Volunteer Match Monitors/GMs

After reading a posting on here about bots in JQ it got me thinking about how Anet could address the issue of bots showing up in PVP and others areas of GW. How would you all feel about allowing players to be present during matches to watch for bots only. There would obviously be constraints on this and the potential for it to be exploited is obvious in certain instances but I think if proper policies regarding being a Monitor were in place those could be mitigated to an acceptable level. So let me briefly lay out the way I think this could work.

1. Player would have to submit an application to Anet regarding interest in being a monitor. The application would require the person to outline why they wanted to be a monitor, how long they have been playing GW and PVP, and any all guild affiliations across all accounts owned by the player and not just the one to house the character that will be used as a monitor. After vetting and review the player would either be accepted or denied as a monitor

2. The player would have a character that is only allowed for monitoring purposes. It would not be allowed to have use of any skills or weapons. And would only be allowed access to outposts and pvp areas. This character would take up a character slot.

3. The system would not allow that character to monitor any matches that has a guild, guild member, or friend associated with that player. This would be an attempt to prevent a monitor from using vent or ts to tell guildmates or friends what the other team is doing.

4. The monitor would not have access to banning commands, game altering commands, or any other access that could alter gameplay or give a team or player an unfair advantage.

5. The monitor would have priority in reporting botting to Anet or NCsoft and would be boots on the ground proof that some sort of botting has occured and expedite the banning of bot accounts. This being if something doesnt show up in the logs due to sophisticated bot programming the player could provide a testimonial to support why a ban was implemented.

All banning decisions would still be made by Anet or NCsoft.

Policies regarding being a monitor

If it is discovered that a monitor is using his/her position to provide an unfair advantage to a player, team or guild that persons account will be banned for life and that person would no longer be allowed to hold the monitor position.

If it is discovered that a team, player or guild has received an unfair advantage by using a monitor those responsible will receive a 1 yr ban from any all pvp areas including holiday and special event pvp competitions.

If it is discovered that a monitor has maliciously or intentionally reported an individual for botting when no evidence exists to support their claim that person will lose monitoring privelages and will no longer be allowed to hold the position

There will be no advantage, special privelages, for beign a monitor other than a display title only along the lines of Friend of the Community or Guild Wars Monitor after monitoring matches for a to be determined amount of time.

Monitors discovered to be going AFK while they are supposed to be watching a match will be removed from their position

No more than 2 monitors may be present in a pvp match at one time.

Players may renounce their position at any time by contacting Anet or NCsoft directly


Potential Problems

Player using monitor postion to scout rival guilds builds and tactics.

- This can still occur during normal gameplay but I can still see players complaining about it.

Player is apathetic and doesnt report botting even if it is occuring

- This could be reported to anet or ncsoft as a complaint and if the behavior isnt changed than they could be removed for dereliction of duty. Besides the traditional reporting avenues would still be in place if another player wanted to report potential botting.

Players wanting to monitor matches can't due to monitors already being present.

- This is a volunteer position so if your not needed go out and play the game and check back later. I can imagine only a small percentage of people would want to just sit and watch matches all day.


I'm sure one response to this will be if the person cant ban a bot what is the point? How is this any better then the reporting system we have now? Well sometimes botting characters don't leave a digital eveidence trail and so while reported the bans do not occur or stick due to a perceived lack of evidence. Also the reporting system is slow in pointing out problems so giving a person priority for reporting potential botting would, I believe, increase the repsonse time to botting players and increase the number of bans thus reducing the number of bot using accounts.


Is this a perfect proposition. No, I am sure there are flaws that will be pointed out by the community. Do I want to get feedback. Absolutely, while I never expect Anet or NCsoft to implement a system like this it is at least an idea to try and fix a perceived problem of the community. This is just an idea that I would like to see how the community would receive a program like this and what improvements or changes to my original idea the community has.

With all due respect, then why bother?

Well I am one of those who feel they have to at least give something a shot then do nothing at all. Secondly this idea doesn't really benefit them monetarily so other than potentially making their player base happy the motivation to implement this idea while they are in the process of developing a new game would be rather low, thus my judgement that something like this wouldn't be adopted in the near future. Companies have to always be mindful of the bottom line regardless of what we the players feel to be important so if it isnt going to help that bottomline it falls low on the totem pole.

I apologize for not having read your post thoroughly so you may have said the following:

This has been suggested before and iirc that thread ending up with most people saying that you have no way of verifying people's honesty. There is no reason a botter or someone with a vendetta against other players couldn't volunteer. And also how would Anet verify people's accounts? Would they have to film it or something? And also the whole reason this problem exists is that Anet don't have the staff to put into this, and that problem would still exist (though certainly to a lesser extent).

Also one thing I'd like to suggest: you say "no more than 2 monitors at a time" but I think almost the opposite. There must be at least two monitors in every match, maybe even 3. This way my problems above are resolved a bit. But if you need this many people then that means they might have to accept people who don't know a thing about bots and diagnose something incorrectly. Personally I think any false positives are unjust and so much worse than lots of bots.

In the end, I think the number of hours they would have to put in into evaluating every prospective monitor would be too much: they may as well referee the matches themselves. Not to mention the increase in elitism this would cause.

I don't see the idea working at all in the way OP proposes

wouldn't it be easier to just put JQ and FA matches in Observer Mode tab while in the outpost for the respective arena?

As far as verifying accounts it is an honesty issue but again thats where the checks of severe penalties for abusing the privelage of being a monitor come in. Yes someone could omit having other accounts but as long as they do the job correctly and well that omission isn't as big a deal.

I guess my concern with the number of monitors in matches is that if they did implement a vanity title you could have loads of monitors in a match and if they all saw the same type of botting activity there could be a overload of the same incident being reported which would be good for verification purposes could also be a hinderance to whoever has to review the reports. It definitely is a gentle balance between to little and to many so I concede that no more than 2 monitors is a little to restrcitve. Plus I wouldn't expect your toon to actually appear in the match but if it did could you imagine having 20 additional characters running around in some the pvp areas? This could be very distracting even if they did turn off character collision for those characters.

Having the verification process and the stipulations and stringent penalties in place regarding being a monitor I think would be off putting enough to botters and vendetta players from trying to become a monitor.

As far as hours reviewing they could set up an automated resume reviewer other companies have it and it could cut down prospective lists substantially allowing only those that meeting their standards to make it through for review.

As far as elitism is concerned this position doesnt give you any benefit or privelages the way I proposed it so I dont see why someone would act to elitist, but there is always somebody who acts like "that guy" in every crowd so I can see the potential.

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What about the idea in general? Like I said I don't think my proposal is perfect, but do you see any way something like this working?

It's easy to say something won't work, but at least give some reasons why you don't think it will. Better yet maybe provide some ideas on how you could make something like this work.

And if you just don't like the idea at all it's okay to say that too.

If JQ and FA matches could be viewed in Observer Mode, there would be no need for volunteer monitors as anet employees could watch any match any time they want. And players could watch matches and alert anet to which matches should be watched via the support forums.

I saw a really big problem here: when you said

Theres a problem there because a lot of the people that play JQ/FA might be in a guild or alliance specified for that type of game play, ultimately it would just counter itself because nobody would be able to monitor.

Just give 10 players GM powers anonymously, that must abide to a NDA which allows them in-game access to GM rights such as banning people. Seriously. NCSoft is the worst when it comes to support.

So you want to give 10 players who have no responsibility towards anet and are pretty much Anonymous GM powers. Even with a application process, people who have no relation to Ncsoft besides owning an GW account. There is a reason why GM are under a paycheck by Ncsoft/anet as they can need to show responsibility or risk losing their job.

I would suggest make reporting have more consequence. as in if a player is reported as a bot in X amount of games is given a proper punishment. maybe going even as far as perma banning after being given X amount of punishments for botting.

Stop ignoring players and playing the game at least more regularly( logging 5mn in kamadan ad1 doesn't tell you how popular the game is) would do better..

These are just the consequences of not doing anything for 2 years... they could but they didn't... now they can't and the game is degrading

About your idea : too complicated in my opinion although it would be good

I like this idea and hate the rest.

My issue with that idea is Anet already seems to have a personnel issue that they just don't have enough people that can devote time to watching those matches in observer mode. I saw it in another post here where a player compiled a list of perceived botters and sent it on to the support staff and basically was told we couldn't find any evidence in the logs so there is nothing we can do. Why they couldn't find evidence in the log I don't know but what I do know is that having actual eyes on a match that could write a testimonial stating I saw player x and it exhibited bot like behavior. And as far as no one being able to monitor jq/fa matches because of their affiliations I have to believe there would be some folks out there who are independent or wouldn't fall under any of the listed constraints who could monitor those matches.

I don't use and have never used a botting program and I am not a programmer so I don't know how those programs work or how Anet could detect the use of one in their logs. But an actual person who can see whats happening and knows what to look for is an enhancement to that auditing system.

As of now it seems most people who have responded to my idea are against it. Is it because you don't trust the players being monitors? You feel its to complicates? Or is it just you don't think a system like this could ever work?

I originally viewed this as being similiar to other volunteer based organizations that are used to enhance public safety efforts or in this case anticheating efforts. We have volunteer firefighters and citizen patrols that assist police in patroling and these systems have helped I just this could be a digital version of that.

Players should NEVER, EVER have any kind of in-game power.

That brings too much trouble sooner or later.

The only ones with 'power' to ban anyone should be people that can get fired, be sued and hold responsible for their actions.

I normally refrain from doing this, but if you read my post you would have saw that not only does this idea not involve giving players any in game power other than monitoring pvp matches, but it also doesn't allow for them to ban either. Please read a post before posting an opinion about it.

I did wrote "Any kind of in-game power" in the first line.

As you describe it, it adds way more problems than advantages and doesn't really fix or help to fix anything.

Just allowing all players to observe any and all matches in any and all PvP formats, and report any player in the match would do the trick, and it would be more generic and easier to manage.