Guildwars Botting. READ!

Well this thread did something: I didn't know that there were PvP bots until I read this. What am I going to do about it? I'm going to go eat lunch.

The vast majority of these "fixes" have only served to make the metagame worse.

Then you should obs more often.

Also, I'll have some of that lunch

The point I was trying to make was that Anet's attempt to balance their game with respect to pvp has affected Pvers, not how Anet can't balance their game properly. While this would've been acceptable when only proph was released (since the "end-game" was pvp), when you have three campaigns and 7/8 elite areas you can't just balance one arena and expect everyone to be happy with it.

Hey, I think that's enough about the PvE-vs-PvP-balances discussion.

Bots in PvP is big. This isn't a simple macro that uses keypresses and clicks, ultimately just for gold. It's having real, instantaneous (well, 1/4 sec anyway) effect on human players, and will have a lasting effect on PvP at all levels - if nothing is done a.s.a.p.

Yeah it's not exactly the sky falling down, but Guild Wars should still be treated by ArenaNet as their baby. Baby's getting sick!

Have we had official feedback yet?

Thank you to GWG Mods for allowing this thread to persist long enough for a public response.

That's just as much a short end of the stick as PvE being affected collaterally by PvP updates.

What, go down our friends lists?

That's ridiculous. If a foolproof duping exploit were to be discovered tomorrow, should Anet not deal with that either?

While I haven't studied PvP bots nor observed them in action I see a fundamental problem with any efforts to get interrupt bots banned, and it's the same as with FPS aimbots: while it is rather easy to spot 'greedy' bots with inhuman abilities, the issue becomes murky if the performance of the bot is properly tuned down so that it only augments players' capabilities within reasonable bounds. At that point you can't really tell the difference between a very sharp player and a poor player with a bot. The most important factors in performance - reaction time and consistency - can both be adjusted into believable ranges, even on the fly so that the performance can be cranked up a bit where it counts the most while still overall staying within reasonable limits.

The best way to handle the issue would be to change the game so that mechanics which favor bots over humans would become less important concerning the outcome of a fight. If a simple bot can do a task better than a human then the task should not be worth much.

Gaming, especially at a competitive, is about pushing the boundaries of "skill", so it's normal that average player+bot and skilled players are difficult to differentiate at a server level, provided the bot dev does his work and hides intelligently the bot actions (although maybe a statistical analysis per account could help to spot this?).

It's no surprise that we've seen in the past players complaining of that while they were probably facing very skilled opponents, I read from PvPers that some pro-rupters are really that good.

Unfortunately there's only one solid method for spotting it, at the client level, and forunately Anet hasn't taken the route of starting to trust the client...

(I see Cliff Spradlin here, hello! )

I wonder if it would be possible to throw in junk information without too much hardware performance decrease. I mean the bot reads the .dll, and if the program is spouting out random junk as well as the true skill, I dunno...

This saddens me though. How awesome would it have been if someone had used the .dll for good things... like parsing PvP matches, etc.

Decreases performance of the game, not a lot of people are going to like that. Generally speaking, security conflicts with high-performance, although it's an arms race (it's amazing how smart people can reverse engineer pretty much anything) so your idea is not fundalentally wrong.

You're SO right.

I don't want to turn this into a pve vs. pvp flamefest, so I'll just say that pvers have been indirectly affected by pvp updates.


Are you naive enough to believe that posting this on guru is going to cause an uproar by itself? Anet rarely responds to anything on this forum because of all the flame and QQ, and there is only a fraction of people on this forum that even play. Again, I've given my reccomendation to try and spread the word be that by talking to other guilds/alliances or posting on other forums to make it apparent that this is a problem that should be dealt with quickly.

My guess is that Anet is thinking "botting has always been a problem in this game, so there's no real rush for them to deal with it, eh?"

Why? Again, I can only speculate Anet's motivation atm and it seems to me like the security and delayed skill balances are what Anet's trying to work on. They don't have a very large team, so it's not like they can fix everything at once

Your average guru poster is probably more aware better connected than the average person on your friends list.

And what 'other forums' are better than Guru for raising awareness of issues?

I can only assume that you either don't understand or don't care about the magnitude of the problem created by widespread interrupt botting.

It's fun that Anet doesn't even bother to respond in this thread. How do you mean we don't care...

If you haven't figured it out already Anet responds to loud voice from the community, not reason. The more people complaining about it, the higher of a priority it becomes for them to look at.

What? Where did you get that conclusion from? If I didn't care then why would I post in this thread in the first place, and if I didn't agree why would I make a suggestion?

You see, I have a rare ability of addding one and one together to draw a conclusion. First, have you seen Anet comment on this thread about this issue being acknowledged at all? I haven't. Second, have you noticed a pattern that when a hot issue (ie New years day fiasco) is brought up that Regina usually posts that they are looking into it? It's not hard to guess Anet doesn't really care about this issue right now, whether I like it or not doesn't matter because I do not own or work at Anet.

Saying nothing does not mean they do not care. What would they say? We are looking into it? Then people would complain that that's not an answer, they 'demand' action.

Guess what. Action was already taken in the Jan 7 update. Might not have solved the entire problem but to me it's an indication that A-net is aware of the problem and caring. The first descriptive mention of this particular botting on QQ was on Jan 5 I think, patch or at least some action on Jan 7.
That's fast, either A-net was already aware of the problem and took some time to develop a solution or they made an emergency solution.

I'd give A-net some time. If I were a PvP (or even PvE) player using the particular bot I would have stopped using the moment the patch was out. Who knows what the patched client is sending to A-net, perhaps data so they can pick out the abusers and ban them (EULA breach, you know)....

Sadly, the incentives don't work that way. This is like asking why safecrackers don't do something productive for society like build better safes. Greed is good...except when it's bad. Gordon Gecko didn't get the memo about externalities leading to inefficient outcomes and requiring intervention by third parties. But I digress.

As for botting, I'd say it's premature to conclude that ANet doesn't care about the issue. It would be fairer, and more consistent with recent events, to conclude that ANet is glacially slow in responding to current events due to work backlog.

Fril is spot on about cheating AND about the problems with detecting it. I had a similar conversation on Tuesday about it (in an academic context). Morally, cheating is cheating. But functionally, cheating that I cannot detect is not cheating. All the enforcement authority (here ANet) can do is catch what they can and leave the remainder up to higher authorities (if they exist).

I understood Ravious' comment more like "if only these programming skills would have been put to good". Kind of having a Linus Torvalds creating GW tools that do good for the PvP community .

the_jos is right, even more so considering that it was just after the holidays. I'm sure Anet and NCsoft have been monitoring network activities closely for 2 weeks.

It dosent just help you bot. There are other fun things graphics.dll can do for your game than bot, that you would_never_get_caught_for.

Well I had a read through a certain "thread" and yeah, it looks like this is the the horse has bolted now, knowledge of this bot has gotten out.

The level of customisation that can go into the bot can give it certain error ratios to try and emulate human behaviour to a degree, i.e not PDing every heal out there and make it virtually undetectable. It's sad to see that people suck so bad they have to goto this length to win, oh well, now I won't feel as bad for losing more now.