Warning on guildwars add-ons

Yes, I'm paranoid. When I started guild wars, There's a warning at the login screen telling me not to download all sorts of add-ons. Does everyone see this? Or is it appearing for the same reason another message appears when you press CAPSLOCK on your login screen.

Yes, I do.

They updated the intro screen a little. Wise choice, I think.

A very good move. I never would have thought about key loggers in a utility. Makes me wonder about the things I've downloaded for other games.

Yes, thats a very good move.

I already well knew about keyloggers in hacks and exploits like bots etc. Some of Diablo II's maphacks and meph/pindle bots have keyloggers, and DarkEden's SpeedHack has keyloggers. May it be a lesson to any cracking players out there. I didn't even think Guild Wars had bots and exploited bugs, didn't they guarantee this to be hack-free?

And Azunder.. Why are you paranoid? If you haven't downloaded any hacks or bots, you should have nothing to worry about. Makes me wonder.

but surely cheaters can't be the only ones at risk from keyloggers and account hackers.

I wonder what else I could do to protect my account from getting hacked into? I don't want to go 9.11/homeland security paranoid about this, but I would like to feel comfortable that nobody is going to screw with my character or game.

Makes me wonder.. are there bot/macro programs out yet? This would be bad for a game like this where we compete. The virus caution has not been a guarantee that keeps such things off of other online games. I hope there is more than that warning planed to combat such hacks.

I don't know about Hacks or Bots, but there are several "Skill Calculators" and "build programs". These can contain key-loggers.

I don't think the typical bot program would be as destructive here as it would be to a game like DAoC. Level 20 characters here are not that hard to make yourself, and their discoveries are tied to the account, not the character. There will be other attempts to cheat this program, but the auto-farming bot like a pindlerunner wont have much appeal.

Still... Anet has taken an agressive stance against cheaters and has no conflict of interest. DAoC had a huge conflict of intrest when it came to the radar hack. They could easily ban all the cheaters, but they would have lost a huge amount of income. So they slapped the cheaters on the wrist and banned about 100 of them, hoping to scare the other 10,000 using the program into quitting. Anet loses no income at all for banning a cheater, in fact it stands to gain another re-purchace of a CD Key. I expect to see far more perma-banning in this game than in any other to date.

There are bugs in the game that can be exploited if not reported immediately. I have run into things like I could would and attack from inside a terrain piece, and not take damage (that was the first bug I found on final release and on first day of launch, and reported). So there are bugs, as well as the scammers both in game (trade scams, casino scams), and out of game (people selling their Guild Wars CD on E-Bay, which I should e-mail them to ban people from doing that). Then there are the utilities, which I myself have been ignorant of having had two Guild Wars utilities on my computer, one that is the color mixer I posted on this forum.

"Just because you're paraniod doesn't mean they're not out to get you"