Anyone else just got a perma ban?

With them restoring banned accounts, anyone guilty of "breaking the rules", be warned that someone is watching.

Glad to see the not guilty being allowed to play again. Until just a couple of days ago, I was unaware of the bans. Guess I spend too much time in the empty outposts and towns, never spending more than a minute or two in the busier ones.

Time to see if my missing friends have rejoined the game.

Well, it's now happened to me too.

Today all four accounts have gone kaboom. After spending so long playing and spending so much money, and even meeting my husband in-game, that is apparently that.

I have submitted a ticket but don't hold out much hope that anybody will even look at it for weeks.

ANET can beat the bots. u can set a script indepth to search for patterns . such as a agro code or even a timed skill set, a human player will not hit the same buttons or make the exact same moves 100% of the time . a bot on the other hand will make the same exact flux in move and skill hits. time is everything to a bot. with this script u can isolate the account IP and track its numbered code/path of codes the game runs threw the written code of the server and tell if its a bot or a player. they have it right to a point, but when u get a ego going that u just stopped XXX amount of botters and want to clear the rest u run the problem of banning ppl that didn't deserve it. and if they still had GM's that were not part of the problem from the start botting would not b as big of a problem as it is now. the other point of it is this. they are using the players personal IP not the server IP to do the bans, this is wrong u can ban the IP the account uses on the server "everyone has one" and not the ISP of the computer player. this in its own will clear accounts that are wrong doing and not hurt say the kids or parents that have diff pc's and all run from same ISP. just another thought of mine.

I guess the witch is hunting again....I am afraid to log onto my accounts now for fear of being banned again --still have no clue as to what triggered the flag on my accounts in the first place and since anet wont pony up...we could just all get re-banned again!

I understand them not wanting to tell us certain information, but if there is something that is causing innocent folks to get banned--they really should let them know the real reason not just a generic code.

Well ive been banned on the first wave which was my main for doing nothing.. and I look at all these stories here of unbanning which is kinda making me sad lol. I made another account and it also got banned yesterday night. No 3rd party usage or botting was present idk where they got this idea from.. Idk if its a computer system just banning or if its a person.. its seriously stupid and all the dedicated innocent people are getting punished.. Anyone else know if theyre still unbanning accounts?

So people are getting un-banned while others are being banned now...... wow...

Wait, so cosy. Did you get banned, unbanned, and rebanned?

I think anet has a few issues to fix... People are getting banned as other get unbanned.

I logged in this morning just fine. I'll try again tonight.

You know it's piss-easy to randomize a bot's timing and exact coordinates a little bit, right? I mean it's a piece of software. Come on.

I just got my accounts back, I hope it will stay this way now. Thank you to the one correcting this and to you guys for not giving up. It does kind of scare me to see people getting banned today as well though. Have you guys tried to log in again later?

Yeah I would also like to know what flagged our accounts and if there is anything other than the obvious we should avoid doing so we won't end up in this situation again. Took a month to get my accs back, I would hate having to go through that again.

Shazbawts program may still be banning people. They'll have to get that sorted out. He seems like quite the asshole tho. Locking & removing a thread that Gaile herself posted in & was investigating. He's got some balls albeit small but still.

Banned Jan 19, and were unbanned on or before Feb 19.

I'm not greedy, but resignation of the kid would be a boon.

How much you want to bet this was Shazbawt that removed my post? lolol

you kno I was going to comment on something someone said but I think they dug the hole enough to prove they them self are a botter and should not b on game. thanks for proving my point and this is nothing more then a forum

^^^ HUH



They need to revert all bans back to bans now because this is really confusing trying to figure out who to re-add to the friends list and who to remove

Im writing software, have been writing software for years (about 15 years now) and I can tell you:
The kind of algorithm you proposed needs about three times as much server performance than a game server gw1's calibre nowadays. If not even more.
Tbh, having customer support sift through botting reports every few months is just way cheaper, AND it has the added benefit of avoiding a debacle as the one that just happened anet. Because funny as it is... human brain sees patterns just way better than computer algorithms, in cases such as this, where its difficult to even find the correct parameters.

A computer algorithm wont be able to tell the difference between someone just farming heavily for hours, or a bot doing that. It will ban both. Because both show the same pattern.

Lets say: online for hours, doing repetitive farming, probably always walking the same way within a certain margin, having more than one account active at the same time.
Ive done that... me, not a bot. During festivals, I sometimes spent hours on farming something mindlessly to get those festival items. Having a second account open at the same time and doing some trading half heartedly at the same time. I mean, seriously... probably half the community did something like that now and then.

A pattern recognition software would flag such a behaviour as botting. To automate a software like that, you could say... if flagged 20 times, please ban, because botter. Because theres no reason to invest heavily into such a recognition software (lets call it bot guard) and then having to pay humans as well for being the last contoll-instance.

See the dilemma? A bot (piece of software) can copy human behaviour down to the ig socializing. Bots in gw1 seem to be rather uninspired. In other games I saw bots so sophisticated, Id have loved to see their coding (kinda like an automechanic wanting to see an engine, ya know? not all automechanics are chop shop owners)


I can really understand Shazbawt for getting frustrated about it. Having to deal with tons of bot reports, bots and only limited ressources (gw doesnt even have somekind of botshield). Id be tempted too, to implement some kind of algorithm I thought would be perfect to automate detection.
But tbh, the difference between me and him is... I wouldnt risk implementing it without heavy testing, lets say testing it for a year, letting the software flag accounts for me and I do the banning if I can confirm it.
And who knows, maybe thats exactly how he wanted it to be handled, just to get some guy from management say he has to implement it NOW or get fired.
Happened to me too a few times, is quite common.

Im admitting freely, I rather have my doubts about Shazbawt. Especially after reading some of his comments on twitter. But Im trying to see the whole picture and not condemn him from the start.

I know this is a wall of text, but... maybe its worth reading Especially if you got banned without doing something wrong, and are just so ANGRY atm.

For everyone saying they should just log movement and things and just kill repeating patterns. Im sure arenanet would love to create terabytes+ of log data for every incoming and outgoing packet to determine that...

lol that might have been the thing to push her over the edge. She probably said wait a minute, who the hell are you to lock a thread I was posting in?

Yeah this haha. And I feel the botters should not be unbanned. They were banned for a reason. They cheated.

Yllena I want to thank you for that I did in fact read ever single bit of it. maybe his boss did say place it now and run it. but on the other hand if he did not and got fired he could argue it and b in the right to say " it was not rdy" but by his twitter posts I would bet money he was not given the order from his boss. and I do understand what u were saying about bots and how some of them are rly hard to track, I do kno ppl that use bots for other games and just the work they put in to them to hide them from GMs and other security, myself and my wife along with some friends were ban and still have not gotten our accounts back as of yet and we all are mad not going to say we are not. I just want to ty again for a bit of a breakdown

Seconded.

Yes, thank to this forum, and most importantly the community here who speak out. I am so grateful that anet is listening and fix the problem. It is a bit slow and hurt no doubt. I hope this type of stupid ban wave will not happen again.

I guess they have reinstated the accounts they are going to I guess the rest of us whom were wrongly Perma Ban are screwed? man do I wish they would just say something to us to let us kno they are still working on it or something

Give them time prolly just going through them abit at a time.

(I am still unbanned---but who knows what caused the ban in the first place, so until then I have been limiting my play time).

sooo..we see new bans on different people, some bans not lifted, and...has anyone who was banned then unbanned then rebanned (spell checker really doesnt like those words )?

this reminds me of a story.

a person is in their car driving along on a road (doing the speed limit etc.)....when he looks into his rearview mirror and sees the lights of a patrol car. As a law abiding citizen, he thinks 'did I do something, do I have a tail light out or something?' as he pulls over. The officer gets out of the car and comes over to him 'licence and registration' they say....the person hands these over and asks 'what seems to be the problem officer?' to which the reply is 'you will find out, get out of the car, you are going to jail'. The now shocked person does as is told, is rough housed by the officer (yeah, they do that)...and taken to the county lock up....where the person is incarcerated, booked, locked up, tossed in the slammer,.....and not allowed to ask any questions (nor given his one phone call).....a week or two passes by. A jailer comes to the door and says he is free to leave, not believing his ears the person asks 'huh, I am free to go?' 'yes' and he is let out. He goes to the lot to retrieve his towed car, checks it over to make sure there is no light out, etc, finding nothing. He drives away...when a few minutes later ...yes the lights in his rearview mirror appear again. Bewildered yet again, he pulls over. Yet again he is tossed in jail with no reason, and left to sit there wondering what the heck he did.

if you were that person what would you think?

Still in fear.

Some got unban but banning still going on.
Wish to know how i was flagged to avoid future reban again.

Very much not innocent of things and was unbanned on alts and never placed a ticket.

At least you're honest =)

When you get 21 accounts banned you shouldn't play dumb. I knew what I was doing but some of them did nothing. So maybe they looked at what they did instead of guilty by association.

there are 2 ways to look at this.
1 many of the folks who did something wrong have confessed to doing wrong--
2 many of the players now have a strike against their names, meaning this was your warning, if you are caught doing this again the next time there will be no unbanning (whether you were cheating or not, they have not said they are removing the strikes we have on are accounts)

Though from the looks of it is appears they unbanned a vast majority of the banned...perhaps now they will just look at those accounts that HUMANS can see are actually botting (no idea how they find the 3rd party programs...though still hope its not a 'computer program' doing the finding...).

Couple ways they could detect botting, would be hours played while actively doing things.
Botting Kurzick faction for a week straight.
Title progression over a period of time.
Botting 3,000 chests in 5 days and then getting max Kurzick title in 7 days.

While hopefully its people looking into situations it also would be a lot of sifting to do, considering a couple people I've seen have over 100 accounts. Hard to tell though. Another thing would be once they find an account that has botted they look into hardware banning, so that way that any account logged from that computer is also flagged. Also IP banning as well. No idea though, moved onto other games for now, maybe talking on here has gotten my unbanned accounts banned again. RIP my darlings.

So happy 2 of the accounts were unbanned. I didn't check my others because I am too scared to log into too many at once.

Also waiting to play to see how the bans pan out. I don't wanna get banned again.

This is basically what I suggested Anet should look at to determine botters.

Also, I think if you win 3 or more matches against the same henchman team in Halls, that you should be banned for syncing. Just some food for thought, Anet, as it is obviously syncing.

Seriously? WTF are they doing over there? They fix one of their large blunders, then immediately start doing the same damn thing.

I can already picture the conversation that happened in the ArenaNet offices this morning


Gaile Gray: "Chrissy! Why did you just ban hundreds of accounts in Guild Wars 1?"

Chris Cleary: "Because I could."

Gaile Gray: "You can't just ban people for no reason!"

Chris Cleary: "Why not?"

Gaile Gray glares at Chris Cleary

Gaile Gray: "Just... just restore all of the accounts you deleted in the last few weeks."

Chris Cleary: "But I don't want to."

Gaile Gray: "Do it or I'm cutting off your supply of Mountain Dew"

Chris Cleary: "Oh fine! ............ THERE! All accounts restored. Happy?"

Gaile Gray: "Okay, good. Don't ban anymore accounts unless they do something against the rules. Can you do that?"

Chris Cleary: < Blank Stare >

Gaile Gray: "Alright then... I'm going to leave now"

Chris Cleary: "I'm a game security agent!"

Gaile Gray: ". . ."

Gaile Gray walks out the door, gives one tentative glance back at Chris Cleary, then walks off down the hall.

Chris Cleary peeks through his window blinds in time to watch Gaile Gray get into her car and then drive home. He then jump back into his chair and flicks his finger over his head.

Chris Cleary has become "Shazbawt - Destroyer of Accounts". He randomly presses the ban button on his computer while tittering like a schoolgirl.

Chris Cleary: "He he he!"

Not innocent of syncing on my alt and still banned. So it seems they do get it right occasionally.

With syncing at certain points HA was so dead that if you wanted to get the title you needed to either sync or get so many people motivated to queue up that it wasn't worth peoples time. Same thing goes for Codex, the issue though is that botting it became common practice. IF you sync up it should be just uncontested but you run the risk of someone finally being like alright let me get some people and kick the syncer out.

I don't think people sync codex for the title ^

As for ha. Syncing is match manipulation. Should result in ban IMO. People don't care about the titles, they just want the emote so they can run around kammadon and pretend they got it legibly in 2009. Syncers should stay banned


And my fanboy posts again! Hai

Wait, so anet unbans the actual botters and those with a ton of alts and lets them play and have all their crap back, then goes and bans people who are innocent? Seriously? Good going, anet, you failed.

This is getting ridiculous. Anet has seriously screwed me up. I was rightfully banned, sure, I accepted that, its fine. But when they start just unbanning everyone randomly its just not cool. Ive stayed banned since the first wave, and Im sure I will forever be banned, no point in putting tickets in or anything, but its just sick to me that some prolific botters are getting unbanned for no reason while everything Ive worked for is left to rot without reason (Note I wasnt always a crapper). Heck maybe they only banned me for using Multi launch or some stupid sh1t.

I know I am just one guy but I sure as hell will not be touching another Anet/NCSoft game again for as long as I live. Its really crap that they have to put such a horrendous turn on what was my favorite game of all time.

JUST LEAVE GW ALONE!

came home from work last night and all 8 of my accounts were banned. has the use of texmod and multilaunch now been deemed bannable? I'm beyond a little upset about this especially after 6+ years of loyalty.

Same.. all I use is a GW timer and a personal textmod which it states on GWWIKI thats it ok to use.. however I have been also banned 1month ago on the 1st wave and my new 2nd account about a day or 2 ago.. Anet rlly need to sort their shit out cos its really frustrating. No bots or 3rd party software were used at all and I get punished. Also thanks for ignoring GW1 tickets.Yeah thanks anet

I would say all previous official comments from staff on what's ok, it's now out the window. It's not the same staff running the show anymore. Texmod and GWMultiClient might have been accepted before, while the new crew have different opinions.