Guild Wars 2

kistell.5684:

Toble.2968:

Ticket # 121110-002927

*3000 tickets yesterday alone in just the account issues category.(Thousands)

*And I never said they are unjustly banning over 7000 people. I said there were well over 7000 tickets, go spend more of your time searching for a quote will ya?

so you show me ticket number 2927 then you go on to claim their are over 7000 tickets ??

logic!!! i fail to see yours , learn to count or bot you seem good at that.

You came back for more? It’s clear you aren’t actually READING the link I gave you.

“Triagon.1843
#121107-002037”

2037 on the 7th at least.

“karrak.3597
121109-002852. "

“Chippalrus-5437
121108-001970”

1970 on the 8th at least.

2852 at least on the 9th

“Dime Baggins.1058
Ticket # 121110-002927”

2652 at least on the 10th

Now, I didn’t look very hard to find these at all so I am sure there are more and higher numbers from those who haven’t spoken up in that particular thread.

All these ticket numbers were found in https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/account/Blocked-suspended-terminated-Players-comments/page/21

For factual reference.

Would you like to stop now?

Igopewpew.8692:

Destinee.1097:

Good news, they must be working weekends, my ticket number was 121109-000560 and I was restored today. When I logged in I had mail from a gold farmer and they were spamming the chat boards non stop in lions arch. I personally think what may have happened is [out on a limb] hackers may have compromised a large number of passwords and the teams quarantined as many of those accounts as possible. That may or may not be correct, but it makes more sense than being banned for botting when you are innocent. Be patient folks, it seems like they are trying hard despite the fact you can’t see that. I was out for just over two days, and it was a sad time for me. I’m going to have to look into get that authenticater today when I get back on. God Speed Tyrians

Nice! Seems like they’re currently solving cases then. Happy playing! Thanks for letting us know. Gets my hopes up ^^

My god please let me back in by tomorrow, this NSP DB SF match up is amazing according to my guildees!

I don’t want to miss it!

Dark Revan.7634:

MaryDeVil.1894:

I read ppl being banned for “botting” while they were fighting in WvW… so be afraid to go everywhere.

I was gathering Ori in cursed shore when it happened and was using TS3, and a friend of mine also told me this, since I WvW a lot. Apparently some people report others in WvW to troll or just because they got owned or whatever (one of the servers we are playing against has a bad name due to certain things but I digress). However after coming on the forums and seeing that a LOT of people are having the same problem as me I doubt it was that. A bot reporting people that come close seems far-fetched but I guess at this point anything is possible….

People report others in WvW they can’t explain. If you have a stealth class (culling) or a high regen class (ele or Engineer), they might nto be able to explain why you are invisible and why your health is not going down, therefore yes they will report you and since there is no section for “Hacking” they will report you under “Botting”.

Put in a support ticket under ask a question and wait. It could be over a week with the current influx of bans that have been made falsely.

MaryDeVil.1894:

I read ppl being banned for “botting” while they were fighting in WvW… so be afraid to go everywhere.

I was banned for botting while in NSP borderlands.

Yes, it is possible anywhere.

Bunzy.8674:

Yer it was a P/D thief, I think it would of been alot easier if I was using D/D however I was stuck using S/D which make things alot harder as I can’t just spam auto attack when they go stealth and get some hits in.

Thanks everyone for the information.

You have plenty of Aoes on S/D If you plant them on yourself, the thief will die first, you have more health and more heals.

I play both Elementalist and thief BTW. Both level 80 fully geared characters.

Chin up mate. And don’t worry about Atriese, he doesn’t camp the puzzles THAT often. EHEHEHEHEH.

Avatara.1042:

Toble.2968:

Avatara.1042:

You wait for the thief nerfs.

They wont be nerfing the stealth, they are nerfing backstab damage, which is why you will be seeing more of these builds in the future. Everyone kinda mucked themselves with the complaining about the high DPS, now they are just going to get messed up by condition and stealth builds which weren’t popular before but will be now!
MUAHAHAHAHHA!

CULLING PROBLEMS is what they need to nerf most.

I agree with you whole heartedly.

kistell.5684:

Toble.2968:

“Your guilty as of now because your banned.”
Aka, you are a murderer because we put you in prison, not because we found hard evidence and have shown it to you. (Martial Law)

What?? You were banned because Anets initial investigation found to have broken the terms and conditions! What has that got to do with martial law?
You’re a currently a banned botter according to ANET and they are the law where GW2 is concerned.

Toble.2968:

“All i can say thank god you are not a judge in any legal system.”

Hinting that Martial Law is the legal system you support since mine is based of proving guilty via evidence before putting someone in prison.

Yet again you are taking a quote of out context and applying your own twisted logic, either the conversation went over your head or you were not following it.

Before you run off on this martial law rubbish.
I do not comply with martial law, where i come from their is such thing as a criminal prosecution service who collate the evidence just like Anet have done, then they pass it on for a judge (ANET) to decide, you were rightfully sentenced banned.

(I comply with the rule of English law, which if you were aware the American legal systems is actually based on the Magna Carta anyway. )

This next bit shows what a drama queen you really are, it also goes to show just how far you will go to twist facts to try prove your point.

You show a picture of a quote from Gaile Gray saying that there is a slim chance some innocent people may be swept up.

Now let’s look at this, you now claim from that statement “ hundreds of people” the very next paragraph you state “ thousands of people” you even claim that “there are people with ticket numbers going well into the 7000s this weekend” where are they I cannot find them???

There is a massive leap from A few – 100`s – 7000`s.

The highest ticket I have seen on the forums is 2387, now that proves absolutely nothing people submit tickets for numerous issues not just because they were caught botting.

Toble.2968:

Don’t get into a quote war with me.

These aren’t twisted words or fact.

You are contradicting yourself.

Read above i have proved numerous times what you say is over exaggerated and more times than not twisted , you make accusations claimed on bias constantly and you are the one who has been banned for botting.
Credibility much i don’t think so.

You tell me to educate my self may be your collage should be doing a better job teaching you how to analyze data.

False claim`s that ANET are unjustly banning over 7000 people for botting with out instigation is ridiculous , why don’t you just do the right thing and accept your ban and move on to another game we do not need bots like you in our gaming here.

:) I’m surprised you had the gall to come back after that last post of mine. I’ll try to keep this one short since it is just that easy for me after what you have just said.

*There was no initial investigation for some people.

http://oi48.tinypic.com/2ijlz5f.jpg

Martial Law = ban lots of people and unbar the ones who we find are innocent later.

Ticket # 121110-002927

*3000 tickets yesterday alone in just the account issues category.(Thousands)

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/account/Blocked-suspended-terminated-Players-comments/page/23

You can find these numbers here and in the account issues section if you wish to count. I’ve been there for the last 3 days or so, hundreds of complaints and over a hundred unbanned (Verbally saying so) so far. (Hundreds)

*You spelled college wrong. Maybe you should go to one. I’m sorry, I tried not to mention your spelling but that one was just too good. Educate yourself.

*And I never said they are unjustly banning over 7000 people. I said there were well over 7000 tickets, go spend more of your time searching for a quote will ya?

Also, do you really want me moving to another game after I mail you my ticket saying “We unbanned you”? (Please stop while you are ahead, you look really silly right now and will look even sillier when my unbar comes in.)

So you want everyone banned innocent or not moving to another game. Great community leader here. Tried to keep it short so you can get your facts straight. You still don’t realize you are rooting for a system that is letting bots go more than the system I am proposing. I thought you hated them?

So far I have moderator quotes, numbers of people based on forum numbers. What kind of opinions do you have to offer me now?

poe lyfe.5879:

look guy whining about the banning. youve said theyre unbanning people. so fine just wait. 2 this isnt a democratic system the contract you agreed to pretty much allows anet to sue you if you even play the game. read it if you dont believe me. so they can and will bann whoever they want. and 3 if you are innocent your account will be unbanned and youll have missed very little.

however i suspect anet doesnt bann without reason esspecially not lots of people. otherwise they would have made a post apologizing to the “thousands” of “innocents” thats youre representing. and they havent and they wont. they arent going to tell you how they caught you. they arent that stupid. but i trust them and their decision. please. just stop whining and botting. try playing the game normally its actually pretty fun. and if you make a few friends on here. you wont need to hack or bot.

and if you dont want to do that or cant then get lost the community doesnt need or want cheaters. before you start defending your innocence again tell me what possibly could have caused them to bann your account and not mine?

You seem pretty aggressive. I am just going to repeat what I said in other posts. This is a suggestion for them to improve their system.

Hundreds of people being unbanned, which means hundreds of people got banned for no reason, please refer to the associated screen shot.

No one needs to hack or bot in this game. The bots ruining the economy are the ones turning a profit from it in real life. They wont be putting in more than a support ticket of effort over this because professional bot systems factor in the chance for loss of account and aim to make more money per account than the account was worth, so they have probably planned for this, that is just how the botting business goes.

Normal people who bot or macro either

a) don’t know macros are bannable and think having an fffff macro to spam pick up is okay.

b) Are way to lazy to spend a week levelling and decide to bot it instead even though this game takes such minimal effort to level in.

I hate cheaters, hackers and especially hate botters because that means items I pick up are devalued very fast and since I do not farm, it is harder for me as a player to make money regularly.

That doesn’t mean a ban wave where people can get “Swept up” is the rigth way to go.

Mind you I have mentioned several times, with the mass ticketting support has to deal with, bots are going free and are now less likely to be caught again. You can trust in the system all you want, that is your opinion, but this is MY opinion thread making a suggestion.

All you people are just arguing against a simple suggestion to change the system and use it more effectively, not to mention to give people back their weekend, which is already mostly over anyways.

Basically you are arguing for a system that let’s bots go right now.

Taemek.1602:

While I agree that people who bot come crying to the forums claiming they do not bot (pretty obvious) I will say that if I was a GM and was monitoring a bunch of bots farming an area that had known drop rates for tier 6 drops for Legendary itemization and seen real players mixed up in there just following the bots trying to tag every mob the bot army was tagging, then I would think that they were a bot also.

So its pretty obvious that, in this sceanrio, some innocent players will get hit accidently, I will leave that judgement call up to the masses.

The problem is, there are ways to check, like monitoring macro patterns and input into the game client. These are the only ways to be sure.

These checks were not used before banning people who appeared to be botting, and this causes and influx of tickets and stress for the support ticketers and mods and for innocents to lose their weekend and bots to go free due to the speeds at which tickets have to be handled.

Then again, as I have found out, not only me but several others were PvPing and running dungeons when banned and were not in any zone near any bots at the time of ban. These bans are extra unexplainable and seem to stem off of report bulk alone.

I am simply suggesting a solution many other games successfully use that wont hurt arena net or the players as much as ban-wave does.

DjC.7039:

This is my personal view, so please no flaming.
But it reminds me of The Shawshank Redemption. Everyone who has been jailed is “innocent”. And yet there was that one guy who was innocent.
The simple fact is this; this sort of game needs a system to take bots out of the game, as bots will destroy the economy & so the game. I won’t deny that people are been banned when they haven’t done anything against the ToCs, but these are what we signed up to when we purchased the license & what we must abide by.
If you are innocent, then you will get your account back & while the time in between will be a major annoyance & possibly quite upsetting, it’s no reason to call for a complete scrapping of any system that is there to remove bots. Any system will be flawed, whether it be humans or automated, as the automated system is written by humans.
& in case anyone asks, I have never had an account banned for botting. In fact the only time I had to fight to get my account back was when in GW1 after i’d been away from the game for a few years & it had been hacked & banned for gold selling. It took a while to get it back, but i waited & got it back.

En mass, ban waves have caused:

-Trouble for support ticketing.

-Many innocents (from the number of unbans) to be banned by association (Refer to the moderator post I had screenshotted earlier)

-Bots to be unbanned (As mentioned earlier as well) which means, as Gaile had mentioned that they have less of a chance of being banned again.

I am not saying get rid of a banning system, I am suggesting a system that does indeed work for other games without as much trouble as a wave ban. It’s not a complete scarping, I am saying roll back the wave and redo the banning process so the innocents go free and the bots do not.

The company simply can not investigate the “Thousands of bots”-Gaile they have banned effectively in but one weekend. If you think they really have the manpower to do that, great, but as we know, it is a holiday weekend, and on Tuesday, there is going to be a very large back up of tickets from innocent people and botters alike and the team will be overwhelmed and mistakes will be made in order to make the process more expeditious.

If in fact they did look into it all personally after the fact, of course botters will have turned their bots off and wiped their computers and they will look no different from the innocents.

So do the personal investigation of macro patterns and game input before banning and less work will have to be done with more happy players and less bots in game.

It is a win-win for everyone.

calmbreak.3569:

I waited for just 40 hours. But the time all we spent is very huge. Maybe 5000 or 6000 days? It’s over ten years. Anet has make our precious time useless. Moreover it’s our weekend time. If we are innocent and our accounts are restored, who compensate our time?

I think it’s a proper method to ban the accounts after investigating. But Anet bans suspicious accounts first and investigate. It makes many innocent victims.

You got lucky. there are some people who have been waiting 4-5 days now. I’m going on 72 hours now… three days.

Yet again with people assuming every single person who gets banned for bottting actually bots.

I am proving I am not a botter to support, but unfortunately it is taking all of my holiday weekend (Which they don’t work on of course) to actually get unbanned.

I understand this isn’t a criminal trial, but yet again, my suggestion is to make it more accurate before applying it.

As Gaile stated, it is very unlikely for people to get banned twice. Now understand it has been proven that bots have received their accounts back after this mass ban due to the hysteria among ticketting and support to make up for all the people who really did get banned for being in the vicinity of bots but not actually botting.

And yes, that was stated by Gaile as a possibility for people to get “swept up” in the ban wave.

Now. If you actually read some of the posts here, you will find links to these quotes and actually see why I am asking for a roll back.

Bots are being unbanned and are now less likely to get banned again and more likely to get unbanned again because of what is happening verses a system that often works in other games where people who are reported on get manually monitored for macro usage and third party hacking.

The problem with proving I am not a botter is that is has officially wasted my time waiting for all the others, botters or non-botters to be dealt with while a mass ban has been made.

My suggestion is a much cleaner more efficient option that actually gets bots banned and keeps them banned instead of allowing them to be unbanned like they are being now.

You, my good sir, seem to have posted out of bot hatred. Check back on Tuesday or Wednesday on the update I put where I have been unbanned. I have no worries about that, I am just annoyed it is happening to so many people and wasting all of our weekends and still not getting the job done.

LFk.1408:

As far as suggestions go, this is not a good one. If ArenaNet is committed to fighting bots, they will need to continue to try to implement their system. It is clearly not perfect, but to cease it and roll everything back is counter-productive.

If you are indeed banned for simply playing the game, breaking none of the rules, then you do have my sympathy. I would be upset too, in your shoes. However, suggesting a rollback or halt of the system, from an objective standpoint, is not progressive. I hope they continue to build on it, and improve the precision. I believe manual review is already being done, but the increasing the number of actions an actual human will have to take (i.e. monitoring, tracking) will slow down the process greatly. I doubt it is feasible for the company to employ hundreds of people devoted to this task.

I hope you are not terribly surprised at the tepid response. The majority of those posting about their innocence, are in fact not innocent. Botters will always attempt to get their ban lifted before moving onto a new set of accounts, it’s just efficient. I imagine many say the same things you say. It’s impossible for any of us to make that judgement. A few paragraphs on a thread does not enable me to discern whether you are a victim or a liar. Hopefully the employee reviewing your ticket has the information necessary for that.

In short:
- I hope you do get a fair review for the ticket you submitted.
- If you indeed have been doing the things you claim you have been doing, the unban should be pretty obvious. I’ve yet to see someone try to bot WvW.
- I disagree with your original suggestion. The bans need to continue, and if observed that it is generating some flawed reports, the issue needs to be isolated and addressed. A momentary stop and roll-back is detrimental to the overall health of the game, assuming you do believe bots to be a negative thing.

The bans need to continue, but not in this form.

Bots are going free because of the mass workload that ban waves give.

It needs to be a trickle effect and also, given my circumstances, I doubt there was manpower used to manually look into my case more than looking at reports.

Thank you for your sympathy. Sad my long weekend has been wasted, but I’ll be getting it back probably mid-next week depending on how many people the support gets through.

I still stand by my suggestion though. Roll it back and redo it the correct way instead of trying to clean up this mass mess.

EmoxiHaX.1726:

I absolutely love right after they do ban sweeps for botting
the tears of “innocent” players are so tasty~

Ah very true, but all the wonderful posts that are made after they receive their accounts back are what make me full and satisfied.

Ohoni.6057:

AoE. People too often confuse stealth for invulnerability. Always have at least one weapon with a ground target or cone AoE effect, aim it vaguely in the direction of the thief, and go to town. swing wild with your auto-attack too, even if you can’t see them, you can hit them. You won’t see damage numbers but they do take damage.

I have killed so many thieves this way.

They are usually very predictable in where they move. Most times behind you and stay on top of you.

Ignore this one too. Just page turning.

As much as I enjoy a good zerg ban hammering, I noticed that most of your video was Ehmry bay and I am disappointed more Northern Shiverpeaks was not featured as a special guest star in your video.

I am especially disappointed no Os Guild members were featured at all in a dead or dying state of any kind.

Please fight Os more.

Very sad if don’t.

Avatara.1042:

You wait for the thief nerfs.

They wont be nerfing the stealth, they are nerfing backstab damage, which is why you will be seeing more of these builds in the future. Everyone kinda mucked themselves with the complaining about the high DPS, now they are just going to get messed up by condition and stealth builds which weren’t popular before but will be now!
MUAHAHAHAHHA!

Bunzy.8674:

I was doing the jumping puzzle and ended up fighting a thief in a 1v1. However this thief was different to any other thief I have ever faced. She would do (cond)damage for about 3-5 seconds and then stealth for about 3-5 seconds and repeat this over and over again. It was really annoying at how often this person was stealthing especially with the rendering issues.

How do you beat someone who is constantly stealthing?

AHAHAHAH! you found Atriese.

Good luck with countering it though, the best you can do is Aoe.

Apparently threads get glitched if they are on the crux of page changing. Ignore this post.

Pathos.5043:

I’m really annoyed
because my account was suspended.
I’ve never Exploit illegal programs or bugs while playing a game never!
But my account access was blocked.
So I’ve been send e-mail, but can turn only one answer.
Answer it macro.
I bought this game . and played just fun.
I live abroad and the vpn to enjoy this game, as far
I Like the game itself, but your operating really stupid.
so I’m very annoyed , if You dont restore my account today, i will refund this game.
and I will talk to this problem with other people who suffering this.
——————————————————————————————————————————————-
its my question hours ago. and I take your answer.
but your answer is just waiting for support.
however , I already waiting for support during three days!
I played just two days, and my accounted blocked three days!
Believe this problem? I bought package game. its very very unfair!
but your answer is same again. just W.A.I.T.

If you used anything that presses multiple buttons that counts as a bannable offense.

If they have found you to be using macros, it might not have even been in a botting sense.

If you use macros at all, it is in fact a bannable offense whether you are at your computer or not.

Catmoon.7284:

Time for homework?
How did Anet know I didn’t finish my homework???

I have a feeling they knew all along. Midterms?! WHAT?!

neon.4863:

Again, if you are innocent, just keep pleading your case. That’s all you can really do. Asking ANet to rollback bans or stop banning isn’t really a reasonable request – it harms the players as a whole.

Also, they will not tell you how you got flagged for botting. That’d be a silly move on their part, because if you reveal how you find your bots, you’re giving them the info they need to reverse engineer it to get around your method.

Oh, it will get unbanned after the holiday weekend is over. the problem is the banning is continuing and the tickets are piling up. They are going to have their work cut out for them.

If they actually put in the effort to investigate each and every one, it will take weeks for people to get back their accounts.

If they don’t, some bots will go free.

My suggestion here is let everyone go and begin filtering on a regular basis instead.

It just makes sense not to do it in waves where people can get “Caught up” in it.

First of all, it’s unfair to those of us who had things planned for this weekend.

Second of all, it let’s guilty bots go.

So why not set in a normal filtering system like other games?

Yet again, I have never been banned in other games for botting before and I farmed A LOT in Aion since it took months of farming just to get par gear. This game doesn’t really need farming so I don’t really farm at all here and I have gotten banned, so something is most certainly wrong here.

You’d be pretty upset to if you got accused of something wrongfully. Even being labelled a botter is offensive to me because mmorpg games are about earning things over time, not just automatically having them, (Which you can already do in spvp anyways so what is the point of botting again?)

One of the things I enjoy earning is a reputation of being a good and helpful player in PvP. Why would I risk that reputation for hacking?

I knew a guy in Aion that was really good at pvp in general but ruined his reputation by wanting to get the best gear he could buy without doing any of the work, so he hacked his way to it, got his account banned and ruined his reputation in the process even though he was still a rather good PvPer. he also became a major jerk when he began this cheating for some reason which is why i don’t enjoy associating with hackers. it ruins the competition, and that is what me and Os Guild are all about.

Why would I ruin that?

notsid.6873:

Lol Lol Lol Guy.1976:

I found it on page 15 currently. Gaile said it. I don’t know how to quote on a post i already made so I’m just saying you can check there :P

Lemme help you out there with the pertinent bits from good ol’ Gaile on that page.

Gaile Gray.6028:

• We know there are false positives. When you’re banning thousands, there is some chance that an innocent player will be banned. We regret that deeply, and we work constantly to improve the processes (which are not automatic, by the way) to avoid false positives.

• Most importantly, you should know that a number of the people in this thread posting about their “unjust ban” are, in fact, botters. They may be RMT workers from a foreign country; they may be the guy down the street who is using a bot program and doesn’t think we can detect it. Not everyone is guilty, for certain!

I for one think this is a pretty far cry from “Lol a lot of you are liars lol.”

Not that far.

And in an even earlier one it is a “vast majority of you” are liars.

http://tinypic.com/r/2my910/6

moose.6973:

What did the ban say as the reason? Just curious

In general, this is the messege we all got. It is for third party program usage. Explained in the forums it is anything that automates or improves your gameplay. There was a guy who actually made a post saying he had a macro that pressed 6 keys and was wondering if he was banned for it.

This made me frown because that’s when I realize most people haven’t actually read up on the ToS before posting at all.

Also, Neon, when I was playing Cabal even way back when 4 years ago, I never had any issues with Xtrap and any of my browsers or anything else. I understand the reluctance, but from what it seems like people hate bots way more than a browser crashing every once in a while.

I would rather have that than orb hackers or fly hackers.

neon.4863:

Game protection systems like GameGuard and Xtrap are often met with some criticism (GG for instance can cause several browsers to crash), so I can see why they’d choose not to use it. I’m not saying the system is foolproof because it obviously is not, but I’m pretty sure it’s not as bad as it may sound. It’s possible to get wrongfully banned for any number of reasons (I saw a case once of a guy who reported someone else for verbal abuse and was the one who got banned).

Be assured that the tons of people you see being banned aren’t really all as clueless as they seem, though. A lot of people will deny doing something wrong even in the face of very solid evidence, so in a case like this (where ANet can’t release evidence, with good reason) it’s even easier to sound like a legit player who got unfairly banned.

I’m pretty sure most of the people saying they have no clue why they got banned are well aware of why.

True, I am positive some of them are bots, but I also want to relate to you a very wonderful story from Aion.

A guildmaster got banned from Hello Kitty Nation, a guild that controlled much of a factions zerg resources and organization. He got banned after a giant influx of individual reports against him for hacking in PVP.

Well, this was news to the people who actually PvPed along side of him whether in his guild or out of it and complaints came rolling in to have his account investigated.

They finally investigated the reports and his account and found that no investigation into the hacking situation had actually been made and the one handling the tickets actually just assumed that with so many unrelated individual tickets this must have been a blatant user.

The ticket influx was organized by a rival guild of the opposite faction.

The guildmaster was reinstated his account and the ticket handler was fired from NcSoft.

Fired.

So yes. This has happened before, can happen, and I believe something terribly wrong has indeed happened here.

Frvwfr.4307:

Well, I haven’t been banned for botting. So far I am 100% in support of this system. Seems to be working as I do not bot, and therefore have not been banned

I would oh so much love to the see the logs of what the system thought was you botting though. Just to point out how obviously you probably were botting xD

I would enjoy seeing that too. In fact, that is what I have been asking for.

Then again hundreds of bots also haven’t been banned for botting either.

Must be working.

neon.4863:

There is no system that won’t get some innocents unfairly banned or end up letting some bots go.

Edit: Gameguard and Xtrap are not foolproof either. Nothing is.

I know this, but did you see the screen shot earlier? By vicinity. You could get banned for being in the space where the bots are farming or even just in their party if they send you a random party invite.

And if it does it consistently we wont have a problem with ban waves. It will be more of a ban trickle making the complaints of innocents more manageable.

Do you see my point?

neon.4863:

Actually, what companies can see is the input that is transferred to their servers if the software is connected to the internet (which, in this case, is true – since the game client connects to ANet’s servers). And even then, either they’re monitoring it live, or keeping logs of what’s been done, because otherwise they really can’t know what you’ve been doing while playing.

Even assuming logs are being kept (they probably are) or that there is a way to flag and monitor someone for botting activity remotely, input from botting programs is nothing more than macros that mimic input from real humans. A macro is something that sends the same signals to your computer as the peripherals would, thus behaving exactly like a click of the mouse or typing.

There is no way to tell with 100% certainty whether input comes from a macro or from a human unless you’re monitoring a user’s computer activity outside of just the game software. Bots behave very mechanically though so their patterns are usually easy to spot – usually. Sometimes a regular player can behave in a way that is really close to bots, and sometimes you make mistakes while monitoring.

It’s impossible to have a system to ban bots that won’t sometimes get legitimate players caught up in it. An effective system, however, will catch a lot more bots than legitimate players, and I don’t really see evidence to the contrary so far (since a lot of the people claiming innocence have probably botted, just like a lot of the people in a reddit thread a while ago claiming they never said anything “bad” in chat had actually said some really appalling things).

It’s a huge hassle to be unfairly accused of something, but keep pleading your case if you’ve never botted. You should be able to get your account back with a more careful review of your case.

Oh, I know I will be getting my account back.

Sure I am angry I lost a whole holiday weekend of playing with my guildees against a much fairer match up in WvW and am going to miss out on the free trail event and maybe even the first part of lost shores, but what worries me is it happening again and to my friends and in general other people.

I don’t think it is fair what has happened and I don’t think it should continue. I do think they should check for the macro patterns. No person could mimic a macro for more than 30 minutes to a T they are bound to make a step out of place when moving or targeting. they should monitor it personally.

My movements and spell casts have never been commonplace or repeated. in PVP you have to dynamically change weapons and attunements and use skills on the fly so there has never been a pattern which is how I knew something was up when I was banned for botting. none of my keys are bound to anything that makes a macro or changes anything than more than 1-1, so I knew it had to be something else. I went on the forums and lo and behold tons of people are getting banned and have no clue why.

What is more, I was banned and my friends were still spotting bots running around. people are still spotting bots.

So I investigated further and as you can see fromm what the moderater said, apparently there is a chance to get caught up in a bot sweep via area.

Then how did I get caught up while PvPing in a WvW borderland?

I speculate it has to be from number of reports and given my current class I can see why people would try and report me for hacking. I heal faster than they do damage. that makes sense, people don’t see that kind of elementalist often so they have no clue why my health bar isn’t dropping. Since there is no “hacking” choice under report, I assume people have reported me for botting. I know this because this is what we do when we see someone blatantly fly hacking in WvW.

Anyways, my point being, there is something wrong with the system and I think what you have said with the thorough investigation of macro patterns alongside an Xtrap program would be best in this case. All good gamers never mind Xtrap so why not use it? It does come to some cost to the company, but it makes for better gameplay for the people who really don’t want bots.

Naoko.7096:

That’s worrying.

I think they should implant those words verification pop-ups in-game for suspected botters. If the GM thinks the player is botting, the GM can give a 2-3 minutes timed verification pop-up to the player. If the player did not input the words verification within time limit, he’ll be confirmed as not being with the screen and botting.

Make the pop-up looks big and noticable (1/3 of the screen). The letters/numbers are easily seen too. Also, make the character invulnerable to attacks during that time so legit players can input the texts without worrying about being killed by mobs. It helps alot in differentiating legit players and botters.

Even better, have them enact Gamegaurd or Xtrap. These programs make sure that no third party input is being made into the gw2 client.

kistell.5684:

Toble First things first if you want to quote me out of context your argument fails already. Is this how you justify botting?

I said " Do a quick search on the internet their are already people openly bragging about botting whom were caught and even got their bans lifted."

Merely pointing out that people claiming they are innocent necisarly are not.

You then quote me as saying “So you are saying that everyone being unbanned is a bot, then therefore this whole sweep is being reversed and was unecessary in the first place? Look at mr. logic!”

See how you are attempting to manipulate facts yet again, twisting what others say and do.

This is pretty much how your entire straw man argument fails, against Anet bans.
Its all twisted made up facts you pull out of thin air.
Bans with out investigations and allegations thousands of people are wrongly accused, you cannot back up any of it with fact.

I also see you cannot hold a debate with out lowering your self to name calling, so
ill just leave you with this " Those who shout the loudest usually have the most to hide. "

“Your guilty as of now because your banned.”

Aka, you are a murderer because we put you in prison, not because we found hard evidence and have shown it to you. (Martial Law)

“All i can say thank god you are not a judge in any legal system.”

Hinting that Martial Law is the legal system you support since mine is based of proving guilty via evidence before putting someone in prison.

“Educate my self are you claiming that Anet just bans people for a laugh with no evidence? please prove me wrong i ask you.”

http://tinypic.com/r/2ijlz5f/6

And thin air you say?

Hundreds have been unbanned.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/account/Blocked-suspended-terminated-Players-comments/page/24#post688867

You can count for yourself how many spoke about being unbanned, just wrap your head around those who didn’t speak when they got unbanned?

“Do a quick search on the internet their are already people openly bragging about botting whom were caught and even got their bans lifted.”

And how many bots didn’t brag about it?

So by your arguing my suggestion, you are saying keep the system that gets what arenanet deems as hundreds of innocent players caught up in a bot sweep. The same system that lets guilty bots go.

Your argument is basically fighting for a system that lets bots go.

“thousands of botters and hackers,
they destroy the game.”

Don’t get into a quote war with me.

These aren’t twisted words or fact.

You are contradicting yourself.

I never name called, I asked you to go educate yourself about the topic before speaking against it and you clearly don’t even no the essence of this topic since you hate bots and clearly are voting for a system that lets them go.

Yes, you are in a suggestion thread which is suggesting revamping a system which lets bots go.

Educate yourself about the topic before you speak.

Well I found out one way that you can be found banned even if they haven’t checked for programs.

It seems vicinity may have something to do with it.

neon.4863:

They can’t check for a botting program on your computer. That’s hacking, and that’s illegal.

Companies are allowed to see what is being input into their software, so yes, yes they can see input from botting programs while they are being run.

kistell.5684:

Toble.2968:

So you think that banning thousands of bots is okay if a chunk of them happens to not be bots.

So you are saying because botters get bans lifted they should not believe anyone at all even if they are innocent?

I hope you get caught up in a ban wave some day and say the same thing.

Oh by the way, the American legal system is the exact opposite of what you say. So technically my way of doing it IS what our legal system is currently practicing.

It’s innocent until proven guilty.

Please go educate yourself and yet again, this is not a debate forum, this is a suggestion thread.

yes im perfectly happy for Anet to ban thousands of botters and hackers,
they destroy the game.

Also you cannot say with any degree of certainty that a large chunk are falsely accused, your pulling that from thin air.

Educate my self are you claiming that Anet just bans people for a laugh with no evidence? please prove me wrong i ask you.

When you purchased the game and acknowledged the terms and conditions of service every thing you needed to know was their.
accounts have been investigated and deemed to have broken the conditions and accounts have been banned, the service has been removed for breach of contract.

You have had your service removed because you breached contract , its simple.
They do not have to prove any thing to you im sorry.

As for your legal system is the opposite of what i say, please elaborate?

So according to you a person can be accused and judgments should be formed on the correlation of number of defendants pleading innocence.

To many defendants are pleading innocent so we have to many false arrests, logic i think not.

Well, if I am pulling it from thin air, then how are so many people getting unbanned?

So you are saying that everyone being unbanned is a bot, then therefore this whole sweep is being reversed and was unecessary in the first place? Look at mr. logic!

So all the people being unbanned are just bots that Anet proved guilty at first but then were let off the hook for not apparent reason and they weren’t actually innocent at all, correct?

Also, please refer to my previous post to figure out exactly why innocents are in fact being banned stated by a moderator.

Also in your previous post, what you were exemplifying was Martial Law where they can take people into custody without giving them rights of any sort and hold them until proven guilty, not what America practices, which was my suggestion, innocent until hard evidence of guilt, I.E. the proof of programs is found. My argument has nothing to do with the number of people pleading innocent. It has to do with the collection of evidence. Seriously, educate yourself.

neon.4863:

Anet staff have stated in posts that bot bans range in the thousands. They’ve also stated that many of the people saying they weren’t botting were, in fact, botting. Sure, there may be a couple dozen legit players who got unfairly banned – but it’s a very small percentage in the face of thousands of bots which also got banned. Some bots will slip under the radar, too, it’s inevitable.

Also, suggesting a human isn’t looking at your case is… odd, to say the least – has it ever been stated that there are auto bans? I think a staff member specifically stated there are absolutely no auto bans.

Suggesting that every bot ban be rolled back and that they stop banning just because a few people got unfairly banned is silly to say the least. What about all the people who are actually botting that they’d be allowing back in?

http://tinypic.com/r/2my910/6

Yes it was stated there are no auto bans.

But if there are no auto-bans, then how did the innocents get swept up?

It has been stated that out of thousands some are bound to get swept up.

but how?

http://tinypic.com/r/2ijlz5f/6

Well this is how, simply being invited to a party or in the vicinity can get you caught up apparently.

Which means they just admitted to not checking individually for a botting program on each characters computer.

Which means this is most likely the room for error that is getting innocents banned.

And yes, if this is happening where people are not even being checked before the sweep, yes, let the bots back in, check them, ban the bots and save the people who shouldn’t be banned.

Banned for botting in NSP borderlands while PVPing at 7pm thursday 11/08/2012

Also think this is a good thing since it is apparent many people think this isn’t a large problem at all and they are happy the ban wave happened.

They also don’t believe any of us are innocent or that there are so many numbers.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Stop-banning-and-roll-back-the-bans/first#post688678

They also think Martial Law is the current legal system in America.

neon.4863:

Anet staff have stated in posts that bot bans range in the thousands. They’ve also stated that many of the people saying they weren’t botting were, in fact, botting. Sure, there may be a couple dozen legit players who got unfairly banned – but it’s a very small percentage in the face of thousands of bots which also got banned. Some bots will slip under the radar, too, it’s inevitable.

Also, suggesting a human isn’t looking at your case is… odd, to say the least – has it ever been stated that there are auto bans? I think a staff member specifically stated there are absolutely no auto bans.

Suggesting that every bot ban be rolled back and that they stop banning just because a few people got unfairly banned is silly to say the least. What about all the people who are actually botting that they’d be allowing back in?

I don’t believe that it was only a couple dozen for the simple fact of my case.

I definitely believe that legitimate PVErs would get caught up in this when someone who doesn’t even participate in PVE at all would get banned.

I spend pretty much all of my time in WvW with my guild killing other players and doing dynamic events such as dropping siege, building it, repairing things. None of my actions are macroed or repetitive.

The fact that they made such a far off mistake proves that the system is flawed and most likely based on number of reports verses anyone actually looking into the botting.

Also, if actual bots have had their bans lifted, that means that Anet in fact has not pinpointed a way to prove the botting, i.e. finding the programs and such and I would rather deal with bots for a longer while than have anet not being able to make a distinction.

The only way I can explain it to you is by using an actual justice system. 100 people are captured by the police and 75 of them are murderers.

You assume put 25 innocent people in jail instantly instead of the police letting them go and on a later event putting all 75 of them away with hard evidence.

In fact, this is how the situation is right now in metaphorical terms. 100 people go to jail, 75 are murders.

5 are found to be innocent, which makes the justice system doubt their judgement and 50 people get out as innocent, leaving 50 murders in jail, 25 innocents having days of their life taken away in jail and 25 murders off the hook and able to probably get out again scott free in the future.

Does no one see the problem in the logic of mass banning without individually investigating each case?

kistell.5684:

Why should Anet provide you or any one, the evidence they hold?
Botters and Hackers will just use that information to circumvent their checks.

So by your logic if every one contests their innocence then they are automatically innocent?

The mere fact you suggest Anet can check your PC now its total rubbish, who is to say you and many others have not done a clean reinstall / removed any potential infringing software since.

Do a quick search on the internet their are already people openly bragging about botting whom were caught and even got their bans lifted.

All i can say thank god you are not a judge in any legal system.

Your guilty as of now because your banned.

So you think that banning thousands of bots is okay if a chunk of them happens to not be bots.

So you are saying because botters get bans lifted they should not believe anyone at all even if they are innocent?

I hope you get caught up in a ban wave some day and say the same thing.

Oh by the way, the American legal system is the exact opposite of what you say. So technically my way of doing it IS what our legal system is currently practicing.

It’s innocent until proven guilty.

Please go educate yourself and yet again, this is not a debate forum, this is a suggestion thread.

Haishao.6851:

Are there proof of these thousand of people wrongly banned for botting?
Because if you just invent numbers then it’s hard to take everything else you say seriously.

Please reference the account issues forums where for the last week or so, there have been hundreds of complaints.

Now, consider all the people complaining on forums and now consider all the tickets that were submitted silently.

On top of all that, there are people with ticket numbers going well into the 7000s this weekend.

Now double it.

This happened last month too.

Need more evidence?

Just ask and please take your arguments into an argument thread, not a suggestion thread.

This is a repost while being more respectful and not telling the person to take a hike out of my thread. This is a response to kistell.5684

Wrong.
We have offered all of our account information, serial numbers and permission for them to look into everything we have. We have openly offered the evidence to arenanet. the problem is, this is thousands of people at this point trying to get thier innocent accounts back over a holiday weekend and Arenanet has not time to go through this evidence.

What they should have done was gone through the automated system individually first instead of sending out a ban wave and cleaning up the mess afterwards.
The people that are “Mostly bots” often haven’t even farmed. I come from Os Guild and I spend 95% of my time in WvW owning the faces off people. Because of this, I am sure I have been reported under the botting section as a hacker despite the fact that it isn’t a hack, I just have high regen, a lot of heals and can take off conditions faster than people can put them on. this is how I got banned for third party programming.
Arenanet didn’t find any illegal software on my computer or anything of the sort. what has happened is those with excessive reports against them were banned and not in fact looked into before being banned.

This is why this is happening to so many people, because those who do simply farm or people that play oddly overpowered classes in WvW are getting banned because of excessive reporting and a flawed system. That or someone isn’t doing their job correctly and is going to be fired.

You will never see the evidence because it is not for players to see. We as the convicted have asked for the evidence as well and have honestly not been offered anything to show whether we are guilty or not.
It goes both ways, you see.

You call us all bots, yet you have no evidence to do such, when we have openly shown we have nothing to hide by giving every last bit of information we have into our support tickets just so they can go in and finger through our accounts in order to prove our innocence.\

We have given evidence of innocence.

Now where is your evidence of our guilt?

Oldorf.4203:

Hagger.6854:

With as many people being falsely banned as there are, it is quite shocking that there has been no official word from ArenaNet in a bigger announcement type format. This is getting absolutely silly. I have been banned for nearly 2 days now and I have seen probably over 100 people post on this forum about being falsely accused. Now obviously there is some people who are really bots and I don’t blame ArenaNet for taking their time to reinstate accounts that were banned prematurely, but this is getting out of hand. It is unacceptable for any MMO developer to ban people from a service like this without any form of compensation. People should at least get some free gems out of this or something. I am being patient as I possibly can.

It is very scary and stressful to think that I could be banned forever from a game I enjoy for something I did not do. I know, being innocent, I should not worry about it..but it is hard not to. I know there are a lot of other people in the same boat as me, who know they are innocent but are scared they won’t get unbanned. Sure, ArenaNet tells us that if we are innocent our account will be restored…but in that case; why were we banned in the first place? If they can prove our innocence, shouldn’t they have been able to do that in the first place?

I, personally, find their casual use of the ‘ban-hammer’ disgusting. People have time and hard earned money invested in their accounts, and for Anet to just ban them with no reason, no warning, no investigation and no explanation, is beyond unacceptable.
I understand the need to deal with bots, but this is definitely not the way to do it. It’s creating a much more serious issue than bots have ever been.
Even if we do get our accounts back, we’re still being unjustifiably suspended from the game in the meantime.

Not to mention this now puts doubt in our minds about investing further.

What if this happens again?

Should I switch games now before next months week long banhammer?

This didn’t happen to me in the October wave, but this has happened before.

Does it mean innocent people are going to get banned at random at least once a month?

ChicknFingrs.8074:

Just got banned and i was only level 3. :L

^ And the fact that people are STILL being banned in the biggest problem here.

icewyrm.5038:

FYI the support team don’t generally read forum posts – you will only find community managers (who moderate the forums and such) around for the most part.

Not to say that other staff don’t drop in from time to time but it’s pretty rare.

If you think about it, if you’ve logged a support ticket then they are already working on it as fast as they can – browsing forums would only slow them down anyway.

Oh believe me, this is for the community’s sake.

I have put my grievances very clearly into my ticket and ticket updates.

I still await an announcement.

Nefaria.7659:

Toble.2968:

Give us all back our accounts and fix the botting problem manually instead so innocent people don’t get their weekends ruined!

So at the moment you’re saying an automated process is coming up with a large amount of false positives. To remedy this, you’re suggesting they do the whole process manually.

Does this mean you’d only want them to ban based on player reports? Since I think with that method you’d still end up with false positives.

No. This means I want them to assess the tickets personally (As in people read them) and then given the bulk of tickets and gravity of the offenses have the devs assigned to check up randomly on these players at any given time and most likely catching them in the act of using third party programs.

This has been used by many games and successfully deals with much of the bot problems while avoiding innocent bans.

I am in fact saying against what you claimed I was saying. Currently, I assume the process of this ban wave was to take those with a certain number of reports against them and ban them without looking into it, which has caused this large issue we now see.

they should honestly make a formal announcement. It’s the best thing they could do at this point and my god if they don’t make a formal apology at least in the ticket no more of my money will be seen going toward arenanet ever again.

What they have done is unprofessional and testing it server-wide before a long weekend knowing there is a problem (This happened in the October ban-wave as well, which luckily I was not in because my OP Elementalist was not created then) was straight up wrong to do. Now so many people are barred from playing for three entire days plus the days they have previously waited, not knowing whether they will even get their accounts back and not knowing why.

I await the explanation of this.

Lutharr.1035:

so let me see if I can get my head around this.

1/ The make a system that bans people for botting
2/ They ban people who are not botting
3/ The bots are still around

Sounds like an awesome new feature /facepalm

It’s great isn’t it? And they decide to test it server-wide just before a long weekend.

Brilliant!

poe lyfe.5879:

you know these anti bot banning things have never effected me in any game ive ever played? maybe im just really lucky. or maybe i just never use bots. probably because i never use bots.

I have had GM’s approach me in previous games, I have even had them nerf my drop rate before. In previous games that actually required farming, because guild wars 2 really takes only 2 weeks to get a level 80 fully geared character with little effort, I would sit there for hours and grind on monsters and I actually had a dev show up on a dev character and watch me. I continued my business as usual for a little bit and then I proceeded to greet them and ask them what exactly they were looking for. Of course they didn’t respond, but I wasn’t banned because they actually looked into it and could not find any third parties or anything wrong with what I was doing despite the fact that I appeared to be botting by farming in the same place with a similar rotation for a very long time. I often got sneered at by players called a bot and reported, but because NCsoft could not find the evidence of botting I was never reported because I was never botting.

I’m sure the wave hasn’t effected many players who have never botted and I am sure the wave hasn’t effected many bots as well.

We have gone over this, there are still bots farming right now and there are still people who have never botted without account access.

It is a flawed system.

Just because you didn’t get hit by it doesn’t mean it’s working.

Solid Gold.9310:

You sure, because at least 3 bots in my friends list with names like (jklznmv) disappeared the day after I reported them, and reappeared about 3 days later.

And have now been on Frostgorge Sound for about a week.

This obviously means this system doesn’t work then.

Wouldn’t you like them to fix it instead of banning people like I Am Harmless (Me)?

Jklzmv I am sure is still botting away in game while innocents like me are waiting to get unabnned. they obviously need to fix this.

Solid Gold.9310:

Is it only a 2 day ban for botting ?

That explains why all the bots I reported that are in my friends list are back online !

No.

For those who clearly don’t know, they put in place a new banning system. Unfortunately, this banning system swept up a whole bunch of people who do not bot and got many of us banned for no reason.

I spend all my time PVPing in WvW and because no actual human reviewed my case, I have been banned along with many others who have no idea why. Arenanet has been scrambling to unban people since Wednesday when this all started, but people are still being banned for no reason.