How to stop hundreds of bot farmers in no time.

There is a small problem with thats since no laws are broken, selling gold on e-bay is not against the law just against the EULA, so E-bay can not be held responsible. The gold and weapons trade on e-bay has to be solved by A-net them selfs. And account banning is the only thing they can legaly do.

o_O a hardcap on how low health gets...

so...bad players who DP up wouldnt get punished for it?

Make the game easier some more?

Even then you can farm with more than just that type of build.

Theres sooooo many farming builds. -.-

Nerf the 55 at Elona. You end up with ViM trapper bots soloing elona? Or how about Earth Ele Tanks? or how about invinciwarrior builds?

Nerfing the build will not nerf the bots.

<rant>
Several posts in this threads look like they belong in a thread petitioning to nerf the 55HP monks. If your issue is with 55HP monks in general, please be honest about your agenda and post your opinion in the appropriate place.
While I agree that botting is a problem that should be dealt with, nerfing a popular farming build is not the solution.
</rant>

In all honesty, this thread invokes the impression of being a downright Trolling Thread. There is no discussion and absolutely no topic to have a valid discussion on. It is however, the same old "Nerf 55" Suggestion in disguise as one can simply notice by reading the posts of the Threadstarter.
This however is known to lead towards Flamewars sooner or later and that is basically the future i'm predicting for this thread. It will be a flamewar real soon, it's just the only logical thing to follow yet another nerfcry mixed in with countless accusations geared towards a wide scope of players.

P.S.:
Someone thinking that Camera Positions affects Bots should not blatantly and downright rude call other people clueless.

P.P.S.:
Had some difficulties submitting this post, i hope it's not turning into a multipost -.-

umm base lv20 max hp penalty leaves you at 192hp, while the single superior attribute/health rune leaves 167. Did you even bother to check why i gave that range? From the top down it could be scaled, though I seriously doubt people even die much, if at all at the lower levels.

One setup can be easily afked, while the others listed can not. Which makes for a easier bot setup, though by account forcing change would easily be a sign of who is botting vs who is not.

Actually a better observation would be, why are you trying to defend the build?

Simple, Nerf the Area, let the bots be and just mess up their farming

Add a group of one of the folloing

http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/Sand_Giant

or

http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/Storm_Kin

or

http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/Jade_Scarab


I mean c'mon it aint that hard just add a group 2 groups of some these guys to patrol, they are desert critters, and 55ers dont like them much , i mean its just like the UW 55 nerf, hell add a dying nightmare that appears then the minotaurs mobs are all agroed together, this will fix the problem, it isnt banning the bots but it will make them useless

A lot of annoyance and anger invoked, and a once satisfied customer who is now not going to buy the next ANet game and who is going to give ANet a bad name, even if just by complaining on forums.

Or worse, afterall banning == breach of contract. That might get costly, very costly. ANet will have to weigh that risc and it's potential costs against the costs incurred by botters.

It might have cost them a small fortune in support costs, they wouldn't be very forthcoming about it.

I don't know much about that build, but if a low 55 HP is important for that 10% of health damage limiter, then there are nature rituals such as Fertile Season and Symbiosis to increase the maximum health of those 55HP bots, Predatory Season to decrease the effect of healing, Primal Echoes to influence the usuability of Blessed Signet and finally, Nature's Renewal mess with enchantments.
Human farmers can improvise, bots can't.

Because players enjoy it. A lot of players enjoy it. Legitimate gamers who buy multiple accounts. I myself would like to make a 55 in the future (my monk still needs to finish though), but right now im happy using my warrior to farm.

I think players should be allowed to farm. I think builds should be nerfed with respect to PvP balance. 55 monks are not used in PvP. The most you have are 55 FC air spikers, but thats for dodgeball.

I would like a solution to botting WITHOUT affecting real players as much as possible.

Thats my point.

please do not generalise all bot farmers to being chinese.

As far as nerfing the build, it's just a popular farming build. Nerf it and the bots will use one of many other farming builds, changing nothing. Like Lyra said, there's no imbalance in PvP because of it.

If you just go and ban all the Mo/W's in elona, you're bound to pick up a bunch of legitimate players. Don't give me that crap about being able to tell intrinsically. I've been there, and I know what the bots look like, and I also know there's no way to be 100% sure. As bad as bots are, they're not as bad as many legitimate players losing their account and never buying GW again.

Nerfing the area is a viable solution, but keep in mind it annoys real players to no end as well. Am I the only one who remembers the heart attacks many people had when griffons were nerfed?

If there was a simple solution to this, then the problem would already have been solved. As it is, it's a no-win situation for Anet.

make the skill cap lvl 25 byby 55hp monk byby elonas bots

Hello happy ppl who wanted raised skillcap

I wouldn't be surprised about the "player profiling" they do but I wouldn't be happy about it if the suddenly ban me... just like many of those players who were wrongfully banned recently. And you're saying such a thing is acceptable?

You saw dozens of Mo/W's but how can you conclude that they are all bots? All I saw were the Mo/W tags. Your screenshots prove nothing. Like I said, you are suggesting "player profiling" which is neither morally right nor beneficial. It takes more than just twenty minutes to find out if all of those Mo/W's are bots or not and do you think this type of process wouldn't cost Anet money? I don't think so. And you're saying the area should be policed, who is Anet going to hire to do that and how is Anet going to compensate for their hard work? Team members and cash.

Good money says lots of those bans were overturned and it costed Anet good money. Good money says it angered the players and the players who weren't affected by it that CAN cost Anet potential good money. And I know how the gold farming sweatshop thing works. Never suggested you were playing by the race card. You're just suggesting player profiling.


Anyway... back to what I wanted to say. I agree that nerfing that area would work since it cuts off a big resource for those sweatshop farmers. And since the drops are usually crap, I don't see many players crying about not being able to farm there. As for raising the level cap? No thanks.

Since the issues of bots and how to get rid of them has been argued numerous of times before, this will be my last post in this thread.

Peace,
-Shin

*cough*Dying Nightmares*cough*, i mean cmon just add that one lil creature to the beginning of that mission where the minotaurs collect and make him show up after the monk has gathered agro, PROBLEM SOLVED

Seriously, why has Anet not added dying nightmares to every zone in the game? They could be our little buddies, popping up, rending and dying every 5 seconds. A whole new breed of dying nightmare farming would come out in which you just walked outside and wanded the 50 dying nightmares that spawned. Ah, good times.

spellbreaker. gg.

Just make some changes on the Rune:

o Minor - no HP deduction
o Major - minus 20 HP
o Superior - minus 30 HP

Self interest ftw.

Of course i have self interest. I do play this game. But my self interests aside, I can adapt to nerfs. I can change my build and farming locations. And guess what....bot farmers can do the same.

I dont like bots. I think bots should be stopped. Killing the 55 build wont stop the bots. Killing Elona farming wont stop the bots. The OP's idea wont stop the bots.

The problem is not farming. The problem is bots.

This thread has degenerated into a "I hate 55s" thread, rather than a "Lets stop bots" thread, that the OP originally posted.

There we are on topic again.

Maybe a good solution to the problem, have a-net develop a program that accesses a characters account and looks for Bot program signatures. Make this program scanner a skill and allow it to be used in towns, then only allow trusted players as spys to go to towns and scan suspected violaters, if a bot program is detected, then the info would be transfered to a-net, and they can take appropate action. That I feel would be the best way to eliminate, if not discurage the problem with out effecting non Bot players who sometimes appear as bots.

I bet I know the reason why A-Net is doing nothing to these botters....Thats their income.....If they ban them, then they cause a buncha Chinese people and children to starve to death. Can't ya see the big picture... Have a heart.... Just 20g a month in inflation... so some Chinese people can eat. lol

A bot program does not leave a signature since it runs outside of the GW client, they would have to scan your computer for it, and that would be invasion of privecy. No, Bot's have to be spotted by manual means.

1. There is this thing called edit. You don't need to reply several times to quote several people.
2. Whoever said that this would turn into a flamefest was right, it will.
3. The OP is racist or extreme nationalist and therefore his IQ probably equals his shoesize and 100% of his comments should be ignored. (I'm kind of hypocrite here)
3b. They are not (all) chinese. What if they were chinese, would that make a difference? CHinese people are going to destroy the world? Mexicans/Jews/blacks/Polish/Dutch/french/german/nazi/ will come to take your job? Did you know that nazis gassed jews/enemies? Belgians gassed africans? Americans gassed Asians? Everybody gassed everybody. Don't go around starting it all over again.
4. From experience in other places I can safely say that it is impossible for ANet to defeat botters. From what I've seen they're handling it in quite an interesting way. Other devs would:
- disable windowed mode
- disable global hotkeys
- disable compatability with certain OSes
- disable compatability with virtual machines and VMware type things
In otherwise, they would have to minimise functionality and also the freedom of the normal legit player only to keep away the -dumb- botters. The smart ones would still be able to do it.
I think ANet realised that doing all that would just piss off the legit players so they just run some thing that monitors everyone and if they fall into the category of botter, they just BTF.

But eh, um, who cares?
Do the botters damage GW in any way?
They sell money to the ebayers and the ebayers then use the money to buy stuff. Most of the ebayers are dumb so they buy crap. This makes the smart people rich because they can sell stuff to ebayers and make a lot of $$.

So you now have nub fowers running around screaming "I'm leet, I'm leet!!" while the powertraders bathe in coins and the lowly legit farmers think they will be rich soon by grinding like morons.

This situation exists in every single game out there. I'd have to say, live with it, there's no way to stop it, you can only minimise the problem.
It's like racists, you can't stop it, only minimise..
sigh


edit: If I pissed anyone off, I apologise. I just feel the need to destroy anything that may entice racism or hatred even if it wasn't intended but may result in just that anyway.

Thats interesting because ive long since abandoned trying to protect anything that seems out of place compared to the rest of the game.
Bots farm. To be quite frank, its impossible to remove them once they begin to exist. The only thing that can be done is throw enough hurdles in front of them to make it impractical to do.

or... WE BAN THEM MUHAHAHAHAHA

As I said before, ANet should simply send out some random dude (work experience guy perhaps??! ) and then tell him in what directions the knows bots move and what they do. This dude writes down every name of every person doing that movement pattern and bam. It wont stop it, but after a while it should cut down many bots.

And... if you happen to be stupid enough to imitate a bot, because it's funny or because you are just a lemming(?!) then you get banned wrongly, but it's your fault.

Let's see.

Monk Warrior....

Broken English...

Coming out on the side of the botters....

You're not from China by any chance are you?

So very, VERY close to calling me Adolf Hitler and breaking Godwin's law there.

How can I put this WITHOUT starting a flame retaliation with you?

Hmmm.

Well, let's try the gentle approach.

Everyone, everyone, EVERYONE and their gran knows there is a sweatshop trade in China for gold botters in every MMORPG out there, including World of Warcraft, Guild Wars and such. Indeed, if you took five minutes out to check ebay, the gigantic majority of gold sellers are chinese, based in China and even, helpfully, have chinese names to enable you to pick them out of the crowd easier.

Pointing out that Chinese Gold Farmers exist and are responsible for a great deal of the botting in Guild Wars is a stone cold fact. It's provable, everyone is aware of it. If I were saying 'I hate chinese people' or 'China sucks my will to live' you might have a point on the racist front. However, you don't.

If most of the botting comes from China, I will gladly put my foot down and say so. What is wrong with stating fact every now and then? Why must people always play the race card? Is it relevant?

Chinese bot farmers exist. Get over it.

In answer to the earlier poster, bot farming causes in game inflation and destroys economies. World of Warcraft for example - rares going for such retardly high prices the only way you can concievably obtain them is by botting or buying gold off ebay. It breaks the EULA, it's unfair and it's bloody annoying beyong belief.

Now I understand your rant! Mo/W!

Figures.

55HP Monks for the win. The first person to have a screaming hissy sweary fit on this thread was a 55hp monk too.

spell breaker? you telling me they will 2 man the minotaurs and split minotaur horn drops 50/50? lol my suggestion is just add another creature out there, doesnt have tobe enchantment render or anything, hell add a creature that vampiric touches or something to kill them off

dude its not just chinese people at it. it could be people from anywhere in the world. i bet there are sweatshop farmers in south america aswell as asia. Stop saying chinese as it they are the only ones. it could be vietnemese too. what you are saying is some farmers are chinese therefore all are. maybe some murderers are english so therefore all murderers are english. tons of people have made hundreds of ecto fairly so stoppping bots wont stop high priced items. you wont get a 15>50 crystalline sword for a million gold if they are stopped lol.

I would agree.

But farming is not out of place in this game. Why is there FoW armor? Why is there Fame? Why are there 15k armors? Heck why does our storage hold so much? (some say not enough)

Bots are the ones out of place.

I agree. But we must not forget that making it harder on bots can make it harder on players. So the solution to killing bots must try not to make it harder on real players as much as possible.

Actually, bots are not out of place. Farming is 'by design', given all the moneysinks etc.... Farming is repetitive, on a computersystem that screams 'program' ... or bot.

Human players will always (well, for some time to come at least) have an advantage, as they can more easily adapt to new, unexpected situations. Bots will have to be reprogrammed for the new situation.

Bot's are out of place because they are against the EULA.
Bot's are out of place becasue it's cheating.
Bot's are out of place becasue some poor schmuck has to sit and watch XX amounts of screens for less $/day than your parents pay for your hamburger.
Bot's are out of place because the take up bandwith that could be used to reduce lagg for legit. players.
etc, etc

Please, it isn't that hard, just do some login check a-like when you're creating a new forum user. It's simple, and it wouldn't hurt players nearly.

I have a monk yes, but it's a Mo/Me. I have 2 superiour runes, both of which are located on a divine favor and healing prayers headpiece.
I don't even know the 55build.

And fyi2 the only farming I ever did was with a wammo =D

And fyi3, if you don't know what the hell you're talking about, don't talk about it.
There are bots everywhere. They even don't have to be sweatshops.

Example: I know of a real actual sweatshop that was located in Belgium. They trained chars and sold them for WoW or EQ whatever.
They used kids who didn't feel like going to school. They didn't even get paid.

Similar things can be found all over europe. Germany has lots of them, but they mainly have 1 guy monitoring 20 bots.
Russians used to be big too

Then there's the actual companies who have paid workers.

BTW.
A few months back it were korean farmers. Once we flamed those who stereotyped Koreans, they changed to Chinese botters.
It's a circle, ein Teufelskreis waaa


Also, a single person can bot too. I can name you hundreds of games in which people used to bot or are still botting.

Eventually, all those games have had to make a rule that allows attended botting. They never managed to beat them and they probably never will. There is no fix, only compromise.

He was simply saying that not ALL bots are chinese. And by the way, farmers from all over exist, get over it.

These pics only show the visual ugliness of bot farming. Keep in mind as you view them that if 55 monks are nerfed, they’ll just be replaced by another build.

http://img214.imageshack.us/my.php?image=bots400pw7.jpg

http://img214.imageshack.us/my.php?image=bots438ai5.jpg

This thread shouldn’t be about nerfing builds.

This thread certainly shouldn’t be about race.

This thread should be about suggestions for combating the EULA violating, bot farming that we the players dislike. ANET needs reasonable proof that an account is in violation. They also need methods to garner this evidence efficiently and without grossly upsetting their agreement abiding customers. It is at this point I wish I actually had a suggestion... instead I'll just say "simmer down folks".

Oh and ANET, please do even more than you already do to reduce their numbers. Thank you!

Actually, I have an idea here. This is really only for missions unless A-net makes doors with the idea on them.

Anyway, you know how some sites have you type out those random characters to assure that it's a human making it? Well, we could apply that to the NPC you have to talk to in order to gain access to the area.



So, we could have the NPC give you an item, which you would open for the code, then when you talk to him again, he will ask you for the password.

An incorrect password would boot you out of the map back to where you came in from or would have a 1 minute cooldown time.

Thoughts?

Thanks for posting up a pic. But ya, i mentioned that read post #10 on page 1 of this thread....

ya...it would be really annoying and really take away from the atmosphere of the game.

It would also break the "4th wall" with things like that.

i posted up an idea that i think works in a similar way, but still fits the theme of the game:

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...php?t=10010831

There are at least 5 probably more classes that can do mindless farming. Theres no way Anet would nerf ALL those builds and make all those skills crap. They also shouldn't bother nerfing rune equipments, the -50 hp item, or any other random thing commonly used by botters. A person who is so inclined can make a bot character in about a few hours and get him everywhere he needs to be to farm. Rolling out a new toon for botting is quite easy Id imagine.
-So no, don't try to swing the nerf bat at MORE stuff

Just because someone says 95% of Mo/Ws in elonas are bots doesn't make it true. PMing people in game is a bad idea, a lot of people, myself included simply don't respond to unsolicited PMs. Theres no reason to get into a conversation with some random person when your farming. Theres a lot of people who farm without bots that got incredibly angry during the last wave of mass bannings, Most of those were overturned Im sure, but still anet needs to watch out for banning the wrong account. If it happened to me, I would stop playing
-No proposed option in this thread has given a full-prove method of stopping botters.

I had an idea before, but I doubt it will ever work, or ever get implemented but I might as well share it now. It is based on the principle of supply and demand, sort of. Bring back Griffons. Make it for people to get money, that way they don't have to rely on ebaying gold to get stuff they want. Of course this will probably devalue items. Thats why Ive never suggested it >.>

I think, i wouldnt mind a full nerf of elona, if, as some people have suggested on this forum, Anet created farming zones.

Places with good drops that reward team play. Places where drops are proportional to the amount of players. Soloing them would not pay as much as teamplay.

Places where bots CANNOT enter. (Things were NPCs give you a simple quiz, where answers change randomly before you can enter the mission)