Let me tell you why we need to stop thinking patches are centered around botters, using historical evidence of games long passed.
Ragnarok Online launched in August of 2002, an amazing game with an amazing history, wonderfully charming graphics, the most outstanding example of gaming community ever, and a severe case of bot-fix-itus. You see, with all of the glory of this game, it always had bots, and in a bad way.
Bots would fill up maps, flood the market with botted goods, and were an overall nuiscance to have to co-map with. As expected, the players sent complaints, the players wanted answers. There was a reckoning to be had about bots, and the players were certain it would be fixed if they just kept complaining. But it did no good, for every bot banned, 3 more came in its stead. For every fix found to put a stop to bots, the bots got smarter.
After several years of attempting to fix bots, we were left with a far inferior game than many would have liked to admit.
They attempted to remove all of the good, farmable monsters that most people would use to level – onto entirely random maps. This only stopped the bots from being effective, long enough for their pilots to move them to a new map and begin the cycle again.
They attempted to place dangerously vicious mobs on the same maps as the farmable mobs, thinking that the players would be able to handle them better than the bots. It wasn’t so, and so the players suffered with inconvenient deaths at the hand of the mobs, while the bots teleported around out of harms way.
The developers called for the aid of their playerbase. To join the witch hunt and report all suspected of being bots. If you saw a player in a map for too long, you would question them. They would often reply in snarky comments for being accused, even those who were innocent – before long, everyone was reporting each other, suspecting themselves to be bots.
The GM’s themselves began to play invisibly in the heavily botted areas, banning people who had bot-like-behavior. Over time, the bots adapted to questions, began holding conversations like normal players (more like an AIM sexchat bot in spirit though – nothing in depth). Their movements began to look more natural, and before long they were hard to distinguish from the players themselves.
This is a cautionary tale. When players demand increased attention to botting, just so they can see anti-bot measures more visible than what the developers would want, they are hurting the game. If ANet has a plan to get rid of bots, which I’m sure they do – then we will find out about it when we stop seeing the bots. We won’t know how they’re doing it, but it will happen and that should be good enough.
The bots we see in game are in larval form still – easy to detect, obvious in their attempts to circumvent ToS. They run around naked, in patterns, doing the same thing repeatedly – and they don’t defend themselves. We should be thankful that right now they are so easy to spot. What should happen ideally is that the very root of their ability to freely bot should be discovered, thwarting all future attempts at botting.
However, by negatively responding to every patch, every change, every control placed on the game – with things like “this only helps the bots and hurts the players”, or “this isn’t doing enough to stop bots” – you’re asking for a police-state mentality to enforce the rules of the game. Let them do their work, let them figure it out – you just keep reporting the gold sellers and bots and don’t worry about if they are still there the next day or not.
! I’m going to do another one with two of my other Engineer ideas (A drill stylized like a chainsaw and little drill minions).
