Guild Wars 2

The better question is why don’t they let us move them around on our own like every other modern game?

The price of them isn’t so much an issue, but forcing us to use six fine transmutation stones to use it usable really grinds my gears. Make it like the HoM rewards, an appliable skin

“The best thing players can do to fight this is continue to report every incident of suspected botting behavior they witness using the in-game ticketing system. The team is continuing to work on various solutions (as seen here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/On-Botting-and-What-We-re-Doing-About-It). Thanks for the continued reports and everyone’s patience. It’s greatly appreciated!”

Why should we continue to report bots when bots reported since launch are still running? We understand you need to collect data on the more advanced bots but there are retardedly simple ones that that is completely unnecessary for. Also telporting bots are wrecking the materials market yet we should totally be content to wait for the several months it will take you to do basic action. You can’t build perfect defenses against the bots they’ll always get around them in time. The only defense is monitoring reports and a swift response until it becomes economically unfeasible for them to continue to operate. It’s not a technical problem, it’s an economic problem.

Wow, their response was completely inadequate and insulting. “we can’t give you an update every hour” seriously? It’s been over two weeks with nothing but silence and there has still been no action. I get that arenanet sees us as parasites at this point since we already paid, but they should at least pretend that they care for PR purposes. Simply saying that you’re totally serious about botting doesn’t cut it at this point when the problem’s been growing exponentially.

They don’t have any GMs and their support team dealing with botting etc is probably critically understaffed like every other branch of their support system. It’s clear they’re only interested in a long term solution and ignoring the short term, not realizing that that’s a nigh impossible task with even memory scanning wardenesque systems unable to stop it, there will always be bots that leak through an automated system, the only defense is to not make it profitable by monitoring the report system and acting swiftly.

It’s the nature of the beast, RNG ceases to be fun when you’re only waiting for one or two options.

Botters are paying customers like everyone else. Actually they’re better, they tend to buy more accounts. Explains why they wait so long to ban, they need to make sure the botters profit before banning them and repeating the cycle.

That’s assuming they want to fix the problem, they want to ban in waves, after a few months so the botters can make a profit mind you, so that everyone profits. Well except the regular players, but we already payed so who cares.

yes it was started by anet, look at their responses, one a few weeks ago saying they’re working on it, and one today saying to not list names, bot problm has grown exponentially since then. In response to what I want them to do it’s simple, hire one person per few servers at minimum wage for one week and ban the obvious bots, if there’s any doubt move on. You can’t eradicate botting, all you can try and do is make it not profitable. Every one of their major updates(DR which doesn’t affect camping in one event, rotating nodes that bots can just teleport to) has benefitted them.

They’re trying to give the bots another advantage by rotating the nodes around. We have to explore for ’em while they just teleport node to node.

Yep, making a ton of money too, anet’ll ban em in a wave claim victory, wait a few months for them to buy accounts and build up ranks again and repeat. That way they both profit.

I think they reason they don’t do that is because they’ve taken minimal if any action and would prefer to keep that on the DL. There are bots that have been going strong since launch that are still running. They ban a token number so they can say they’re doing something in the status reports but that’s about it.

most of em teleport around because that bugs been in there since day1

The main problem with orr isn’t the number of enemies or their power, if anything they’re too weak. The problem is it’s like walking through molasses, you’re permanently crippled and constantly yanked back/immobilized. In a game where supposedly mobility plays a large part, they’re doing everything they can to turn it into a tank and spank.

yep they aren’t going to explain how they detect bots automatically, that’s fine. That’s a perfect explanation for the more advanced bots that exist out there. However the vast majority of the bots infesting the game are not advanced enough for that to begin to matter. Botting is a serious problem, it’s kittening up the game, and we hear “don’t worry we’re working it.” weeks pass and nothing happens, more people leave and still silence. I understand you can’t ever fix the botting problem, you can make it non-profitable however, and that starts by not giving them free reign for months to profit.

This is an automated message. Your post in On Botting and What We’re Doing About It was infracted.
Your original post in On Botting and What We’re Doing About It:
You’d think anet would realize by now that silence just creates mistrust and PR problems. They sure made a big deal about how much they cared about the game before release, but once it’s out and things start going to kitten we get a vague “we;re working on it” and weeks later the problem has grown to an epidemic and all we get is silence. I feel terrible for the members of the team who actually do care about the game, but it’s clear that they’re in the minority.
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After contacting the forums@arena.net and recieving no response on this and other messages, I am making this post. While the above post could be considered antaganostic, it was largely meant to be because it’s obvious that concilliatory responses are ignored out of hand, I believe my post made a meaningful contribution to the topic. In a topic about what Anet is doing about botting, I believe that discussing the complete abyss of information from their end is extremely important. Arenanet simply needs to stop redacting opinions they disagree with, this is not acceptable.

There isn’t any inflation per say, prices seem to have reached equilibrium, this of course assumes that anet won’t release any more shocks to the market like fixing the godskull problem which doubled the price of precursors in a day. http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/29185 It’s been relatively stable for a week after the shock of the change to MF. I’d also expect a gradual decline in price if they fix DR like they’ve been saying they will.

no need, they’ve dropped because of the bot swarms, and will continue to drop as anet does nothing.

An irrelevant example does not make an argument. Just for giggles though I’ll use your exact same example. "Did you ever notice how many blue cars there are on the street? I mean, of course you didn’t notice them because you don’t look for them. But once you start looking for blue cars, they are everywhere. Because if you’re looking for blue cars, you’ll find blue cars. " Unless you regularly experience hallucinations those blue cars still exist. You won’t necessarily see the DR if you don’t look for it, but just because you see one doesn’t mean you’re having a stroke, the DR like the blue cars do exist. I agree that it’s probably attributed to more things than it should be, but it can be extremely difficult to reset in some cases.

tolunart.2095:

Hey, if a dozen people say it’s a bot, then that means it’s a bot, right?

That’s the biggest reason why the staff behind these games tend to go easy on the banhammer – griefing exists, and it’s very easy to make it seem like people are doing something wrong when groupthink sets in and people go along with the leader because it’s easier than thinking for yourself.

At the very least, you waste a lot of time and resources chasing down false leads. At worst, innocent people lose their accounts and the companies lose paying customers.

They had no problem going crazy with the ban hammer the first couple of days for names etc. so it’s clear that they don’t care about banning paying customers. Even if they did minimal investigation just pop an observer on highly reported players and move down the list, they’re doing the same circles day after day it’s not rocket science if there’s the slightest doubt just move on for now.. While more advanced bots do exist, there are swarms of insanely moronic bots in every zone. Just getting rid of those would do wonders. Banning these wouldn’t give away your detection methods and as such there isn’t a reason to ban them in waves.

Xionaz.7065:

After resetting my DR twice I have still yet to see a rare let alone a green. What is going on here?!?!

You’re not playing the way Anet wants you to play, you should stand still at one event all day, then you’ll never trigger the DR. It’s the only way to make bots not profitable…. oh wait.

They seem to have a whole lot of skills that are blocked from underwater that have no reason being so. Most notably signets, why the balls are there signets that don’t work underwater with active effects that affect your target? Unless a skill targets an area(and even then you could make them auto cast a sphere on your target or yourself depending on the skill) there’s no reason to disable it.

Sister Xing.9072:

after a while tho if you do that event more then once your “prize” goes down. I know I was tryin to get mats in a lvl 63 char area and my karma from each event went form 300 to around 24.

Agreed, the DR should kick you in the nuts if you’re doing the same event over and over not the raw number of events. Ironically the current system has no effects on bots that just camp one event permanently.

I can’t really give you the benefit of the doubt on this, but hopefully you changed the loot DR and not just the easily screenshottable karma DR.

However the chances change randomly and with no warning. Their fix to people getting precursors through the god skull glitch was to make those exploited precursors double in price overnight.. Basically sends a strong measure that in order to get anything in this game you need to find a glitch and exploit it, you’ll be rewarded not only by the exploit, but by arenanets overreaction to it.

It’s disheartening how the only responses we ever get on gamebreaking issues like this and DR is, “don’t worry we’re working on it”. Weeks pass and nothing happens, prices for high end items double and still no change. Even some BS publicity stunt like actually doing their job and send a GM around for one day with a flashy ban animation would be better than silence.

Cerise hit the nail on the head, why are these changes not put into the patch notes? We get that we’re beta testers on all these new features you’re adding, but how are we supposed to tell if something’s a bug or just some radical change you stealth updated in?

The materials for the legendaries are fine, they’re long term goals even if it takes a few months or even a year to craft them that’s acceptable. What isnt accepetable is that the precursors double in price every week putting them out of the hands of all but exploiters.

That’s absolutely kitten. So world changing events will happen with no warning, and if you don’t happen to be on at that time, whoops you missed out on a one time only paradigm shifting occurence, sucks for you if you aren’t on 24/7.

@vaerah DR resets after a half hour or so killing things on a different map if you’re lucky. If you’re unlucky well, there are people stuck in the DR state for a week :-(

Yep cerise, that’s the only viable option. Its also what the vast majority of the bots are doing. DR actively punishes you for exploring, and completely ignores bots And arenanet is somehow surprised that this causes everyone to cluster and do the exact same thing.

Yeah halloween may not be a big deal for the new people, but for me(and i assume a fair number of other GW1 players) halloween was the coolest and most important event of the year. There would be riots and cow bombs everywhere if mad king thorn didn’t come.

Tybalt, he always knows how to appreciate a good set of… apples.

doing something about the dozens of bots in every single zone would probably be a good start to stopping the gold sellers.

I don’t want them to be faster or anything, I just want to see a norn riding a mount meant for an asura. Poor little pony.

I miss the days when we had dozens of bots shooting fireworks instead of kittening up the game. Stupid adapting programmers :-P

i’ve been noticing my high tier nodes(trees/orichalcum) rotating since the last patch. Three times at approximately five hours apart, so I’d guess it’s <=5-6 hours.

A slight modification to #1 though, up to level 80 if you are level 70+ don’t want people getting rushed there for easy leveling. I love the idea of having to maintain a complete supply chain makes perfect sense in context too!

Nope berith, they just ban a few token bots so they can tell us they’ve banned x bots. Botters buy more accounts, they’re Anet’s best customers. Teleport bots, auto-attack bots, swarms of bots farming the same routes day after day and still going strong.

I just hope they tell us how we’re supposed to play if they’re going to be punishing us for not playing “normally”.

Favorite definitely Kodan with skritt being second, least favorite being norn

Soulravel.4150:

So anyone who has bought any of the boosters from the cash shop will have to wait for the few weeks after they’ve done some changes to the DR system to use them?

Basically, hopefully there will be at least some change in the monday patch, but given their history with “fixing” dungeon rewards kaborking everything in the process I wouldn’t hold my breath.

There could also be a nice boost if they’re usable in polymock once it comes out.

Jon why are you flat out lying to us? DR in it’s current state cannot possibly affect botters and not affect farmers, let me explain why. Regardless of the strictness of when the DR triggers, the main issue is why the DR triggers not when. The karma DR triggers when a large number of events are done in a short period of time. A farmer will always be able to complete more events faster than a bot. It is impossible for a trigger of this type to affect bots and not legitimate players. Additionally a farmer will be more effective in combat than a bot and will therefore kill more enemies and get more items having the loot DR trigger faster than it would for a bot. Again this entire type of trigger is incapable of punishing a bot more than a player. You need safeguards yes, but they should be a net partway down the building not a shotgun at the door to the roof.

I’m confused as to why people are surprised that arenanet only wants people to play for a limited time. Keep in mind we already payed and at this point are costing them money. It makes a lot of their decisions make sense when viewed from that cynical perspective.

no it’s to help curb spam and inflation. If there was a safe trade system noone would ever use the TP for high value items with the tax
.

Hooray we finally get a response that this is a bug! At least we have a timeframe too, sucks that it’ll take two to three weeks to change a single variable value but at least i know when it’ll be worth coming back too.

It was worth the money I paid, but it’s not worth my time to continue unless there are some serious changes. That was probably the intent of those updates actually, drive people away to lower costs.

You can play however you want so long as it’s exactly the way we mean for you to play.

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.