Altrumm Ruins BOT freight train

Yah another bot thread....but come on ANet there are so many bots that there are 2 active districts and sometimes 3!

BAN THE ACCOUNTS AT LEAST THEY'LL HAVE TO BUY NEW ONE AND THEN YOU MAKE MORE MONEY!

Anet knows about the problem, and bots are banned daily.

And bots strive to make money, so botters usually STEAL accounts. They rarely buy them.

Some moderator close this T_T.

More like steal another account.

I felt so strangely alone in such a crowd...



Such serious adventurers, never talking...going about their business...in such a solemn manner.

I started having feelings of inadequacy and a deep sense of shame for not being as professional and methodical as them...the discipline I lacked.

Horray for the daily Arborstone Explorable bot thread!

Artkin gets a fortune cookie!

Perhaps we should make a sticky about bot threads?

rofl.. they should should..

Anyway, Gaile Grey has told us that they do infact ban bot users everyday. 300 daily she said! So people that always whine about anet not doing anything (like I used to do) should just shut up.

whenevr i'm in altrumm ruins, I always just imagine the running monks screaming GOJIRA! GOJIRA! sets a nice festive mood

Yep, we're banning an average of 300 bots a day. It was a total of 9,009 for the month of June. I bet we'll top that for July.

I know it looks bad when you see a ton of the same characters in a district, doing robotic dances and returning every few minutes. I wish there was more that we could do. But honestly, with reviewing the reports, doing the research, and so forth, we'd rather be a little conservative and assure ourselves that those being banned are deserving of the action rather than make massive sweeps and find that innocent players (who just happen to be Mo/Me's in AR ) are wiped in the effort.

Hope that makes sense to you.

9000 bot bannings in one month? Wow. If that repeated over 4 months, that would be about 1% of all guild wars sales (going on the 3.5 mill units model). I'm curious to know, if it's even possible to know, are these bannings having an effect on reducing the bot population? Or is each ban followed with a replacement bot? Are bots the mythical hydra of the online gaming world? Or can we actually reduce their overall number in time? Honestly, i am just curious.

Sorry Gaile I just can't seem to keep my big mouth shut forever:

See this is where I have a problem. I can tell within two blinks who's a bot and who's not a bot. A few prime examples:

• Anybody with a silly name that was made mashing home row keys is probably a bot. Example: Adjskf Bzxcv
  
• Anybody not in a guild is probably a bot as most bots are not in guilds.
  
• Any monk in scar patterns, undyed, etc is probably a bot. Somtimes they even have PRE scars.
  
• Or any combination of the above would pretty much guarantee they are bots.

So is the real problem being able to distinguish who's real and who's botting? From what I'm hearing the problem is because you are relying on data collection instead of putting real people in these areas to police the questionable activity. Your scared to ban legit farmers because they might have trigged themselves on your data collection? Sounds like a problem with the way you're going about banning accounts to me...

Funny we hear how great of a job your doing banning bots but we still see this abundance of bots flowing into certain bot friendly explorable areas. You would think after 9000 accounts last month that the bots would become more scarce-but that's obviously not the case. If you were in fact doing a good job at banning bot accounts then the sweat shops and IRL gold sellers would not be able to afford constantly buying new accounts. IMHO you are doing the bare minimum and stating your 300/day 9000/month numbers might appease the few but it DOES NOT solve the problem for the masses. For all we know you are just making these numbers up since the towns are still FLOODED with bots.

You are not winning this battle and the legit players are the ones that are suffering. The GW market is completely FUBARED and the bot situation only makes it worse. Actually HM+Loot Scaling only made gold more valuable which has been a huge benefit for botters.

Seriously though? 300/day? I'm not impressed. I could do 300/hour by myself, manually, taking screen shots in Bergen and Altruum....and since I would be doing this IG the number of "mis-bans" would be kept to a minimum as well.

Honestly I'm just waiting for the "ANET" solution of nerfing the crap out of Protective Spirit, or some other staple of the solo monking skills in order to take the easy way out of fixing this once and for all. Hopefully you won't do this though since you'll then loose a large chunk of players in the process (not a smart move right before an expansion and GW2 right around the corner).

I figured you guys would be all over this considering banning accounts means more account sales for ANET/NCSoft?

The best solution for this would be to remove the binding key option to "target closest item". As I understand it bots don't use mice-everything is automated via keystrokes. If there is no keystroke combination to pick up loot then bots come back with empty inventories. Who cares if the legit players suffer from not being able to use their keyboard to pick up their loot. As a legit player I would rather have to mouse-click my loot than deal with this jacked up economy that botting has generated.

Here is my problem with your post. Each post in your list has the word probably in it. Until that probably becomes a for sure or absolutely you can't just lay the ban hammer down no matter what you want to do. I think 300 or so bots a day is pretty good considering the fact that they are trying not to ban legit peoples account. I would rather have 300 bots with no real ban complaints then 3000 with 300 legit players banned per day.

I would really hate to see my 55 mo/me enter this area, run out to go farm as a 55 in her grey tats and the boom next day can't log in because you a bot NTY. Please continue to make sure bots are bots.

Really, this problem would be a minuite problem if people didn't buy gold on E-Bay. Really come on real money for pixialted gold is rediculous. But in reality, No demand for fast gold for cash = no demand for bot= botting not profitable = No bots. Lets get at the source of the problems and not blame anet because the players in this game can't stay away from e-bay gold

Actually, bots dont do that. They look at what's at the screen and place the mouse in the position where pixels are gold colored and loot gold items that way. In the same way it can check if skills are recharged and how many health the player, partymembers and enemies have.

As a programmer and game designer, I've been making a few bots, actually made a w/mo pongmei farmbot as school project. I'm not using them though (besides a testrun or two to see if they work) and I haven't put them on the internet either, so don't worry. I'm currently working on a somewhat smart monk bot that follows the player around and heals party members. Maybe I'll actually be using that one, as I have two guildwars accounts and I don't see why an AI isn't allowed to play with me

Yes my friends who all enjoy playing so much that they play all day in the same place so they can have plain armor and give their cash to someone else will be hit from the collatoral damage from a mass ban. It's going to be hard for my friends to make another character with the names they like because they like making names which seem random but they're not. They have deep meaning inside the mashing of keyboard. It's not their fault they like to hang out around sign-posts with like minded gamers either.

You totally missed my point. If you are guildless, have a name "Asdf Jkl;", and are in pre-searing tatoos I can say 99.9999999% that you're a bot.

If you're in 15k Kurzick, have a guild tag, and your name is George Bush then you're probably a legit player.

Come on this isn't rocket science. Goto Altruum if you don't believe me, or Bergen, or Granite. A friggin preschooler could figure out who's botting and who's legit.

Right on. If you banned every person who looked like that and got, say, 500,000 bans in one day, maybe ONE person would be real. Maybe. I'd say it is a LOT more accurate than anet's current method where you always hear of accidental bans taking place.

It's not really that simple though, Anet needs to have a way to positively identify
bot, not just ban any player that looks and acts like a bot.

If they just used your criteria, botters would just hide themselves better, and
they'd still have to find a method to identify them positively.

To make it worse, if Anet did ban people as bots just because they had gibberish
names, looked, and acted like bots, us internet gamers, being the mischievous
folks we are would start making our characters with those attributes. And yeah,
we would do it just so we could whine and fuss about being wrongly banned
by the monsterous Anet corp. You might say that we deserve to be banned too,
for acting like bots just to mess with their heads. But there's nothing in the EULA
that says we can't be twits.

Even though I hate seeing all those bots, I think Anets going about dealing with
them in the right manner.

Where do the botters get all those accounts from? I don't believe they "steal" that
many accounts. Do they have something like a wholesalers account somewhere
in asia and pay $10. per copy or something?

Or just an uncreative person who doesn't care about their character name.

Or... someone that doesn't care about being in a guild. I know a few myself.

Yes, they are a bot because they use the most common 55 monk armour. Flawless logic. They couldn't possibly be real people.

To reiterate, because someone is not very creative or doesn't care about their character name, they don't really care about the community aspect of the game and they happen to have pre searing art armour for their 55 set, they are bots. BAN EM! BAN EM ALL!

Should make a thread just for bitching too

I appreiciate the fact that Anet are being mindful in distinguishing real bots and farmers.

Please don't judge a book by its cover - I solely believe that looking into the collected data of a suspected account provides less a chance to make errors and mistakes throughout the banning process. And hard fact evidence is needed when justifing why a certain account is needed to be banned - I think it won't be plausible when explaining to the account holder that because of the following characteristics, their account is now banned.

As far as I am concerned we need way more of these bot threads. This is a serious problem. It is our responsibility as legit paying customers to make it painfully obvious that we have a problem with the bots and the practices that are supposedly in place for taking care of the problem. Anyone writing any of these concerns off as "just another bot thread" is doing their part to make a major contribution to the problem. Going about our business and learning to live with the bots is exactly what the bots and probably Anet themselves want us to do.

That's "probably" a bad idea.

We definately needed another thread on this.

While a few think Levi`s solution is a bit drastic and to an extent i do as well, I believe its a reasonable short term solution.

I used to often run my Mo/Me 55 from Altrum/Marketplace/The deserts Shiverpeaks in Tyria and one spot in NF that I cant remember as well with about 50 Bots following me. I don`t currently play GW anymore because of the Loot scaling, not because I 55 but because I feel i am being discriminated against because of Bots.

I would rather I got banned accidently and had to explain myself to get the ban lifted than let these crettens who are destroying the game and its economy for the legitamate player keep going about there merry way. After about 6 months if Levi`s solution does not work then try a new solution.

It is obvious A-net`s current solution is not working sufficiently as there are always about the same number of Bots as there was 12 months ago which means Botting is still profitable. GW has been Nerfed too many times because of Bots and its always to the detriment of legitamate players. and never seems to have any detrimental effect on the Bots.
My son is playing GW currently and he has shown me all the Bots.

To me it actually looks like there are more Bots now than there was before Loot scaling came in <<< I am Biased on that opion though and have no Stats to prove it.

Ya, change prot spirit to no more than 40 healh per attack. General PvE wont complain (that is what prot spirit does anyway for players with normal HP), PvP wont care because there are no 55 teams.

OR dont let multiple superior runes with the same attribute deduct more health.

People will huff and puff, but they are playing a solo game to earn more money for what purpose? Nobody is entitled to earn millions in gold - they just want to.

AFAIK, bots do not buy or steal accounts.
They make new ones with serial key generators.

This will probably be deleted, and I won't disagree, but most people just don't know how bots keep coming back so fast.

Enix, This is what I was talking about, Nerfing stuff to the detriment of legitamate players. Why? does this affect your gameplay somehow?

Nobody is entittled to millions? Tell that to Bill Gates, sorry but thats incorrect, anybody is entittled to "EARN" any amount they wish so long as it is legitamate. Unless you are a communist

If I or anyone else makes a 55 you want to Nerf it so we cant do it anymore? Its not a solution to botting and would alienate a lot of legitamate players. and not just the 55/soloers

yes it is/was a major way of earning gold quickly and some/or a lot amass/ed a lot of wealth this way. I spent my gold on getting extra NPC`s for my Guild Hall and buying keys. If its legit good luck to them.

Its the ones who are "buying" GW Wealth that are the cause of a lot of the botting problem/GW Economy, If Area could stop that then that would help with the problem, it wont stop it altogether, but it would be a better step in the right direction.

If they Monitor Gold Trades somehow then investigate that, ie a player gets 100k gold trades times 2 or more within 5 minutes they can get red flaged, Area looks into there account and see they have recieved 500k or whatever with a legitamate trade, say a Mini Mallyx or Cranelled sword no problem, they get a please explain if no reasonable trade exists as does the person who traded with them. This solution has some obvious flaws but at least its a suggestion to work on rather than penalising the legitamate player

But please stop with the Nerfing stuff to the detriment of legitamate players

See, I'm not really cool with that. I may decide to give a friend of mine some gold because I'm not going to play for a while, or they got hacked and have nothing, or for whatever reason under the sun I may want to; it's my gold. I can give it to whomever I want and in whatever quantities I want, right? If what you are proposing goes through, anyone that gives another person something what is considered "high-end", it will be suspect regardless of the reason.

What will be considered too much gold?
What will be high end?
What will be considered an accepable 'excuse' for giving a large sum of gold and/or high end item?
Who is going to answer these questions?

I wouldn't want it to be a machine sniffing data on the servers from anet, mostly because it would be impossible to tell the motive behind such a transaction between players. While I realize it probably does not happen often, but I doubt I'm in the only guild or circle of friends where high-end items and/or money freely trade hands when the situation or need arises.

Like you say, it's is not fair to suddenly be asked questions for merely trading just because other people are illegally farming gold for sale on eBay. I don't have to explain my actions to anyone unless they are actually violating the EULA (even then I don't, I'll just get banned).