Bots in JQ. Pure Incompetence.

I wouldn't say there are no repercussions, a few people have actually bothered taking the time to report a few botters with what appears to be some form of success... So it's just a matter of getting everybody to pitch in and report these botters with accurate information such as time of incident, name of character, possibly screenshot/fraps and a general description of their behaviour.

Then again, most players can not be bothered manually reporting the plentiful number of bots, and the in-game report feature tends to not work very well (aside from spreading dishonor around).

Many people that got banned in the first wave claimed this as well as a reason why they should not have been banned.

It did not work then, and it will likely bite many in the ass again, as well it should.

The first 'cure' for rampant botting was nerfing the faction rewards in the FA and JQ formats. The nerf had no impact on botting, since any reward is superior to nothing when it costs you none of your own time or effort. Instead, it frustrated legitimate players and accelerated the drop in population, effectively increasing the ratio of bots to real players.

I'm not sure banning will ultimately fix this problem, either. The Factions campaign sells in bulk for as little as $5 USD, especially during the holidays. With a cursory search, everything past the first 30 Zaishen Keys is pure profit per account for Real Money Traders. Bans would have to be delivered aggressively and rapidly to make a dent in it.

Doubtful. Having 95% of your company on another project tends to diminish support for a game.

There will always be some new game, or expansion, or extra content in the works. The bugs database will always grow more rapidly than any company can outright eliminate.
The concern people express is not truly over what issues exist now, but how problems that have cropped up over the entire lifespan of the game have been prioritized. Bugs, leeching, botting, and balance concerns in Competitive Missions did not suddenly appear after most of the Guild Wars 1 team migrated, or after their population crashed - while their severity has fluctuated over time, they've been reported since before the release of Nightfall.

Fort Aspenwood, Jade Quarry, and Alliance Battles aren't a big deal to me. However, these formats weren't merely incidental. They were listed among the major selling points of Factions for its release. If you care about that kind of content, seeing them barely touched for the 5 and a half years after the release of Factions should leave you concerned with how such Guild Wars 2 content will prioritized.

The problem with Gw pvp formats now is that they offer PvE based rewards and are easily exploitable... Bots are there because of the exploitable rewards not because of inactivity... since the beginning the reasons for playing PvP have moved from the sheer fun of it to earn title and rewards as quickly as possible... Blame lays on both sides of the fence... the devs for adding such rewards and the player base for activlly exploiting rewards in ways that were not intended for game play... The most effective way to get rid of botters and syncers would be to remove rewards all together... but is also the most effective way to make the remaining player base QQ... So for a player base that plays for rewards and not for the sheer fun of it will have to put up with some bots and hope they can incite action from Anet. Until then cross your fingers and hope devs learned from thier mistakes in GW2.

lol, I just encountered a full bot team (or at least 7, I'm not sure about one). A couple of them even has similar names, nice sync XD

And since nobody reads the botting /reports, you have to take screenshots and send them to support if you want them to even consider looking in to it.

Kinda eats in to the fun gaming time.

It's getting even worse now, i'm seeing far more people with real accounts(from proper top guilds) botting again. No longer are the rmts the majority of botters. I hope Anet sweep in with the ban scythe and ban everyone, coz the longer they leave it the more they say, "it's ok to bot we don't care so all you people who have played gw for years can jump on the bot bandwagon, we're not going to ban anyone for it". Either they need to stamp on this hard quickly or just remove it from the game.
I'm fed up of playing JQ and every match having between 3-7 bots on my own team, and the other having the same.
I've tried asking about this on their own site and had my post removed 3 times because it's not a bug, so i shouldn't be posting any minor issues.
So Anet man up and say something on here or your own forum and tell us you're aware of the problem and do something. At this stage i don't care if you have to remove it entirely, but actually take your thumb outta your ass and respond in some way.

They have addressed the botting issue in JQ multiple times already. Honestly, what do you expect them to do? They are doing all that's in their power. They can't afford to hire people to sit around JQ all day waiting for bots to walk by. Instead, they look at player reports and ban botters from there.

If you are really fed up of bots in JQ, why not do something about it? How about you report any bots you encounter. I guarantee 90% of those you report will get banned because those bots are just too obvious. Support won't have any trouble dealing with them.

I report bots everytime i encounter them, both via the ingame report and taking screenies and sending them to support. I have recieved back about 10 of the 100 or so emails i've sent over the last couple of years telling me that i got so and so banned due to them botting and about 5 emails telling me there is not sufficient evidence to prove they were botting.
They last addressed the problem over 2 years ago now and have ignored it since. Yes i understand their problems with time management and staffing, what i am saying is they need to let us the players know that they are aware of the major problem and are trying to sort it out.
If you read my post you will see i mentioned that i tried posting about it on their forum but they don't want it advertised on there that they have a bot problem. I am not asking for them to have a person watching the matches all the time, although i have suggested in the past for them to even spend 1hr a day there and they'll catch 100's of bots, what i am saying is if they can't deal with the problem remove the format from the game.
They did it with HB and TA because of major issues so why not JQ, yeah i know lots of people will be upset but i'd rather it went than have to see everyone cheating at a game format i loved. I love Anet as a company they have managed to do some wonderful things over the years and still do manage, but when i see an issue that i feel is a problem(and alot of others do too) is it so hard for you to understand me wanting some form of response from them, or some fix. Anyone who isn't aware of the problem there either hasn't played JQ with any frequency or has their head in the sand.

If reporting bots really worked, i guess there wouldn't have been such problems about rupting bots in the past... and besides, after few weeks, i still see many bots ... What's fun is that i tend to see more bots in team...

I had 5 games right now, and i had 3 monks bots in my teams always( note : it wasn't the same " players " ) that just go yellow side, stand on stairs and spam random skills...

You know, when you see Ha/gvG/Codex/AB empty and only active formats such as JQ and FA are botted, i guess something REALLY needs to be done, like at least a PvP rework if they can't deal with bots...

The amount of abuse going on ! and anet release stupid worthless fixes instead of working on real issues! I bet you new buy-with-money-costumes will come out before a much needed bot fix and BANS !!! ~ 1-3 bots, every game, everyday. Some people had time to make a couple botted r12 zrank accounts by now ! Screw Anet, they killed the fun of this game, I\ve lost my faith in this pathetic excuse of a company.

If you hate ANet so much, then stop playing and whining about it here.
Also, I fail to see how ANet killed the fun.. they keep releasing FREE content, working on bug fixes that are reported and severe enough to be fixed asap.
What I can see is that BOTS have killed the fun. The fact that bots are so readily available to every Tom, Dick and Harry means that all those people who come here to have the game played for them can do so quite easily. Coupled with the fact that not many people actually bother to properly report (not just /report in-game) bots, as well as the lack of Staff available to deal with this (yes, this one aspect is ANet's fault maybe) means that the people who use bots are able to do so with little to no risk to their accounts.

I'd assume if enough legitimate bot reports are lodged through the website, ANet would take drastic action once again to weed out the majority of the people using these programs. And as mentioned before, keep in mind that many innocent people have been falsely banned previously so that is also deterring the Staff from rampantly banning everyone who even remotely seems like a bot... even if they aren't.


tl;dr: stop QQing about how it's all ANet's fault, this game is 6+ years old, take the effort to properly report botters; Stop being so demanding if you're not willing to put some effort into it yourselves.

Just my 2c

You sounds like this is really a "free" game. I don't know how you get it but I paid! It is part of the ethics that game company provides the customer a clean, smooth game. Bot is part of the fault, but the lack of security, the lack of control, is part of the fault too.

If a bank get robbed every single day, it's not just the robber's problem. There must be some problem too in the bank's system, or how it handles customers.
Same for a game. I don't quite know bot's AI, or do they have one. Is it just some random key programming? Find the same pattern, and call out Dhuum. Or they hacked into the game files? Then it really is Anet's fault. But afterall, bots are machines, I can distinguish them. Anet should be able to too.

And hey, why isn't /report working. Is it a useless function? If yes, just remove it. Or is it lack of evidence? If yes, remove it because it's useless. Or are the staffs lazy/Anet don't wanna pay a guy a look at all those report?

Honestly I rather have the bots then people. Atleast they can accomplish something.

Yeah....
Cause that's the point, right?

I'd rather have people learning how to actually play the game
instead of characters running around based on code.

Although i have noticed a massive reduction in the number of bots, there are still quite a few around. All you have to do is stand in the JQ outpost and watch them run the programmed path and v-space themselves to Hei Tsu, The Luxon Scavenger and Tolkano. Maybe to stop them some more they could disable the v-space in the outposts so they can't get rid of any faction and it wastes it. As a side note some still do the ;-space command when the enter the outpost and head straight for the flag to start their bot pathing, others still c-space when in outposts as though they're still in matches.

program code can be easily changed. disabling any of those command wouldn't do any long term good.

kurz bots lux humans


im on 5th straight 10-0 win.


i always knew JQ wasnt real pvp, but now its really just pve.


sad part is the bots will still out earn me because they probably run 24/7, then turn in imperial for zkeys and then sell the zkey for gold and then rmt that.

i guess i can give up on gw1.... but seriously gw2 devs need to pay attention and build something that prevents this.


I dont understand why they dont pay more to hire more gms. the faster bots get banned the faster the botters have to buy new accounts, and the faster that happens the more money anet gets.

sure some people get their account hacked cause their password is 1234.... but eventually that pool will run out.

You can never completely stop botting from occurring. No matter what Anet does, the botters will find a way to beat the system.

What Anet needs to do for gw2 is design their game in a way that makes it 'unbottable'. GW1 is very formulaic if you think about it. Formulaic games are ones that bots will run wild in.

From what we've seen, GW2 doesn't look very formulaic. The PvP is quite dynamic and proactive and it'll probably be very difficult to create a bot for it. It's probably too soon to say though.

Lucky you! I wish all the bots would just stick to one side so all the humans can just keep farming them or something, but I suspect there's some algorithm in their code that says something like "if you lose five games in a row, switch sides". Bashing bots is no fun, but losing because half your team are bots is even less fun. If we can't have all the bots banned, at least we can hope to farm faction.

Agree. Who cares if it doesn't stop people from botting, as long as they have to keep buying new accounts.

We notice bots because of lack of activity. That's pretty much the same as RA :
- play it around midnight-9am gmt and you will notice many syncers
- play it around 4-8pm gmt and you might face one every 2 hours

The same goes for syncing in HA/Codex/GvG: it's easily done because noone is playing and not a bannable offense( as long as you don't bot in addition) because you can't make diference between people syncing and people who wan't to play ( a.k.a some randomway)

Finding a way to make more people play diferent formats would have an incidence on everything

There's still a botting problem. /Report is a symptomatic approach and it is not working; the /reports aren't being read.

If they're too understaffed to enforce their rules then they should announce that it's ok to bot and leech in pvp arenas so that all of us can get our titles and zkeys whilst afk.

I would just like to mention that the bots are coming back again since the recent purge, time for Dhuum to get swiping again. Been seeing tons on both lux and kurz sides.

Aye 3 straight games i've had 3 people or less in(both sides(that makes 13bots and 3 humans)). Bot farm in JQ Kurz side anyone wanna join for free points, no leechers!

Why not make it a harsher scale? For example, for every 20 reports you are banned for a day? Or some kind of exponential level where after you get hexed, the next unhexed round you play, if you get even 1 report, you have hex for 20m, then 40, then 80, etc? That would really hurt them. And I mean reports FROM OTHERS, that way those reporting can't have this backfire in their faces.

Sad commentary is that these bots are better at the game than some of the players in JQ

O god as a monk I can agree, some para got pisses at me for not healing him he had 5 skills all of them were normal and hes expecting me to waste my energy on him >.> some trolls should be lit on fire thrown off of a building and hit by a bus then die.

Funny as hell solution, have JQ's victory reward go back to 800 faction.

well the thing is that none online rpg/mmo game can avoid botting there will be always a farming spot or a way that some ppl will create a script for a bot to farm in a way,
even that space command etc that i saw as an idea in another post will not stop ppl from creating a script,
there is much more than recording the mouse and keyboard commands etc, at some point they were injecting custom *.dll's in the game so bots can work and i think still happens but i' m not sure,
i played many mmo's saw many bots but the only game that bots affect so much the players is guild wars for 3 reasons:
1st: inactivity,
2nd: the pvp and trade system that is '98 gaming style (its old we understand that, back at '05 game industry they didn't had a specific model/style),
3rd: not online live game master's in the game like most mmo's in market so players can open a ticket and after a few hours to speak with them ingame and investigate the specific bug/problem etc,
also anet/ncsoft didn't cared about game we saw official support game forums after 6years, (it was so hard to add a forum at official gw site ?)
ppl were using guru forum to report bugs etc and still they were slow fixing them (5years of turtle/jugger bug at JQ cmon...),
and i like that they say at anet that they play the game and they love it etc (marketing yeah).
The trade system died at dupe period and with some ppl sell or released public bots the problem gone bigger,
also the thing that the game is free gives a reason to ppl not care so much for accounts and try to hack/bot or whatever not legal,
i played 5 years an mmo with a monthly fee and never tried/tho to hack or cheat cause was easier to ban with online game master's and me/most ppl were seeing accounts valuable cause we were paying hot money so we can play,
i don't say gw2 to have a fee i'm just saying that free game means bad community, cheaters or ppl that simple don't care in bigger % at players database.
I hope anet to find a way fix all that in gw2 cause the industry has to offer other mmo's and ppl can leave/move rly easy and if that happens we will have the same situation, many mmo's died like that cause of bugs or cheating,
players don't forgive mistakes they can easy leave if they don't take what they payed for, we have many examples and most ppl will understand what i 'm saying.

This problem has made JQ mostly unplayable. I think I'm just a bad luck charm. I play on Kurzick side, lose a few. I try luxon and proceed to lose a couple. It's like the bots know when I'm playing and don't join when I queue up.

Not nearly that bad....

At this rate of bot (and mind you, they are everywhere and not just JQ) rates, you would think they would create a voluntary force of GMs who actually have a knowledgeable background about GW held by a Non-Disclosure form.

Play late in the evening and the game is all theirs. Pure incompetence indeed.

Would it really be such a negative if we disabled the "go-to" command as far as posts are concerned? 90% of the scripts need this to get anything done, but for pve and anyone who's actually human, it's just autopilot.

They did not take into consideration that players are too dumb/lazy to use /report.

There are easy ways to spot the bots in JQ.

In the outposts, most people stand in one spot til the match starts. By looking at how people move between Hei Tsu and Tolkano after a match, you'll quickly see repeating path(s) taken.

There are also "follow" bots, that randomly pick someone nearby and run to them. If you know that they are a bot and they are running towards you, you can run around the outpost with a bot on your tail. Even better is when the bot follows you in game. If they are an enemy you run into your base for instakill, or if on your team, run them to a shrine for some backup, great if the bot is an ele.

In the game, Purple (Kurz and Lux) bots head towards the middle, Green Kurz bots stand at teleport point until aggro, Yellow bots (Lux and Kurz) go up the stairs.
Also bots tend to cast enchants 30 seconds before the start???

You'll also see that a lot of bots:
don't show a title
have gray armor
have a nonsense name

I've since stopped using in game reporting in favor of sending in a support ticket.
I've also stopped sending in screenshots and now just send in list of names.

I just wish that Anet would have come up with an automated CM game log check and ban those that use a repeated sequence of commands. Either that or open up an arena exclusively FOR bots. They might find that there are some quality programmers out there.

If Anet are lazy or preoccupied couldn't they just implement the invite/team system like AB?

I'm sure someone can pick holes in that as it's an off the cuff statement but it seems like an easy fix no?

Not sure if it would also be open to similar abuse as I know SFA about botting.

No thanks.

I've seen people /report merely because they are raging on a new player or someone they dislike personally for what-ever reason outside of any actual PvP merit.

I've also personally received reports on a few occasions purely because I turn all chat options off and set my status to offline.People often confuse a lack of chat or response as a sign of botting when it's actually because I can't be bothered with all the infantile chat and BS that takes place in 99% of the PvP, PvPvE formats.

if you enter PvP and then are not willing to communicate, you are not willing to play as a team and therefore should not be entering PvP in the first place

if you can't handle some BS in the chats you shouldn't be playing an online game

The crap that is sometimes polluting the chat can not be considered 'communication', let alone that it is in any way related to ''team-play, therefore, turning the chat options off can not be considered as an unwillingness to communicate, or play as a team. If you justify and allow bullshit on the com-channels you should not be surprised when some turn of the chat channels.

It's the people that abuse the chat with their bullshit that should not play online games, not the other way around.