Zin Ku Corridor aka The new Bots Heaven

You naive!
Jokes apart, I think there can never be a mechanism to stop botters, so even if it doesn't accomplish much I see nothing bad in reporting...a drop is not the ocean, but it's always better than nothing...but maybe it's me the one being naive?

But as someone said the only way to really stop them would be stopping to buy what they sell, no market no gold sellers...and honestly I still can't understand by far why people buys this stuff for real cash...it's a bit crazy and also it's not like being rich in gw gives any advantage...

Well people are buying the costumes from the ingame store for ~$6 only to look better. I can easily imagine people paying the same amount of irl cash for the ecto to buy them a tormented shield, a vs and an elite armor to look good.

Difference is ofc that you can obtain these items by playing which isn't true for the costume, so they're not fully comparable but you get the point.

Just saw this in ToA aswell, rit with r1 luxon(farmed <1hour) zoned in, pm'd him straight away. no response.
went to grenth statue
went to merch
went to grenth
i had /kneel before him, but he still did, and yeah, they just walk to like, the grenth-totem, not close to the actual spot.

I'm interested in a practical example of such a fix for GW.

Would never work, 95% of guild wars players aren't more talented than bots, and they would leave.

Using some sort of captcha-like system to access UW, like voice of Grenth asking players logic questions based on Guild Wars universe.

Would that work though? Even with a big pool of questions, my limited understanding is that bots can parse text directly from the client, which basically makes it a simple list comparison to get the correct answer. Of course, they could use a random, distorted graphics 2 word combination like captcha does which would bypass that problem... (ish) but I doubt they'd be willing to do something like that.

Of course there are plenty of other places botters could bot but even the best places would probably cut their average income to a third of what it is in UW.

The idea of a captcha fails on multiple levels. One this doesn't even interfere with the real problem being botting as they would just move to another spot if it actually worked.

Two a good amount of captcha systems have been cracked already as in automated answering just would need to pull from a web project if that is the case.

Three the biggest failure as a extremely intrusive anticheat protection that would be more bothersome to the actual players while still not giving the insurance that it 100% protects.

The final issue is why answer a captcha when you would most likely be able to mess with the game packets to give a correct answer anyway.

You have to design rewards with this in mind. Attempted solutions like Urgoz, The Deep and DoA both promoted skilled team play and contained built-in solutions to the techniques used by botters. Sure, we found exploits like Tis's evil genius plan to suicide players on The Deep portals and use Rebirth to get those players into just three rooms, but botting still wasn't going to fly.

The problem with Green weapons as a reward is that they get supplied until the supply pushes the price below the time price of producing the weapons, given consumer demand. Then the area dies. DoA has fared better since Armbraces can be used as a high-end currency item, but it just takes too long to complete for casual players. If the end chest in The Deep spit out Ectos and the end chest in Urgoz spit out Shards (and UW/FoW didn't exist), we might have a better end-game PvE situation.

In any event, the takeaway is this: due to sunk costs on PC hardware, you have to get this right at the beginning. It takes a much greater disparity to get the gold sellers to switch from a capital-intensive (PC botting) strategy to a labor-intensive (skilled players in a low wage country) strategy once the botters already have a capital-intensive, PC botting operation established.

This is somewhat tautological and is also the result of a selection effect. Not sucking requires effort, but not sucking has never paid well enough relative to sucking to encourage most PvE players to invest that effort. Increase the disparity, and more people will make the effort. It's also likely that some players would become frustrated and give up as you suggest. That's a well known sad song for the PvP community.

However, the talented PvE players left for games that better rewarded skill. Which pool of players would you rather surround yourself with?

That's entirely right.. The biggest problem isn't the reward in itself.. Overall, if a good work is required for a good reward it's fine..but most players just want easy areas with no risk and very good rewards..
I'm pretty sure there are unfamous places that some players managed to beat easily along times and giving " correct " rewards..The same goes with PvP : i was quite suprised to see that noone was farming the GvG quest yesterday( note : noone tried to make a group, it was mostly only 2 accounts + 4 henchs), although it's not especially hard to get a few wins in average( if you will face resigners or people from your level) and quite a good reward for it ...

That's probably the same reason why players usually fear losing so much in PvP, troll you on dnd or ignore.. Along years of no updates, we get used to farm over and over the same mobs with bad reactions, it's understandable..

Just an idea, but wouldn't bots be totally screwed if Anet rejigged UW/FoW so that ectos and shards didn't drop but were only a reward from the end chest and say, triple or quadruple the current chest reward? Or maybe a quest reward?

That would severely buff speed clears?

Depends how they did it. If they worked out the average ecto drops per clear, then balanced the chest or quests so that the average was still the same, it wouldn't buff SC's at all, but it would severely debuff bots.

Of course, it would then push everyone towards clears as opposed to farming solo, but is it that big a deal? Though if they did make it a random chance as a quest reward, the solos would still have something to do.

In an alternate universe...

Well it would kill rewards for playing UW how it was designed to be played, so I don't think it would ever work out. Ecto and Shard drops were consolation for repeated failed attempts at balanced PUGs into the elite areas. If ectos don't drop, then that means Anets intention is for us to speed clear*, which they have stated is against their intentions.

*in it's current form. speedclearing in general is fine, but we use SC as more like "beat the **** out of design holes with tools we shouldn't have" than "optimized speedrun"