Guild Wars 2

Botting involves a third-party program of sorts to perform a series of actions without interaction from the user, thus allowing the user to go afk or just watch. Usually these programs are set to loop a series of logical actions. They can range from a very trivial AI to very specific/dynamic ones.

Afk turret/pet exp’ing, while not using an outside third-party program, is exploiting the design mechanics of the game. In this particular exploit scenario, the player is taking advantage of the turrets and pets in such a way they weren’t meant to be used, ultimately giving them an unfair advantage over other players who aren’t afk exp’ing.

Generally speaking, people have enough conscience to know when they are or aren’t doing this. The first few people banned for afk exploiting, may could plead ignorance, but when people continue to do it after others have been punished, they don’t have much of an excuse to fall back on.

Do you mean 1 copper?
Let me direct you to this post
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/account/1-COPPER-IN-MAIL-GOLD-SELLER/first#post281903

Interesting videos. A guildmate last night, told me he saw a ranger bot doing this very same thing. If I was a botter, I would certainly not be popping around the map like that, it would look a lot more suspicious, than trying to mimic the actions of a legit player.

A lot of those bot features are things that are not too difficult for the average coder to set in place(I’m actually surprised they aren’t more complex). Specifically, the warp hack, applying certain abilities at X hp %, and auto-looting can be done with a third party ‘utility’-like program, not just an automated bot. Bannable never the less.

- “Although it may not be in this particular video, I have often seen this warrior stealth in combat.” If true, this is very worrisome. I’ll admit, I’m not sure how they could achieve this , unless somehow it is placing its position underground, and solely using the warp hack to move. Otherwise, the bot would permanently stay invisible while doing its business.

- “Although I am not 100% sure, it seems that this bot is currently undetectable by Anet.” Hard to distinguish as I don’t know the current methods they have in place. Undetectable though, is fairly short lived to non-existent. Games heavily over-ran by bots are usually the result of the game company allowing it to happen, being understaffed, or being in a business position where anti-bot measures can’t be put into place/afforded. So far Anet has done a fairly good job at keeping the bots dealt with on the server i play on.

If Anet is relying on player reports as their main alarm(I sure hope they aren’t), that will oppose a problem, as eventually the bot’s logic, would merely scan the radius for players, if one was located it would log off, and come back at a certain interval and check again, repeating this process until the coast was clear.

Snido.4827:

….. I was obviously not botting if I was I would have been standing perfectly for a long stretch of time ignoring the world around me when I was not in fact I switched my weapons several times and changed which direction I was firing in. This information combined with the fact that I know I was sent a message and what it said should be enough to vindicate me….

First off, I’ll state I am not botting in this game, but playing it legitimately, but as someone who has a lot of experience with bots in other mmo’s, I can say that it would be trivial to program a bot to switch weapons and change directions while firing, so I can’t see that alone being a defense. A bots limitations vary, but usually are only restricted by the design and skill of the programmer.

Sending whispers to a player and waiting for a reply, has been done many times in the past(everquest for instance) to check for botters. I’m not agreeing with the method, or saying that is what method is being used, I’m just pointing out its been done before.

Most gaming keyboards have programmable macro keys(my mouse even has them), so I hope they don’t get ban happy about those. I’ve purposely avoided using mine in this game. Those same programmable macro’s can also be set to loop, which is what I suspect is getting a lot of players banned(afk or not, the macro is at that point playing the game for them). I hope we get more insight on what they allow/disallow.