Can we do anything about interrupt botting in HA?

Hi Folks

Please keep this thread clean, no flaming and nothing that would get it closed as already two other threads have been closed because they went off track and due to arguments between several folks.

I hope this thread makes a difference or helps Anet to understand the impact interrupt bots are having in HA and that this in itself could lead to more people giving up HA as 'dead'. I am very close to r9, I will pretty much retire from HA due to the increased number of interrupt bots prevailing HA, especially in high ranked balanced teams.

What do I want to achieve with this thread? I really do not want this to be a QQ thread, rather to bring awareness to the current major problems in HA, Anet can better guard against such problems in GW2 and perhaps a response from the Community Relation Managers about this problem as they really should be communicating on this issue to the PvP community. I sincerely hope they can and as I am hearing significant number of people in HA saying that they are going to stop GW and not bother with GW2.

What are the problems?
There are a variety of programs that enhance the role of mesmer and rangers, enabling to turn on a 'program/utility' that allows them to select which skills can be interrupted, this program can be used whilst the user can manually override and play the game themselves. The net result is that they are able to interrupt far more skills then an average player, often resulting in over 15-20 interrupted skills in a minute between the mesmer and ranger.

I am going to list a few issues that I am aware of, in my experience or of those I associate with.

1.My guildies are not playing with friends who are in guilds that have known admitted botters, means less teams are formed.
2.Guilds who have 1 or 2 botters are being tarnished with the same brush.
3.Those that are using these bots flame and ridicule other players (nothing new in HA) but they force new blood out of the scene further killing HA.
4.A GW buddy sent in screen shots to Anet from a known botter who was selling them to him 4 weeks ago, he has yet not been banned.
5.Seems that high ranked balanced teams use them (I have played against high ranked balanced teams over two years and never have I observed a 500-800% interrupt increase until recently).
6.Several friends in other guilds have admitted that their guildies are using interrupt bots, seemingly with little or no consequence.

Future problems

Will lower ranked players turn to bots?
Will HA just be a bot zone?
Will HA become further dilapidated?

Does reporting botters in HA actually work?
Does Anet care to address the problem?

Solutions?

Reporting botters? Futile?
Anet address the problem?
Publicly let it be known that botters have been banned to deter those using them and those who seek to use bots.
Non-botters band together and spread the information of known botters.
Please keep this thread on track and help increase the awareness of this problem. I am really sorry to the talented Mesmers and Rangers who actually do have skill being inadvertently being tarnished.

Why do I care? To be honest once I get r9 am I will not HA until the botting problem is resolved, but the main thing is I care about GW and possibly GW2, I do want actual talented players being recognised for being talented and I want people to enjoy their experience of HA, rather then being frustrated and turning to botting themselves.

Thank you all and I am really sorry for the wall of text.

Silver

TBH about all anet could do now is nerf interrupts to hell. Too bad they've ditched energy as a resource (and therefore denial), and increasingly relied on interrupts to keep other things in check.

Cannot say that ANET does not care about the problem. Another thread covered this topic in detail, after researching the programs involved it is very difficult to reliably detect and defeat this problem.

There are bots for every facet of the game that has a reward. The depth of the issue is really shocking, the program is available to the general public and is easily modified, in addition to that microsoft promotes the use of API's and provides tools to develop better applications using the software which the botters currently use.

Not trying to sound defeatist, but until better methods are developed to combat this I do not expect to see any public statements from ANET about it.

I do know that people are making real money using bots and selling the items/rewards obtained to the RMT's, money is a strong motivator.

Continue to report bots when found, regardless if they are banned or not. May seem futile however it tells ANET that I still care.

previous thread:
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/b...tml?t=10422646

So... make GW2 console only to defeat botting? I admit I don't own a console and don't know if such botting exists in that realm, but I imagine it would not be so prevalent.

A quick solution that I was thinking of is to update once every 3 days, and in the update change a random line of coding, sure Ursan may turn you into a Tiger instead of a Bear once in a while, but it would cause the bot makers to search for it and change their coding as well. I dont know if this is a viable idea, but I think it would help tone down the sheer amount of players that can effectively use bots. I've seen other games do this, and it didn't stop botting, but it helped tone down the volume of them.

what makes this bot unique is that it's just an intricate autoit script, rather than an actual program. to be honest i don't see anet ever doing a damn thing about it. i don't have any idea how easy/difficult this is to detect, and nor do any of you so let's just get that straight, but the nature of the beast isn't the easiest thing to pick up on, reporting people for botting (depending how how responsive anet is toward it) might be the only notion we can apply to even start being proactive.

i would really really really really like to hear a few words from regina or somebody on the issue. wouldn't get my hopes up though, we may just be told "we know its there, we're workin on it" and wind up with 10 pity zkeys a few months down the road again.

to fix the issue, they'd have to find out what makes it go. like i said, this bot's a lot different in how it works than most bots we've heard about. there's a few different ways a bot can be made for this, a few of which i imagine would be easier fixes, a few of which may be a lot harder to do... if anyone would like to speculate that's cool but i'm not going to be one to use it and find out what makes it tick.

This is you're biggest problem be it HA, JQ or anywhere else in the game. What has to happen and I have not seen or heard of it happening yet is for a said bot user / gamer that's making money with VR items is to be sued or held liable by a company for copy right infringement. People use to think down loading music was something they would never get hammered for either. Sooner or later I see this happening as well. You are essentially stealing another persons work and re-selling it.

No thanks. We get enough bugs with their once a month updates, new bugs every 3 days is not needed.

Pretty much why HA has been dead for a while. Now botters are salting the wound

Also this script could be harder to detect, isn't this not really a bot but a exploit in a script or function in the source code?

I loved HA when it was fun. There is also a social stigma of HA. Veterans like us look down on new players. Like whenever you see "insert gimmick way" or get rolled unexpectedly by a new gimmick you can't help but look down on these fame farming team builds while your balanced is ripping apart teams in halls in a few runs or so. Like I'm sure most HA vets don't mind new players coming in, but you hate them unknowingly? Kinda hard to explain.

Just think about all the gimmicks that have lived and died in HA...

So it has come to this.

One of the very few games virtually cheat-proof on the pvp side due to the pvp design and personal skill required, eventually going down the same road. First very primitive bots in JQ/FA, now this.

Well, since one can't escape this madness, the only solution is to make cheating not worthwhile instead of making it impossible.

Now, how does one achieve that without excess grinding to the account? Losing a hard work of 3+ years would certainly put a very visible barrier to every potential pvp cheater. On the other hand, even more useless titles, grinding and discrimination is what this game needs least.

The worst part is, every honest player has to suck it up, while those scumbags can ruin the fun of everyone and cause damage beyond repair (yeah, you read this silly post and laugh at the naive poster, which arguably is one of many idiots you make fun of by cheating ...).

i don't know how to tell you this, but,

it's just going to get worse, much worse. so enjoy it while you can.

There's a lot of circumstantial evidence that could be used to detect interrupt botters. Hitting spell casts under .7 seconds consistently and bringing five interrupts on a dom mesmer bar are pretty big tells.

Unfortunately, NCSoft support apparently doesn't recognize that.

Maybe, but not with titles. This kind of botting is possible because all regular clients receive more information then they show and ANet basically trusts it's client program to filter this information and implement their 'security', or play balance.

This mistake has been made before, and it will be made again.

What they should do is stop trusting their client program and servers should only send it the information they want the user to see, nothing more, because anything more is going to be used.

IANAL, but I think it's not happening because it wouldn't work, since there is no copyright infringement.

That requires special laws, since it's not covered by copyright laws.

Ah, now we're getting somewhere. One could skip the copyright infringement crap and go straight to the heart of the matter. ANet pays to keep the servers running that deliver the service to it's users and resellers basically abuse this service for their own profit.

/sigh.. I'd love to move on from the R4 Ive been on for years, but I doubt I'll see that happen now reading this thread, it just makes me sad

Dr Love - Do you think the botting situation will get far worse? Why is that? I think anything you can add would be useful to highlight the gravity of the siuation.

Everyone else who has posted thank you for keeping the thread clean, some very useful ideas, keep them coming and spread the word to watch out for these botters.

I have deliberately not referenced my observations about the interrutp bots bars as I too have noticed that they carry far more interrupts then usual and that you can tell when you are consistently being interrupted near the start of the skill activation. I believe these tools used are very customiseable, and can be toggled on and off to decieve people. As it has been mentioned it makes little difference.

I was told by someone or read somewhere there is a top 100 gvg black list of botters, is this true? Is that a good idea to do on a different forum? My concern is legitimate players could be hurt by this.

Thanks all

Silver

It is very difficult to detect script. My guilds have been running this bot for several months and none of them have been banned yet. Unless Anet fixes the source code, nothing can be done. This is similar to an exploit in Team Fortress 2, where players are allowed to unlock weapons via an error in the main source code without having to play to unlock the weapons.There is a saying:

"if you can't beat them, join them"

The point of a competitive game is to have a leveled playing field where players can compete to find out who is better without having to depend on bots and scripts. However, since Anet takes no action in fixing this error, we must take our own actions by joining the masses. We must uphold the value of competition. I believe Anet needs to start hiring more knowledgeable programmers. It's sad to pay someone money to do something incorrectly.

Anet can not explicitly know who is cheating, so they can't ban people unless they have strong evidence proving that people are, indeed, using a script. An example of a strong evidence is multiple screenshots (usually 15-20 screenshots of different interrupted skills) of the interrupted skills. If all the skills are interrupted at the exact same time, then it's a red flag for cheating. Then, the cheater will be banned.

The interrupt script is fairly simple. For those who know any programming languages, you know what I am talking about.

Location: Seoul, Korea

Stereotype reinforcement.

It's not impossible to detect cheaters/botters in this case. It is, however, impossible to detect them with GW in it's current state. There needs to be measures in place which detect the usage of bots not relying on visual conformation.

Though as Lemming said, when there is certain individuals running a Me/R bar with dshot, pleak, block, pdrain, leech, preturn (you get the idea) interrupting pretty much every keyskill on your bar, it's obvious, and they can be "visually" targetted by Anet. Though this requires way more resources than Anet is willing to spend on it.

Also, the real problem lies underneath. These apparent botters are the little fish in the ocean, the real problem is the botters you don't see. Snowball At's come to mind, weapon swapping bots and even those same interrupt bots.

Any person stupid enough to put all those interrupts on his bars SHOULD bot, because they clearly lack any common sense, and insight in actual PvP. Because it is these same players that, despite their apparent stupidity, still realize they can only farm laddermatches/HA. Running such a bar in a monthly, if not monthly finals will be an autoban, even if we're talking about Anet here.

If you simply mod the bot (And I know some people who bot top 100 GvG), you can make it alot more effective, and alot less apperent, pretty much next to nothing for the visual eye.

For starters, you could implement the publicly available "opposing party window" in your bot, and target monks NOT on shield set. (And thus on higher energy) You could then make your bot ONLY interrupt when the enemy Monks are low on energy (A bot can easily keep track of enemy monk's energy). So now, the bot will "slumber", waiting for the opportune moment to hit a pleak when your Monks were already low, pretty much guaranteeing a party wipe. (Even if it's on a 1/4's cast, noone will report someone getting a seemingly "lucky" interrupt)

On top of that, a real player is also capable of hitting such a lucky 1/4's cast, and therefore you can no longer visually detect botters.

Anet needs to implement certain securities which detect injection in the GW.exe process. But then, these will be bypassable, and then will have to keep on adjusting it.

So long story short:

Any bot can be detected through code/security measures without any form of doubt whatsoever. However, botters will always find ways to bypass that security, so you got pretty much of a rat race going on between Anet and the botters.

And concidering Anet barely cares about their game (with GW2 upcomming and such), and these botters clearly want to push their bots through, there can be but one victor, the botters.

I'm not saying it's hopeless, because Anet is definatly capapble of keeping certain events clean (RBR, monthlies, snowball, etc) but a 24/7 sweep of every botting in HA and GvG would require too much effort for a team so short on resources.

Problem is they don't even bother with keeping anything clean. I see botters in monthlies (I recognize their names from certain forums), snowball At's, HA, ... and nothing is getting done about it.

Several of my pvp buddies have quit recently due to bots ruining their fun. Look at any mmo and the end of its life cycle is characterized by rampant botting, hacks, and no support. If you ever logged into Diablo2 a few years ago, you know what I mean. The game, although lame compared to today's games, was just bots, bots, bots. So look at gw1 today and you can see what to expect in its final days:

No support = Test Krewe recommends changes to skills and they dont know their head from their rear ends so we get rotten skill changes
= No official acknowlegment or inquiries into the pvp botting
= No programmers to fix the xth tournament so it ends
= hb cancelled along with other pvp stuff I never did
= 6 months before they do something about the hacking of accounts when it reached unprecedented levels
= more stuff I am sure you can think of

botting: pvp bots are everywhere and they can not or will not do a thing to stop it

There is a reason why my fame stands at 1 point and the odds of me ever playing pvp to double it to 2 points is zero. That reason is I was too lazy to ever learn how to pvp. HOWEVER... now I have a second excuse as well, bot wars...

*nods @ Borat*

The basic problem is that intelligent botting is more or less indistinguishable from quality play. I might suspect that a certain player botted this year's RBR...but I can't be sure. That player might know something I don't, have a ridiculously high quality ping, or just be lucky. I can't discriminate between the hypotheses based on the available evidence.

Establishing whether someone is "lucky" or "good" in any individual case demands resources that Support doesn't have. You need significant time and expertise. Someone reviewing the records would have to know what should be "expected" in order to observe whether or not someone's behavior conforms to expectations. But expectations vary from arena to arena, and it's ridiculous to suppose that ANet has a person in Support that is pro at HA, another that is pro at GvG, another that is pro at Gamer arenas such as RBR and Snowball Arena, and so on.

Have to disagree with Borat that it would be possible to keep any format clean. Mostly clean, I'd buy. Unfortunately, "mostly clean" does create some seriously undesirable distributional effects.