Bots! Bots! Bots!

OK, I know I'm a n00b to the fora, but I just wanted to point out that since I've started playing the game I've seen an enormous amount of bots, especially (right now at least) in the Granite Citadel. There has to be at least 200 Monk variants with gibberish names running from a spawn point to a sign, bumping the sign then moving through the door consistently, like a stream of some kind of freaky zombie parade.

My suggestion: Move the signs.

yeah they've been around for a long time now. anet should just stick a mod in there for about 10 minutes each day and just ban them

Now that each bot will receive only around 1/8th of the drops that it did before the farming changes the bot farmers are probably just running more bots than ever!

Unlike real players, bots never sleep, and the bot farmer can simply set up more accounts to run at the same time so as to keep up their revenue.

There is a video somewhere that shows these bots, not sure where it is but its quite funny.

They probably do. It takes a lot of time to go through the process of verifying all the bots & naming how ever many they can. So far they seem to have done the banns in large groups, so it seems they are building up a list.

Instead of moving the signs, they can move the required npc's (merchant, mainly), or install obstacles. I think they did this in Droks, by sticking the dye trader in the route between the Talus Chute entrance to the merchant.

The bots use the signposts for a reason (it gives them a point of reference when entering or leaving the outpost), and the reason why they run from post to post is that it gives them the route to the merchant. All Anet has to do is stick an npc between the signpost and the merchant....problem solved. The bots will run into the npc and won't be able to reach the merchant. The npc doesn't even have to be a functional one, as a dwarf guard will suffice.

That happens to me in Drok's when I'm Id'ing stuff while walking to the merchant, I'm always hitting a dwarf guard. lol

But yeah, there's a TON of them right now in the Citadel, they're just swarming past, hit a sign, exit....

What would be funny would be to move the signs to the middle of the outpost for a bit. It'd be like a mosh pit in there.

Bots are here, and so are repeated posts..

Repeated Post! Repeated Post! Repeated Post!

And please don't be ignorant when you say "gibberish names ", they are Japanese, Taiwan, Chinese, and various asian languages.

I remember talking about the bot problem last night with a few people from the AIDA guild who were there and some others.

Here were some of the suggestions:
1. Make the signs out of town non-clickable. Personally I don't like this because they can still use merchants, xunlai, and henchies to navigate with.
2. Alter the functionality of Protective Spirit. This is a nice idea, but the devs have to do it in a way to keep it a viable spell as it is very useful in the other chapters and in HM.
3. Add some imps with necro or mesmer skills and can strip enchantments.
4. Be able to force bots into the party and let them do all the work
5. Limit the amount of HP your max can be reduce by. Say make sup runes -80HP and then limit it to -160 hp. Another thing to do is reduce how much DP affects your HP so you can't work around it that way.
6. Hire some cheap labor to sit around and take names of all the bots.
7. Enable body blocking in town.



Okay, so what does khshfgsgk asdfasdfa mean in any of those languages?

This the "Safe" version of the post.. .. no names. here.

I've heard many people talk about it, but I didn't belive it intill I saw it myself.

I went to the Granite Citadel today to see THE BOTS.. and I have ask.. Why is a.net not doing anything about it? My guild mate has said they have been there for over a month now.. and I sat there for 10 minutes and saw 29 diffrent bots running..in 10 minutes I had written down the names of them but that post was locked and all the names of the bots where removed. (which is fine and I understand that)... Its easy enough to just go see for yourself.


These are just some of the names, Im sure I missed a couple.. and this doesn't include the bots in the International Districts... which is like an easy 20 more.

This is easy to see they are bots, they follow set paths..

A.net keeps nerfing skills, and trying to stop farming.. and they allways have said they are very very intent to stop bots.. well then if so.. why a.net are you just leaving this untouched?

I have edited my secreen shots to exclude any names.

-I wrote that almost a month ago, but I decided to wait a month before I posted it just to see if a.net WOULD do anything.. now its been almost 2 months.. and the bots STILL are all over the place in plain to see Granite Citidel.

If for some reason you don't belive me.. go there yourself.. and see the constant influx of bots in and out of the area, and how the all are Monk/Warrior or Monk/Mesmer level 20.. with Grey armor.

Here's a secreen shot of the merchant getting .. Botted!!


A.net.. I just want the answer to one question... Why havn't you just banned them? or atleast a temp ban? or atleast.. . done something about it?

If Ms Grey could make a statement about it.. it would prove to me that atleast they are aware of it.. and might do something to stop this.. if you wanna know what REALLY ruins guild wars.. its the bots.

PLEASE stop the bots.

I beg you.

It would take all of 30 minutes.... or maybe one hour.. to ban these bots that are destroying your wonderful game that I have been playing since the WPE.

Also, what about the people who spam "Buy gold from our website" In Ascalon ID 1? I went in there the other day to look for a item.. and the local chat is flooded with people posting websites to buy gold FROM the botters..

Are you NOT aware of this? How can you not be aware? .. Isn't posting websites to buy ingame items a breach of EULA? Why is the same name person able to sit in Ascalon city ID1 for HOURS at a time posting these websites?

Please.. do something.

These secreen shots, have been edited to contain no names, and are just normal secreen shots of guild wars, taken less then one hour ago from the time of this posting.


I dont care enough to edit it anymore.

w/e
... A.net.. do something.. or make a statement.. this is bunk

There is a suggestion about regeneration behaviour modification that woudl kill 55monks without touching anything lese, but the problem is no that.

The problem is that they will use another build and another place and bot-farm again.

Making merchants have different spawn locations in different district would help a litte.
A new district is 'created' the NPCs appear in different places...

Most of those would only stop 55 hp monks. True almost all bots are 55 hp monks, but if you nerf the 55 hp monk so it doesn't work, they could just switch to a different build. It might take a while for the botters to switch, but then again, most bots are likely only a few months old.

WAYYY to many farmers out there get a bot.
(Siblings with no school/work= instant gold farm.Just teach them the basics and let them have a character.At least upgrade thiers once in awhile. )

Also, solo farming in hard mode is bottable, and will yield 2-3x as much as it did before in the same area, easily topping 10k / hour. As long as there isn't any enchant removal, the increased attack speed makes some enchant based builds godly, with zero risk.

Aren't we all glad solo farming was nerfed...

1st) I also use the signposts to navigate, and in outposts like the kurzicks ones and Sunspear sanctuary, signpost are a time saver.

2nd) Each time they nerf skills and game mechanics, they are also creating an even bigger impact to Human players that actually farm.

3rd) You may find farming stupid and a waste of time, but other people will consider "Vanquishing" every enemy in the map or wall hugging every wall in the map stupid and a waste of time. Others even do bought.

4th) Yes, Anet should ban all the bots, and even cheaters. I once saw a lvl 22. Other time I saw a guy in Pre-searing with 2 secondary professions, something like R/mo/me.

Some are, and I wasn't really talking about those, because I can't be 100% sure those are bots.
The bots that I can talk about are swarms of lvl 20 Monks with actual gibberish names, like 'SSS Xxpx' and so on.

I like the signs as well, in places like Droks they're heaven sent. But I don't want to see things get nerfed because a bunch of people want to make a quick buck off of A.net's bandwidth.

So do I. It seems we both have the same opinion.

But after seing nerf after nerf sent to farmin in general, and still seing the bots in exactly the same place, I cant stop thinking that either Anet believes farm is bad for the game, or that they cant stop the bots, the bots are making them lose money and so they decided to end farming, since no farming no bots.

From their statements, it seems they think farming is a viable and legit way to play this game, but when you consider the effects of their changes, the message that the comunity gets its the opposite. So farmers begin to appear thiefs, cheaters, destroyers of the game and whatnot.

Here were some of the suggestions:
I think that this will not help very much, because the bots will become more sophisticated and they begin to use other ways of navigation, maybe a map to teleport to town.
This is not a good idea because it will affect many more players that aren't cheating.
This will help nothing, the bots can have a name creation function so they can have millions of combinations and they can even have meaning so this is nonsense.
This will help only against current bots, but not the next ones.

Actually, this has been going on for MONTHS and MONTHS. There is no doubt Anet is aware of it, and yet it still goes on, even after the loot scaling update.

The solution used for previous Mo/W bot farming should work as well in Granite Citadel. Anet just adjusts the monsters in the area being farmed to strip enchantments, problem solved. Why hasn't this been done?

now tats pretty ignorant ...taiwan n chinese..dont u think theres something wrong there?better not make a fool of urself english,western ppl..who speak western language ...

imo changing sign or having npc in the mid is not gonna do a diff..ppl who program bots arent stupid...heard of path finding ?way points? these can still get them..its just a matter of time

I think that all we must do is to create the most fitting description (in the meaning of behaviour) for a bot. What is it doing or what is it not doing and from that we can try to make a "vaccine", an algorithm that can at least alert ANet of possible misuse of bots. So you are welcome to write down your suggestions.

My suggestion is that bots are:

- mostly using the same area whole time.
- not sleeping (account is used for many hours/day)
- used to farm something

im sure anet knows wat is a bot..n theres plenty of reasearch papers/journals on it.i personally wrote my thesis on bots. pretty pointless to teach a maths teach math

1) The bots are supervised by a human. One person can be in charge of a dozen bots, but there IS a human there, to answer whispers from moderators and to unstick bots which get stuck or confused.

2) ANet does ban bot accounts. I know this, because I've reported several bots, added them to my friends list, and watched them go offline permanently.
So what do the botters do when they get banned? Buy a new copy, of course! Prophecies costs, what, $35? That's what the botting companies charge per 300K gold. A bot running continuously makes that amount of cash in a couple of days, so unless ANet catches it in less than a week, the botter still makes a profit.

Actually with the introduction of the Hard mode I expect botting to increase; there are now some areas which are not only very easy to bot, but way more profitable than they used to be.

If you see alot of bots in one location, I think Anet likes to trap them there to deal with them later on.

I've seen it before in prophercies and the odd thing was that none of the bots were moving. It wasnt like they were running in, and running out and back and back out. They were trapped.

But you can tell a bot, because its movement are pre-set. And if you try to try to talk to it, all you get are automated responses. And they tend to have really stupid names which look like they were run off from a programme.

Oh and if their a W/mo or a mo/w and their is a staggering number in one place, its a big give away.

Then it's nearly unpossible to detect a bot supervised by human.