Farm Bot solution

Farm bots go from creature to creature right? They cast their spells, run in, kill what it can and moves on... right?

The game Rapplez has the solution for it. Make enemy creatures that you can't attack and they don't attack you. The bot will run to it, try to kill it without success and stay on that 1 creature. Thus never being able to win and doesn't move on. Make it so that the system can automatically ban that "player" after say 2 minutes of trying to kill it.

Place creatures like this next to every portal and randomly throughout the area. Problem solved?

No. Bots can be programmed to be a lot smarter than that. It wouldn't stop anything.

not to mention AoE spells like [skill]Symbol of Wrath[/skill] that activate with out targeting anything

Well, you wouldn't be able to attack or damage the creature. But if bots can be programed to avoid them... I guess it's not solved.

No matter what you do, there will always be bots.

the bots could have a timer, and after that they just move on.

and what happens when someone just keeps attacking it becuase they think it is a glitch and they get beat with the banbat?

There will always be bots unless farming is redundant.

ArenaNet made farming more difficult, hence less accessible by players (which automatically means more accessible to bots).

If there simply wasn't any need for farming, there wouldn't be bots.


The only thing that is stopping bots right now is mass bans.

I like the idea of buffing chests and nerfing monsters, that might slow down the bots a bit... not much but a bit

As long as there are people willing to part with RL cash for in-game gold. There will be bots

I dont think a-net care anymore, life has been pretty sweet if your a bot

Yeah, if your a-bot (something like u-boat?) could be sweet, life would be awesome. Your =/= you're.

And frankly, A.Net is responsible for more bots. Nerfing of drop rates = less drops for Mr. Smith = Mr Smith gets less money in same time = Mr Smith gets a bot because he doesn't want to waste time = There will be more Smith's all the time. And soon whole GW will turn to a world, where everyone is a Smith and everyone is a bot, an AI... Matrix, eh?

No offense to anyone called Smith, cool name, rly. It was just an example.

i'd say the easiest bot-killer solution would be having the players answering a simple question like:

Give the answer to: 2+2 (____________) (The answer is 4).

Bots cannot read and there would be say... 30 such questions and one would pop up at random each time you exit an explorable area. Even illiterate ppl would have the answer in front of them so they won't be cut off. If the question is answered incorrectly for 3 times, the client quits and the player must log on again.

I think this could cut bots down somewhat.

EDIT: I think this should have been in sardelac, not here.

I would hate it and bots can read and answer questions. Harder for bot makers, yes, but it will annoy everybody so they don't do it.

I don't agree with nerfing drops. That's quite silly. Just do the opposite of what has been done thus far. Remove loot scaming and don't give more to soloers, instead just give exactly what you would get proportionally. There you go. Grapes and golds from chests should be worth more too.

Nt cring bout speelin=phun! But lootscaling was a gift from the gods bot wise, harder for players to make money, thus turn to sites, bots are not effected because time isn't an issue.

Dont forget to write the 4 all crossed out and multi colour . But this kind of thing could get annoying for the poeple who dont care about bots and just want to play. Doubt it will happen, i wish a-net would just accept they cant stop bots and make things back to normal...

Do you know how many idiots would be banned that weren't bots? There are some that try to kill everything......like the cows on noob island in factions.

I'm not saying it wouldn't be annoying, but bots, AFAIK, cannot read and copy (o/c it wouldn't be possible to copy-paste it).

Still hey it's just an idea so don't carbonize me XD

We don't TRY to kill cows. Do, or do not.

This used to work on webforums, but as someone already said, bot programmers got smarter. The only solution they found is ask people to read short words (with numbers) written in a picture that were distorted (the initial picture without the distortion worked until the programmers created picture readers). It wouldn't work in an MMORPG as it would slow down (slightly) the user experience and (considerably) the client-server architecture.

The OP's idea would not work either, bots would detect they're not making any damage, then forget about this target and move on.

Where did you get that? If the text is displayed in the client, it's transmitted over the wire to the computer so the bot can read it.

How about bring back the tag system where after 10 times of doing the same place it asks the question, if the person gets it right anet has a small "this is to prevent botters" message, if they dont answer for 5 minutes they get temporarily banned (or some other thing)