Zin Ku Corridor aka The new Bots Heaven

Hey guys, I'd like to point out the fact we have a Bergen Hot Spings 2.0 located in Zin Ku Corridor.

Bots, loads of them. Again.

I saw them, and they are over there in every hour of the day. In almost every district.

You can recognize them by this: default grey armor, most of them are ritualists(me and a friend of mine spotted some eles or monks as well) and they use to be stuck in outpost names, like every bots so they can follow a standard path.
If you want a real test done by yourself, go near grenth statue, /kneel for the rift warden, then wait: ALL of them will kneel even if there's already the rift spawned out.

Who programmed them, was smart enough to set the bots in a team of 8, maybe to show themself like a real player to any casual visitor.

Another thing me and my friend noticed was that many of them insta-logg off when we joined their districts. I dont know how they do that sort of thing, but it was a pretty common move for some of them.
Altough many others didn't care about us and they kept to farm and sell items to merchant like there is no tomorrow.

Well, I know some of you are aware of this, but when I see something like this I feel myself almost powerless. We tried to send some reports to aNet, my friend did even mail reports. I'm doing the same as soon as I can.

And if I'm here, on gwguru, opening a thread...it's not a rant...but much more a help request...to players like me who hate these people who exploit the game, in the worst case to sell money for real cash.

If you agree with what I said, go there, report them, send emails, do something.

I hardly doubt any anet employee will read this but if we are many enough to report them, we have more chances to kick them out.




Best regards by a loyal gw player

Looks like Dhuum has some work to do.

I never understood why do they do this? What's the point of this?

good, lets have rid of em.

out of curiosity, what do ya rekon they're farming?

they are farming ectos.
And the why is simple - they sell them for real cash.
I would say (not exactly sure number or w/e) most mmo's have these bots that farm and then sell items/gold/ectos(in gw's case) for real cash.
It's a very lucrative business.
I'm totally against it but what can you do? Anet cannot deal with these people as far as I know as this game has been plagued with bots since I started playing years ago.

They're using the SoS build with a team full of UA healers. We've found this team build to be on lots of recovered hacked accounts. Ofc they're after ectos.

If no player would by RL money then this wouldn't really be a problem. Their businuess would die and we would see less hacked/stolen accounts.

Stop buying money from gold selling sites!

This is the only true 100% solution.


Getting everyone in the Universe to comply however, is a 0% chance event

Guys, I've counted in less than a hour 54 different alts running on the same paths, /kneel in front of the rift etc. and this only happens in the american district.


International and asian ones seem to be populated by bots as well, a bit less tho.


Sometimes, when they've done the run, you are going to see them coming in waves. WAVES.

I had problems to make a sort of list cause of that.


It's a shame. Seriously.

Not much to do in GW1 I'm afraid.. by the time they're banned, they probably made more than enough ectos to make up for the banned accounts.

The question is how to stop them from "securing" their stack of ectos, as they must trade between accounts. Obviously Anet is not getting their secured accounts or they're very good at selling off the ectos, or it would've been a waste of time for the botters. My guess.. ecto-sellers in GToB or Kamadan, auto-spamming til someone replies, then a human behind the bot answers.

Pro pickpockets usually deal with at least 3 people. They pick, pass it on, and pass it on again. If victim notices it, his/her belongings are already far away. My guess is botters do the same. They pass on between several accounts, maybe in form on automatic but non-suspicious trades.

GW2 will deal with this better, I think there's simply less pure monetary goods/gold to trade. Instead they probably rely on karma instead.

Go Go GWA2

Shhhh be very quiet I am hunting bots.

I usually only see bots in euro and asian dists for the most part, well except for JQ

well if the all need to /kneel


and see the list grow....

You better watch out
You better not cry
You better not pout
I'm telling you why
Dhumm is coming to town
Dhumm is coming to town
Dhumm is coming....

You know, if you haven't already, why not report it on the official support forums? Then someone at ANet will probably take notice.

There's not exactly a category for it, but perhaps it could fit under Account Support or something...seems I guess banning botters would be a form of account support in a very round-about way.

Trust me, they are even in american district.

They use to be most of all ritualists, then there're some war/ranger/ele even a mesmer that I spotted with rt as secondary profession.

90% of them are on "offline" mode.

You can see them coming each by each in few time or in waves of 3-4 and even 6-7, all togheter.

You need to camp the outpost, of course. Since there are dead times when there's none aroud.

During my catch, I've spotted totally:

-55 bots in american dist1 (same behaviour for all of them: stuck in outpost signs, /kneel in front of the rift warden when not needed, most of them in offline mode, default grey armor)

-7 bots in chinese dist1 (they run instead of sos+7UA healers a single rt/nec, you can spot them easily like for the ones in ad1)

-5 bots in international dist1 (ritualists with 8 team party, same behaviours as above)


Well, I think these are not little numbers at all.




A friend of mine already send the report, I think. Or he's near to send one in few time (he just need to take more screenshots to show at best the situation)

I'm going to do the same when I log in again in the game.

I was there this afternoon to check WHO were them and HOW MANY of them.

And I came up with a list full of 67 different account names that need to be monitorated by anet.



Last but not least, some of the accout I checked, visually, they look to be hacked accounts. They have worthy armors, titles, etc

Or maybe they are just random peeps running a bot individually for their own.

I'm hanging out there and I am starting to notice a pattern too. Their pattern to running to the statue is terrible, as they try to run to a portal, then turn the other way.

/EDIT

I kneeled right before two bots got there, they both got stuck at the rift warden, and I guess their code times out after 20s or so, because then they kneeled themselves and left.

[QUOTE=Maya Cerestiez;5651969]They're using the SoS build with a team full of UA healers. We've found this team build to be on lots of recovered hacked accounts. /QUOTE]

I've heard of this before, but I don't get the point? A full team of heroes= crap drop rates, Im guessing the full team of UA healers is that they can insta rez very quickly?

Replace 7 heroes with 7 additional accounts. Assume all 8 accounts are controlled by a single person or group.

But they arent using other people, they are using heroes..

Lol, this district is going crazy now...must be prime-time-bot-time in Zin Ku Corridor right now

That probably works out better. More parties assaulting UW would probably be better than a single party with 8 accounts, assuming they're all bots. Bot accounts don't care about drop rates anyway, although drops aren't assigned out of compass range. They could have the heroes flagged away until or unless a party member dies. It's not possible to observe their behavior in UW unless you are ANet or NCSoft with access to server logs.

im just curious in their farming style. Is it send the rit bot to farm solo, and if it dies, UA heroes comes to the rescue? if thats the case theres a lot of variables that would affect the botters bot.

ok i appologise now lol`ing at that , thats a question that would show who bots by the answer.Normal player wont think on how its done also they cant really answer , but a bot user would be able to answer that and in doing so would show they bot - if that makes sense

It is interesting watching them interact with the voice since it turns, then still kneeling anyway.

/report and send in screens, that's the best we can do to resolve it.

I thought about doing that, but I wasn't sure how much good screens would be for evidence, unless you're taking frame by frame screens of them standing...standing...standing....kneeling etc.

Sidenote: Can I get MY account banned for reporting all these botters? I ask because I reported about a dozen in an hour earlier while bored and afk'ing there at work.

I'm sure something will be done about this...

... after the month of June.

of 2016 when they shut the servers down...

I have a bit of free time so I suppose I will explain what these Rt/x and x/Rt bots are doing in zin ku corridor. They also are in chantry of secrets in elona and also TOA in tyria.

It is a 7H team comprised of whatever minimum heroes available to the account since a lot of them are bought or stolen. The 7H team all runs UA as their elite skill with either some prot, heal, or damage as the rest of their bar. I have seen quite a few variations.

The actual bot being the player account runs a SoS bar as expected by all the Rt. The bot moves to several waypoints around the start area of UW while not on a strict timer but rather checking for the death of all enemies within in a certain range of a waypoint or team before moving onto the next point for aggro. It is possible they also check for energy and health levels of the heroes which is possible as that info isn't strictly serverside.

The goal of this team is to make it to the labyrinth reaper and pop him making sure he is secure. The next part is the interesting part.

The way dialogues work in gw you can send dialogue packets so to speak that aren't normally possible as a normal human player. That is why as mentioned they enter uw weird sometimes.

The big deal with being able to send any dialogue you want is in UW the way it is designed you can teleport as if all the reapers are up. So their first stop is bone pits then plains, and finally spawning pools clearing all these areas.

So they skip on the slow and tedious mountains using this exploit/hack to get to the high ecto drop areas thus making 7h not such a detriment to your ecto rates.

If you are wondering well hell I am going to rush out and get me this neato setup gl it is a private system and by the looks of it over 100 accounts strong. My guess is one of these major RMT sites running them.

I left quite a bit out of their workings but that should enlighten people as to what those are actually doing at least at the most basic sense.

That sounds like a major bug on Anet's side. Only checking for quest completion to activate the teleportation from the client's side? Silly game developers

Obviously a really inefficient farming method, but bot farmers care about a lot more things than efficiency.

i don't understand how they are to teleport without popping reapers?

My understanding from what spun ducky said:

The game lets you teleport whenever you send a certain message to Anet's servers. Your own PC checks whether you should be able to teleport, but obviously you can modify code on your own PC to send the teleport message regardless. When Anet's servers get that message they teleport you without double checking that you can actually teleport, which is where the check really needs to be.

A fairly common exploit in anything with a user-server setup, always boils down to trusting the user's PC instead of verifying things on the server's end.

All Anet's fault for telling me to stop reporting bots.
I kept that place clean for most of the latter half of last year while waiting around for people and now that I stopped, all is "back to normal"

Also, the majority of them are not hacked accounts. The RMT companies don't rely on that anymore, it's risky for them to do that. Most of the bots are brand new accounts since it's so cheap to buy the game. They hire "levellers" to run the bots from Shing Jea Island up to Zin Ku Corridor (or ToA, Chantry of Secrets etc depending on where they wanna farm from). I've seen them happen and even befriended one of the levellers on accident . They don't work for the rmt companies but they know everything about them and I learned a lot!

I don't completely agree with this because I've seen the bots as they've started out in Shing Jea Monastery and only some of them get run through eotn for the heroes. Most don't and they end up using henchmen.

If it's a hero team, either it's a hacked account (which are mostly used for feather farming in jaya bluffs, not ecto farming) or the particular leveller ran the bots through eotn.

Also, there is more than one type of bot. The ones that we mostly see are the 8man party farmers, but sometimes you'll see solo ecto farming bots! There aren't as much of these and I mostly see them in the asian districts. These ones, imo, aren't controlled by rmt companies but by other, more secretive and less populated groups of people. These are more advanced bots as they aren't as easily detected through anet's bot detection system and it took almost a month of investigation to finally take down some of them. I'm thinking that these are the bots that are run by the actual people that wrote the codes and they know how to make the bots as undetectable as possible. Fun fact: these bots are also programmed to farm the gvg zquest!

I banned around 1500-2000 ecto farming bots late last year (maybe more because sometimes the support team told me they managed to find more bot accounts that were under the same ip) that it almost certainly meant that less ectos were being introduced into the game, which is why I sometimes think that I was the cause of the ecto price rise.... sorry everyone.

Sad to see that all my efforts didn't achieve anything though, other than make Anet some more cash.

It is actually a very lucrative farm weighing in at several stacks of ecto per 24 hours with the number of accounts running.

A fun piece of trivia the same packet manipulation technique for the teleport also use to let you enter UW for free it may still but I am not sure.

You should ask for a commission next time.

One can only hope that they've already learned that lesson in GW2. We'll know soon enough.

It's a minor miracle that the exploit either took this long to find or remained secret for this long. Duping got outed within six months. HM Urgoz got outed within a month. I think the Ebony Citadel glitch took two. This would have been available from a month after release, and practical at least since 2008.

absolutely no point in trying to stop them, do you realize how insignificant all this effort is for?

It is most likely less than 1% of all the bots you see.

This is the wrong attitude, my friend.

No, he has a point. Enforcement really isn't the answer, at least not the way ANet has gone about it. You don't cure these problems by playing Whac-A-Mole with the botters. That's inefficient, costly and ineffective. You cure them by fixing systems so that botters can't easily exploit them.

ANet has always been out of touch and slow to react when it comes to these issues. They deserve the criticism on this front. What they've always needed and lacked is a good intelligence operation to keep abreast of botters' methods and a small team of people with the right sort of creativity. Defending against this sort of problem requires both anticipating problems in system redesigns (stuff like red /resign just should never happen) and plugging holes quickly once they spring up.

I do agree with this, but superraptors does have a point.. We can fairly say that the number of abusers( botters/syncers/bug exploiters,..) left in the game is quite high...
Remove them all and the following will happen :
- a lot of ecto sellers/gold traders will disappear and it will have some impact on the economy of the game
- that's about 60% of the PvP population, the rest 40% won't be able to do anything else than some RA and C GvG At's, that's all..

Note that i'm completly for doing something against abusers, but I think they should have done something in the past; at this point, if they " removed " all botters and abusers, they would also have to do something in PvP especially, and i don't believe they plan on doing that..

For PvE anyway, i think there will always be botters somewhere. Even if they were farming elementals in ascalon without doing anything, they would still have some profit.. What i mean is that they could still go farm in an empty place where noone goes and still farm, although profit will be less..

It very difficult for Anet to plug the exploit holes in this game. Their usual method is to adjust mobs(position, skillbars etc.) but that can be difficult to do without making it extremely hard for normal groups trying to complete UW.

I believe this all comes down to the fact Anet used all their resources to make GW2 as bot free as possible. They seem to think this will redeem their failures in GW1.

Has Anet ever considered using a punkbuster type program?

You're never going to remove the possibility of automation entirely. What you want to do is create as large a profit disparity between automation and the efforts of a talented human as possible. At that point the gold farmer has the former bot supervisors play a single account rather than manage the efforts of dozens, which is the closest thing to victory that is attainable.

Wouldn't it just be easier for Martin, Regina, Stephane, or Rubi to read this and have someone spend 10 minutes of their day in Zin Ku and see that it's happening, than for people to keep sending in screens of it?

Am I being naive? If so, flame away