Does banning bots bring additional revenue to Anet?

To me the implied answer is because they might accidentally ban someone who isn't doing anything wrong. Banning one person incorrectly will cause more bad publicity than not banning a bot.

Also, having administrators message someone in-game is outside the standard operating procedure of a-net, as far as I have seen. I would be dubious of any message claiming to come from an admin.

Incidents where seat belts kill people who would have lived were they not wearing them are very unlikely. Incidents where your method would result in incorrect bans are not.

I disagree. Employees can always be transferred to GW2 or any other project when they are no longer needed here, and any action that makes a significant portion the current population more pleased with their administration (and therefore more likely to buy GW2) is economical. Also, assuming GW2 will have similar logging systems and policies, training will partially carry over.

As a side note, any ban may be appealed to the support team. Therefore it is more economical to research the ban initially and document the appropriate sections of the logs where infringements can be found so that appeals can be handled quickly and decisively without excessive overturning of bans.

I didn't want to address that stuff because the topic isn't "build a bot catcher for A-net" nor was it my intention to do so. I'd actually guess that A-net's solution is more successful AND cheaper at banning bots. The point I was making was that they don't spend hour (s) before making each ban.

But since you and Xylia both bring it up I'll bite...

Set strings in the game for the questions and localize them the same as they localize all other text in the game. Problem solved.

Anet writes the game. They can change code to show a particular admin message even if all chat is turned off and status is offline. Problem solved.

Anet could make this message take up the WHOLE SCREEN and play trumpet sounds if they wanted. They write the game and control the GUI. Problem solved.

Horribly lagged but they still continue to farm for multiple minutes...

I'm sure you can poke more holes in said way to do it if you are so inclined. I'll give you an simpler mark 2 version:

1. Set up automated methods to catch bots. Make them very specific so false positives are very unlikely.
2. Ban players suspected to be bots via automated methods.
3. Only get support involved if and when they complain

Here's my question to you. Tell me why you think A-net isn't taking these exact three steps I just mentioned. Also, tell me why you think one ban costs more then the profit made from selling a copy of GW. That's the real topic at hand.

I disagree with this thinking (because it's an ad hominem attack, you're taking shots at me instead of my argument) but if you really think so... apply this same logic to all comments in the thread that say that banning someone costs more than buying the game. Including the one by Gaile initially quoted in the first post. I suspect a Community Relations Manager hasn't banned bots before either.

If you made a comment about Guild Wars on these forums and I said "your "observation" can't be relied upon, because you have no experience to base it on. It's really just a guess.... You didn't write the GW code (that's obvious based on your comment).", would you think it was productive or unproductive? How would it be different from your comment?

You're totally wrong: specific checks would be circumvented extremely easily. Detecting a bot is all about global checks, or a subtle balance of "specific checks". A lot of legitimate players would not pass the "specific checks" but would pass global checks.

Impossible for legal reasons I believe.

Here is the answer: because it takes time, thus money. Log management applications require expert knowledge (not a degree but it's quite complex), in two ways: understanding the log messages (the technical bit) and interpreting them (how do you differentiate a bot from a human? plus the legal aspects of the question, if you need to "prove" to a judge your case of banning the player).

Bots improve all the time, every time you create some "successful checks", they'll adapt. So your detection system needs to evolve all the time, and you need a team of people understanding this. And sometimes you even need to implement new in-game features, that's what happened with the /report feature, plus a few other updates. All this is very costly, as it can't unfortunately be processed in a manner as simple as the ones you suggest. There's no "problem solved" in this case, the problem is ongoing and permanent. You may gain money on banning scammers or dupers, but you won't in the case of bots/RMTs.

Once again, as said before, if you knew what a log look like and what log management entails, you wouldn't think it's that simple/fast. It is not, it requires less knowledge than programming the game but much more than playing it (bots will try unexpected sequences of messages, so you need to go through the messages sequence by hand trying to understand what does not make sense, what message couldn't have been spent by a legitimate client or which one correspond to automated actions as opposed to human action, possibly looking at the use of the keyboard and the mouse, which is A LOT of data). And most importantly it requires more time than you think, I'd say that the basic case should not take more than 1h, while the average would take overall 2 to 3h of shared employee time, possibly going to 10h for the most difficult ones (which, in general, will make the team think about new ways to catch the "bad guys").

You cannot possibly claim that it's cheaper for Anet to ban than not to ban, because you'd have to have pretty good "estimates" (I really mean numbers, not fuzzy statements and words) and be able to back your "reasoning". All the people that work in computing, and in particular on the server side, know that logging is a big problem in terms of checking it. There are automated tools of course (and no doubt that Anet has some pretty good ones, which means that cases can be solved in a matter of hours), but still it's not that simple. By banning an account, the company is exposed to legal consequences (no, contrarily to popular belief, they can't do what they want) and the cost of this is huge, so it's only logical that they fix the problem at the level of log management.

You're right on one point here: in the end, we can't really discuss this because neither you nor me have the numbers. It's a matter of trust. And who should we trust: Anet's CR (whose job is on the line if something bad happens) or you (totally unknown guy, you could even be leading an RMT/gold-selling company!)?

I think you really have a problem understanding what people are telling you: there was no ad hominem ("against a person" in latin) attack in the text you quote, none at all. You may be over-sensitive, or simply misunderstood the text you quoted.

Don't confuse the fact that we're rebutting the theory that you're the only one to defend here with personal attacks. We're attacking the theory that it earns Anet money to ban accounts, not you. But since you're the only one defending it this theory, one can quickly think that we have something against you. It's not the case.

No personal affront taken. The ad hominem is the following:

1. Entreri claims it costs less to ban a bot then the profit from a new account.
2. Entreri has never banned a bot himself
3. Therefore his claim is false

2 does not lead to 3. Furthermore, 2 is about 'Entreri' and has nothing to do with the actual claim. Whether I've banned a bot or not has nothing to do with making the actual claim true or false.

This has nothing to do with "ad hominem". He's answering to "you", not attacking you (you could replace "Entreri" by "someone" and it wouldn't invalidate what he's saying). And re-read his message, he didn't say your claims were false, but "unreliable" due to your lack of understanding of the technicalities.

But I guess we shall now go back to the topic and stop discussing the logic structure of our answers (unless someone discovers a sophism of course).

A claim stands on it's own, it doesn't become more or less reliable based on who said it. That's the point. Pointing at the fact that I said it doesn't make it unreliable. Pointing at the fact that "someone who hasn't banned bots" said it doesn't make it unreliable either. You're right about getting back on topic.

What makes you think this? They just need to show violation of the EULA, I'm not sure it matters if an automated process detects this or if a person does.

I'd use this as an argument as to why you don't have a person go over the logs (or if you do you severely limit the time they are permitted to spend). It would cost too much time and money. As for the 'prove', an automated process can document the reasons why just like a person could. If the case is all questionable, they don't ban and it's not an issue.

I'd agree on the need to evolve and that there's a cost involved. However, I'd say this happens at the programming level. You don't have to readjust it every time you ban someone. So this cost is divided by the number of bans made.

My assumption is that the part in parentheses has happened by now. With 'new' meaning 'more cost effective'.

A CR's job would be on the line if they said:

"World of Warcraft actually handles bots much better then us"

or

"We don't really take banning seriously"

Giving the party line of "We spend lots of money banning bots" would never get a CR fired, even if it wasn't true. Especially if the statement was vague and didn't give exact numbers.

A CR may be limited in what they could say about a topic much more then an average player. The duping incident was actually a really good example of this. Players caught on before A-net did. A-net did a great job of handling the situation but the PR statement afterwards wasn't indicative of what actually happened. It had the tone of "didn't you know we will catch you? we check everything!" without thanking the players who noticed first.

You apparently know very little about this business. It HAS to be a person banning the account for legal reasons, no program can stand in court in front of the judge. The logs are the BASIS (even legal) for banning but the important bit is the interpretation of the logs.

What you draw is an "ideal" picture of the problem. If A=B, then do C, else do D. Problem solved. But it does NOT work like in ANY real business, because of the intricacies of the underlying problems (not only technical, as log management is a business on its own, but also in terms of company management, PR, legal and, obviously, finance). To achieve the best balance, you have to predict that banning account is on the "cost" colum, not on the "benefit" one.

No it does not, not only. Log readers (and I'm not even sure there's a position for that, it's probably programmers or QC people doing it) have to update their knowledge and feed this back to programmers. This is a BIG task, as bots evolve tremendously, but not so "important" one given that the RMT business is low in GW (not as rewarding as in WoW apparently).

This is CONSTANTLY happening, it's not a "evolve once and problem fixed" stance. It has to be done all the time. It may be needed more once in a while, but overall it's a regular phenomenon. And the cost of this regular update, plus the constant bot and log checking , plus the cost of modifying the software, all this is much worse than the benefit of a new account being bought. Bear in mind that Anet employees are paid monthly, RMT people only have to pay once for the account.

Defending your idea that banning account benefits Anet would require you to explain how money paid monthly on the various things I and others explained before is inferior to the price of accounts bought after ban. Something along the lines of:

for X bans a months (X in the thousands for a first estimate) which will give you 80*X dollars of accounts bought after the ban (80$ may be the wrong cost as these guys buy tons of accounts, so they probably get a discount, but it can do for the time being), you need Y money spend over the average lifetime of "to be banned accounts" of Z months, hence the final comparison:

80*X > Y*Z

(note: I'm not asking you to come with the perfect solution OF COURSE, as I said before only Anet can do and they will never release these numbers; we can always make some progress during the discussion with this "mathematical model", it's only a tool not the purpose of this discussion)

Any automated method to catch bots will be immediately analyzed by the bot builders, and scripts will be developed to circumvent it. Because of the nature of the different projects (the bots being a small scale project with many independent developers and no call for rigorous QA or code promotion, GW being a large scale project with requirements for in-depth QA and code promotion), the bots will always quickly catch up with any automated system that A-Net can provide. This makes the system overall more likely to ban players with a false positive than it is to actually ban bots once it has been in place for a period of time (probably a rather short period, but I can't prove that). In addition, as I stated above, one false positive, or even a false accusation, is more bad PR for A-Net than not banning the bot. How would you like it if you were daily accused of being a bot by A-Net because your farming practices trigger their automated system.

I believe this has been covered above, but basically:
Botters only need 1 chapter. You can usually find copies of Prophecies for around $30, so assume that is the base income from the sale. It is probably safe to assume that botters do not buy directly from the A-Net store, but rather from third party vendors who don't know/care that there's no reason to buy 50 keys. The retailer will get a cut of the income from the sale. As distributor, NC Soft will always get a cut from the sale. So now we have $30 with two chunks ripped off - lets be overly generous and call it $20. Automated bot banning is bad, for reasons stated in several places, including the first half of this post. For employees, time is money (regardless of if you are a salaried worker, from a budgetary standpoint your time still counts as a money transfer). In addition to the employee salary, there are federal and state taxes and fees that have to be paid on the employee's time by the employer, and there are benefits that have to be paid to the employee as well. Let's say the employee makes $40,000/year (reasonable for a technically skilled support worker who can read logs and institute bans, I would think). This is $19.23/hour. If it takes one hour to process the logs and institute the ban, then the company is out $19.23 + taxes + fees + benefits, probably totaling $30-$40. Even if they made $20 off of the initial sale, they just lost money.

I don't know if a ban costs more than the profit from selling a copy of GW. I've never banned bots, so I can no more make a reasonable estimate than you. No one posting in this thread can, either. So really this is a pointless discussion.

All we know is that Gaile said it costs more. You can either trust that her statement is true, based on what she has been told by the ANet employees involved in bot banning, or you don't.

I never said the claim is false. I just said that any argument you make in favor of the claim is suspect because you do not have the knowledge necessary to make credible arguments.

Let's look at the wikipedia definition of estimate "Estimation is the calculated approximation of a result which is usable even if input data may be incomplete, uncertain, or noisy.". You are saying we can't make an estimate on this problem because the input data is incomplete. That argument goes against the definition of 'estimate'.

Actually, Xylia did a reasonable estimate in the post right above this comment. I'm arguing the other side and I still find the estimate reasonable.

I'll only argue two parts of this.

"Automated bot banning is bad". I think the best situation is to have an automated process do the work of finding the bots and a person looks at the final data as a sanity check and says yes or no. So you have an automated process do 95% of the work and the last 5% is a person verifying. This brings them in line with Fril's statement that you need a person involved while minimizing the associated cost. (As an aside, I have a hunch you could do a good filter of possible bots simply based on watching gold made from selling whites to the merchant. I'd suspect this number is a lot higher for a bot then a player.)

"If it takes one hour to process the logs and institute the ban". Here's the other part of the assumption I disagree with.

Here's the reason for those two disagreements. If the situation is costing A-net money every time it happens, they have a strong incentive to do whatever they can to reduce or negate this. If there was any possible way to even do some of the bans that would cost less then they would have every reason to use it because it translates to direct money in their pocket.

Think about the following alternative. A-net hires somebody to buy the absolute least money from a gold seller. Let's say it's $5 (This is a price listed in a sponsored link ad on the front page of gwguru. Does that make it ironic that we're arguing over this here?). He logs this, shows up for and logs the money transfer and places the ban. This has less chance of false positives then current methods. Some credit cards support 'virtual account numbers' which give you a different credit card number for every online purchase... you could use this to do the process over and over with the same account.

The employee needs to know how to capture the info of the transfer but he doesn't need to interpret logs so I'm going to take your low estimate of $19.23 + taxes + fees + benefits totaling $30 per hour. I'll make the estimate that said guy can perform all steps of such a ban in an average of 15 minutes or less.

$5 + ($30/4) = $12.50, under the $20 made from an account sale. You don't necessarily catch the bot itself but you ban an account of a gold farmer operation which we'll assume is equivalent. This is the simplest case, you could potentially check one sided gold transfers to this account and log IP addresses to at least get an idea of which other accounts are part of the same operation to get better results.

If A-net was losing $20 for every account banned and they had a chance to instead make $7.50 for some of these cases, don't you think they would jump on that?

This just goes along to raise my respect for the GW crew and Anet in general. They don't autoban, they actually review each case before they ban. SO I think in a way yes banning bots does bring revenue to Anet. It raises the quality of the game, which in turn makes me as a consumer want to buy all their games, and to not cheat on them at all. So, if it were a cheap game (like Diablo II) and I felt that the company (in that case, Blizzard) was not doing enough to stop botting, then I, too would bot, because I wouldn't really care about getting banned. Guild Wars is a fun, free online game, and I do care if my account gets banned. I play by the rules to make it even more fun, and if Anet comes out with more expansions or games (GW2 for instance) I am more likely to buy them...thus creating revenue for Anet.

Just my 2 cents.

Well in Gaile's user talk page on wiki, here is what she says:

She said she banned about 50 accounts in an hour. At $20 for each account thats $1000 assuming that the botter/gold seller gets another account. Of course there is the chance that she is merely the 'final say' in the matter and another employee is putting work in tracking down the bots, but it doesn't look like they are losing money on the deal. I think Anet's stance on botting is that they are forced to say they lose money on bots whether they actually do or don't, because if they say that banning bots gives them money it raises suspicions about whether they like bots.

I saw a post here earlier asking the question of whether or not A-net makes more than 5 dollars a box for GW- the answer is that they might not.... after production, marketing and distribution costs, many products we all buy return a fraction of the money you spend back to the original company. Five to Ten bucks a copy isn't a bad guess for how much NCsoft or A-net gets per box of GW sold. (If the the Devs made so much money off of sales, why in such a rush for the next expansion or sequel all the time?)

At the same time, I'm sure it takes more than a handful of minutes to look up all the required data on somebody and decide whether or not they should be banned.......you think dealing with trade chat in busy districts is a pain, try reading some server logs sometime.....pages and pages of junk, just for a few moments of actual time on a busy server.

Funny related question: to how much do you value Gaile's hour of work? The simple answer is based on her salary. The complex one is to take into account how much revenue she brings thanks to the community relationship that she establishes and maintains, thus making sure that people continue to buy Anet products.

(I've been admin of a major online forum and you know that if banning is done right it does take a lot of time; on the other hand, once you've got a good hint at trolls, you start digging around their IPs and style of posts to find other accounts)

But this info definitely brings some meat to our discussion, though I doubt you can rely on it to get more than "slighlty more credible estimates". I would be enclined to say that they're not loosing as much money as I initially thought, I will grant you that. But I still highly doubt that it's a rentable process.

When I proposed the simple equation 80*X > Y*Z I was simplifying the situation to the extreme (I started thinking of the ramification of exploring this and it would drive us mad but more importantly nowhere due to the fact that we have absolutely no clue what Anet people are earning and how much profit they're making), yet keeping the essence of the problem. I think that the more we discuss the numbers, the more we'll have to exhibit hidden costs (one hour of Gaile banning bot is one hour less she's spending doing her CR job, plus the hours the devs have to invest to tweak the bot detection and banning systems, etc.), though these costs can be broken into small pieces that are not worth much.

(aside comment: the sum of extremely small numbers can be bounded or reach the infinity, in math it's the well know "sums" of "inverse of natural numbers" and "inverse of squares of natural numbers", that respectively tend to infinity and pi square divided by 6 ... my point being: we can't say much about sums of small things)

So what's the point of this thread, whether we should or should not /report <offender> ?

I'll make it simple for you folks, It doesn't matter if ArenaNet makes or loses money bots are ruining the game for my enjoyment. Does it bother you or not? That is the real question you need to ask yourself. If so then /report them its that cut and dry.

I don't give a rat's @$$ if ArenaNet is losing money, that's their problem, not my and not yours. They made the game they can fix the problem. They went as far as giving us the /report tool and I'm going to use it regardless if ArenaNet can't afford it.

There are ways for ArenaNet to make money such selling more merchandise and licensing their Guild Wars properties to 3rd party ventures like comic books, action figures, stuff animals, kitchen magnets, stickers, more shirts. toys (like dragon sword, Prince Rurik or Charr halloween costume) About ton of other nicknack's they can be selling that could more than make up the cost of banning bots.

They just need to hire a marketing firm, that knows how pimp a video game property to 3rd parties.

I have a question: A-net has reported banning bots, but has A-net ever sued or otherwise cracked down on any of the seller websites? (question posed because if they ban bots and have never sunk their claws into one of the seller sites, then they really don't accomplish anything as far as the "big picture" goes with black market gold sellers is concerned)

So have they ever iced a seller site? Taken anybody to court and forced them out of buisness?

I don't think its really feasible for them to take down sites. Gold selling isn't illegal or anything, just against the EULA. AFAIK Anet's options are to either A. try to ban them in game or B. Engage in a very costly, time consuming lawsuit in which they can't even be sure to win, while nothing will prevent another site springing up a week later. Besides, a gold seller's site might be located in china or something, in which case the government will just tell Anet to go to hell.

No, I'm sure you are spot on with that.....I just wondered if they had ever done anything like that before.

Just to simply answer the OP, no A-net doesnt make money off of bans. The idea that they probably lose money when they spend lots of time banning people is not very far fetched at all.

No, I'm saying we can't make a good, reasonable, quality estimate because the input data doesn't exist.

Let me put it this way. If your boss asked you, "How long will it take you to do XX?" you would be able to give him a good estimate because you are familiar with your job and you have a good idea how much effort and time it takes to do things. If your boss then pulled someone off the street and asked them how long it would take to do XX, they wouldn't be able to give a good estimate. By the dictionary definition, whatever they say might be an estimate, but I suspect you would think it was just a guess they pulled out of their ass.

Fair enough. I'll agree that we're not likely to get a quality accurate estimate of the amount spent per bot. Keep in mind that the question being asked is more general then that. It's just "Does banning bots bring additional revenue to Anet?" which is a lot more broad. And people aren't just saying yes and no, they're trying to say why they think one way or the other. That's the interesting part even if the answer is wrong.

It's kind of like one of those "how many jellybeans are in this clear container" contest questions. Yeah, you're practically guaranteed to be off but if you think about it you might be able to come up with something closer then a random guess. This is actually easier... it's the equivalent of "are there more or less then 100,000 jellybeans in this container" so you've got a way better chance.

The problem with the sites breaking the EULA is that the individual account is breaking the contract, so to speak. You can ban the account, but they make so much real world money from the time they spend on it that it doesn't matter. They prolly have a couple master accounts to run the new chars on new accounts up to lvl and speed, and then those chars will make the real moolah...meanwhile, ANet's busy trying to catch as many of the "minion" char accounts, but really can't go after the big fish at all...

but yeah, anyways, I don't do anything with bots, because it ruins the game. And despite some of it's flaws (every game has flaws) it's a great game.

From what I've read on RMT, the companies are not in the USA. Difficult to sue a Chinese company ...