Guild Wars 2

inactivehyperaddict.6759:

Ok…im writing this message now to inform the other players affected that i happily got my account back after a day of no-playing…so don’t lose hope guys!!! thanks to all players who initiated this and ask for the support people’s help, of course now that i’m a happy norn again i wish you guys could have more patience with this matter…if it is clear that there’s no issue you’d get your account back…although i know the feeling at first which is depressing. JUST BE PATIENT….“coz it’s a talent” and thanks to arenanet for the quick fix…and lastly, I’m still waiting for the reason how and why it happened coz it’s really really scary…if this was a mad king post-halloween trick then it definitely got me….!

Grats dude, and fingers crossed. An explanation would be nice I agree. It’s been nearly 4 hours now and no response from them for me.

Is there, or do you think there should be, any form of in-game compensation for people who have been wrongly banned, say for a false-positive botting ban?

Please do not move this to the “banned comments” section, as it is not about legitimate bans.

Thanks for the info on the contact you have received from them. It gives us some hope.

creny, when did you get your ban? I was wrongly banned for supposedly botting a few hours ago now, have submitted the ticket etc.

Gaile Gray.6028:

Thousands of botters banned? Yes. But only a handful, a small number, are terminated in error.

Would you be able to state how many have been terminated in error? It feels like a lot at the moment, not just a small number.

From what I have read on Reddit and here, people are experiencing similar problems to me. They have been describing in detail their behaviour, and it seems that the false positives are going to those who spend long hours running events in Cursed Shore. Please do all you can to sort this out as quickly as possible. It is creating a bad image for the game. We have legitimate grievances that ought to be addressed quickly please.

Mirror.9126:

Yesterday I was playing as usual but suddenly the game crashed and then..ban for botting, using macros exc exc. I’ve never done such things, I did a support ticket….and still nothing.

Mine crashed too, in Cursed Shore. Then wrongfully banned for botting. I have submitted a support ticket about an hour ago now. Sad to read that you still haven’t received a response after 24 hours. This is terrible customer service. I bought the digital deluxe version, and have already spent an additional £34 in buying gems from ArenaNet. I hoped that this would be going to pay for customer support and great new content. Sadly it seems I was mistaken.

I am hopeful that eventually someone will sort out our issue, as it is clear that many of us are getting the same wrongful bans.

WHAT WE NEED IS SOME KIND OF OFFICIAL COMMENT FROM ARENANET PLEASE

Edit: I have just found Gail Gray’s post from about 30 minutes ago, so I guess that rules out any official response. I am waiting for the response from customer support now, so I can get on with helping my guildies in a dungeon…

Before going any further, I am not a botter and do not use macros. I am a normal player who sits at the keyboard using his fingers, hands, eyes and brain (sometimes).

I just experienced a game crash whilst at Plinx up in Cursed Shore. I rebooted my system and when I tried to log back into the game, I was met with the following message:

“Your Guild Wars 2 account has been terminated due to botting, extended unattended play, using macros, or similar behavior. Attempting to automate gameplay through any means or attempting to circumvent idle-time restrictions in any way is in violation of the User Agreement and Rules of Conduct. The account closure is permanent.”

Totally gutted. I was planning on doing some runs in Arah given that it is unusually un-bugged at the moment on our server. But no, I get wrongfully perma-banned. Yet another marvellous mess, ArenaNet.

I should imagine that it is a glitch in a new system being used to get rid of the growing number of bots that are appearing in-game, which is needed. But it is not working, because normal players are getting banned.

Please sort this out ArenaNet. I have submitted a support ticket. If someone from ArenaNet could reply to me I would be most grateful.

I had the same problem and will definitely be keeping a backup from now on. It is really surprising that we have to re-download the entire contents of the game, though. There is almost certainly a design flaw in the GW2 deployment package if this is the best solution to corrupted files (assuming only a small percentage of the files were corrupted and needed replacing).

I was in Malchor’s Leap. Game crashed soon after logging in. Had to ctrl-alt-delete to stop the game exe. Opened internet explorer, windows message saying that IE was experiencing problems and had to close. Started GW2 again.

GW2 said it needed to check the files, so it went into verification mode.
Then whole system crash to blue screen “stop” message. Rebooted to safe, then to normal windows.

Started GW2 yet again, and this time it started downloading the whole game from scratch. I didn’t delete anything.

tarnin.1690:

You just need to go play another game. You have a very dystopian view of this one.

So real life is utopia? You miss my point.

While I think about it, there are far too many comments I read in game and on the forums where people say things like “well, you should just quit the game then if you don’t like it!”

It’s the kind of comment made by someone who is probably happy with what they have (i.e. probably a winning server) and doesn’t want to admit that success in GW2 actually CAN be bought for real world money (please give me the reasoned argument explaining why it cannot and I will reply).

Of course, he may just be on one of the many losing servers and have quit WvW some time ago and has merely been oblivious to how awful the situation is getting.

I won’t be going to play another game, contrary to his advice. The rest of GW2 is awesome, and the fact that I need Badges of Honor for my Legendary means I simply must get into WvW. I am allowed to voice my opinion on how I feel about the product I have paid for, and I think I speak for a lot of other players out there.

:)

albi.9518:

You argument fails because it’s obvious you see the score system as the only reward for playing 3W.

3W is not about the score, it’s not about who gets the more keeps, it’s about large-scale fights between organized huge teams for the control of a map. The fighting, the strategy, the defense and attacks ARE where the fun is, only the fact to have part in such a thing is a reward by itself.

Look at board games, like, for the most famous, Risk. When you play Risk, you have some losers and a winner. Well, despite that, everyone around the table will enjoy the game, will take pleasure by making long-term strategies, hiding his intentions etc. The game itself is enjoyable, not the reward at the end. It’s the same for 3W.

Haha. I do love sweeping comments like this one. It begins "Your argument fails because it is obvious you … " and then proceeds to talk about something that is irrelevant. If you want to be all condescending when you reply to people’s posts, feel free but you get replies like this.

Everyone around the table playing Risk. Hmm. From my recollection that is a game based on dice rolls and the strategic decisions of whether to “Risk” an attack, or another move, etc. It is based on probability, and the skill of the decision maker. Players gain an advantage by capturing countries, just like we capture forts and supply camps. But in Risk, players don’t also want to be given an equal opportunity to earn Badges of Honor so that they can experience the game in a more complete way.

Dominant WvW servers have a distinct advantage in terms of earning Badges of Honor compared to the lesser servers, and the fact that they are a requirement to make a Legendary Weapon, one of the main goals in GW2, will encourage players to all want to congregate on the best WvW server in their match-up.

You try earning Badges of Honor at a decent pace when your server has totally lost interest in WvW and you do not want to move servers.

Risk… lol

Gigachip.9473:

WvW isn’t supposed to be fair. If you want fair there is sPvP.
WvW is supposed to be 24/7 warfare between the servers.

So what you are saying is that in order to get the Badges of Honor required for various major items, such as Legendary Weapons, we have to stick with the non-competitive server-swap-inducing-by-buying-gems WvW? What a surprise!

The fact that sPvP give absolutely zilch when it comes to rewards that carry through to the rest of the game is because there is very little you can do to BUY SUCCESS.

WvW success, as the game currently stands, can be bought by players with real world money, buying Gems, getting a ton of in game currency and upgrading/sieging etc. That is only required early on in the match, because once the entrenched team has the upper hand with all the orbs and a healthy robust stat advantage, they won’t need to spend much on new upgrades as they wipe the lesser teams so easily. The final key in the business model comes when the losing players decide to buy a server transfer.

It is a business model of a game, nothing more. It is not designed to be a good competition. The winners can buy success. Tell me why I am wrong in a way that stands up to critical argument please.

@NCSwireframe Regarding your request to name a sport where the size of the team varies from the other teams during the course of the match, I give you “Royal Shrovetide Football”. Matches last two days, and there are very few rules. There is no limit to either side on the number of players. However, neither side at any point has the opportunity to increase its strength in any way.

Boulderbolg.3460:

…WvW is not like a sport, it is like war. Nothing is fair and balanced in war.

And real wars are not fun. People rarely pay to join a real war. They would rather be playing a decent football match with their mates.

Please don’t compare anything in this game to real war. If you are unfortunate enough to have any real world experience of real wars you would understand that sitting in front of a computer clicking buttons is as far removed from real war as it comes.

Next time you are talking to someone who has just returned from a real warzone, ask them how similar WvW is to it, because you think “it is like it”.

Phaedryn.3698:

The problem you (and many others on this forum) seem to be having is one of expectations.

You are correct in saying that the problem is one of expectations. Most of us expect an enjoyable experience that is competitive. Most of the great team activities on this planet are based on good competition. The ones that are not have been lost by the wayside, the rejects in the evolution of games.

Competition is what this post is about. It’s not about what WvW was “intended” to be. It is clear that it was intended to be imbalanced. I am in complete agreement. But it just isn’t good competition. That’s my point. It is a point that I read about in game, on here, and elsewhere on the internet about this format that is increasingly irritating people.

You cannot ignore the fact that there are thousands upon thousands of players who are unhappy at what they had expected to be an enjoyable competition when they first bought the game to turn out to be just another server dash that results in bizarre, other-worldly matchups that have no reflection whatsoever on real human interactions that can trigger enjoyable experiences in customers.

From a business point of view, it is illogical to have one server happy and the other two unhappy if you also intend there to be an equal distribution of players across the three servers under consideration. Therefore, the intentions of the creators of WvW must have been for the vast majority of people who want to engage in WvW to move to the winning team server by purchasing tokens. The longer the matches, the more entrenched the winning team gets, the more people on the losing teams decide to hop servers for the while. Maybe whole guilds will move. Just you wait and see, it’s very clever in design, and it will make money.

If you still think it’s a decent competitive activity, then you are a mug.

A: What would you prefer out of these two options?

1. Close matches where the result of a confrontation depends on the skill of each side at the moment of the confrontation; or
2. Whitewashes where one server increasingly dominates having secured an early advantage that perpetuates with time.

B: Name a team sport that gives an actual (not merely psychological) increasing advantage to the initially more skilled team, such as a points increase per goal scored, as opposed to tallying up the number of points scored at the end of the match having given the teams an equal opportunity at all stages of the game?

In relation to B, I tried hard to come up with an analogy to WvW in the sporting world. I chose the area of team sport because it relates to tried and tested ENJOYABLE team activities that involve decent competition. You know, football, rugby, basketball, etc.

I couldn’t think of a real analogy for two main reasons: firstly, WvW involves three teams, which can be explained by the most popular team sports having evolved with two teams being the usual set up. Secondly, I really couldn’t think of an example of a team sport that grants increasing “power” to the already winning team. We are talking here about a double-winning force: The score line, PLUS the increase in power. In most team sports, the score line is all that exists. An increase in power FOR EITHER TEAM only occurs when one side commits a foul and a player is sent off, either for the rest of the match (red card in football for example) or for a few minutes, like in ice hockey.

The DECREASE in power of a team that has committed a foul is justified because that team (at least a member of it) failed to comply with the rules of the game. So far as I am aware (and I would appreciate any contributions to the contrary) there are no team sports that grant INCREASED power to a team when it accomplishes a difficult task (i.e. obtain the orbs of power in WvW). With the WvW increasing stat system on top of it all, it is plain to see that WvW is nothing like real team sport.

So why is WvW nothing like real team sports? Wouldn’t it be better to have a mechanism that has evolved through the centuries of human civilisation as being the way in which sport is played? Even the losing team can have a final chance to score, maybe many times in the last few minutes, and a miraculous victory can be celebrated. But WvW at present has an EXPONENTIAL ENTRENCHMENT MECHANISM that kills proper sporting competition. It is not enjoyable for people to engage in such activities, as time has shown with real life. And let’s not say “but this is not real life…” because to do so would be missing the point. You are using your brain to engage in this activity, and let’s hope it is human.

Ruith Seimh

Get rid of the orbs then. Plain and simple. But the problem is that there is a team of game developers who have thought long and hard about the orbs, and they think they are appropriate. In all the calculations they have made, they must have arrived at the most enjoyable experience for the majority of players, otherwise nobody would want to play WvW. And my name is santa.

I just had a truly horrible time in what is probably my last WvW game for a while until the orb situation is sorted out. The players on the tri-orb team were clearly not deserving of what their early-morning counterparts had achieved, as a team of 3 of us killed 6 of them, only to be wiped 3 seconds later by their “zerg”. Great.

So I suggest to the whole of our team that we all respawn, and form a zerg, only to find that there are about 10 people on our team versus about 100+ on the tri-orb. In another post I made I suggested that people on the non-orb holding team would be discouraged from playing because of the unfair advantage given to one side based on the night-time habits of a few of their players (namely securing the orbs early on). This again proves to be the case, with me now being the leaving player.

I consider myself to be a decent PvP player, and I recognise a good opponent when I see one. Most of the people you fight on the tri-orb teams are lazy PvPers who are “carried” by the orb boost, and you can feel it when you fight them. They can’t avoid cc, can’t dodge properly, and have little tactical knowledge. But you end up taking massive damage from them when they hit you, and you struggle harder and harder to stay up.

Normally by half way through a 1 v 1 fight i’m clear on who is the more skilled player out of me or my opponent, and when I am playing against a lesser opponent who is beating me, it is really odd.

PvP to me (and WvW is PvP, on a large scale) is like a sport. I just want to be able to compete on a level playing field alongside teammates in the same position, without having to worry about what a total stranger did or did not do in the early hours of the morning after the server reset.

In tennis, you don’t give a player a larger court to aim at if they achieve a particular objective. In snooker, everyone plays with the same set of balls, regulated cues, and there is no system where one player is allowed to shoot at bigger pockets than the other. These somewhat ridiculous comparisons are in fact what the orbs in WvW are like. You may laugh, but think about it. Is it really a sporting competition when what is perhaps the better team in the first place is able to further entrench their advantage so as to dissuade any opponent from really trying?

Good bye WvW, until the orbs are gone or changed significantly.

I think there should be the option to turn off the icon at least, so that we have the option whether we want to see all commanders, specific commanders, or no commanders.

I have also witnessed a lot of arrogance coming from the only two commanders I have seen in WvW, demanding total strangers to behave in a certain way, standing at the back doing nothing, telling everyone to “shut up and listen”, you know the sort.

It’s a good idea to be able to identify someone that you personally might like to be your leader, but this is not an oligarchy where we must submit to the will of rich strangers (well, they were rich before they became commander).

I enjoy a decent battle. I like a good challenge. I love PvP and what WvW could be. But I have a really big problem, and the clue is in the title. Orbs of Power.

Games in WvW are now turning on which team secures the orbs in the early hours after the server resets. Personally I am not able to play at these hours. The likelihood of a third orb being captured once two are owned is increased. This is the “escalating” power that people are complaining about elsewhere on the WvW forum. Once three orbs are owned, it is extremely difficult for the other teams to re-balance the difficulty level in their favour.

Let’s think about what it would take to re-balance a three-orb in one world match, a common occurrence. It would require a lot of players joining both the weakened teams, for starters. This is a difficult hurdle to pass at stage one, since people may look at the WvW screen and see that their server is at a vast disadvantage, and prefer not to play. On the flipside, if players see their world owns two or three orbs that is, I would suggest, encouragement to most people to join the match and further improve the power of the orb holding team.

Assuming we have the unlikely scenario where there are equal numbers on each of the three teams, what would we need to do to get the orbs back in balance, or even shift the balance to a different team? We would need a boost in morale, and a coordinated effort, possibly involving the two weak teams collaborating … somehow … and enforcing some kind of siege scenario to prevent the strongest team from repairing any damage that is done to it’s orb locations’ defences. This is a frighteningly difficult prospect, even for the best of teams. With a 15% health boost and +150 to all stats, the orb-controlling team is so totally overpowered it is ridiculous.

And remember, most of the time there will be fewer players on the losing sides. So in short, orbs are ruining WvW for me, and many others. Get rid of them please, ArenaNet. Let us use tactics to break through defences, and not have to rely on what our fellow server players did or did not do at some unearthly hour in the morning (or earlier on in the week if it shifts to weekly resets) when the orbs were first secured.

If they are destined to remain, please change their effect – reduce it at least, or even better, turn it into something less combat oriented and more defensive, such as players can carry a few more supplies, or defensive structures for that team become tougher. We could then compete on a level playing field when it comes to fighting other players face on, and it would keep a sense of achievement around stealing an orb. It would make an assault more challenging for a non-orb holding team, but would not make it depressing as it is currently when even a large number of players gets wiped by the orb-wielding folks who don’t have to try very hard to maintain their position.

Another thought just occurred to me – perhaps have the orbs reset every hour? Or every 2 hours? Just please, do something about it. I’ve been on teams where we have had all three and it’s great running around the place being able to kill two people at once when you are all alone. I then shed a tear for the dead, who have to pay out for the repair bills who inevitably give up on WvW for a while. But I’ve more often been on the non-orb-holding team and it’s not fun at all. It’s not how I would define good PvP. It’s imbalanced, and it must change.

Ruith Seimh