/report for botting = fail on Anet

This point made me thought of an interesting addition to the /report feature: Anet SHOULD actually send you an email if you're banned, giving you a reason (and indicating that a possible more detailed investigation is pending).

Though this would not change one bit of the /report implementation (well may be one call to the appropriate function and an email template?), this could make the feature much more understandable, and possible acceptable, to the community. Without any information, people rage!

Actually, for the sake of our sanity and the ease of conversation, we should clearly identify 3 very different behaviors:
1) players farming in a very repetitive fashion, without 3rd party program (manual);
2) players farming in a very repetitive fashio, with a 3rd party program to help farming (semi-automated);
3) bot (fully automated).

3) can be spotted with some ingenuity and is not only illegal but harms the community. 1) and 2) are trickier, though 1) is very probably if the behavior looks "humane" (mistakes, often clicking on the wrong spot...I do that all the time .

This worries me, because I discovered the joys of HFF yesterday. For about an hour non-stop, | ran out, sent off H/H, got reward, went back in....repeated 50 times. Because the U map covered more than half my screen (and I am too lazy to close it and reopen ). I got into the habit of finding the Melandru's Hope sign and clicking on that as soon as I was back in.
That could have looked like bot behaviour. If I have more time without distractiuons and nothing else to do, I could maybe do it for longer sometime. What happens if I get 'bot' reported, how do Anet check, that I am the 1 pressing the buttons?

I also failed to mention that the name of the character used by this person/bot is rather suspicous in the first place. I cant say names on here, but as most bots are some like asdf jkl; , player 1, ccciii dddll, a boy (all examples). The bot i reported had a name similar to something as those. That also helped in my determination of it being a bot.

This thread can close now. I vented. Sorry Anet for the rude attitude i aspired. Just didnt appreciate someone cheating their way to get a prestigous title(IMO) that takes real players months to do.

That's a strong argument than puts your case in a good light. Having been myself moderator of a big webforum and having had to track trolls (more difficult than bots!), I can say that accumulation of evidence is much stronger that the strongest single piece of evidence (I think that's also a principle in CSI, and this "reinforcement" mecanism also applies to many social phenomenons)

But still, one has the right to create a character typing randomly when asked for his name (or the player is drunk maybe? )

Pathetic.

If you spotted the guy, this means you were doing FFF of HFFF too.

FFF or HFFF are bot-like activities. Means you repeat hundreds or thousands times the same action like a bot. No strategy, no skill, no fight, just running or placing flags on a map. And this for 500-600 hours at least.

Now, this 500-600 hours of bot-like no-skill activity mean "prestige" for you?

And you come to this forum whining that someone is maybe using an automated system to do the same bot-like actions that you do manually?

How can someone even think to boast as a sign of "prestige" a title obtained wasting 500-600 hours of his life sitting behind a keyboard and pushing the same keys over and over?
And cry to mommy that someone else is ruining his "prestige" of button smasher?

The difference is that nr 1 is very inhuman to maintain for a long time. Humans take breaks occasionally and as you said, misclick. Nr 2 and 3 are easily spotted by Anet if they get a report on a person and start to investigate. Since my guess is that bot-programs do not use random-number generators, the skills like PS and SoJ etc will be clicked at set times.
I wouldnt call nr 2 real botting, since it does involve a human controlling it, but nevertheless should be banned if they find it. It is lame and sad to 'play' a gime that way.

Some towns, like Elona's Reach, Beetletun and Granite Citadel used to be crowded with bots. All bots had starter armor, guildless and odd names (well, they were just too plain and they all looked the same). They moved exactly the same paths and went exactly to the same traders. I guess a player could report them all, if that doesnt happen yet.

Now we can not complain to anet anymore for not banning enough bots. If we dont report the bots ourselves, they cant ban em.

A better Tyria starts with yourselves.

No, even with a report on Anet's side this is not "easy" to spot. Case number 2 may involve the user switching on and off the program, that itself has possibly lots of randomness ("noise"). You then need to apply statistical analysis, which runs the risk of false positive (a player who plays repetitively behaves from a statistical point of view almost the same way as a bot), so to avoid that you need to get back to the character action logs with this information and read through boring and extensive logs to see any sign of suspicious activity. If not, the default decision is: it's not a bot. (if the default decision was "ban", all the false positives could end up complaining which would be totally counter-productive and ineffective)

By the way, case number 3 can be easily spotted if Anet knows all the code of the existing bots. But this is almost impossible (unless they have undercovers ) as it is an arms race where botters will regularly change the code (I guess).

So they didn't ban him instantly? Well thank god! That means they're being careful now. Like Leprekan, I've gotten the hard end of the ban stick quite a few times now. FFF is mindless and boring, pretty much as any hardcore farming - and it's quite inconvienient to log in and see "oh hay BANNNED"(I used to be pissed off about getting banned but now it's just lol.)

If they're a bot, good they'll get to it. If not, then I'm *VERY GLAD* that they took their time and researched it. And besides, it's just a bot. What they farm for is pretty much pointless and won't help you in the long run.

So please, be thankful that ANet is taking their time with this. I don't think you'd feel too good getting an honest person banned.

OFT. Honestly, after the banning of people AFKing on 9-rings you'd think people would like A-Net to thoroughly investigate.

Those bots cancel every trade instantly, can a human player do that?

Umm how so? If you just hit the trade window with someone randomly, a window pops up BEFORE the trade window appears asking if you want to trade with that person. If you traded with somebody and he ignored you (I would if you randomly walked up to trade with me) then it would appear that the trade was "canceled" (since you don't see the first "accept/denial" screen as the starter of the trade.

Thought I'd reply to this thread since ***YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT ME***.

I achieved the max title yesterday, and do my runs at the hours you mentioned doing your own. How long did it take me? Certainly not 3-4 weeks. More like 5+ months, thanks. I haven't been doing anything else in the game, since my only goal now is maxing more and more titles. The 5-6 hours I played most nights (not 48 hours consecutively) was spent completely on FFF using the hero/hench flag run, which gives me all the breaks I need to chat with friends, change the song I'm listening to, grab a drink, whatever. Once your AI friends get past the initial enemies you can choose to speed them along with stances, or DO NOTHING and have a spare minute to do whatever you want to.

I use the signpost to move to the exit because it's efficient. I go to the guild hall and donate my faction when I reach 5k because it's efficient. Perhaps you haven't seen how bots move in a while, because they certainly don't bother rotating. Though I walk to the sign post, I actually run up the stairs in the appropriate fashion; I'm not strafing back and forth, wall-walking and running into corners.

BTW, my IGN is "A Female" which is why I only say it SOUNDED like you were talking to me, since you mentioned your observed and alleged bot had the more typical "Awoefij Afj" name.


edit: I just noticed you used 'a boy' as one of your bot name examples, so I retract the uncertainty. I suppose if you didn't grasp the humor in naming a female elementalist "A Female", then it doesn't make sense and must be a bot.

See what I mean, Gattocheese? ANet would've totally pissed this guy off without research.



(and damn, what're the odds, anyways?)

LOL. Pisses you off doesn't it. I have been banned twice myself for being efficient. Threads like this should be closed on sight and petitions made to bring back public stoning.

Drives me nuts all the morons screaming about bots. If they were easy to detect .. Anet would have purged gw of them long ago. Yet there is always the person that feels they know better than the guys that wrote the code.

I've gotten reported also, for soloing a bit of Eye of the North and using the Portal Clickers =P

When it comes down to it, there is no way to make sure someone is actually a bot, instead of a person who is trying to max a title or farm and is not paying attention to their chat.

Enough Said.

Apologize for the semi-double post, but I forgot to add that the majority (~6 million) of the faction I earned toward the title wasn't even from A Female and HFFF, since I didn't know of it until well into the title's progress. The first 60% of the title was done solo FF running with my Assassin, who also has a very bot-like name, "Chips And Salsa", and who used the standard SF + deadly paradox + stances to run the whole thing on her own.

Here is a summary of your stated observations that have absolutely no merit:

• 48 hour consecutive running (6 hour nights at most)
• 4 week title completion (see above)
• r3 to r8 progress in X weeks (A Female wasn't even used until I was at least r8)

And for good measure, I'll even beat you to the screen shot:

http://img398.imageshack.us/img398/9942/ssnm5.jpg

Irony at it's best! You have to admit this is funny. Closed.