if possible. Thanks in advance and thanks to all of the posters on pages 1 and 2 because there is some really good info that I have used even on my older machine.

My brother’s friend was an Alienware employee, and at least when I had the chance to chat with him a year and a half ago, he pretty much said the same thing you did: Dell took the name and cut the quality all for the sake of profit margin.

I’m a big fan of home-built, but you have to be careful with component manufacturers too. Designing a gaming machine is a bit more complicated these days than it was when I first started a decade ago… In any case, AnandTech and Tom’s Hardware are decent starting points for seeing comparisons of different parts, manufacturers, etc. I wouldn’t pay TOO much attention to benchmarks, though. Stuff like that is over-hyped… People make a big deal out of a 5-6fps difference, which in my opinion is well within the margin of error in real-world applications (ie, playing a game instead of running a benchmark)

Samaul.6073:

11. MSconfig is your friend. Use it to disable unneeded memory resident programs that are using up your ram and burning up cpu cycles. You can get a 10-15% speed boost just by using MSconfig. Turn off all auto-updaters except your virus protection including java, quicktime, itunes, adobe, office, windows update etc. Disable all CD/DVD programs including roxio and power dvd. These programs will run fine without them.

13. Remove all unecessary software, browser plugins, desktop enhancements etc. None of them will help GW2 run faster and are likely to slow it down.

14. Close all programs while running GW2, especially browsers with multiple tabs open. Browsers can use a ton of memory, cpu cycles and bandwidth.

Depending on what it is you have enabled/running before all this, going through and closing programs or disabling them from auto-starting could have a negligible effect. This was standard practice and boilerplate advice back before multi-core processors were standard, but I’m sitting here browsing the forums while playing GW2 and two of my logical cores (CPU) are sitting idle.

Memory is a different, though related issue, and IS highly dependent on your individual system… However, you may be surprised by WHAT exactly is hogging your memory.

Ever since I found it, I’ve been utterly in love with Process Explorer

Looking at what’s running on my machine right now, besides Guild Wars 2 (and rosetta@home), the highest memory usage is by svchost.exe. More precisely, the svchost.exe instance controlling the Windows service Superfectch. There are pros and cons to Superfetch (and other Windows services), as well, but I’m getting off-topic…

My point is, use something like Process Explorer to SEE exactly what’s the bottleneck. I’m at 33% CPU (give or take) and 11GB out of 32GB of RAM. In other words, closing programs and the like will probably not net me a fraction of a frame per second difference.

The REAL issue is disk I/O performance… and that gets complicated

I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why ANet decided to scatter the numbered volumes of “The Founding” throughout Ebonhawke RANDOMLY. It’s a chronological tale! Every other game, assuming the devs actually wanted people to read the little storyline extras, would have put them in some sort of numerical order to be discovered.

Apparently, their only purpose is to metagame: Find them (or look up their locations), and then go back and read what the contents actually were on the wiki

Just wanted to repeat that I’m having the same problem. This whole area (Hellion Forest) seems bugged to high hell.

The only way I was able to complete the quest is to lure spiders to a living logger I found, get him killed, and revive him… repeatedly -_-