Petition to Demand a Response from Anet on Botting

It's kinda too late for this game, and while i would love for anet to design gw2 that way I don't think you can actually do a MMORPG with that in mind. Just think of wat you would need to remove from GW pve to accomplish that.

- Money and drops
- Reward from completing a think the second time
- pretty much all the title of the game (i won't cry over it btw)

Guild wars will became exactly like anet wanted first. Start pve, get the hang of the game and then go pvp.(Ok for me)

But then you will have 2 problem here

1) Gw population clearly never followed that choosing to stick with pve, so anet will likely design gw2 for them.
2) What about the pvp bots?

Only glanced at first page as the rest will say more or less same thing.
Yes botting needs sorting out by anet but as someone said - anet catches the stupid bots - how the hell do you spot a clever bot ?
Ive said recently in a post on similar subject that its hard , 55 monk users who have been playing for several months or longer will know what i mean when on an outpost you get accused of being a bot because of armor/55 monk , hell i even responded in local and was chatting and yet the fool still said i was a programmed bot ( WTF! ) .
How does anet recognise a bot or more to the point a clever bot.
Names ? not always viable as some names are jokes like my necro who has arghhhh in his name just coz i thought it funny as foes say that when he kills them.
Armor ? again not viable
what they farm ? same again - some farms when you done over hundred times you end up walking same path , id bet most of the old a/e farmers could walk same route blindfolded .Im sure even runners often take same path each time.

Its easy for us to spot a bot when we spend a lot of time in 1 place but are anet going to pay staff to sit in 1 outpost all day to spot and report bots - most of the community would leap at that job or even do it for free.

Faster you remove and ban a bot a replacement comes in and over time the mark 1 bots becomes mark 2 and so on - they improve and often the botters who provide gold sellers get temp accounts or even probably hacked accounts and have multiple ways to get different ips.
Maybe anet should take a leaf out of the white mantles books and hire the peacekeepers to hunt down bots lol.
Bots as i said need to be dealt with and im sure anet is trying even if we dont see the action taken

/Signed
but we all know If they reply it will be "were working on GW2 .... bugger off."
I still see the bots i have reported in game months later in the same spot
doing the same thing so I doubt anything will be fixed properly.

Yes , that henchman contest was a complete joke about rules they said , like " original bars " , " meta bars wouldn't be taken " . Me and some friends personnaly tried to work out some builds heroes/hench could use ( by checking IA in Hero Battles for example ) . However , we were quite mad to see that , upon all bars selected , ALL were from wiki . I

It looked like they didn't even care to check all bars , to see which could work , and they picked some randomly from wiki, which corresponded to existing build ( of course some people from a certain guild who already have some kanaxai mini do have many of those tonics too , how strange .. )

Anyway , back to the topic , bots are most annoying in PvP ( when you lose because your monks cannot cast any heal , etc..), and there will be more and more of those if nothing is done .

In regard to botting, I am strongly in favor of a zero tolerance policy. I'm sure Anet is too, but the live team probably doesn't have the resources to enforce this policy. This brings a problem, there are certain rules but aren't enough resources to make sure the rules are followed. When, as a result, there's a mass of botting going on, Anet can do one of three things:

1. Allocate more resources to enforce a zero tolerance policy, and ban everyone who uses and has ever used a bot.
2. Allow botting since they can't seem to control it.
3. Modify the game in a way to make botting pointless.

As long as Anet doesn't leak details on how they are going to tackle the problem, there is no issue with them saying any of the above. Right now, Anet has said nothing about it other than the usual "we're aware of the issue, we understand your feelings, we're working on it."

In regard to demanding information, the subject of botting is just one of many examples in regard to transperancy. Until not too long ago, it was always a guess if there would be a skill update this month's next thursday or not, and I remember there being a huge discussion on this forum, with the Anet live team replying about why they didn't release the expected skill update. It could have all been prevented if people were informed beforehand to not expect a skill update. Luckily, this has changed now, with the Live Team distributing the Preliminary Skill Update Notes, which is in my opinion one of the best things the Live Team has done lately in regard to communication.

It doesn't have to be detailed, but as a customer of any kind of company, wouldn't you'd like at least a general meaningful response to your concerns?

I demand people not post demands. Will you listen to me? In short, no you won't. If people are going to cheat they will cheat and for every fix you do to stop them they will find another. I play the game to relax and have fun not to accomplish any set goals, if I happen to achieve something it's all good. People take video games way to seriously.

Very good point. And do not forget the Halloween contest where the guy paid a 3rd person to tattoo a mad king on his ass. That was a clear violation of the rule that stated all work must be done by the person submitting the entry. Unless he tattooed himself, that should have been trash canned at first glance. (I am sure that was a stick-on tattoo anyways, or if it wasn't, he needs to get his money back...)

I said all this at the "great nerfing" a few months ago. Take away the so called overpowered skills, which will make grind intolerable to the time conscious players of today, and they will resort to shortcuts. All this problem lies right on Anet's doorstep and is a result of the retarded nerf bat and Testes Krewe. People have a tradeoff, time vs. reward. Nerf the so called evil and overpowered skills, you make that tradeoff punitive. So here come the botting shortcuts. Remove the grind from titles and you remove the problem. You can either reduce the title requirements or you can make them easier to get by bringing back the evil skills of the past {insert sarcasm}. Bring back the old SF, bring back 600 monks, bring back Ursan, who cares? Grind will be reduced, items will be cheaper for poor people to buy, and everyone benefits. No one is hurt except greedy rich people who want to keep their epeen high by keeping other people poor. I cant wait to see the new skill updates that make mesmers the new "overpowered" class and then have people whining about that. I have not done a doa run in 2 months, but I joined a pug over the weekend for fun. It was a bunch of idiots hitting the DwG skill and rolling everything in site! Reminded me of the old ursan days, except now there is just one skill to hit. Oh... and everyone seemed to have a fun time. Imagine that. Bring back all these old skills. Level the playing field. People can choose what overpowered skill they want to have fun with: SF, 600, Ursan, DwG (current steamroller), the new mesmers? Who cares? Remove the stupid grind, fire the incompetent Testes Krewe, start recoding the entire engine for GW2 so botting is not possible (I would not bet anything that this is being done ~ same engine, new content is my guess), and just let GW1 fade into the sunset with people not getting their asses "grinded" to the bone.

Not sure how many time this has been said, but ANET does not have the ability/technology to get the bots. Probably not cost effective to remove them from such an old game on top of it.

Currently there are many people that are making actual money by botting and selling the stuff to the RMT's, not all people but a large amount of them.

One way to fix this is to remove the bots is to remove the rewards. I have no doubt this will anger many people.

I have said it before...add a NPC called Santa Claus, he will award you whatever the hell you want. Want 1000 ectos done, all titles done, Zkeys done, you name it you get it. Once all the rewards are removed it would be pointless to bot. As extreme as this seems it would work. If you don't want to use Santa then dont. This would end the RMT's and botting in an instant. Why bother to bot when you can just ask for whatever you want.

Am I [email protected] crazy? Maybe....but the game is old (not dead), everyone could fill up their HOM and wait for GW2. No more bots, but most of the reasons to play the game would be gone also.

Anyway, IMO I doubt ANET is not going to publicly address the Bot issue until it is able to effectively combat it. It makes no sense for them to. What does everyone expect them to say? "We have a huge problem with bots but cannot do squat about it, Sorry. Please Buy GW2 by the way!!!

This horse is dead, all the meat has been eaten by maggots and all that is left is a skeleton whose bones are cracked and the marrow has been sucked out.

Cancelling its simple not good.

Let's suppose you cast 1 second spell.

The interupt windows would be something like 0.2 to 1 sec (if its a mesmer)

A good bot can simple randomize the time when he interupt, so if you cancel too fast you will waste energy for nothing (the bot still have to cast any interupt) if you wait too long you will get interupted.

So yea, most of time it will be a useless waste of energy.

I'm not suggesting that there are other ways to counter it. Rather disagreeing with your original post which suggested that by cancel casting, you put the other team at the disadvantage not you.

I don't HA much but i have been a lot this week, a lot of teams you'll face at the moment are Hexsins, which carry a PnH Mo/P support monk which has aura, as well as the prot with aura. Aegis is usually used on the SoC anyway. Several teams are also beginning to take Ward of Stability on rits.

Fair play on that part, but cancel casting just isn't that effective.

As many have said, it'd be very surprising if anything is done to fix this with manpower/economic ideals. It'll likely just be the finishing blow to this games pvp.

Out of interest, source?

Sadly like all games unless you have super obtrusive things like game guard and the sort (which quite often can be malware and whatnot) then you are not going to be able to slow them down.

Many of the same people that are unhappy about the bots, are not giving realistic solutions, while I agree they should have enough active GM's to manage the reports, just to say, well they just should ban everyone that appears to be is going to cause more harm than good. During the special events large numbers of people appear to be doing bot like activity gathering the festive items legitly. I know myself, i try to get at least a stack of items each holiday for whatever purpose I decide. Quite often, the same people screaming the most about the current bot situation are also the ones that would go bonkers over the nasty game guard stuff

I blame the builds that are so retard easy that a bot could do it.

There are two different types of bots, and it just serves to confuse others when people take a hard stand for or against just one type without making the proper distinction.

One type of bot is supplemental to player skill, able to be turned on & off at will and still leaves most of the general control to the player. These are pvp oriented like scripts for interrupts, cancel-casts, or giving extra info to someone. These directly affect other players in competition, give a powerful advantage, and are now being brazenly used at even the highest level (monthly gvg tournies).

The other type of bot is one that performs monotonous tasks, generally farming something or spamming an action to pump a title up. Most of these are run while the actual player is afk. These have little or indirect effect on other players or sometimes the in-game economy, but give an unfair advantage for maxing titles to those willing to take on the risk.

Those making the simple response that the main problem is farmable, monotonous activities being linked with rewards, you're fairly spot-on in regard to the second type of bot. The thing is that the first is the really pernicious type of bot that will ruin other peoples' experience in gw if allowed to run rampant.

Since the second type is pre programed would changing the player spawns in town get rid of it?

Some bots are actually capable of determining every skill that your opponent/oppenent's team has and then responding based on that. It's not because the builds are easy......often bots can run builds that no human could run.

Nope. It'd take botters about half an hour to fix that.

I think he meant pve farmbots.

However to his point, near enough all farm builds i remember playing could be botted as you don't do anything reactive.

Yeah but they follow a pre set trail, changing the spawn location in town could mess it all up.

The information that bot's can obtain extends to npc's. All they'd have to do is find the id of several npc's in the town, target them and path the bot that way.

They can also detect your location (town etc, so if they got blocked or whatever it could reset etc).