Cheats, hacks, bots, exploits etc

I am spurred on to make this post only by feeling repeatedly ignored by GW support team when i have raised my concerns about the number of cheaters in Guild Wars currently. I have sent numerous complaints, only to be greeted by the same automated answers telling me to voice my concerns on the community forums - so i voice them here and now.

My first message to the support site for Guild Wars was concerning the hundreds of farming bots that were abusing Augury rock. When i say hundreds i am not exagerating, there has been in Augury rock until the recent nefr a continuous stream of farm bots leaving the area to farm griffons. After seeing them for myself i decided to look into it on the internet and in minutes i had found on a number of "hacker" sites an Augury farm bot advertised. They were in Augury rock for over 2 months before the nerf.
Now the very same bots have shown up in Droknars, all in the international districts, but a few in all other districts. If you have never seen the extent of ilegal farming bots, go and look for yourself, i for one had to turn off local chat channel because the spam trade the bots are producing was giving me a headache. (thats right, the bots even seel the wares they farm now)

I have comnplained a number of times about these blatent cheaters only to receive preset messages back from support saying were looking into it but will never tell you if we take action. The bots have been nearly a week and a half in Droknars now and theres no sign of them being stopped.

Another concern i have raised with the support site is of the insane number of adverts on Ebay for people selling in game resources and gold. Just today i looked and can see almost 1500 adverts for gold alone, and nearly 1000 more for items. Again the same automated response that they are looking into it but will never tell if they acted has been recieved by me. It's not an imposible thought that the support team are bots too at this point.

Yet another concern is with the manner in which the support team have dealt with farm bots, rather than to ban them all (for they would have to make hundreds of bans) they have made the areas tougher so you cannot solo farm them anymore. So to all you fair players who do solo farm but dont cheat, now you cant because of GW's unwillingness to ban cheaters it would seem. And consider how the GW economy is knowing that there are literally thousands of plat for sale for real money on EBAY, and that farm bots were not stopped in Augury rock for over 2 months (24/7 farming for over 2 months equates to a huge amount of in game gold) and ask yourself are the days you spend to legitimately gain your gold or items worth it considering the farm bots make the same in hours.

I also asked them why they needed to have referees in the world championships, but again i get only a automated response that doesnt answer my questions but only tells me to "tell it to the community forums"

If you dont believe what i am telling you go and spend 5 mins stood nr the exit to Talus chute in Droknars Forge, and you will be amased by how obvious the bots are, and by how little GW does to stop them.

Does anyone else have these concerns, does anyone else complain about these cheaters, is Anet doing anything about the frankly unbelievable amount of in game resources available from Ebay, is it worth paying for a game update like factions when after all anything new and unique will soon be farmed by cheaters to the point of being worth little or nothing.

And the biggest question is WHY not name and shame the cheaters. Why do fair players not deserve to know a scammer, hacker, cheater has been banned. Instead we seem to get another bot produced "we have banned 50 accounts this month for using bots" type message. Look in Droknars then ask yourxself are any of these bots getting banned?

These are my oppinions, after playing GW for over 1300 hours in 4 months i feel aggreived that my time energy (in creating and running a giuld) has been wasted. If i got a pound for every time a player has said to me "you cant cheat in GW" i might have half the money the bot users have made from cheating.

I can surely tell you NCsoft takes cheating and ebayers seriously, but I am not sure about the bot.

I have reported to NCsoft 3 times, the 1st time I reported a ebayer trying to sell something on eBay as I see his name was displayed. 1 day later he canceled his item on eBay for the reason "this item is no longer available" If you want to report them, give evidence of their in-game information, who are they supposed to ban by merely looking at those ad??

The 2nd time I reported a scammer who took my money away after I gave him several 100k. The guy was on my fd list and I never see him on since then.

The 3rd time I reported the scammer using another account yet the same name, I reported him again with screenshots of a few conversation, after that I never see him on again. That guy didn't actually cheat me anything this time, but NCsoft banned him based on the conversation. Now I just don't care about giving money people first if the amount is a bit over 100k becasue they will get ban if they try to steal my money away.

NCsoft will never tell you what action they will take but you can predit what will happen to them when you add the guy in your fd list.

It's impossible for Anet to ban all the bots out there, or, for that matter, to track down every ebayer and do something about it. And you know what else? The bots, the ebayers, THEY DON'T AFFECT ME. At all! I don't care about fluctuating ecto prices. I don't care about your precious gold item ecomony. As far as I'm concerned, if someone wants to spend their time and money writing a little program that lets them go around finding items with NO REAL IN GAME WORTH WHATSOEVER, let them.

Conversely, if someone wants to spend real world cash on some strings of 1's and 0's, hey, all the power to them.

All i can say about the subject is Welcome to online games, i dont like it but the Bigger Guild Wars become in PvE the more bots will show up.


19/3/2006

Thanks to Shawn The Samurai for the post &The Boat Crew of Lion's Arch, for the chat logs. at gwonline.

There are "too many" bots, but I dont know if you would call it "cheating" persay. In my opinion, they are causing inflation, but whatever, ANet will never get all of them, but they sure could slim the number. I, personally hate bots, with a vengeance, but i dont know if cheating is the right word. I think ANet wastes to much time worrying about language abuse/bad names and etc. They should be concentrating on these programs, not even people, that are flooding their economy with excess gold. ANet needs to get things in order.

Using a bot is not cheating. Using a godmode or speedhack is. Bot, or macro if you like, is just there to assist you to do tedious tasks over and over again. I personally do not use bots because I'm not into farming, I'm into PvP. And I haven't seen any cheaters so far.

Ok I know that ANet should try and they for sure working in a way to fix this, but I think if Ebay and other Online’s sites got off there arse and controlled what is sold on there pages I am sure this gold farmers will have a hard time to sell this amount.

Its says on Ebay that is illegal to sell virtual items now it would only take one moderator every to type Guild Wars in the search to find hundreds of pages about gold been sold like it was said before.

But I am sure Ebay dint got rich buy doing the right thing so they close 20/30 of this gold farmers selling on there sites but they leave the remaining ones alive, cos at the end of the day Ebay makes a good profit, imagine how much the sell a day and how much Ebay get in Selling fee + Paypal fees.

You may have not seen any but at the start there as a few bots running in PvP arenas, i guess they wanted to get points dont really remember what it was done about it. maybe if dint work like they intended.

Edit, Sry about double post i wanted to edit and end up making a new one.

I don't know about you, but I haven't seen a big decline in prices of perfect rare-skinned items. If anything, all of the gold being sold on Ebay would have the opposite effect by creating inflation. I haven't really seen that either.

Whether farming bots or macros, they are just doing very simple repetetive farming which generally won't net much in the way of new and unique items. They may get a non-perfect gold or two now and then and sell them cheap, but that wouldn't have much of an impact on the economy at all.

The thing is Droknars Int 1 is a mo/w district. How many are bots and how many are real people, can't tell for sure. But i assure you`ll feel pritty stupid in that district if you`ll go there with anything but a mo/w.

Using a bot is not, in fact cheating. It is, however, using an outside program to influence and effect the game in a manner in direct violation of the user tearms and agreements, and has very much the same effect, often worse, than that of what a cheater does.

If you do ot realise this, you have absolutly no idea what botting realy is. If you simply disagree, it is because 1) you are retarded 2) you dont give a rats ass about the game, its economy, or playability, or 3) you are among the botters, and therefor should be banned.

How about tracing known bots activity and designing a response so gold/item drops go gradually to zero if overfarming?

How about tracing known bots activity and designing a response so gold/item drops go gradually to zero if overfarming?

Nice idea kylie, it would certainly help.

Another idea could be to move the exit to talus chute and removed the exit tag then just ban the hundreds of bots that get stuck where the exit should be and just stand there until their human controllers return.:P

Because that would hurt/piss of the honest farmers.If spots/skills/spells continue to be Nerfed this game will be dead.This is actually already done ,in a way kinda.

Ever get this message?


Now this pops up after killing 30+ enemy,so doesn't make much sence.

I was talking about a little more complex tracing, like:

account trade movements+farming spots visited and time spent farming+time the account is active+"solo" time.

Something like that...

It's obvious that anet implemented very little for the average player to be able to ignore spamming farmers. A 10 people maximum for the ignore list is pathetic.

Go to any popular trade town district 1 and add a few of the 3-6 line spammers to your ignore list and be amazed at how much clutter it cleans up without having to disable trade/local chat.

i feel the only way to solve it would be one huge nerf which would smite both bots and honest farmers..
its been done before but i feel a huge one with tremendous consequences coming...

BS

it is against the terms you agreed to.

official GW answer to that shit
their privacy policy prevents them from notifying anybody of an action taken.

an action taken may be days or weeks due to the high volume but it does get there eventually.

NEXT ON THE EBAY

yeah nice quote from Anet there, i stlil dont get if what they say there is true why hundreds of bots farmed augury rock for over 2 months, and finally were only stopped by Anet nerfing the area outside. I see no evidence that Anet ban people unfortunately.

And how would you? Do you have these accounts on your friends list? The sweatshop farmers (I refuse to call them bots because they do not fit the correct profile of a "bot") simply move to a new account if one is banned. ANet isn't under any obligation to announce to player names of those they have banned (and it would violate privacy if they did) - they can only state that they have banned sweatshop farmer accounts and will continue to do so.

ANet has to tread a very fine line. There are only a few actions they can take to combat the problem.

1) Ban server access via account - only affects one account out of thousands, and is very laborious.
2) Ban server access via IP address - account simply gets a new IP address.
3) Ban entire IP subnet - extremely dangerous and can mistakenly ban innocent accounts for potentially hundreds of users.
4) Ban the ebay sellers. Yes, there are a lot of advertisements for GW gold on ebay - yet the vast majority of them all come from the same handful of "businesses" all of which are simply sweatshop owners. getting that account info is tricky since they don't tell you the account up front, and the sweatshop owners would simply use mule accounts to transfer money anyway. Doesn't affect the revenue stream of the individual bot farmers to the owners.
5) Ban based on end user reports. Very time intensive, as reports of "bot activity" needs to be verified before actually banning the account. Multiply that by 1,000s of sweatshop accounts and you can see how monumental it can be.

Publishers of online games like GW, WoW, etc, have to pay employees to combat illegal activity - and the more they spend on combating this behavior, the less resources they have for game development/new content, bug squashing, balancing etc.

As far as googling the internet for farming bots in GW - yeah, I'm sure you'd find "hits" for them - but more than likely they are keyloggers and trojans falsely advertised as "bots". I'm pretty sure ANet employees have access to the internet and google as well as anyone else, and would be aware of any legitimate bot/hack/exploit programs if they existed - but would never admit it, since it can actually make things worse as thousands of wanna be hackers and script kiddies flood the servers for easy money. If anyone played D2 during the mass duping exploits, they can tell you how much "fun" that would be, as ordinary honest playerrs suddenly all decide to exploit the game at once.

As long as they don't get caught its fine

Hehe, im standing in droks 7, american sever, near the exit to talus...

In the past seven minutes, ive seen a total of 233 Mo/w going out the exit... Lots of them got kinda caught in the henchies, and some ran into the wall untill they finally moved closer to the exit.. One even tried selling me something.. So, i accepted for a laugh, turns out, he stood there for 3 mins without offering anything for sale? so i whisp him with no thanks. But, he doesn't do away, infact he follows me to the rune trader and back, then to storage, all the time trying to open trade with me, untill i finally whisp him with fck off.... Ironically he doesn't bother me again? If it was a bot, why would it have responded to my insult and left me alone? Unless maybe its set up to recognise these things, ha, ill never know.

I tell you these bots are plague!

Then i ask you the same question, how do you know these are all sweatshop farmers like you say. I would offer a guess that your just repeating what Anet tell us regularly to make us think they are acting. I am stating my oppinions based on a little research and a lot of observing.

To just accept what Anet say that these are not real "hacks or bots" but merely account stealers is to be naive IMHO. These sites do exist, they do give hacks and cheats out for many diff MMORPG's GW being just one of them.

If you were to spend a few minutes observing Droknars international districts you might come to a different conclusion than just simply accepting what Anet tell us they are doing is true.

Interesting statements about how Anet have to tread a fine line when dealing with this kind of abuse, but i ask you - why has the answer to bot farming been nerfing the areas if Anet actively ban the bots? Why were farm bots working from Augury rock for over 2 months and finally they stop -: because they were banned NO, because Anet nerfed the area so it became un-solo farmable. Why did it take a week for the "sweatshop farmers" to re-appear in Droknars after having their patch in Augury nerfed, because it took the sweatshop farmers a week to figure a way to farm solo in droks... NO, because it took the hackers a week to re-code the farm bot. The very same day that Augury got nerfed the "Augury farm bot" dissapear from the hacker sites, and a week later a new farm bot appeared....

To be frank i do not accept them telling me they are doing something when all evidence from observations lead me to believe they have not banned anywhere nearly enough bot users and fair players continue to lose out.

Went to international dist1 Droks last night to see the monks on parade! After standing there for about 5 minutes i got an invite, OK so I accept it and the little girl monk runs out the door. She powers up her enchants and runs off, I wait to see what happens and after a minute i run after her, catch up to her in the troll cave and throw up Symbiosis! Symbiosis + 55Monk= Instant death lol. Instead of getting any response from her she goes into town and then runs back out again. I did this a total of 5 times and got no response in chat so finally just left. This was either a bot or a very forgiving and patient person.
Tonight I think I will try to get an invite again and be nice this time for the free drops. My thought here is that if the bots will invite us into a party then we are cutting their income in half. Not solving the problem but might as well slow them down if we can!

i was happy because it takes skills to 55 in the hydras, griffions were way to easy. and that gets boring. farming is something that anyone with the need for an item, (such as a green) and not the ablity to it find them selfs(maybe they dont have the skills to run in B/P groups) they will allways be looking for the next good loot and gold dropping spots

What Mimi says is the truth. A good 75-80% (rough figures from my own testing) have legitimate people behind the keyboard. Bad english speakers? Yes. Bots? No.

Now, granted, they are in sweatshops doing the same repeatitive farming runs over and over again ... but technically they are not violating any of the terms of service by doing so. THAT is why they haven't been banned.

Yes we know they sell the gold on EBay and other places, that violates TOS ... but until they can be caught doing that (much harder to detect than botting) they will continue to make the Talus Chute exit look like the Mo/W Indy 500.

Quoted for truth. I'm sure that some sweatshops have custom coded their own "bot" scripts, but they're not about to give them away, that would be shooting themselves in the foot.

And the farmers don't sell the gold - they give it to their boss who "launders" the gold and sells it via ebay. You can't do anything about the farmers unless you can definitely PROVE they are bots, not human controlled - and the sweatshop owners know how to circumvent any "checks".

Repetitive behavior doesn't neccessarily mean "bots" it more likely means bored farmers doing the same thing for 12 hours six days a week.

of over 40 monks that i saw only one would reply

I'm sorry, but all these posts about sweat shops and what not, to me, is just starting to sound more and more unbelievable. The idea of a bunch of kids being stuck into a big room with expensive computers and internet connections farming their little hearts out on GW, with hardly any breaks or food and water is obsurd. For the tiny amount of profit they are making off GW gold/items sold for real money? I can hardly believe sweat shop owners would invest in all the computers/internet connections over something like child labor or anything else, just to get a few bucks a day. Doesn't seem likely, but bot programs built for farming does.

There has been some great TV programs about this and if you took the time to Google you would find many online articles.

http://www.firingsquad.com/news/news...?searchid=7804

There is also a great atrtical from NY times but you need to sign up to view it so I wont link it.

The Second Foundation

Um...it's not cheating? Guild Wars is a game meant to be played by human beings, not computer macros. Using a farming bot in GW is just as much cheating as it is to use an aimbot in a first person shooter. It's cheating because you're using something other than your own skill/time/concetration to advance yourself in the game.

Ok, well, I will try doing some more research into this type of idea, that article didn't really support any hard proof to me. It would be interesting to find out where this type of thing goes on at as well. Off to researching I go...

Well, I stand corrected, sorry. After reading this article which was very good.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/12/...ess/gaming.php

China, for the most part. Our dollar goes such a long way there, that the "couple of bucks" they seem to make from the sales on our side (less than an hour's work for most of us) is proportionally more in their own currency, sometimes a week's pay depending. There is alot of information out there on it, i've no doubt you'll be able to find more than you wanted

They use sweatshops to make clothes, they use sweatshops to make toys, why wouldn't they use sweatshops to exploit the game. Virtual gold sweatshops actually make much more than a few bucks a day. They actually make much more profit than other sweatshops. See all they have to do is initially buy the computers, and pay a small upkeep cost each month for internet connections, add on tiny wages to all their workers and they don't have to pay for much else. Other sweatshops that make clothes or toys or anything else have to pay for a lot more including a constant stream of new supplies/materials, constant stream of transportation for both incoming supplies and out-going products, occassional upkeep of machinery, and of course the tiny wages.
I don't even wanna know the exact ammount of their profit but it's definitely off the charts in comparison to any other business I can think of.

i am honestly happy that you have a standard of living that does not even admit the possibility of living standards so low that adults (not kids) would do this for 12-15 hours a day to make what is for them a living wage.

enough for basic food and shelter for them and family.

50 cents an hour over there is enough to keep someone alive and a roof over their heads.

they would not trust little kids with the equipment but young adults and adults yes.

they make a bare living instead of starving and each higher layer makes a better living and the people that run it are rich.

proven by enough people so it is not simply a myth

why do you think these old guys retire overseas- they take thier little 500 dollars a month and live like king kong over there.. unless they end up in russia and get sold like in hostel

I think Anet should do what Valve did, call in the FBI and have them hunt down these relentless ebaying-bottish sweatshop farmers like grown-ups.

I remeber when 55hp monk's started farming in aungery rock,at one time all the districts were full with bot's lol

Stand by the Talus Chute exit in Drok's Forge late at night. You see a stream of monks in an ant-like fashion entering and exiting the area. Bots galore.

No way there are humanl players...

Legit, honest players are the ones that really suffer. These bot programs? Well the users of these get to sell in-game gold for real cash on Ebay.

Sorry, the FBI has no jurisdiction over in China. All they can do is complain - if the host country (China for example) doesn't have any laws against this behavior, there is little anyone can do about it, except to ban accounts.

The problem is that if you can solo it, it's bot'able - period.

If you want to allow solo farming you will never stop them, you will never slow them down, there is nothing you can do about it. Testing tools available are good enough that you can automate testing (otherwise known as "botting"), even with graphical interfaces such as GW.

It's like free speech (or many other freedoms) - you either allow the actions to happen, including stuff you do not like, or you stop it altogether.

All it takes in one botter to figure it out. Once that one does it is all a matter of copying what that one does.

There has been much more money, much more people, much more brain-power expended on copy protection. Yet Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion was cracked before you could download the whole torrent. In less than one day how many thousands of dollars was rendered useless?

I can assure you that the copy protection is MUCH more difficult than a botter. I've written enough testing suites that I could fairly easily bot all my farming runs with some standard testing tools. I would guess a month or two to get most of the spawn possibilities down, another month or two to test it enough to be of "commercial" quality. After that it would take a *major* change (much more major than the AI update) to take more than a week or so to fix/test.

No, I don't like it. It ruins the game for those of us who actually play the game. It ticks me off the see what you describe. About all Anet could do is pay several people a full time salary (along with overhead) to search them out, investigate, and ban (and that is very expensive). I know I've followed a bot's path fairly closely in the past (most effecient is most effecient - I didn't know it was a bot path), I assume I will again. They have to balance screwing legitimate players and stopping the bots. Though the fact that I played missions (many times the blinking ones on my map), switched characters, and all sorts of other things *should* invalidate me being a bot - but anything can be automated to get around the filters.