Botters and Leechers in JQ...Arena will die very very soon

Yep. IMO the bot leechers are the worst offenders since they can keep their bot/macro running 24/7. A 60 sec rule will not hinder them at all. Only a ban will.

Make it so bots would have difficult time joining.

The teleporters in the crystal desert has a sequence of lights to trigger their activation. Make a "pre-staging" area where you would each have to activate some such item. Each trigger would be random, now way to program around with a 30 sec. time limit to activate. The character unable to activate his switch is not allowed to try again for x amount of time. The next "cued" person replaces the banished one.

That wasn't directed at you... I was only replying to you saying the game is dying, sorry for the confusion.

You're right, unless there is some magical solution everyone is missing the only practical solution is to have a few select individuals monitoring all the bot/leecher heavy areas and banning them as they see them. Even that probably wouldn't be enough, seeing as how bots are like cockroaches and will just keep coming back.

Well when you pose a stupid argument you get stupid replies. What do you want us to do? The only thing that can possibly bring problems to Anets attention is complaining. If everyone was silent then nothing would get done. The fact that so many things are just left untouched puts them on the bad side in my books.

Guild Wars Guru members wouldn't understand what a Troll was. You think that anyone who disagrees / goes against the grain is a troll. Is it so hard to believe that you aren't always right?

It's easy to see. They do the same skill-combo over and over again. Even when it makes no sense and they still come after you killed them over 10 times at the same portal. You can lure them into your own base, 10 times in a row and they are instantly dead. Or an elementalist that casts GolE and immidiatly afterwards Glowing Gaze. Just watch.

Has nothing to do with me being right or wrong, has everything to do with your original post contributing nothing of value to the thread and situation in general.

I've had several matches in a row again where I saw bots. They weren't in my team but with the opponents. All free wins, 10-2 or 10-0. At least 2 warrior bots every match. I like the free faction but it's not right like this. But I'm not going to report anyone, a guildie got a dishonor hex for reporting players who were AFK on our own team.

Why are people so afraid of the hex? Tell your team to report with you and if you get the hex so what...its like 10 mins, yes it is kind of annoying but it should not be hard to find something else to do with your life.Get up use the restroom, get a glass of water, go outside grab some fresh air, by then your hex will be gone or almost gone.

As for Anet..I think it is unacceptable, there very well known bots and leechers that a huge majority of the JQ/FA community know of and yet these bots are still around. I understand it's hard to catch every single bot but these well known ones? You ban said 1000s of gold farmers/sellers/buyers every week yet you can't lift a finger to ban a bot in a PvP area?

I think if a bot/leecher gets reported X times by Y people in Z games then they should get a 24 hour ban, and if they get reported again, a longer ban. If they are truly real players that somehow manage to look like a bot then they can appeal to anet and they can review their playing habbits.

Of course they don't fix stuff like this fast, it would make the game pleasurable to more people which would put pressure on their hosting bill. That's the not so secret development strategy of Guild Wars.

If you want a good game and community I suggest you start looking through the indie games, and smaller devs. Devs that are rich and backed by a big publisher all seem to just want to put an arrogant smackdown on their audience rather than listen. And who can blame them they're the ones getting something out of suckers, of course they're arrogant.

That's a nice idea.
I hope it will be implemented something like this.

And you're contributing here? Rofl Guru trash is so cute.

...only to enter the next match to see another bot, to report him and have been rewarded with the hex another time.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for reporting these bots, but either the community has to step up and all cling together and /report together, or the reporting system is in need of an overhaul.

Leechers and bots have been around for a long time in FA and the interest from a.net in fixing the probem is pretty much non-existent. There are so many leechers in FA nowadays the best thing to do is to learn how to write bot programs (v. easy) and just run them in FA.

Still should use the email reporting. Scribble down the bot names then after your done playing shoot off a quick email to ANET. Easy and no hex why is it so hard?

Take away faction on reported characters. More than 3 different people reporting a character would cause a infraction and the following happens. Make the penalty worse.

Infractions within a 24 hour period

Offense # 1 1k faction loss 500 Baltz loss
Offense # 2 3k faction loss 1k Baltz loss
Offense #3 5k faction loss 1500 Baltz loss
Offense #4 24 hour suspension

If you receive any infractions after 24 hours it would reset itself.

People aren’t reporting because they think it is a waist of time...well take there rewards and the bots waist there time.

I just played a few matches of JQ yesterday and I have to admit that the leeching/botting has gotten pretty bad.

To be honest, it's never going away because of one simple rule: There's no permanent punishment for going afk in a match, regardless of how many times you do it. Even if you never take one step off of the initial spawn point, on average you might get three /reports against you, which means that you can continue to hit the enter button practically forever. Eventually you'll get a dishonor hex, but all that means is that it slows your earn rate. Since you're getting something for nothing, even a slow reward rate is still being paid for doing jack squat. And best of all, unlike illegal bots and such, you'll never have your account banned.

I find it really hilarious that ArenaNet went and shut down the reward system for Amatz Basin because it was such a farmer's heaven for Faction. Despite that Amatz Basin was broken, at least it didn't ruin other people's enjoyment of the game. The worst that it did was crash the market of amber, as even today the Urgoz Scrolls are selling at NPC Merchant price. Who the heck was collecting amber to sell for a profit anyway? Oh, and it made towns really hard to control because there were thousands of farmers racking up huge Faction. So those were your "negatives".

Today, JQ/FA offers huge Balthazar/Allegiance Faction rewards to encourage play, and it's worked all right... It's worked so well that now people can just click one button, return maybe 20 minutes later and see that they got free Faction, and keep pressing the button all day. Because somehow this system is better than the old broken Amatz system. Instead of free gold rewards, you get Balthazar Faction which can be converted into Zaishen Keys.

I'm curious, i What districts do you guys play in to see so many bots?

Any comment by our community relations manager, Regina?

The best way to overcome this atrocity is for everyone to stop playing that instance. I remember about a year ago maybe more the place was dead. Oh wait Anet added titles thats why all of you play it. If you don't give them players to play with how are they going to enter it? If they do manage to get enough bots all to enter with them selves Anets job will become much easier Cheers.

The best solution would be to allow teams to be assembled pre-match and to not reward losers. This random team assignment system and preschool style of point awarding is going to attract botters/leacher no matter what kind of system they set up to stop them...

Wouldn't this be making another "elite only" outpost. And personally I don't think we need anymore. I like the random. I really think A-net can nip this in the butt, but that would require them to get off there butt to do it.

Then two teams of four for each side. The idea is that with no lose points to leach and bots' inability to fight real players the area would become very unappealing to them.

Of course people are only playing there now because of the faction. Its the same with HA, remove the fame and it'll become a ghost town.

Also why are people asking anet to do something? They couldn't even manage this issue when they had the resources to deal with it, what makes you think they can deal with it now?

So what if it does become a ghost town now? The rewards were implemented so it could start generating interest. Judging from the amount of people in JQ and the amount of people who complain about constant leechers, I think they did their job on that regard. If they reduce the rewards, the people who actually enjoy that format will still play while the leechers will probably go back to more worthwhile endeavours like bot farming. I never understood why people thought the rewards were supposed to stay at the amounts they are.

People will always bot regardless of how much is earned per battle. The reason they weren't plaguing the area before the update is because you would almost never see enough people on either side to form a team making botting almost impossible unless you got 16 botters/leachers to work together and it was hard enough to get 16 real people to set up a game.

Its amazing how much effort was put in to nerf HFFF and Amatz Basin to "stop botters and exploits" and yet this far more disruptive botting/leeching in FA/JQ and sometimes even in AB...still haven't been solved >.> Now the only way to earn factions at a rate comparable to HFFF without wanting to rip hair out is vanquishing....so much for extra options.

I tend to agree with this. I wasn't an HFFFer or a Basin guy and most of my faction is from AB and now JQ. It has become rather disappointing when we're all sitting waiting to get into a match and the convo turns to all the bots and leechers we all know of. Sure I report, but nothing has been done. I've seen some rather decent ideas on how to control this but I think the report system would work (better at least) if it was enforced more and bans were given.

Agreed. I can understand that Anet isn't made of money, but I really think they need to hire a small group of people dedicated to the eradication of this kind of thing. People that are in charge of investigating and rubbing out bots would be a great asset. I do think the hex for reporting needs to be removed IF it happens that you're the only person reporting. I guess I never understood why that specific part of it was added in. The problem in general with bots is that they pretty much are just cockroaches. They're a damn nuisance that will continue to come back no matter how hard they crack down on them. WoW, Lineage 2, every stinkin' MMO is full of them in certain areas and I really don't think there is a surefire solution to getting rid of them. The only REAL solution is to get rid of the people making and distributing the botting programs, I think Blizzard recently took one to court and won. Even then, I guess that wouldn't get rid of them because other people would continue to make bots and distribute them through torrents and such. So we come back down to a more realistic solution, and although it would not remove botting and leeching entirely, it would remove most of it's appeal. Make the titles easier, although I hear people say KoaBD is "easy enough" that doesn't change the fact that the Kurz/Lux, LB, and all of the faction titles in EotN are nothing more than grind fests.

A suggestion would be to greatly increase the faction from EotN books, as well as quests. On top of this, the faction quests in Factions should give you a slew of faction for completing them. It's that or reducing the title requirements so that it's more on the level of Sunspear, which was quite well balanced for a faction title.

Can you stop posting? If all you're going to do is pick fights then we all might as well assume you're just a forum troll.

The district doesn't matter. You can only see who is botting during the match.

and people who are doing the drunkard title do what? not that i am afk usually but i will sit and read and click after the appropriate time...

as for botters, yeah report or ignore.

I meant booted from the specific location, like JQ and such, if you were working on drunkard you would probably be in an outpost. I think you might have misunderstood what I was getting at, or maybe I misunderstood what you were getting at

What?? So you're saying that if you're going for Drunkard then once a match starts, then you just end up standing around doing nothing for more than 60 seconds? He's not talking about AFK in towns, he's talking about inside the arena. 60 seconds being idle, then you're going to be kicked out.

Of course, even if this was implemented, people will just start running follow-bot programs to give the illusion that they are "playing" but in reality just running around aimlessly, spamming junk skills, and getting themselves killed.

Maybe I'm just a cynic, but here's why I think that nothing will ever be done about it:

The first problem is that there's few or no actual moderators that are actually monitoring the game. Something as boring and inane as Jade Quarry or Fort Aspenwood is almost a guaranteed unmonitored area, and you can grief all day if you wanted. The /report feature is basically a cheap and automated method of letting players police the arenas themselves. I'm sure that they would say that if players aren't reporting the leechers, then that's society's problem, not theirs.

The second problem is that ArenaNet seems to only step in when there's a direct tie to gold selling. Either actual gold or loot that could be instantly merched for gold. Both HFFF and Amatz Basin, no matter how you look at it, paid players gold rewards at the end of a run. You may think 50gp or 150gp is not a lot, but think about a bot that can run the quest or mission 24/7. JQ/FA both don't pay any player in direct money rewards. You can turn Faction into items of value, but it still means that it requires somebody to watch the faction bars and you have to regularly go to a trader to convert it into items and then merch them. This is a huge hassle for a bot. You may as well program the bots to run missions in EotN and turn in Hero's Handbook books for the gold reward. Zaishen Keys have no value to gold sellers as they have to stand around all day trying to offload them to other players. As a result, JQ/FA has little to no interest in gold sellers, and that means that there's nothing wrong with it in the eyes of ArenaNet.

If ANet does fix it, then it won't be with increased monitoring or finding a clever way of removing the leechers or bots. More than likely it'll be some kind of drastic sweeping change, like lowering the Faction rewards again--the equivalent of carpet bombing the entire arena so nobody plays it, either players or griefers.

Saddly, this is my thinking. I didn't do JQ before the update as I knew it was a place that was...let's just say this...dead. The faction drew me in and I found that I liked it (the format and the faction gain).

I have given ANet the benefit of the doubt on many things, I mean, it's a free game (subscription wise) that I'm playing. However, the report function was added by ANet for specific reasons...and botting and leeching are chief among them.

Also, I think Z-keys are valuable and if they are obtained from "doing nothing" (much the same as buying gold), then the attitude must change in terms of ANet's perspective. The relationship is there (between buying gold and leeching/botting for faction/Z-keys). Both reward players for not "playing" the game and earning on their own. Ultimately, this is WHY ANet should be more active in the report process when it comes to leeching/botting. It would seem to be in their, and by default our, best interest.

If Izzy just took one day to play JQ and just hit the ban button every time he saw a bot, that would help the problem quite a bit.

it's probably the same for every luxon or kurzick that does jq when they see 6/8 players in the shrines rdy to play and see 2 people standing there leeching. It's not fair especially for players that need a full team. Anet need's to look into this and eliminate this problem.