Advanced Mo/W Bots in RA

Loot scaling did have it's intended effect on the larger population. Now most everything is near worthless AKA easily bought.

Not, I am not, that method is the one in the second paragraph of my post:

Yup.

Business interests > making the game work. ANet wants to sell games, and the best way to do that is to build the biggest tent possible.

Don't recognize the names. A hazard of being a C-list e-game celebrity, I'm afraid. People that recognize you > people where you can keep straight who's who. I talk to a lot of people, and I have a good memory, but it has limits.

Seconding Lemming's motion. The player in question does not bot. Like Lemming, I have played with him and he does not exhibit bot-like behavior.

I completely agree that something has to happen. But the response doesn't have to be mass bans. RR proved that if civil disobedience becomes sufficiently widespread, ANet isn't going to ban everyone. Honestly, I think that it sucks that people exploiting the Ebony Citadel glitch ate the banhammer because they were a small group, but the people exploiting RR get off free because ANet won't ban 10-20% of the active player base.

This shows the inadequacy of a banhammer policy. At the end of the day, these issues are design problems that are the sole responsibility of ANet. It is their responsibility to find them and fix them. No other regime is sufficiently transparent to work. Gaile used to like to invoke "common sense" as the test for using the banhammer, but that's cultural and it's ludicrous to suppose that Gaile's "common sense" is universally shared by all human beings of all cultures. The only fair regime is to establish a list of behaviors (like duping) that is easily understandable, indicate that those behaviors are bannable, and then fight fires as they crop up.

Worse, you should realize that Schelling won a Nobel Prize for showing (among other things) that deterrence only works when the deterrent threat is credible. If this were 2005 or 2006 and ANet was still deriving a lot of revenue from game sales, I'd buy the banhammer threat. But it's costly to enforce such a policy, and I don't see the current skeleton crew spending their time doing a job (hunting down botters) that they simply have not been trained for.

Finding botters is a complicated enforcement task. You have to figure out how to separate out non-botters from botters. This is harder than it sounds, because real, live human beings focused on efficiently completing a task can be rather botlike. I know a fair number of real people that have been banned for "bot-like behavior" because ANet didn't believe that a real human could produce those results. If you believe in America, then you should agree with Jefferson that we should let 100 guilty people go free before convicting one innocent man. That principle makes enforcing an anti-bot policy difficult.

At the end of the day, I come back to the original argument: the banhammer doesn't solve these problems. Staying on top of why players engage in these behaviors and correcting flawed incentives does. ANet has an intelligence problem. If I were a developer, I'd employ people to infiltrate the networks containing the most sophisticated players (who hear about these problems as they crop up), and then use that information to fix my game. That's a lot cheaper than playing catch-up trying to enforce the rules, and it's more efficient.

qft.

i dont give a shit if 1000 afk botters are running around.
a legit person being banned is worse, especially if it ends up to be someone you know or even you yourself.

still not enough monks.

where do they draw the line on who to ban then?

heres a scenario with a so-called infuse bot.
at what point does it become a bot:

1. macro esc+f1+1+f2 on a keyboard - auto weapon swap to 4040 to infuse
2. macro esc+partymember1+f1+1+f2 on keyboard - auto weapon swap + target party member 1. works the same for all party members
3. a macro that infuses once u double click on a party member
4. texmod to make frontline a glowing beacon so you can watch where the damage is happening
5. a macro that just targets the party member with lowest health
4. combine 2+4 and put in some if,then variable. if health>20%, then infuse.
5. go even further than just after the fact infusing: if 4+ opposing party members are casting/attacking 1 party member, auto target, then infuse in ~1 second.
6. have a calculator automatically add up all the damage opposing members will deal, determine whether or not to infuse
7. screw the infusing, just turn on some interrupt bot and interrupt the spike.

and the drunkard bot.
so ANET doesn't ban people who use a autoclicker
but if they use that dll inject thing which auto clicks alcohol, thats a bot?
it has the same result.

which brings me to the RA monk bot.
lets assume you agree up to scenario 3 is acceptable and not a bot. what if it applied to everyone of your skills. thats still an unfair advantage.
even if you just agreed to scenario 1, its an unfair advantage, though a small one. one click is faster than 3.

i believe they should take that RA monk bot, shove it into Tahlkora, Dunkoro, Mhenlo, and all the other monks AI, so I can wear starter armor, perma frenzy, and still beat HM.

I decided to do some RA and I found myself wishing for a monk bot on my team. It took a few teams to even find a monk, and when I did, they were bonder monks..... that's right, life bond and life barrier. WIN.

Agreed. Banning RRs was pratically useless when there were 10+ districts of people.

Although the cases of botting in pvp don't sound dire now, wait for summer when people get out of school and have free time on their hands. When the average GW player finds out that bots are easy to run and nets them cash, there will be a massive influx of pvp bots, just like what happened with RR.

Hopefully Anet does something about this, although I'm not very optomistic.

I have never seen a bonder in RA and i play for years...also join date: Mar2010...nuff said

You haven't played as much as you think you did then.

I've seen hundreds over the years. It was even a hugely popular build on PvX for a few months.

"I have never seen a bonder in RA and i play for years...also join date: Mar2010...nuff said"

see bonders fail daily

see join date...nuff said

A good idea would be removing zkeys n (remove/freeze) Titles , so that nobody can make cash or gain anything from it.
Ppl who need gold should farm in pve, pvp is the place to have fun.

this would actually do something considering that most pvp people as of now are motivated by prospect of titles/emotes/$$. mostly tho, its about the zkeys, as there is very little prestige attached to titles and emotes now. reducing the reward will lead to less people playing them, but it is the trade off for actually increasing the quality of players somewhat. and given that anet always allude to their lack of resources/manpower, it is in fact a plausible thing to do, as it would not require them to put in as much work.

Woe to those who seek a sense of achievement and self-worth by competition. Ironically, higher forms of competition have the trend of bringing out the worst in people, rather than the best as one might expect. What happened to pvping simply for the fun of it? It is a game after all.

My $0.02

that is BS, they are many idiot (believior wise) HA player(and gvg too probably), but if you ever gone to RA you will notice that they are everywhere.

Just a heads up - these bots aren't advanced. Hell, they're barely good. You should see what a well programmed AHK bot can do compared to the Mo/W's.

The only reason these bots work is because 1/2 bar healing is easy and typically a team with a monk is going to win over one that doesn't.

Enjoy your free glads, guys.

Martin, I really like your perspectives on these issues, esp. botting, you are very rational and you play the devils advocate well.

My problem is WAY WAY WAY WAY back when botting first started in PvE, then migrated to Rollerbeatle, snowball arena, but JUST BEFORE it got to the sophistication of Rupt Bots. Anet would have had a lot fewer bans to dish out.

And again to my point of Red Resign, Botting currently has not spiraled out of control, but by the time I personally start noticing it while playing (I rarely play) it has reached a point of saturation that will tip QUICKLY into the "Out of control" category.

Back during Rollerbeatle botting you advocated not banning as well, they have not banned, and the problem is worsening.

At this point in the game, I can hardly believe that Zkey farming is effecient enough vs other bot farming methods to warrent these monk bots existence in RA, the Rupt Bots in HA, etc.. PvP farming is SLOW unless you are getting tournament reward points.

The existance of bots in PvP is solely for taking the "grind" out of otherwise unattainable titles/status. While that doesnt exactly explain the monk bots in RA unless its RA Zquest night, the title is easy enough to get in your HoM, but even with a bot, still not going to max it in the near future. I would only gather that RA serves as a low risk test environment for more sophisticated bot developement.

In HA you can help 7 legit accounts boost their fame with one rupt bot, if the rupt bot account gets banned, the 7 others still profit. So Banning the RA bots, and HA bots serves very little to the cause, it will keep the problem from spiraling.

In situations like this I always remember that putting up deterents keeps the "honest" people honest, you will NEVER keep a theif from stealing, if they want to steal, they will. Basically you are 100% correct, the mass banhamer will NOT solve the problem, but again, it will keep those players that play the game honestly from seeing a Red Resign Situation and jumping on WITH THE SAFETY OF KNOWING that Anet doesnt issue mass bans.

Lowering rewards is not going to do anything to the PvP bots, they are title grinding/testing the rewards are already low enough.

They did try to do this in 2005 and 2006. Unfortunately, it didn't work. Figure that ANet derived around a quarter of a billion dollars from sales of GW. Unfortunately, game design is a comparatively low margin business. Most of that money gets eaten up in salaries, benefits and overhead.

By contrast, the gold seller in a low wage country has a very high margin business. The business model is to exploit the wage differential between the developing world and the developed world. Further, the botting confers massive economies of scale compared to those of the individual player. Long story short, you can make in-game loot at a cost far, far below that of what your customers are willing to pay. And while the activity is technically illegal, in practice ANet has no ability to enforce the law.

The result is that the enforcement team is always horribly outgunned. The enemy is well funded and well organized, and they win in the long run because of that. That's to say nothing of skilled programmers who figure out how to bot largely as an intellectual exercise that tests their programming skill. (I'm sure they want the resultant rewards, but I guarantee you that the ego boost from figuring out how to do it trumps whatever they earn with the bot.)

While I agree that this is true, I disagree with you about the solution. I'd love to see everyone that bots get banned, but there are a couple of problems with that. An effective mass ban will cause lots of false positives. We don't want that. Worse, the bots will just come back in a form that ANet cannot yet detect.

If there's an effective RBR bot out there, then it's stealing hundreds or even thousands of ecto from me. I don't like that. But the evidence suggests that trying to ban botters is a Sisyphean endeavor. There's not a lot of point in rolling the boulder to the top of the hill if it's just going to roll back down once you let go.

If they're looking for the PvE bots, and they're not looking for the PvP bots, then it makes a certain amount of sense. And as you note, botting RA starts to look time efficient when the ZQuest is available.

Yes, but a better solution is to strip the incentives that lead people to bot. In all honesty, it's probably too late to do much for GW. What you should hope for is that the development team learns from their mistakes (graphics.dll, title tracks, artificially low gold caps, massive disparity in the rewards for playing different content/farms, bottable solo farms, etc.) and returns with a GW2 model that is fun to play and doesn't drive degenerate behaviors.

I've argued for similar systems in the past. I'd rather see a time attack sort of format where speed, rather than grind, allocates loot. Think the Factions missions, only with extremely challenging time limits and reserving the best shinies for players that can finish all of the missions with insanely fast times. That also provides an additional disincentive against power creep, because that will offend the hardcore audience that had to work to get their goodies.

Unfortunately, Jinkies is on the money with the claim that such a system will limit the number of people ANet can sell games to. Some people just want to spend most of their time sitting in someplace like Kamadan, using the game as a chat client, and making in-game money as a middleman.

ANet (and everyone else) wants to sell games to these people. Games in this genre therefore retread the random drop system, which dates (at least) to Wizardry and 1981. MMOs improve on the inefficiencies of the system somewhat, in that you can at least trade scarce shinies you don't want for scarce shinies you do want. That creates markets, and usually the most efficient way to get capital in a game is to farm up a bankroll and then move into the trading community. Some subset of any community is clueless about item prices and can be exploited, and the profit potential for high-end items is large due to the innate barriers to entering those markets.

But it's still crazy that the power of the market causes us to have to live with refinements on a 30 year old core mechanic. You wouldn't be able to sell a shooter with a 30 year old physics package, so you'd think that eventually some developer would be brave and try your idea, or at least implement it as a large part of loot assignment. (No, I don't consider the campaign endgame armors or green items to meaningfully do this.)

Out of curiosity, how would you account for people aimbotting in public servers where stats aren't recorded? There's absolutely nothing tangible at stake in such matches.

Botting is a really old issue,i am just glad anet dealt with it better than all the rest mmos out there.
Ncsoft on the other hand,does have a very bad history with veteran players.
Lineage 2 was bot infested to the friggin core as far as i remember.

http://lineage2.stratics.com/content...L2-comic16.jpg

This one is one old comic strip by an artist who got accused as bot user and banned(which the guy was fanatical against them,and thats why he mentioned the situation on his strips)
Nc pretty much didnt like the strips mentioning how bad the situation was,which was the real reason behind his ban.
Anyways the thing with the game is that they dealt with the basic bot infestations,now we have the advanced one.
Now what can i say,if they wanted to clean this one up they could.
I believe all they have done is to leave it to players to do this by reporting the bots.
Now of course why arborstone and bergen arent clean,it still eludes me.

Lulz. Some people just like to grief. There isn't a whole lot you can do about it, TBH.

Other than perhaps GvG, there isn't really any incentive to bot GW for lulz. GW botting tends to be outcome-oriented.

I think (hope) ArenaNet is dealing with it, of course admins arn't going to come on here and tip everyone off "were working on it"... Like when they banned everyone for the HFFF bot... they waited until it was wide spread so that people felt safe using it, so if your the type of player that would cheat if you wouldn't get caught... they got them too.... they collected massive evidence on the bot users and banned them all on a double faction weekend...

Hopefully same will happen here...
But really thou... how are ppl going to argue that bots should be allowed because there better than ppl?.... why don't we just all go animated and watch bots play while were at it?... last time i check games were meant to be played.


Pvp = Bot Wars now, I can see everyone's PvP accomplishments being greatly devalued maybe even totally inlegitimized in the eyes of the community if this continues.

People in this "virtual" world are heartless, malicious, and evil. They override all forms of morality and thrive off of other people's irk, pain, and displeasures, plus they get away with it because their identities are hidden (unless they're stupid enough to reveal themselves). There isn't any accountability enforced online, and that's why they do these evil deeds, such as botting. No one cares in this "virtual" world. However, if those same spineless jerks actually tried some $h!t like that out in the REAL world they'd wind up with a twisted jaw, fines, inprisonment, six feet under, etc... because there's enforcement in the real world (in the US at least).

Until internet users are held accountable for their deeds, they'll simply continue being spineless, shameless, malicious, obdurate, unrepentant, etc.

Fortunately enough, nobody gives a shit about what goes on in RA.

Fair enough - people do indeed run interrupt bots in r600 ladder on non-quest days. Not much incentive there besides watching teams die in two minutes and getting a kick out of it.

Admittedly, monk botting doesn't fit under that category of motivation, but remove glad points from RA and I can guarantee that people will still bot what they can.

save the bots!!! Eradicate any sign of humans!!!

http://www.cyberbullyalert.com/

I'm sure every botter is out them maliciously coding and saying how much they hate every person that plays the game normally and they thrive knowing that their bots are -hurting- you directly. /sarcasm

I'm going to take this opportunity to share some words of absolute wisdom that will probably be lost on you lot, but if you take some time to consider instead of instantly replying with some half-witty shit you might some day come to realise I was in fact sharing true wisdom.

People are evil, spineless and jerks regardless of a virtual or real life environment. It's basic human nature to look after one's self interest first and foremost. Despite all our enforcement people still commit horrible acts of crime, even when faced with threat of death people commit crime.

The only way to prevent this is to create a system of incentives that makes it rational in terms of self interest to act selfless. Adam Smith realised this when he talked about the "invisible hand" in Market Theory. The general idea is that when everyone on a free market acts in their own self interest the total output will be greater than any other system. This greater total can be redistributed to increase wealth for all.

In a game perspective that means rewarding wanted behaviour and punishing unwanted behaviour. The link between your action and the reward needs to be as immediate as possible. Playing the game "the normal way" needs to be more rewarding than ways that exploit it. A system needs to detect bot behaviour and exempt them from rewards such as glad pts and zkeys and reward real effort. Easier said than done obviously, but my point is that a system that relies on a reference to "morals" will inevitably fail. The ones upholding the "moral code" (not botting) will suffer in terms of rewards(zkey, glad pts) while the "immoral" people will benefit. This is not to say that people upholding the moral code will not get some reward in the form of feeling morally just and honest.

To sum up: Banning people for botting is no real solution, the most efficient solution is to create a system that actively discriminates bots and other unwanted behaviour. (The dishonorable system in RA for leaving your team is one such incentive structure. Another thing is that I disagree that the option to leave your team is an unwanted option, people should not be forced to play in a team without prospects.)


You'd think I was being sarcastic.

I might not have been also...

Syncing does not diminish others experiences by defeating players while the player is not even present, or having a tool that gives me an advantage over other players in combat. Anyone with some friends with alt accounts can do it. It would be similar to someone with prophecies only calling someone with heroes a cheater.

Furthermore,

Definition of cheating - act of lying, deception, fraud, trickery, imposture, or imposition. Cheating characteristically is employed to create an unfair advantage, usually in one's own interest, and often at the expense of others. Implies the breaking of rules.

You can't create an unfair advantage when another party is not present, and match manipulation is only against the rules in tournaments... it is not described in the EULA... therefore syncing does not meet the definition of cheating... if it was, we would of seen a mass ban for red resign day.

I'm not going to deny i synced codex for the monument and the z-quest days, When it came out it was just flat out quicker because there was nobody to fight, At least I don't claim to have gotten the title legitimately like [Fly],[SoS], or whatever guild that group has moved on to. Nor do I attend to achieve a rank higher than 3 in this manner.

Syncing is an opportunity of circumstance caused by lack of players... it won't last much longer... ppl are catching on which means ppl will have to fight each other.

Try arguing with facts not insults, and Don't Cause Drama plz

I just want some z-keys.. see you next z-codex day.

Dont forget NoQi double PB mesmers who bot.

let's say anet decided to take martin's advice...after the Shining Blade rolls the White Mantle Princess Salma declares:

• mini island guardians and kanaxi's start dropping from urgoz/deep chest (akin to dhuum).
• other rare minis are offered in the online store (~20-50$ per)
• faction can not be traded for zkeys...they can only drop from tombs chest or from RP's
• or zkeys can be purchased via online store (effectively lowering their ingame value)
• gold items dropped more in HM
• ectos were set at a constant 150g at trader
• titles were adjusted, some effectively cut in half

i think that's everything right? you'd anger an assload of people. but you'd also take away some incentives to cheat/exploit. and yes it is most likely too late in the game to turn the "economy" upside down...but people also said it was too late to nerf shadowform/speedclears.

I think you are severely missing the point. Your proposal is to create a system to discriminate against botting activity. First and foremost, that system would require being able to detect bots at an appreciable rates with both low false positives and negatives. However, that's the entire problem: once you are able to correctly identify bots, you are done! Whatever disincentive you create is no more or less efficient than simply banning all the botters.

The IDEAL solution is to remove incentive... completely. Remove zkeys, remove titles, make rare drops not rare. Create a game that is fun to play because it is fun to play, not because you have some chance of receiving phat lewt which you can then show off to all your e-friends.

Not forgetting [FpO] as well... Running three bot midliners. Ranger, then two hexers both with pspike lol.

Nice joke.

I'm missing the point? Where do I advocate zkeys and titles? Show me.

Yeah we played them, they beat us because of it. Got a nice -45 and a poop trim.

Right here: "A system needs to detect bot behaviour and exempt them from rewards such as glad pts and zkeys and reward real effort. "

I'm saying that the problem isn't in creating disincentive for known bots - that's easy. The problem is in detecting bots.

On the other hand, if you remove zkeys/titles etc COMPLETELY, people don't won't bot because they have no incentive to grind.

But.. I agree with this?

If you look at my post history you will notice that pretty much every 2nd post I make talks about titles and farm mentality being bad for the game. Usually I mask it in some sarcastic statement though.

When I talk about "reward" as per you quoting me that simply accepts the undeniable fact that people need motivation to play. The best reward(IMO) is FUN itself, whether this is enough or not is another topic for discussion.

If you could somehow find a factor of playing that a bot could not mimick then that's the factor you want to reward. Maybe there is no such "human identifiable" variable and then rewards will only serve to promote more botting. I'm not opposed to removing titles, glad pts and zkeys totally until such a system is in place, get your facts straight. Thinking you will get anything even resembling a majority to petition for this, however, is totally unrealistic.

Yes, but this goes back to the fundamental problem of being able to identify bots. You stated that banning is not effective and incentive needs to be created to not bot. That's simply not true. Not getting banned IS a very good incentive not to bot - as long as bots can be reliably and immediately identified.

No matter how much you incentive someone not to bot, the truth is that a bot can play 24/24 and a pc can run more then 1 bot at time on different account.
So botting will always be better then not botting.

While mass ban will not exactly resolve the situation they are needed, sure you will need something other then just bans to fix the problem. Like in real life you will need both the carrot(incentive to honest citizen) and the stick(prison) the same you will need on the virtual world.

I don't know if you are just trolling or deliberately trying to twist my meaning or what? Maybe I've not made myself clear enough. Being banned IS an incentive not to bot, but the way I see it a rather crude and ineffective such. To draw a parallell to real life's penal system studies show that risk of detection is a much more effective deterrant than the size and severity of a potential punishment.

I already said that rewards(or punishment) needs to be as direct and immediate as possible. The way it is now you risk a potential ban maybe sometime in the future. Until then the rewards in terms of zkeys/title are immediate and certain. And YES even this small potential keeps the majority of the playerbase from botting, tough as time moves on more and more will probably join in. This way then rewards the ones who started botting first(ie the most "dishonest") the most, hardly a just system.

The problem indeed is identifying bot behaviour, this needs to be done by some automatic and immediate measure not by manual supervision based on "user complaints" or some similar ridiculous way of policing it. I don't have an actual fix up my sleeve, if I did I would present it at once instead of talking in general terms. (Surely they have some computer skilled people at anet?)

I don't think we need to discuss this further, we're not even disagreeing by the looks of it. No need to continue a circular argument.

They might as well make pvp a big lotto. Give every skill a 1/5 chance to kill the user and a 1/5 chance to make the enemy asplode. Would at least be balanced then.

Either that or remove reaction based skills from the game. OFC they'll probably just do a mass ban sometime before gw2 since there's not much point in reworking gw1's pvp now.

Trolling... seriously? Don't be that guy. LISTEN to what I'm saying. I've argued with you in the past, so I know you're not that dense.

You are drawing a blatant false dichotomy. The choice is NOT between banning and "REDUCING REWARD NOW."

There are two parts of the process to dealing with bots. 1) DETECTION and 2) DISINCENTIVE. Both banning and your suggestion are simply the disincentive. But that is beside the issue. Which disincentive you choose doesn't matter, because the problem for developers lies squarely in detection. Once you are able to reliably detect bots, it doesn't really matter which disincentive you choose.

At best, you are arguing that banning cannot, by your words, occur "directly and immediate as possible" which is patently false, considering it is policy, rather than anything intrinsic to the act of banning.