ANet, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Hey everyone... long time lurker here, a small bit about me. I'v turned 19 5 days ago, am a pretty hardcore gamer and been playing gw pretty much all the way since Prophecies. I have a total of over 3800 hours spent on gw with very little being afk. Have 2 collector's editions factions + nightfall. What i'm about to tell you is my story of the disturbing customer service that ANet has and my assumed "methods" they use to find people using bots/3rd-party programs.

So it all begins on a lovely morning of the 20th, I wake up get some breakfast do all the usual stuff, turn on my pc, turn on gw type in my password... and then bam i'm greeted with a (code=45) message. For those of you that don't know the message is this:

So I stare at this message for around 2 minutes in complete shock and finally realise that i need to try my secondary account since, surely if i had any 3rd-party program running it would be banned too... Login, everything seems fine. Tell my great guildies and everyone is in complete devastation. Everyone says to email support immediately and tell them it must have been a mistake.

Next thing I do is email support with a pretty short message, at this point im pretty frustrated and annoyed as to how this could happen to me. But I quickly type up a very polite message and send it off. I obviously have quite a few mistakes in the message, because I don't even have a sense for errors at that point.

Few hours later I get a reply asking me for some details, the error I get, the email address used to login and my serial key to register the game account. Afcourse i reply immediately with all the requested info and await patiently for the next reply.

Get the next reply and it just says that they're investigating the matter, and will contact me for further information if nessary or any news. Around 40 minutes later I get another reply, turning into happy mode thinking this is it I open up the reply and I get another shock.

Now at this point I'm beyond pissed off, im mad I'v spent enormous amount of time in this game. And I've been through plenty of game exploits not using them once, or even thinking about them. So I get on guildwars with my 2nd account and tell my guildies the news, everyone is disapointed and says not to give up and put my spirit up to send off another reply.

So here I am writing another message to the customer service. At this time when they mentioned bot/3rd-party program I knew immediately what the cause of all this ban is. 3-5 days prior to the ban I have been working on my chest title, now most of you know that it is an extremely hard and long title to get. 5 chest per 10-15 minutes is pretty ineffcient and you will get bored pretty quick. I used to do the mirror of lyss run and it bored the hell out of me so quick it's not funny. A friend tells me about this really great run where he gets 1 chest every 45~ seconds and it spawns almost always. So i go try it out... perfect just what I need to get my title up to rank 4.

So i do this in the evening and open up around 50-70 chests and go to sleep. Next morning I decide to do this all day long. It's very simple very easy and very mindless. You don't need to think how to get past groups or anything, just check if chest spawned put up Shadow Form and go in. After I get the chest I type /resign and return to outpost. So doing this for a whole day or atleast most of the day, I recall seeing "you have played for 5 hours bla bla" I end up with around 300~ chests done in 1 day. I think to myself wow this is awesome way to get chest hunter title. Sure it's boring but atleast it's easy and fast. Next day I do around 150~ chests getting slightly bored of it. And finally on the 3rd day i get my last 100~ chests and get rank 4 .

Meanwhile all the gold drops I get i sell Unidentified to other people to get my money back. Since I spend a huge amount of money on keys and need to keep going with the title.

Now how suspicious can a guy get right? Zone in and out every minute for 5h+ must be a bot right? Well ANet Thinks so.

Righty back to my messages to customer service, my last reply was sent off at 17:40 UK time, which at the time I didn't noticed but im guessing it's around 20 mins before they close it off and call it a day.

Next morning still in big frustration I send off another ticket this time completely new explaining all of the situation and including my last reply. Funny thing is... every time you want to submit a ticket you need to create an account... now that's just downright stupid if you ask me. So I notice you can login, try that however it won't let me if I type my email address in and the password used for the first ticket I sent. It just says its incorrect or mispelled. If I try to retrieve the password it says the User ID doesnt even exist. Okay so how can this be? I created an account yesterday with my ticket? How on earth can it not exist? Something fishy... So i used another email address and look at this... it works fine?!

I know this is getting pretty long, but hang in there it's almost there. So i watch my ticket saying "In proggress" for a while and notice that someone replied with a message saying that it's in the wrong category, okay wait what?! It wasn't in the wrong category yesterday? I then patiently await for the "right" department to have a look at it. Half a day passses by and I get a message telling me their closing the ticket due to the other one still being unresolved and that I should use that to contact them. I think fair enough I guess I mighta been a bit impatient.

An Hour and a half passes by and I get another reply. And here's what it says, this is a direct quote nothing altered whatsoever.

At this point im very happy and very sad at the same time. I get no apology whatsoever, I get called a "one-time offender" I get treated like crap and they tell me that I can't play how I want? I'm sorry but if i can only play with "automated behaviour" then what? Just gonna ban me, because I chest run for a few hours? okay maybe a bit more than a few hours but still...

So here's my theory on ANet's "superior" bot detection :

They have GM's being judges against innocent players.
They have pretty crap judges.
They don't whisper you or talk to you to see whether you respond to them or not.
They don't like to admit they're wrong.
They don't like to apologise.
They have no built in 3rd-party detection in the game client? Maybe something simple? Maybe they do but decide not to use it?
They don't look at any other factors at all, insane amount of hours, chatting to my friends while doing chest runs.

I think that's pretty much it, hope this message is both a warning to the players and ANet. That innocent players should not have to suffer what I just have. I'v been a loyal gw fan since the beggining and I truly don't deserve to get treated in a way real offenders should be.

Anyone that does something for long hours beware, ANet is watching you

Hope mods/admins leave this intact so players are aware of how bad ANet can be and how much they could improve.

Thank You for reading this huge post and play safe

P.S If there are any grammar mistakes in the post, im not english and it took me a long long time to write this up but pm me and I'll correct them if needed.

Did you leech in Fort Aspenwood? DID YOU LEECH!!! Bastard!

since my "ban" for being too much afk on festival rings... i aint surprised at all when i hear that kinda stories

If i plan to do lotsa chestruns like u did, i'll send a ticket "gaise, i gonna run chests, no ban pls ^^ "

Well its clear they ant really detect whether you use 3rd party software or not. So they check for repetitive behavior, and accuse anyone who goes beyond a set parameter. Only thing u can do is alter your behavior periodically, log out, do something else with the same character, find different spots to farm chests.

Unfortunate, but the only thing you can do against it.

Yeah, whatever. Great way to show some support or gratitude for a guy who takes the time to issue a warning.

At OP: thanks for the warning. I ll take note and after I hit /resign I make sure to say something in local chat.

To be perfectly honest.... if you sit there for AN ENTIRE DAY doing a 45 second run over and over again, I'd probably ban you too. Nobody has the mental capacity to do that. I remember spending 3 hours in a row doing the presearing rurik run for exp... my brain was melting out of my ears by the end of that. Count yourself lucky that you got unbanned imo.

You know, if all you do is mindless chestruns all day trying to achieve some meaningless title, you should have been grateful for them to ban you. It might have been your last shot at freedom.

But yes, of course, you are right, you shouldn't have been banned.

They made a mistake, they're people too.

I'm sorry to hear your storry, good to see you got unbanned...
Patrick Smit is right, just don't do things so repetitive.

The sad things is, innocent people get banned and Altrum, the Mekka of All Botts is still full of real ones...

If you talk to people on Guild Chat or in PMs I imagine it won't look like you're botting. It's much easier to farm + chat to guildies or friends than to bother making yourself look unbotlike :P

ca_aok, the ban was still not legitimate as they actually can't prove a single thing except repetitive behavior (which is NOT a violation of the EULA). They ASSUME 3rd programs to be used for this behavior.

Now, if they were bots they are very unlikely to send in messages to get an unban, while if the ban involve human players they will try to get an unban. Yes the owner of the bots could try that to revitalize accounts, but I assume that a 12+ hours repetitive short run warrants bot behavior. They will never mention what exactly is the time limit for bot behavior so they cant intentionally avoid the screening mechanisms. ANet has basically no proof, and therefore ban you on illegitimate evidence (which is not proof).

I understand the reasons for ANet to still do so, but I'm also concerned on the clients side. I'm not a farmer, but just can imagine that people do like it for kicks of getting gold (items) or whatever. They basically should just adjust their routine once in a while, or be warned by email that they have been flagged for bot behavior, and be warned to change their behavior.

It's not that they can not detect 3rd party software it's just that some 3rd party stuff will probably be pretty sophisticated stuff.
And therefore "manual" monitoring is required, sometimes people get it wrong? the people who are watching are only human after all.

Mind telling us where this magical chest is?

That story sucks and I'm glad it was settled for your account, but since I'm an optimistic person, this is evidence that anet is looking at bots closely and that eventually they will disappear....

.... huuh, woah maybe this is beyond optimistic :s

It sounds like the viel chest in DoA

on-topic, 3 day's worht of chest runs about 5+ hour's each from what it sounds like. I'm not surprised you got banned it did sound very very repetitive (aka bot like behaviour).

You deserve the ban, seriously all that time chest running. Dude get out of the house go see the daylight, ride a bike, watch a movie without download times, chat up a girl, atleast try to live damn it!


Warning real life is seriously lacking in res shrines... becareful

Even if they could, they are not allowed to check what programs u are using, if people are running them they can still not check what the output of such a program inputs stuff (i.e. where it puts the keyboard simulated input). It is in conflict with the laws on privacy. So basically ANet cannot possess such information legally. So they can also not use it to support bans.

Yeah!

And what if i get lag? I'm DEAD!

One additional point why the game moderator banning him was not much good is the fact that keys cost money, golds bring in little money, but never enough to make gold.

I.E. CHESTRUNNING DOES NOT EQUAL BOT BEHAVIOR, there are much more interesting places to farm for bots.

True there is still no reconnect feature for Real life. Why aren't the devs working on a reconnect.... If i was a CR/PR rep I wouldn't speak out but, the last guy the company sent down was crucified

If this is true, then why is Altrumm Ruins, Granite Citedel, ect... full of bots? Also as you said, you were chatting at the same time. Maybe the GM (If they actually exist) had his chat off, which would make him incompetent. And if they had a GM watching you, why would they need to review the log files?

Simple solution would have been like you said, to whisper you and see if you replied.