Merged: Annoying "Chinese bots" in droks

Wow guys, you seriously don't know how to distinguish between bot and sweatshop farmer.....

Bot: Mostly Mo/E and Mo/W who take the same EXACT path out of droks everytime. The true bots I was sure 100% that were bots by the path they took were mo/w

Sweatshop farmer: Mo/W or range of other secondaries that actually TALK and don't take the same exact path every single time. Those guys give you free exp. Some even have GUILDS.

Don't talk rubbish. It was about 10mins after the servers come back up from maintenance, they were not normal in how they were there and stacked at storage. It was like some change in the game code had confused them and they were stuck. Then it was like someone noticed and they all left, not in groups as you would if they were a party, but 1 by 1 within seconds of each other.

Just cause I'm not you, don't class me as guilible, I have enough common sense and know enough to realise it wasn't a normal party meeting up.

Anyway, I just wanted to post this because I had been reading this thread and it seemed related, so thought I would post it. Its funny how aggitated you seem by my post...not bought any ebay gold yourself have you. lol Now take your flaming post attitude and go jump.

most others district ppl are spamming WTS and WTB as well.

I agree, most of them are likely to be sweatshop farmers from China etc accounting for all the spamming of WTS in both US/Int Dist of Forge. Perhaps its mentioned here before, that its not easy to program a bot program to aviod mobs while running to the troll cave spamming skills at the correct time, picking up loot zoning back to town and selling them and repeat since they arent really any shortcut keys we can use normally for those things. If theres a bot program that can really do all that....the programmer probably should spend his time on other bigger ambition with his skills.

Its easy to try to spot a sweatshop farmer, while they are in town just open trade/join party/pm one of them and they will most likely try to sell you something and conversations will most likely include things like: I SELL YOU CHEAP! OK! YOU BUY NOW!! YES! peace

So now they all must be bots because they all left around the same time? Interesting.

They may very well be bots, but these conditions are not sufficient proof to say, without a doubt, that they are. If you've heard of flash mobs, they could have just decided to make a large suspicious group, stand around in Droks int1 for a few minutes, and then disappear. It's unlikely, but some people seem in a rush to condemn others. What happens if you just banned 20 legit accounts?

There are many other situations in which they may be legit players, but I feel throwing them out will net the same "They look like bots, so they have to be bots. And that's enough for me." response. Are you a fan of witch hunting?

I also found it interesting how you jumped to suggest that I buy gold just because I'm not so quick to accuse like you are. "What!? You don't think she's a witch? You must be one of them! Burn them both!!".

Actually there are very few real bots in this game, simply due to the inefficeny of their success. A co-worker of mine from singapore showed me one at an internet cafe, it was the biggest PoS I'v ever seen. Worked about every 4 to 5 runs outside droks, often running into gashers, getting nuked by avicara and get stuck behind a tree, getting disrupted by trolls. We both had a good laugh, since it took the thing about an hour to get a little over 500 gold.

Most of them are sweatshop farmers, who have little understanding of what they are even doing. I'v taken screenies of this and they talked to me as well. Lets just say they dont get very far, which is probably why they require so many farmers.

Now, Chinese farming does not hurt the economy. If you really understand real Economics, you will understand why this statment is true. God, you have no idea how wrong this statment is in Economics. It's just the same as saying outsourcing hurts the economy, which it doesn't.

Consumers Benifit
First, the effects of the chinese farmers create a huge, positive externality on general players providing cheap, inexpensive items. In this game a 14^50 req 8 long sword costs 40k from an American seller, but now I can buy it for 5K from a chinese farmer. People who have real life money and demand for items are able to obtain then them through eBay, MAXIMIZING THE GAINS FROM FREAKIN TRADE.

Producers Benifit
Second, the chinese farmer are mostly real people. Do you ever wonder why they work in sweatshops ? Are they not being exploited ? hmm... lets look at the alternatives to working as a sweat shop chinese farmer. Prostitution, homeless person, pornography, criminal uh... wanna try think up other alternatives to sweatshop working when you have no money, no education, no trade skills to begin with? Chinese farmers don't do this because they want to, they do this because it beats the hell out of the alternatives.

The pie is getting BIGGER... this is a pareto improvment

Losers, Anet propaganda and Inflation
Lastly, chinese farming does hurt Arena Net, by essentually capturing potential economic rents that should belong to Arena Net. This is potential money that could in theory belong to Arena Net and not the chinese farmers and their bosses. Arena net uses this games "economy", as a reason to hate chinese farmers claiming "item rareness" and other nonsense. Arena Net and NC soft are buisnesses, just like any real buisness you only care about profit maximization and will gauge the most money possible from a product.

Inflation, only happens when the government does nothing but inject money into an economy temperarily solving deficit problems. The chinese farmers are no just giving away millions of gold to anyone for free, they charge real money for gold. This is not inflation... its a secondary market that has developed for so called "guild-wars gold". Guild-wars gold is not the same as saying it's "money" since it's not a government regulated medium of exchange. New gold is being "created" by everyone meaning that everyone has a magic machine that can print dollar bills, not just the chinese farmers. Everyone is causing the so called "inflation" not just the chinese farmers.

What Arena net should have done is set up their online own store which sells items for real money, to mitigate the secondary market that was bound developed.

Won't only people with the most real money afford rare skin items?
Theres something in Economics called "demand", but only about 1/4th of the people who know this word actually knows what it means. Your willingness to pay dictates how much you "want" a specific good. If someone is willing to pay $600 USD for a good why not let them.

Uh.. how about its not fair to the rest of us who can't afford it!
Real Economics is seldum considered "fair".

I see a few problems with this statement:

1) Bot or regular player, you don't always zone into a town in the same location, so you wouldn't take the exact same path out of town every time.

2) Like anyone else, these 'bots' also have to hit the merchant and/or storage from time to time (again goes against your exact same route theory).

3) From wherever you are in town, as long as its in your radar, you can hit Alt and then click on the Talus Chute sign. This will take you over essentially the same route every time as long as you're coming from the same area. All you have to do is take control over your character just before you get to the exit.

4) Not every character takes the same route every time - you would have to watch the same character over and over to see if it was actually the same exact route. While I'm sure lots of people like to watch the so-called bots come and go, I doubt they watch the same one each time they zone into town. Watch as they exit...if they truly took the exact same route, they would be going single file to the exit; they don't.

I've said it before, but I once got many of these 'bots' to start DANCING! that proved for me they are mostly people, individual people who occasionaly take a break, but pretty much they are hard at it all the time - be nice to them and the term 'chinese farmers' is honestly bloody racist, it's like me calling someone a black idiot... Just think about it.

Beeline, you seems to be the only aggresive poster here... if you want to make a point maybe you shouldn't call people brainless to start off with.
After all this talk... the best solution which has been mentioned many times is for people to stop buying gold from these so call "chinese farmers" on ebay. But since this most likely wouldn't happen, people just have to suck it up. Besides, if you spent enough time on a game to get so furious about things that harder affect you, I think you zealots need to take a step out the door and enjoy some sunshine.
by the way, "chinese farmers" used in this context is very racist and the community should stop using this term. Its not like white people and black people don't farm.

finally i think this thread is extermely pointless and people will start flamming soon (or already have)... why don't we just close this?

I know, I know, everybody knows that there are farm bots in GW. I went to see them for myself and sat by the exit to Talus Chute in Droks, taking screenshots of the farm bots as they run by. There are many 55 monks that look suspicious, and I know that many actual players farm out of there, so I only took pictures of monks that ran the exact same route. I didn't move at all, I just stood right beside their run path and let them come to me. In at least one of the pictures you can see 2 bots running in complete sync with each other (1 monk, 2 names). Most of these bots aren't in guilds.

edit: picture censored


Want to see for yourself? Just go to Droks, sit by the entrance to Talus Chute and watch for 55 monks running by that are following the exact same run path, without stopping. There's an awful lot of them, and you know that they must be unbalancing the game economy.

And it turns out that 90% of 55 monk bots are female.

You can't post peoples names on GWGURU, expect your picture to be gone if you don't black out every name.

I farm outta there with my 55 monk, but I usually stop in front of the gate and do a /flex or /rank or say, "Look! I'm not a bot!", just to be funny

I went to the International district 1 and observed the stream of outgoing Mo/W in the exact same path.

After a while, they all stopped and started screaming with their symbols and svastikas. And they were many.

http://www2.hemsida.net/nightwolf/bots.jpg

Where do they get these bots? How do they work?


If possible, post links when the picture is too big for the page please. - Swampgirl

Hehe! Just realized how fun it is to ruin their runs... You grab one and aggro everything and let him fight them... He will die. You will also steal the loot etc.

TBH some are not bots. Im tired of people saying ZOMG bots>_> Really cant robot and human get along ;p

[QUOTE=dahlen]I went to the International district 1 and observed the stream of outgoing Mo/W in the exact same path.

After a while, they all stopped and started screaming with their symbols and svastikas. And they were many.
QUOTE]

Those are Chinese language, please refrain yourself from ignorantly insulting another culture's writing by degrading them to merely symbols or "svastikas".

They are asking to buy other players' gold armour or weapon material in that screen shot.

If you doubt that they are bots, go to Droks and sit at the entrance to Talus Chute for 5 mins. Look in the direction of the nearest merchant (the npcs that make armor, as opposed to the storage npcs), and watch monk after monk come from that direction, taking exactly the same path. Also note that the vast majority are not in guilds, and have rather nonsensical/mispelled names. The name thing was interesting to note.. but out of respect for GWG I edited them out. Note: I'm talking about American districts.. not international. And these names are not using foreign characters.. they are just odd. There were three monks that had the same combination of (Chinese? I don't know) words, just in different orders.

I'm not saying that there are not real 55 monk farmers. However, I am saying that if you go and actually watch monks that are going out farming, it really starts to look as if at least half of those monks are bots.

How to take the same path:
Upon zoning in, hold down alt and try to find the "Talus Chute" sign, and click it. You'll start running to it automatically. If you can't see it, click one of the "Crafters' Corner" signs instead. Then click the "Talus Chute" sign when you're in range to see it. Once you see the portal, click beyond it. Viola! Now everybody has proof you're a bot!

You tell them Farmermancer!!! I love it when people respond knowledgably.

^^ /Agreed!

QFT. But i dont agree about about ANET setting up their own gold/item selling services since games that do this usually offer their game client for free and this does not suit ANET expansion/Chapters marketing which would sound like/be a ripoff to charge for new content.

It is not a racism remark if its true. Majority of those of whom that this thread exist to complaint about are those sweatshop farmers who are payed poorly to play this game to farm gold to sell on ebay. Anet cant ban them on the grounds of botting since they are real players, unless Anet can trace their gold movement and justify that that the said individual sells gold for real cash which violates the EULA. Even if they are banned, they would just buy a new copy and be back again doing the same thing within the day which is actually beneficial for ANET as this means more copies sold this way. Otherwise as posted originally by Farmermancer, gold sold on the internet represents potential income that would otherwise belong to ANET should they allow and enage in such practices.

The use of bot like behavior to play the game for farming gold is not the same as using a bot program to run the game. Farming is about effciency both in terms of technique and also time spend vs reward. Most of the these pple we are talking about do the same things mindlessly (skill spam,running route to merchant to sell) for hours on ends but this doesnt neccessary mean they are running a botting program to achieve what they are doing.

One example of a poorly coded bot from an internet cafe - im sure the cafe subscribes to cheat sites and gets the most up to date bots available huh...

One person watching 10 machines that all run bot programs can quite easily make anyone trying to communicate with his array of bots believe he is a real person....

Well, im not sure why REAL economics has anything at all to do with a game based economic system. We invest our time into playing a game where searching for and finding items is KEY, hoping were playing without bias, fairly and what we find has an uneffected value(ie, we find good items there worth good cash). Now, farming bots earn more cash than the average player as they farm 24/7, they make rare items lose thier value by flooding the market with them, so in effect the bot users are creating gold, and fair players are losing gold. I lose gold because what i find is worth less - this is because of direct impact bots have on game economy...

Wrong. The effects (and i dont use the term chinese farmers) of farming bots have been negative, and similar to the effects that supermarkets have caused - they put all smaller vendors out of business and lower the value of everything they supply which only causes them to control the market. Getting items cheap en-masse was obviously not the intentions of the game creaters or they would have all started cheap....
blah blah blah....

So many inteligent answers to the bot problem, but so few people willing to say YES bots are a real problem, Anet dont seem to do anything to stop them other than nerf real farmers out of areas, WHY ARE THEY NOT DOING ANYTHING ABOUT IT or is the game lost to this farmer, "i dont want to play i just want everything now and easy wins" culture.

those trolls hardly drop any gold anyway, the only way for them to get their handson gold is to sell items ( much of them being utter crap ) meaning they'll have to farm 24/24 basically to get any decent amount of gold .

quoting from one post :
the only solution is for the community to stop buying from these people .. but with so many high dollar items in the game and people that dont have endless hours to devote to farming, that isnt likely either

that sums it up . Nerfing a farm spot simply does not solve anything. They will simply go somehwere else and start again. As long as there is a demand for gold from those ( illegal because in violation with EULA ) sites there will be farmers supplying it .


I don't see any solution to this . I'm even considering if it wouldn't be wiser to completely scrap this section in EULA . Why? because you'd get more sites and farmers out there and prices would start to drop ( not at first but most certainly in the long run ) .

I think it's now proven any action to totally stop pro-farming taken until now didn't solve the problem at all and only made "legitimate " farmers ,i.e. : those that do it for their own use , mad and frustrated at the action taken .Pro farmers simply go elsewhere if a known farm-spot is nerfed and thus it only affects regular players .

Those characters in your screenshots are chinese language. and they are different. they can only be typed in like what you would do in english. How can they be bot?

I really don't understand why some ppl are so mean to others. If you against farming, you wouldn't care about the loot dropping rate, would you. Then, what they do really has nothing to do with you. If you like farming, what's the difference between you and others? You may say I farm for upgrade, not for ebaying. So what, farming is farming. Anet won't differentiate if you keep it or sell it.
People keep saying those farmers destroying the economy. Remember, there are seller and there are buyers. Without buyer, seller is nobody. If you want to blame, maybe you should be fair and blame both sides. This is just like ppl keep saying those street girls scum of the society, but I think those who use them are even dirtier.
Just get a hold of yourself and enjoy the game.

just tag with that random bot and put nr up , GG

tl;dr, droks bots are good way to get a quick skill point when you're half asleep, that's all I know.

OMG! in about 5 minutes there was probably around 200-400 monks flying by me like bats outta hell . it was insane!

My god, I have not seen that expression for so long. Last time I saw it, it was was too popular in my forum and anyone who used it got banned o.o

Just 10 minutes ago, I joined up with a 'bot'. Power leveling for free! yay! Take THAT services section of GWG!

Yeah like most of what has been posted so far seems like people are not bot hunting but want to ban all the legit farmers or Chinese players.

I assume bots would not take the most used path, which is running till you see the Talus Chute sign and clicking it. I mean wouldn't a bot be able to find it's own way out of town?

Also as said by many, if you can speak even basic Chinese, most of these "bots" will talk with you and tend to be nice. I do not know of many bot programs that will engage in intellegent polite conversation, or even have basic manners.

Also a bot would not randomly accept someone. It would reduce it's effectiveness. Nor would a farming bot try to trade. Again, the purpose of a program like a bot is to farm as much as it can in the shortest peroid of time.

Looking over the bulk of what is posted, people are just griefing non-English speaking farmers, and asking ANET take action against them. But what is different than a Chinese guy farming and your typical farmer? Sure one ends up selling his gold, but if ANET pushed ebay, they would end all Guild Wars auctions leaving farmers with no where to sell. Then both groups are now legit farmers that ANET claims to be ok. However players complain so much, and popular farming routes are closed. Then people power farm the next one till it is closed.

If ANET wanted to botting and selling on ebay, why not work on you know, ebay? Selling in game items for cash is not allowed, and Sony has shut down auctions in the past. Why not have someone from ANET start to apply the pressure. My friend sells bootleg clothes on Ebay and his stuff is constantly getting shut down with reason. Usually one complaint from a company and that is it auctions ended. Shutting down these auctions for illegally selling ANET's property would end the exploitive part of this alot faster than nerfing every single area people can farm.

I agree as well that the purpose of this thread has has degenerated into discrimination against the sweat shop farmers and non english speaking legit farmers.

As regards to accepting random invitations, there are 3 main reasons to do this:

1) increase possible likelyhood for selling items they have hoarded to the invities and

2) theres a myth started sometime ago on how grouping increases likelyhood of better drops (purple up). Should the invited exp leech die or stay at the starting zone far from farming site, they wont share in the distribution of loot due to proximity drops allocation but gold and exp will still be evenly distributed.

3) Prevent misconception that they are running bot programs ( a bot program wont accept invites) in case a ANET staff request party and tries to chat with them ( ANET must have some form of SOP to adhere to before justifying a ban on grounds of botting).

The main problem of why these sweatshop farmers are so prominant other than the common excuse of supply and demand on ebay, is simply due to currency exchange between countries. It doesnt take a rocket scientist to figure out that to maximize profits, these sweatshop usually located in asia region reaped the most benefits selling gold in USD or EURO on ebay and playing the English version of Guildwars allows excess to both Amercian and Europe district or even both using the international dist to trade gold for cash.

IPs confinment of accounts wouldnt work since international region still exist and back when Guildwars first started when there was only US/EU/KOR regions. Even if the international dist didnt exist for cross region trade, i dont think confining IPs from the whole of asia and maybe australia play on the Korea server would be a good idea... needless to say due to the uniqueness of the cultures in the pacific, both the new regions of Tawian (not sure if china will join their server..another political issue) and Japan have their own region.

Logically sweatshops farmers would populate the server/region where the population is most active both in game play and trade and for a long time US and Korean servers fits that bill and due to the easy access of ebay and affortability of those gold prices for the average amercian player (no offence to interantional players on US servers) makes its an ideal region to operate in.

The problem with ebay would be, they are involved in operating a bussiness and if turning a blind eye to these *moral obligations* which maynot have concrete legal implications to shutdown trading of ingame gold/item selling means increased traffic and use of their web services, nothing will be done.

Microsoft, NCsoft and Sony are giants in the industry with the resources to *back up* their Intellectual properties and will spare no effort in doing so when dealing with either indivduals or groups of violators. I am sure Anet would prefer to invest their precious time and profits into creating new content/expansions than to engage in tiring and draining legal procedure whom gold ebayers readilly explots loopholes in the system ( i am selling my time spend blah blah) or another coporation like ebay who if you havent notice already, isnt really a pushover either.

Back on topic of the excessive amounts of sweatshop farmers creating unrest amoung our dear players who think they are bots. Anet can do a few things.

1) Give in to the whining and ban all those sweatshop farmers irregarlessly, but remember it will be hard to tell whos who since some of us have 55hp monks also, so be preapred for the tons of "ZOMG WHY R I BANNED' topics on all forums and support to be swarmed.

2) Keep nerfing those areas that are being exploited. As mentioned they will keep on moving to other areas that can be used. Legit farmers will have lesser and lesser areas they can farm for fun and have less incentive to play without too much frustration.

3) Make items less valuable in general. The problem with the game is bascially its idealology. Its meant to be a PvP oriented game with PvE slapped on. In the early phases of the game, concerns were on inflation such that gold has lesser and lesser value since everyone has more of it over time if gold is not removed from the game. This is solved with gold sinks, the largest of course would be FoW armour and rare skin items that are not present as green items. The introduction of green items have generated its share of ebayers but as they become more common their prices dipped making them affordable to the masses. The idea is to allow players to own what they *want* through playing the game normally and not have to fork out 90k for a bulwark shield or 100k +55ecto for a HoD sword. Its things like these that make players who dont have time to grind for them visit ebay to buy gold or the said item hence creating the demand for the services of the sweatshop farmer whos time isnt as valuable as most of our players here in terms of salaries.

Keep this in mind the next time you are trying to sell that Bulwark shield for 90k in forge while cursing at the numbers of *bots* zonning to farm trolls for gold to ebay.

Edited for spelling

How can you say those are main reasons? You are still thinking they are all bad players. that's the base of your assumptions. And your reasons don't make any sense at all.
Most posts here says they power level you if you give them the drop. I don't see anyone mentioned they tried to sell to the invitees. Selling you item is only to get game money. That's not REAL money. If you think they are ebaying, won't ebaying be more profitable and realistic? And if they are hired to farm, they won't have right to sell anything, will they? Only the boss can decide whom or where to sell to.


If you don't stay close or you die, gold will be evenly distributed, NOT experience. Again, if they want to increase the drop rate by having parties, I assume everyone will do the same thing. Not just 1 out of 30 or something. Or they could create some bot that have parties of 2 or 3.

Again, think about 1 out of 30 ratio. If you are bot, you will definitely accept invitations to cheat Anet, right?

I just watched rivers of Mo/Ws run out of the door at Droks.... most had no guild tags and odd names that I dont think you d name a character like verb first and noun second.... here is an example but not one that I saw at the time "Runs Monk".... just an observation

heres an idea...instead of sitting at droks international cross-analizing and documenting the farmers movements and names...... play the game. Although from time to time, it is entertaining to watch the "ducks in a row" running out into talus or hopping onboard with one of these guys and picking up some exp. , let them do their thing..its not adversely affecting anyone...a few items like +30 sword pommels have skyrocketed recently and its not because these guys are selling them at a ridicilous amount...its the morons that started paying 100k+ for weapon mods.

let the flames begin....

Totally agree with you.

Just do /wave at them as they run out the door shouting things like "Good Luck" or "Find Something Good"

I used to this all the time when they were located in augry. good times

wow..when i created this topic, i had no idea it would get so intense or last for so long

wait........ so if u go to internationl droks dist then add a bots name on the party screen ull get accepted and get free power lvl?!?!?!?! IF THATS THE CASE I BETTA TRY IT SOON

I recommend for those who are interested about how sweatshop farmers operate and work read this article which was oringinally written for WoW but the same principles apply. I am getting tired of responding to threads like this.

Secrets of Massively Multiplayer Farming By Paul:

http://www.gameguidesonline.com/guid...tober05_01.asp

The site doesnt have references to guildwars so i hope i am not breaking forum rules by linking this.

Sweatshop farmers are not for the stating the fact *good players* in defination due to the fact that they exist to play the game to farm gold for ebay. Try standing around at storage hotspot and see the blind trade invites stack. As for your cute comment on ebay and farming bosses, they care only about gold quota to be filled, item (eg greens) ebaying are usually done by a small proportion of real players whom may or may not be related to those sweatshop farmers. Selling items (ranging from white drops to merchants or close to perfect mods to players) are all ways to raise gold before their shift ends.

Creating bots that form parties would make sense if the drop rates are more definate rather then the hazy enviornment as to how drops works (even from chest) would explain why it is still more cost effcienct to have a 55hp monk on every account behind the monitor to farm for gold.

Powerleveling is something that has come up recently and is most likely a perception shared by players on this community but may not be what is intended by the sweatshop farmers. The easiest explaination other than those i have stated would be that they are simply bored or even trying to befriend other players who may serve as potential mules/bank for them.( Some sweatshop farmers do befriend normal players and pass them items to sell for them either in gold or ebay and spilt the profits. This is done of course without the knowledge of the bosses. This serves to either supplement their own personal income or to stash gold else where so that incase they cant meet the gold quota for the day before their shift ends they have a banker who they can visit.)

I'm glad everyone is just so okay with this. While it may not affect my game time it does allow for an outlet for exploitation in 3rd world countries. Can you imagine the number of kids working in sweatshops right now? Kids force to play computer games all day. Children having seizures and having their hands imputated from carpal tunnel left untreated. So please lets all support farming.... who cares right?