Bots in JQ. Pure Incompetence.

Mascu, I most humbly beg your forgiveness for vaguely implying that more seasoned gamers can and do see the diferences between bots and crappy players and in doing so gain insights as to whether it is a serious issue in one format(PvP/PvE) or another. I meant no slight against anyone who may or may not be trigger happy with the Bot Gun.

As t whether I believe in bots or not. Yes, Mascu. There is a Bot-a-clause. Oh, wait. By using a paraphrased 70 year old movie reference I may be causing emotional distress to those too young to get it.

An easy way to spot bots without even looking at the name is watching the path they take. Most bots I see are contagion bombers who always follow a set path. I can't tell you how many times I have seen a contagion bot run up to yellow and stop within spell casting range because it cannot recognize the npcs are friendly. :\

We all acknowledge the existence of bots. No one is going to deny that there are bots.
However, coming on the forums and complaining about it isn't doing any bit of help to solve the problem.

You think you see a bot? Ignore it and keep playing. Don't spend the whole match chasing it down to "get proof that it is a bot". When you do that, you become as useless to your team as the bot. Simply /report and move on.

ANet's support team gets more hate than it deserves. You just have to report them right, including for example all the people using the same bot in the same report. Be sure to include the times you saw them botting, because that's how ANet is going to locate the bots.

However, I'll still say that JQ is horribly polluted with bots, sufficiently so I find it hard to be bothered reporting them all. There're all kinds of bots now. Last I saw, Assassin bots (A/Me with Ether Feast) were quite common, Air Eles as well.

Never been in there myself. But to comment on your above banter..... if you try and open your eyes and look at the big picture of things, you will see what these other people are saying.

Simply, they are paying people to make useless costumes for GW1 (too many now). They can better spend that money on making the game actually the way it is supposed to be, humans playing it.

Please stop demonizing support. They are doing a great job considering the policies that they must follow. They will gladly listen to your claims as long as you remain polite, understandable and reasonable. Currently, I have them investigating bots which are avoiding account terminations by using multiple IP addresses and so called "hacked" accounts.

If you have a problem with the bots, why not do something about it? Whenever I JQ, the minute I notice a bot, I take a screenshot of their names and after I'm done playing I compile a list of bots and send them off to support. It's not hard to tell who's a bot and you wouldn't be wasting any time during the match because it's as simple as targetting the bot and observing their skills (and movement on your compass) while doing something like running to a shrine.

I also keep a list of every bot that I've gotten banned and those that violations could not be found. It was very handy because that was what led me to the entire issue of bots having their accounts reinstated, which I'm discussing with support at the moment.

To whoever that said that bots are undetectable, you are mistaken. However, there are bots that are less detectable than others and these are the bots that I've got support currently investigating.

I gave up on this and many issues in GW. The support/GM/community/live team seems to become little or none since Gaile left.

Botters are bad but what's worse are leechers. Bots at least do something while leechers sit afk at the spawn point. I like neither because neither are able to get any kills and are very easy targets for me

Here is their reasoning: if a rich person can get 20+ accounts, go create bots and have them run in JQ leeching up faction and Balthazar and maybe one account gets suspended after a week. The guy has collected (say 7zkeys per day on every char * 20 =140zkeys), this person then sells them illegally for 50keys = $5 or something like that. Eventually he makes some money and will use it to buy more accounts and make more intelligent bots. It's what happens, players just leave matches or report but most just want to play and therefore ignore the botter and it's they who win in the end

There's no bigger picture: the two things are simply unrelated. They have to pay both artists and support people - who, as mentioned, are hired by NCsoft and not Anet.

It's just that artists do something you can clearly see, while GMs don't.

Yet, those players would BE ABLE to play...About dead hours being longer every day, ask anyone in game if they prefer:
- being able to play a format when they want to, although maybe losing more than winning
- not being able to play a format at all

I'm seriously getting tired at how joke HA is. Everyday i'm tempted to play before work , but i just notice that one team is having free wins thanks to their second accounts, while you cannot do anything but watching them( either noone in the district, either team stop after getting ganked by sec accounts in halls)
Allow 7 hench teams = more parties at any hour = less abuse.. Easy

Honest to god, I was a regular on Gaile's page way before the report feature was introduced and I sent in dozens of screen shots and support tickets about different regular leechers in FA back in the day. Since the introduction of the report feature (and tweaks made to it) this problem has been dramatically reduced over time and actions ArenaNet have taken have worked to a large extent. They also seem to be permabanning a lot of the botters as people who I saw botting regularly in FA and JQ were banned in the day of Dhuum last year and I haven't seen them since.

Having said that, I agree JQ seems to have a considerable bot problem atm. It's frustrating getting a match and knowing your going to lose cause 4/8 team members are brainless bots. Keep using the report system, I truly believe ArenaNet are taking notice of these accounts and doing something about it.

I empathise with your dislike for bots but I strongly and vehemently support ArenaNet's decision to hold off on banning bots unless they have absolute proof. I'd far rather play a game with bots than play a game where innocent players are getting banned. It already happens sometimes even with the reply you got, I don't want them relaxing their policy to get more of the bots at the cost of innocent players.

What kind of made-up nonsense is this? First of all, why would you be rolling new characters all the time for JQ and FA? Does the meta change every single day? I know of people that legitimately got to R12 in Luxon/Kurzick by playing CM every day, and they stuck with just three characters at the very most. Most of them only relied on two primaries and that was it.

Also, if you're rolling new characters all the time, you have to only type in a name ONE time. Why not just use the same stupid name as the one you just deleted? What do you care, since you're going to be deleting it soon anyway?

Finally, if you're so darn lazy to type in a new name, which takes like what, three seconds... Well, it takes longer to go through all the armor and weapon configuration menus. I've rolled new characters for PvP and it's a total pain. You have to manually select all the runes and insignias all over again, and you have to pick a weapon and select all the mods and inscriptions. And if you're serious about PvP, then you need to have an alternate weapon set, and that's even more time wasted.

In short, the name process is the easiest and shortest part of character creation. "I was too tired to think of a new name?" That's your excuse? What's next? Saying that you were using macros during Snowball/Beetle Racing because you have arthritis and therefore deserve pity instead of scorn?

Haven't you ever heard of templates? No, you don't have to go through all of that stuff again, because all you have to do is load up equipment templates and you're fine.

Asdf-style names can point to them being a bot, but not always. I've seen a few bots named like that, and a few that had 'normal' names. I've also seen a few Asdf-named characters that were clearly regular people.

Again, the costumes aren't made by the Live Team. The artists who create them aren't a part of the Live Team, so no resources are being taken from that. And neither the Live Team nor the artists that work on costumes handle support - that's all done by NCSoft.

Basically what you're saying is "Why should they keep paying their employees that they already had instead of doing what I want?". It's not like they just hired a bunch of new people to make costumes.

There is no larger picture, other than that people will complain about anything and 99% of the time they don't know what they're talking about.

Also, I wouldn't say the costumes are useless. People buying them is helping to pay for the Live Team to be able to keep making new stuff and fixing things.

Man, after last night I was expecting a thread titled "Sciros Darkblade in JQ. Pure incompetence."

I don't think sweeping some bots under the rug manually is the solution. The best thing to do is attack the problem at the source and find how to close the holes that allow third party programs to execute commands in the game. This would also be the most reliable way to avoid false positives.

Hopefully this is something they're doing for GW2 that they can two-fer and squeeze in to GW1 in the meantime. Otherwise we'll be dealing with this stuff for quite some time.

I have been playing JQ off and on while trying to achieve my Luxon Friend Statue and gather up faction for ZKeys. There really is a problem with bots on both sides of the line. Granted, there are some players I have been teamed up with who just weren't running builds optimized for JQ, but I could still tell that they were trying with what they had (trying to kill hauler, engaging other players in combat, assisting in capturing quarrys, etc) Now as been previously stated if I see a player with asldsfj akldjjf as a name I usually will message them in the countdown to see what kind of response I get if they send something back then I am leary but at least it appears someone is at the controls so I give them the benefit of the doubt. If I get no response I usually will follow them to whatever teleporter to see what they do when the match starts. It usually becomes quite apparent wheter it is a bot or not.

What I have been seeing lately is a grab bag of tactics you have your straight up leecher, could be a bot or just a lazy player, that just stands at the base and does nothing. Then there is the find a quiet corner and wait for it to be over bot. They simple run to a less travelled area of the map and stay put. As a bomber I usually see everybody getting respawned at least a few times during a round so if i havent seen somebody for a while i usually try to seek them out while looking for targets. Lastly you have the random archer attackers who have a very random set of skills that very poorly attempt to kill the archers. I usually will ask the person if they are having a hard time killing those guys. If i get a response then i chalk it up to new player. No response well that typically is a bot indicator to me.

The signs are there and its not rocket science to pick out a bot from a new player. I have been in several matches where I have lost horribly due to being on a heavily botted team and I have been on teams that dominated 10-0 because the other team was mostly bots.

Its frustrating at times for sure but bots have been a problem since the earliest of days in gw. I just hope that we have a more active presence of GMs in GW2.

I can't believe that none of the Community Relations team have even posted to acknolwedge this. Or any recent issues for tha matter. Where to I apply for a job that pays for doing zilch?

I've said this before but I will reiterate in the hope that someone with influence reads it:

Remember when they cracked down big-time on trading in Local Chat? They were temp banning players and they even had a log-in announcement with warnings and threats about using WTB/WTS in Local. They actually did use the ban stick back then. Why not apply the same technique here and use threats?

This just shows that the whole report system is a joke... There were a massive ban of bots few months ago, but you know upon those, 90% were easily PvE zos shivros farmers, people that didn't annoy anyone...

Today, there are still many botters not banned and still doing it and besides, the dishonor system is terrible( i love having to wait 8min in JQ/RA/Rollerbeetle whereas the fight is already lost or there is some runner...; also like getting dishonor becausei made a sync fail...)

There really needs to be a "like" button.

Really, the bots aren't that bad. If you guys are "veterans," maybe you remember the whine-fest that occurred when people were given the ban stick for bot behavior. I used to see a bunch of those every day on the forums. Anet figures that the auto-report button is used too much by sore losers and people with thin skin, so forgive them if they want to investigate a little harder than just accepting someone hitting the ban button every five seconds. I think that shows more concern for the fan base, that they would rather make sure they don't ban the wrong people.

Greetings, Time Traveler. I know you didn't have PvP equipment templates in 2006, but we do now! We really, really do!

Actually the current bots moves in a circle around certain paths.
From the teleport near purple going over the bridge to green as soon as they detect a hostile npc they start spamming their skills in a certain rotation, if they opposing character dies they will continue on the same route.

I've been monitoring their behaviour for a while in JQ.

The thing that bothers me is that they spot the enemy lets say 20 yards away, when they start hitting him, they stop attacking when their longbow reaches the max range which is way more then 20 yards.. They should handle short bows..

Because perhaps he plays more different PvE and PvP formats and doesn't have enough slots left to keep semi-permanent PvP toons. I know I wouldn't have enough slots to keep toons around for RA, FA, JQ, HA and GvG.

You can not reuse names.

Making up a new unique name that makes sense is a lot more work then typing it.

We have something called templates, had them for years.

What? Yes you can...

You can reuse the same name as many times as you want as long as there isn't another character in game with the same name. I've rerolled 1 of my dedicated PvP slots dozens of times always with the same name.

IIRC Once char is deleted, name is reserved for 24h. Past this delay any account can use this name.

Bot Wars !



I'm so distgusted with how GW 1 is doing that I don't even want to hear about GW2. What pathetic ability to respond to 3rd party program users. Im sure tons of players are running this just by googling it, knowing nothing will be done. Why be an honest player when botting is being allowed ??? Seeing how long its been a problem, this is BEING ALLOWED ! Out of 16 people we're lucky to get a real player or 2. Its total PvE in JQ right now.


Bots are easy to spot btw ! Just takes common sense and observation. Mechanical behaviors, random skill spamming, complete lack of reaction to changes in environment, randomized names, movement to platform, moving in groups of synced bots, durable / useless builds, can be pulled like a mob, set to offline or do not distrub and will never answer in area of party chat, more.

This seems like a repeat of past events.... hopefully when were all fusterated enough... they ban them all at once and we get to watch them come over here and QQ about how its not fair they got caught cheating and paid the price.

OK for for the sake of full disclosure, I was in JQ the night before last quite late and the bulk of the Lux side were bots. Quite obvious. Quite deliberate in their un-diliberate routines. Honestly I was liking the consitant 10-0, 9-1 victories. Was bitter sweet. Now the only diference in my gaming was that I was playing much later than normal, about 8am eastern Asia time. Asian 9-5'er bots? Who knows? Who cares? I dont. I didnt let them ruin my day. I just repeatedly toasted their Healing Breeze Derv toe to toe over and over.

Actually there was an occasion where I had deleted a PvP toon to attempt a reroll only to find that someone else had snatched the name away.. this was less than a minute after I had deleted the character. (Even added them to check whether it was really taken.)

Actually srew this stupid garbage. Screw Bot Wars and screw GW2, I will NOT fund a company thats fails so hard at its own products ! They don't give a sh ! t about you, they only want your money. What a crappy failure of an end, not suprising for a failure of a species heading for extinction. Stupid people need to die.

I guess you should head that way too.

A few things to consider before you do:
You paid for the game ONCE (a few other times to purchase additional content)... I don't see how that makes them greedy for your money.
The company is NOT charging you a fee to play every month which a lot of other games do (also games which are much worse quality than GW).
Additionally, the company is still providing FREE content and updates, as well as attempting to fix bugs and skill balancing with their currently lacking staff members (and this is after 6 odd years of running the game).
I'm sure if you browse for other MMORPGs you'll run into much worse companies and you'll realize that what's going on in GW is not nearly as bad as you made it out to be.

Yeah this really needs to be addressed. If anything like this exists in GW2 it will ruin the game. As of right now, FA/JQ are plagued by bots/leavers/afker's/leeches. Been reporting them for months. Nothing is being done.

The real flaw is players cant join a game already in progress. This really should have been implemented a long time ago. If players could report someone on their team and kick them out then others could come in who actually want to play.

Not a bad idea, Swingline. As long as the rewards earned at the end are weighted by how long you've been in the match, that could work well. (They have to be weighted, otherwise you can earn 4000 faction just by popping in at the last second which would continue to benefit bots the exact same amount as no solution at all.)

That still opens up the option of making syncing a helluva lot easier for certain people, if one random happens to get on their team: *POP* out he goes, in comes the sync-ee.. but still, has good potential for kicking out bots and griefers.

The problem is once again inactivity... Every single game has bots and abusers anyway... the only diference is how many times you notice them... Even in the most populated PvP format today, which is JQ by far, you can note a certain amount of bots upon 10 games... which means that the number of bots is too high compared to the total number of players....

You note that even more in formats such as RA , furthermore HA and Codex entirely... Who would care of bots, abusers if there were 3 full districts in every format and we then faced those kind of players once every 3 hours ?

Your idea is on theory good, but :
- on the long term, it will have no impact on the number of players
- people will still play formats for the reward only
- most problematic one : how will you do to make someone leave?

Basically, my 3rd point is where the problem is. Obviously, if someone left yet, it would be cool if he was replaced, but :
- if you need, let's say 5 reports to make someone leave, can't you imagine people will report warriors, paragons etc... then fights will be reports till both got roj monks bombers and mesmers...
- if you make it so you report leeching players, how will you make the diference with someone who's just afk for a minute ?

They are very proliferant during late evening and nighttime hours in the US/Europe. As others have stated, it is due to how many fewer real players are on at these times. When players start going to bed, teams in JQ become more and more filled with bots, since there are fewer players entering at a time.

Imagine if they had been your teammates instead of enemies. I have had plenty of matches late at night when I was lucky to see one other real player out of the 16 characters on the map. Even more commonly, though, I see 3-6 bots on both teams and a major factor in determining a winner comes down to which team has the fewer wasted player slots. This is a very annoying reality and does affect gameplay.

A few of the normal patterns to watch for in spotting bots:

-If they are programmed to head to the center portal, they "miss" to the side and circle to the backside of the portal before taking a step back to exit (always the exact same path).

-If they are programmed to exit the portal towards the nearest shrine (Purple for Kurzick, Green for Luxon), they will stand immobile for a long time on the portal waiting for an enemy to come into range. This means that unless a real player goes to that side, the mine will not be captured for a long time, if at all, because an enemy is not detected by the bot.

-If the bot is programmed to exit the portal towards the Yellow shrine, they will always turn immediately towards the ranger shrine on the hill if the opposite team controls it (including at the start to the detriment of the mine).

-They only use C targeting. You can stand in one spot tanking a group of bots and they will NEVER change targets unless someone else moves closer to them and then the effect is immediate (You can keep them from ever capping a shrine in this way as a side note).

-As long as they stay alive, they will not move from their spot until the foe that they are spamming skills on dies or moves. There are spots where you can actually trap the bots behind a corner out of casting range and they will not move unless a teammate gets closer and causes them to switch targets.

There are plenty of other tipoffs, too. Some have been noted already by other people (like the usage of healing skills at 100% health in synch with their rotation). If you aren't seeing many bots, you are either playing at peak times or aren't watching for these patterns.

EDIT: On rereading that last sentence, it sounds agressive. Know that I didn't mean it to be, or for it to be directed at you personally, Damian. It was meant to be a generalized statement.

No worries Bobby I just posted to clear the air due to my previous "Aint seen no bots/WTH u talkin bout?" posts.

Is this what we can expect from GW2?

By doing bugger all, anet is permitting this behaviour by implication.

Feel free to bot and leech faction all day long. There are no repercussions.