Botters in PvP (Preventive actions for RBR)

Before it got deleted you asked what further could be done.

Not playing devil's advocate and giving Anet further reason to turn the other cheek is a pretty good start.

Your argument is the exact equivalent of that often presented with overpowered skills - "X doesn't need a nerf, it has counters, therefore it is balanced and acceptable." You're obviously not stupid enough to realize the absurdity behind this, however you seem to want to decry the importance of this issue anyway.

I won't pretend to understand your reasons, but all it's achieving is giving Anet a reason to look the other direction. Resigning such an issue to defeat before any official response is given is only going to give them the impression that the community is of divided mind on the issue. Regardless of how good the bots are or not, it would be beneficial to yourself (if you truly deplore bots) if you were to drop the arrogance from your posts and admit the bots are a problem. Though it is unlikely that doing so will force Anet's hand, acting otherwise is only going to give them cause for inaction.

Try and keep things civil ladies and gentleman this is a debate, dont give the moderators another reason to lock down this thread again.

Pol

I want to make it abundantly clear that I am not now attacking the poster when I say that the idea of not playing ladder matches as a solution to botting is plain retarded. Surely this in itself is an excellent measure of just how large an issue botting really is?

I'm not disputing that there's a problem. I hate the bots too. I'm disputing the severity.

When other games (eg: CS) were overrun by bots, people organized leagues to get legit competition against legit players and had observers monitor possible cheating. That's not optimal; it's costly. But it's the available second-best solution in the absence of a developer response, which is going to take a while. It took Valve quite a while to come to grips with that problem, and they're unquestionably a first-tier gaming company.

Even so, I remain unconvinced that you have exhausted all of the possible options available to you for beating bots. You are so sure that the bots cannot be defeated! But I know that isn't the case in some arenas, and I've seen evidence that suggests that the bots could be beaten in GvG.

You're probably correct that if the absolute best teams were to begin cheating using the bots, they would be unbeatable. But as you noted, there are barriers in place (obs) that make this unattractive for them.

Isn't this what people have done in games for years once the game's integrity is compromised? They form private leagues and bar the cheaters from participation. If all you care about is the quality of the competition, it's the best solution in the absence of developer intervention.

There's a huge difference in cost between fixing a skill and making the botters go away. It's reasonable to demand action now when a skill is obviously broken. The effort involved in fixing that problem is comparatively minimal.

It's ridiculous to demand developer intervention now when the game gets cracked. The developer has to figure out how the game has been cracked and what will fix the problem for good. These are not trivial tasks.

The importance of an issue varies not only with its severity, but also with the cost associated with making it go away.

I'm aware Anets track record is unreliable at best, and after such time as an announcement of inaction on their part I might agree that such measures are necessary. Until then, decrying the issue and resigning yourself to their nonintervention is doing absolutely nothing but giving them reasons to do naught about it.

For most players, adjusting your play to accommodate the issue, or simply not playing is NOT an acceptable solution. I honestly can't say why you don't abhor such prospects, but it appears that you are set in such thinking, so I'm not going to bother pushing the point further.

And you seem to have weighed that cost/benefit analysis all on your own without knowing any of the details involved. I'm not demanding action in the short term so much as acknowledgment. If the issue is such that it will take too much time or effort for Anet that they will not act upon it, then I will resign myself to that. However, community mind on the problem also plays an (albeit minor) role in their decision to act. If no one thought bots were an issue then, even were the fix fairly easy, it would probably not be applied. Until such time as we get an official opinion I believe that a bycot of the ladder, or a downplay of the seriousness of the issue is going to do absolutely nothing but provide Anet with reasons to downplay it themselves.

I'm just being realistic about what I have control over. I can't control the other players. I can control the quality of my play. If that isn't good enough to beat the bots, then there's always the option of controlling who you play against or measure yourself against.

If the client has truly been compromised at the level that has been suggested, expect to wait a while to see action irrespective of the level of attention ANet gives the issue. Those holes aren't going to be easy to patch.

I'd seriously laugh my ass off if Anet were taking the Valve approach and just stealth watching who was botting, then ban them in a massive swoop, or even just strip EVERY unlockable, reset all titles to zero and affix (CHEATER) to every character name on their account.

Yes Anet, I am subtlely feeding ideas.

How can you dispute the severity of the issue, yet suggest such radical solutions as not playing ladder matches, or even replacing ladder play with (lol)scrims? You never actually answered that before.

How severe does it have to get before you feel that it crosses the line?

The fact that a old polish guy is able to find this freaking program openly available on the internet is proof that it has gone into the severe zone. If I located it any fool can get it.

Time has come for ANET to combat this, the progam being used is easy to get, ANET can study it and determine how to shut it down. No need to determine how the game became cracked when the hammer is free to use.

@ Sarevok - I'd love to see it.

- You have outside options. This isn't like account security (NCSoft side) or duping where there's absolutely nothing you can do as a player. They may not be particularly desirable outside options, but they are available to you if you want a "pure" competition decided by human skill.
- The cost term for fixing the issue is extremely high. We're not talking about a single loophole (like reconnects) that can be closed temporarily at some cost to players. Remember, it took a while to get reconnects back, and that was small potatoes next to the complexity of this issue.
- There are other unresolved issues still on the table that also matter. I'd like to see a skill update rather than have ANet drop everything chasing the botters.
- I still think the case for the advantage conferred by the bots has been overstated.

Basically my stand point on bots is this: in a perfect world there wouldn't be any bots, but we dont live in a perfect world. Having anything this drastic done to this game is already too late to ever think about happening, You know it, i know it, no reason trying to argue about it, we just need to accept it, so what needs to be done is making sure GW2 is bot-proof. So in my opinion all you computer-savy players need to be making suggestions to anet (since they are either incompetant or are too busy working on how sexy the pixels look in gw2) on how to make sure bots dont ever appear in GW2.

I disagree.....Taken from a script description of the bot:

The most powerful script that has been created using "freaking program" so far. The "freaking" Bot is a highly advanced, customizable tool that doesn't take too long to get used to, but can provide great results. The bot has been optimized and thoroughly tested to assure that your interrupts look genuine. It's not about hitting those 1/4 casts, but more to steadily interrupt, without missing, and allow you to do whatever you feel like at the same time. You may also manually interrupt still, granted you're fast enough, it takes everything into account really.

Sounds like a big advantage to me... The more I read about the worse it gets...


Funny I also see the person that put this crap on google present in this thread.

You know I actually feel kind of sad that people have to use a bot to enhance there skill. Just goes to show that some players are so desperate to win a pixalized item or cape that there willing to go to extreeme lengths for it.

If you cant do it your simply not good enough yet. The old adage, practice practice practice if you want to make it to the top of the tree.

Pol

But what's being described here is behavior that is obviously botlike and yields a competitive advantage. So I'm not sure how seriously we should take this claim.

It's looking increasingly like account security issues are the fault of NCSoft rather than Anet, and we're getting a skill balance withing the week. Assuming it's not an ass-terrible update then I see absolutely nothing that should take priority over this issue.

I don't think you fully understand the implications of these newer bots. Their behaviour can be switched on and off at will. They are capable of interrupting 1/2 second casts. EVERY TIME. Fakebots are likely on the horizon. In snowball they ensure you can never retain ownership of a present if you're split 1v1. An infusebot that analyzes packets of incoming damage and works out a perfectly optimal infuse time has been created. The opposing party bar screen very likely uses the same loophole (This bar includes stances, weapon sets and more in case you haven't seen it yet). There are rumors of a synchronized spikebot. Weaponswap bots. Dodgebots. This is likely an incomplete list, these are only the one's I've seen part or all of the code for.

Implications include protbots for such things as Aura and RoF. Consider a bunch of bots designed to throw a skill at a warrior as soon as he frenzies. The code and the possibility is all there. Bull's faking, perfect quartering off of other people's KD's EVERY TIME. Hexbots - look at how overpowered heroes were with those. Autochaining of skills among different characters. They could so such things as cancel one skill to cast another - canceling diversion to pblock a 3/4 would be simple to code, if it hasn't been already. This is just the limit of my imagination currently, in a ridiculously tired state as it is.

And all of this occurs while the player is free to manually use skills and control such things as movement. The bot behaviour can be manually toggled at any stage during the match according to the player's whim.

If these things don't seem to confer much of an advantage to you then I can only imagine how little PvP experience you've really had.

I would ask the person that put this on google in the first place to answer that question. He is very keen with this kind of stuff - very

Just ain't so. They can make it a lot harder, but you can abuse their stupidities. Suppose your opponent has a dodgebot. Said dodgebot has a fundamental flaw: it will always drop the gift at the same time, because this has to be timed properly to successfully dodge. So if you skill cancel and scoop before the bot can (because it's auto-executing its dodge and can't scoop), you now have the gift AND your Hidden Rock. You have converted a liability into an advantage; you never have to actually use a snowball to get the gift.

If you play it right, the best move for your opponent is then to turn the hacks off and play you straight.

If the coder of the dodgebot gets smart and successfully codes to get around that, you can still get the gift. If you get right up in the bot's face, it can't dodge the throw 1v1. It's important that you do this at an angle from the direction of travel, but it still works.

Now, if the bot is technically flawless like that, you're going to have to DnD his snowballs to do anything but stalemate the gift. But at a minimum you've negated the advantage, and against anyone that doesn't position perfectly you've still seized the advantage.

You're still insisting that technical perfection is everything.

You always have one huge advantage over a known botting opponent: you know what they're bringing to the table beforehand. You know what's on their skill bars. You know what they're going to do as a team, and what they have to do to beat you. You can predict their every reaction at a tactical level.

To take advantage of this, you have to think outside the honor balanced box a bit. If you show up with the expected team and plan that the botters expected and coded to beat, you're going to get thrashed. No doubt.

If the problem really is that a specific combination of skills, played flawlessly, always wins irrespective of the opponent's behavior...then what we have is a balance problem that botters are exploiting, rather than simply a problem with bots.

Again, this is why getting the skills right is so critical.

No, you can't. Said dodge occurs at the moment the snowball leaves your hand. Canceling won't fake the bot out.

This is wrong. These bots are way beyond what you've seen before. 7 interrupts is just the beginning. I have seen and toyed around with that this code can do. If it wasn't going to get deleted I could post it here, though you should be able to find it easily enough.

Some wonderful (not) people have gone out of their way to create a nice codebase, replete with documented help and function library for script kiddies to be able to create a bot for nearly limitless purposes. ANY SKILL at all that you want to write a very specific set of instructions for, you can. You can't buildwars them, because they can run ANYTHING. Obviously some skills will be better than others in bot hands, but you can't buildwars the range of skills that they run. And they have thinking human minds behind the technical part, so saying 'just split' isn't actually going to solve anything, unless they really are RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GOing terrible. Add to that the possibility that you can modify or turn off the bot behaviour on the fly, and you have a ridiculously major advantage right there.

The code is amazingly flexible, and easy to use. At the moment you've no doubt seen and heard about the interrupt bot - which is strong, but not incredibly flexible, as you've pointed out. However, believe me when I say that this is the tip of the iceberg. As much of an ass they are for creating this trash, I have to say hats off to Mr S. (not a real name) and his buddies, because the possibilities for this stuff is amazing.

EDIT: A few more possibilities - Ripping enchants/pulling hexes or conditions the instant they land, auto canceling a skill about to be diverted - before the diversion lands. Bsurging/flashing any attack skill you can possibly want. This thing is even capable of tracking how much adrenaline each skill on a given player has.

FURTHER EDIT: As far as I can tell, it looks to be possible to create anti-stupidity measures using this stuff as well. Say you were to use devhammer on a target in balanced stance. By the looks of things it should be possible for the bot to deny such an action, disallowing the skill while retaining full adrenaline.

Uh uh. I've played against the "suspected" botters. Your bar will be about 75-80% full when the gift hits the deck. In practice, I find there's a delay between when you drop and when you are able to move - hence the early drop.

Either that or the players that stand accused simply aren't botting.

Sure, but some things are going to be more (apparently) advantageous than others. They're going to congregate on focal points.

You're correct to assert that you can't buildwars them with the same trick repeatedly if they can continually produce new builds that they can play. In the limit, this turns the game into something similar to a 1v1 match with your buddy in the guild hall, where who turns up with what becomes decisive.

That's hardly desirable, but the outside options to avoid that still exist, and you can still win as long as you can stay a step ahead in the guessing game. If you don't, you can blame it on the Monks.

The projectile's course is decided on the moment it leaves your hand. If they were to drop and strafe before such an event, then it would adjust accordingly for their strafe - this is the game I'm talking about, not the bot - and still hit. I don't know whether your opponents were botting or not, but it does seem like inefficient behaviour.


Every single skill with a conditional effect can be coded to be stronger in the hands of a bot than a human. Skills which require major coordination to be effective can be coded to be stronger in the hands of bots. By my guess that's a good 50% of the skills in the game right there. That's a shitload of leg room botters have to work with. As I mentioned above, there's also the possibility of limiting manual skills that wouldn't be run well by a bot.

After further browsing this code I can see how easily a spikebot could be coded also. Your caller using a single skill could automatically allow any other bots on your team to acquire the same target and use their own spike skill synchronously. Such a script would probably be less than 10 minutes work to someone familiar with this stuff and would produce an uninfusable nearly unprottable spike which compensated for each players ping and landed INSTANTANEOUSLY.

Everything I have come up with is well within the realms of possibility for anyone familiar with this code. And now that it has been made public it IS going to propagate. There are myriads more possibilities beyond my scope at this time, though I'm sure the botting community is going to go nuts with it. All of the things I have listed constitute absolutely MASSIVE gameplay advantages, you'd be a fool to continue to declare otherwise.

Server side this stuff cannot be blocked against, it needs client side monitoring ._.

And I do have to agree, this stuff is going to spiral out of control soon unless it's sorted now with SERIOUS consequences for those knowingly abusing it to ward people off, a simple slap on the wrist won't do squat here.

/agree

Mr S. anything you would like to add to this discussion feel free. Perhaps you can confirm the creation of the RBR bot?

I'm sorry for how big this issue has become, but the people Borat talk about are in no way connected to me. I'm just an Open Source reverser.

I even sent an email to ANet some time ago, trying to point out my views on this etc., but guess what, they never even bothered to reply. So much for that.

To make the RBR bot is totally possible, simply a matter of moving to set coordinates and using skills at the exact right times. Very easy to code and it does in no way take as long time to create as some people in this thread believe. It could've been done during the Dragon Festival last summer easily.
A year ago, I even tried making this, not full functionality though, and it was working quite well within a few hours.

Thanks for being honest You have way more knowledge on this than a majority of us.

Is it possible for you to remove this from google?

You can't just block someone's site from google from this, you'd have to be the site owner to get it delisted.

A lot of the whining on here is by people that are like Roger Clemens. You all point your fingers at the cheaters, but do it yourselves! Start pointing the finger at yourselves! If someone is using a bot program in a section of a game I play and the community for said game is crying foul that they do nothing about it...stop playing that section of the game! It's really simple. Why would anyone spend their leisure time playing a game or whining ad-nauseum about cheaters? This baffles me to no end.

Evidently I wasn't clear. When you drop, you often can't move immediately. There's a delay after dropping before the game will let you resolve an input command to change direction. If you drop right when the snowball leaves the opponent's hand, you're going to get drilled every time. (Don't believe me? Go to the Isle of the Nameless and try this with the flag or repair kit.) You drop early in order to be able to strafe at the correct moment when you DnD.

But those advantages do not come without meaningful cost. In order to take advantage of the heightened reflexes, you have to script the bot's responses. A botter comes to the match with a predetermined response set to all of the opponent's possible actions. Interrupt X, do not interrupt Y. The botter chooses that set of responses based upon your anticipated actions.

If you can change your strategy such that the botter's prescripted behavior is suboptimal, then you have created an advantage for yourself. If you can create enough of those advantages, you can beat the bot despite its superior technical ability.

You're making an unwarranted assumption. The botting will generate a tactical advantage if and only if the prescripted strategy remains optimal irrespective of what you do. Now, given the interchangeable parts, honor balanced model that has come to dominate GvG, I see why you are assuming that there is no alternative set of responses that can beat technically flawless play.

But the reason the best players won with balanced builds was because they were able to adapt their tactics on the fly when an opponent did something unexpected. The bot can't do that. It's limited by the ability of its coder to anticipate the opponent.

Yes, if the coder of the bot can anticipate every possible action in the feasible set and hard code the correct counter, the botter is going to win. But that's impossible.

Which is useless if you don't know the correct coordinates and skill timings. The assertion that we've been making is that if you're spending your time coding and debugging, you aren't out there experimenting with the course to find the absolutely optimal line. And we aren't telling. I think the creator of the infamous video has figured out that wasn't such a hot idea.

The existence of a private server and unlimited practice time is a much larger threat than the availability of a bot to do things that a human can easily do, given sufficient practice.

EDIT: Thanks, Tullzinski. Don't know how I managed that.

If a human can do it, a well designed bot can do it better. Only need time for that bot to be developed; if you believe otherwise then you are a terrible coder and terrible coders have no business trying to talk about bots. The existence of bots, or gamechanging UI interfaces is something completely unacceptable. It doesn't matter how little it 'currently' affects the game, its potential for future problems has no upward limit. This is why as a developer you have to stop it as soon as it becomes present in any format.

Wait, are you implying that people with closed minds and can't code are making incorrect assertions about the possibilities of coding?

No, you have to stop it once you can get it right. Banning the users would be nice as well, although my fear is that ANet will pass on the ban hammer as they often do when an issue becomes sufficiently widespread.

In the meantime we've all got to live with it. That could be a while.

No problem, I will be the first to admit that I am not knowledgable to code this stuff or figure it all out without a year or two of working on it....

Why are you guys arguing over 1v1 snowball scrimages? In 1v1, it comes to whoever can kill the other person faster, OR get an interrupt on their KD. Even then, TRUE 1v1 scenarios happen maybe ONCE every 50 matches. It usualy doesn't take too long for more people to get involved.

And if it is a 1v1, as said before, the person that kill the other one fastest wins. I do NOT believe a pick-up bot would get you alot of advantage in 1v1 scrims. A Dnd will, as it can DnD a snowball from nearby range, whereas a REAL player would have to time it perfectly.

Martin, I love how you're trying to defend some aspects of botting, but at the same time digging a hole for your guild members. You talk about "abusing" said bot in tricking him to DnD. That's exactly what I did to your guildies. The bot DID always DnD, and we managed to steal a couple of relics that way.

To bad it would only take another KD from your guild's side to steal it back again, as they could so easily out-pick up us...

And yes, I am not involved with Sunec's business, tough he could possibly know "my man on the inside". And we he said is correct and what I have been preaching all along. A RBR IS possible to make, it WILL outperform a player in such a way it WILL cut corners perfectly every time, it WILL have a perfect path and it WILL detect incomming KD's. This on top of the fact you can ALWAYS manually override the bot to manually iron out small errors it makes.

For a company with a history of poor understanding of its playerbase and poor support as Anet, they are going to have a much different response if the community's attitude is "oh I'm sure you'll deal with it soon, its really not a big deal right now, its not like its really affecting anyone that matters" as opposed to the appropriate outrage.

I'm also not sure if you believe some amazing solution can be reached where no innocent person will be punished and no abuser will go unpunished. Typically referred to as Type 1 and Type 2 errors, both of these are going to be present in any solution presented. While reducing the occurrence of both is important, it is just not possible to completely eliminate either or both. An ounce of prevention, a pound of cure; right now we do need some cure, but lack of action or a delay in action means we are going to soon need a lot more.

Assuming that the board looks like it's going to stay 1v1, this is more or less true. But usually it's the case in a 1v1 that you're just jockeying for position until other people show up. You rarely want to stop and try to DPS someone down from full life in a 1v1 scenario. They'll just Cone, someone else will show up, they'll steal and you will be sad.

If it exists, and I'm not convinced that it does, that's exactly what you should do. The problem is that it's always strategically correct to try to execute a DnD, so it's not possible to distinguish correct play from cheating.

I'll believe it when I see it, and it's still no help if you don't know the course well enough. At best it's a shortcut. A crutch. A substitution for making a ton of runs.

I'm going to bring this back from several pages ago. I've been on and off studying online monitization (content sites, messageboards, news sites, free games, pay games, advertising trends, iTunes, XBL, anything online), I could write a whole lot on Anet's business strategy and its inevitable failure. That strategy doomed the game from the get-go. No matter how 'optional' the stand alone expansions are, with added classes and added skills, they all are effectively mandatory and forever increasing the gateway entering into the game; and no game, not subscription models, box sale models, or free models should ever try to discourage new players.

While one can argue that proph,fact,night,EotN is not too much of a gateway, the business model called not for EotN, but for a new stand-alone with two new classes and far more skills; this model also called for a new expansion after that, and yet another one. EotN and GW2 were Anet even acknowledging the failure of their old business model. Yet I have no clue why they still cling to that model for GW1 even though changing it could not just benefit this game, but also their pocketbooks.

Just want to say, I DOUBT they will pass on the banhammer here, this is intentional modifying of the game's running (i.e inserting non-standard input sources from the bot), something you have to go out of your way to do knowing full well it's wrong.

This isn't like red resign day.

QFT, until the problem gets big enough for ANET to finally do something about it, we just have to sit and wait...

So I should get upset because if I rage at ANet really loudly, I can get them to act? Not bloody likely.

I'm just telling you how to cope with the problem while we're stuck with it. It's not like they're going to be able to just bang out a coding fix and then everything will be alright again. For someone that claims to be so knowledgeable about coding, you should know this and be realistic about what's going to happen here.

If you can propose a functional, quick fix, I'm all ears. But my sense is that we could be waiting for a while, and with good reason. The problem is bad, but not absolutely mission-critical. As Div pointed out, it affects a minority of players. And it would be time-intensive to fix unless someone can do the legwork and present a workable solution to the devs.

Obviously that's not the case. It's traditional in US criminal justice to accept some Type II error to avoid Type I errors. I would expect that this would be the approach that would guide them.

But it's also been the case that very widespread issues have gone unpunished (eg: RR, Urgoz HM). That's what concerns me here.

Sarevok, it's not a question of justice or deterrence. There are two issues. One is the manpower cost of enforcement. The other is the desire not to ban huge numbers of users. If enough people disobey the rules, it ceases to be feasible for ANet to ban them all. Just how it is.

The solution to RBR is simple = take the profit motive out of it. Do not give 100 beetles away to the top 100 botters this year. Instead hold a random drawing to all those that enter the RBR and score some minimal score. (tired of the art contests where the same talented people keep winning the big ecto prizes and the less talented of us /fail.) I guarentee you that if there is not beetle for top 100, and the beetles are given away in another manner, then botting will not be a factor. So simple... it will never happen.

Your personally saying practically that all top 100 times in RBR this year will be botters. I am one of those top 100 last year and I assure you that most if not all of us never and will never use a bot, Anet can easily check each and every log and they will find the routes between each and every player completely varies from one another.

Even if they did remove the mini greased lightning reward it wouldent deter me to get the best time I can possibly get and by the way thats with my own hands not some coded bot the bottom line is I love RBR because I want to have fun and get the best time with a little time and effort.

Also I think that this isint such a massive issue in RBR as it is in proper pvp. Absolutely theres an issue there but I highly doubt even with someone who allegedly has a private server to practice RBR can make a bot just for a 3 day period of which he can win a mini greased lightning.

Pol

I'm saying that not raging is a guarantee that they will never take action.

I'm saying that by giving 'coping solutions' that include such comments as 'bots don't affect anyone that matters' or 'players don't lose to bots' that rather than addressing botting as a real issue, you are dismissing it as a non-issue. Compare that with my above comment and you might understand why myself and other people are taking so much offense to what you are saying.