The March of the Bots

Let the working stiffs be there in spirit.

/dance

I'm at work too. Shhhhhh.

If I worked for A-Net, I would put right in the agreement that no game items or game gold are to be sold for real money and that buying or selling such items will result in really bad game karma. Then I would program up some gold and rare items that were made to disappear one minute after the first time they are traded. I would list those things on ebay. When some doofus bought them on ebay for hard earned cash, I would trade the items to him in-game, and a minute later those items and/or gold would be gone. Poof.

This would kill the ebay market.
It would piss off doofuses who deserve to be unhappy anyway.
And how are they going to complain? The user agreement SAID bad stuff would happen if you bought things with real money.

Plus it would just be hilarious.

--Nokomis

how quickly do these bots reappear?
are there any changes in the time?

maybe this could be the new version of the casinos.
bet on the bot races! who will reappear first? "iam notabot" or "asdfoweif asdpfiap"?

The problem is they are not selling the item. They are selling the time to accumulate the gold or items. ArenaNet has no way to go against it unless they ban all trading, gold or items.

I was just on with my monk and there was one guy who kept on trading with me..err attempting to trade with me. I was hoping he would give me 100p like someone else stated he tried to do to them. I would buy Dwarven Ale for everybody!

I said he wanted YOU to give HIM 1000p.

A beggar botter, can you imagine ?

Well, this explains allot.

I just made it to Seekers Passage this morning. I hadn't seen any real dance parties since Lions Arch.

Hey, that offends my HOBO sensibilities... I do my begging honestly thank you very much!

Ah, the dance parties in LA are exquisite

I botted in RO.

Do I do it in GW? No.

Why did I bot in RO? Because I could. Because all the gear cost a shit ton thanks to a ****ed up market. Because you had to buy 20 Slotted Silk Robes so that you could possibly have a chance in getting on to +9.

I wasn't a selfish botter, I gave shit away to friends all the time. I did guessing games in S. Pront Field and gave away 1mil zenny (gold to you) as a prize for each game. I gave away Mummy Cards, Verit Cards, and other rare cards as prizes. This is how I had fun.


WHY people bot is not important. WHY people bot is unique to each botter.

I also helped destroy certain parts of the economy by introducing a flood of loot like Slotted Bucklers (when I started botting, they were going for about 100k each, by the time I finished, their value had been more than halved to around 40k). On one hand, you can say that by doing this I hurt players. But it wasn't like these were dropping so regularly for others that they were their main source of funding. On the other hand, I made them more affordable to regular players who couldn't justify spending 100k for a Slotted Buckler. Same principal applied to slotted boots, mummy cards, maytr cards, and verit cards. I wasn't the only person botting these areas, but due to the influx of the amount of each item, we helped lower the price so that these rares became more affordable to casual gamers (only the hardcore could amass enough funding to get a lot of this shit).

But then you turn around and say we're ****ing up the economy by bringing in a shit ton of gold from NPC-sold-loot thus driving up prices on everything. BULLSHIT. Prices go up because people are stupid and are willing to pay 7k for a clean max damage fiery dragon sword.

It's the everyday player that drives up prices. It's the everyday player that sets the bar. Joe Average pays 7k for a FDS, so then the seller keeps selling at that and eventually someone buys again. And all the other sellers see this and jack up their prices.


I don't bot in GW because I don't have a need to. I have 13k, I have my final armor for two of my chars. I don't care about FoW or 15k armor. I have my collector staves, wands, and foci. I have my armor dyed. All from money I made while just playing the game. I can farm trolls, or taxi to Droknars. But I don't bot.

Guild Wars doesn't have a lot of things you need gold for which is refreshing.

just checked this out and i can see why you would need a bot. ran to first wreckage and got a white air wand, ran around to second wreckage and a couple of white items. boring as hell and nothing to show, even had to sit around for a few minutes until those riders cleared out. wasnt worth my time.

No waiting needed. Only time I even have to slow down is if I get past the devourers too fast and the hydras haven't moved far enough along their route yet. Other than that, it's a dead run to both wreckage sites. I've got a 13 second sprint. Doesn't take long.

Btw, a lot of people who turn to botting are pissed off farmers who have no where to go for gold since their areas got nerfed.

They were willing to invest the time into making a build that could farm. They were willing to invest the time in sitting down and doing the farm runs themselves. But when they get hit in the nuts with a nerf bat, it just makes them look for other ways to get gold (aka, botting or buying it from botters on ebay).

Farming isn't bad until you try to stop it.

lol i did it too just for fun and it sukcs lmao anyone who thinks they need gold that badly is an idiot

/Violin

Creston

There are still plenty of spots to accumulate gold and items rapidly without botting. Do what others have done and explore for better areas and switch up your builds if neccesary.

hehe - i just spend 30-40 minutes there...
now i got a list of around 30 characters (some from same guild) who are going out there solo every few minutes.... they just run through _ one got stuck on a wall and stayed there for like 10 minutes..... i taunted and point&laughed at him but there was no response

one from anet was there too - nice chat with him and some others: they are already logging the area and seekers itself and he told me this would be taken care of = let's see how soon....

anyhow : a funny yet sad thing to observe

i have around 50 megs of screens i am uploading to anet support... with my list ^^


regarding the execution of banned chars: i love!!! that idea - dibs on some heads so i can put them on poles in my guild hall ...

well.. rumor is gw precious code of moving around certain spawns for wreckages/barrels/chests has been cracked and put into affect with those pesky bots. so basically if done correctly at certain chests that's about 100+ gold a minute which is about 6k+ an hour, 144k+ a day per bot. then turn around and look at the ebay prices 100k=around $15 usd. but then you extend the cracked code into weapon drops and rare materials and those people found themselves a new job.

but gw is run by the same people that did l2 which is 90% bots, and when that was proven to them by an outstanding survey... they banned the person that did the survey and deleted his results on nc's site. the big question is, will they do anything about bots in this game.. unlike l2..................?

The community fuels botters. As long as there are people willing to buy, there are people willing to bot and sell.

Look to our peers. They're just as bad as the botters since they keep them going with cash.

I read his letter pertaining to l2 bots he sent to the company. I was quite disturbed at the reaction it caused. His baning. And others as well who stuck behind him through it. I've said more than I should have in anycase, it seems all who speak of this get screwed over.

Bots are why we should be able to PK someone in or out of town

hahaha that sounds more like l2

Quoted for the truth. This has been going on since Tuesday as reported on the IGN boards. These botters or farmers have made lots of money in that time. They will continue to do so as long as there is a market for it. The best thing to do is to not buy gold or items from Ebay or any other website that sells it.

However, i hope ArenaNet does something about it. Seeker's Passage is very laggy now thanks to the botter/farmers.

First off, that's a stupid idea.

Secondly, you wouldn't be able to target and kill bots before they zone.

Thirdly, that's a stupid idea. We don't need griefers having the ability to kill people in town. That's trading one problem for another.

It's funny to watch. The issue is far from.

For those that have gotten at least to Abaddons... w/o spoilage I can say you might remember there was a chest here to the right of the fort gate that you could open before engaging anything. It's gone now. Meaning it was exploited to death. But spotting a bot here would be even more subtle. You'd never see him from a casual stop in town... only that the same guy, his name always light blue, keeps entering town and zoning away.

This is the only reason I care: The bots are ruining my game, not because of all the gold they are flooding the community with, but that they're causing the item drops to be so stingy and the chests/wreckages to be removed. Here's another bot mapmod; have you done Sanctum lately? Now there are imps where the giants used to be. Too much rune farming depressed the rune trading market, one assumes.

And honestly, laughing is all we can do. Even they can't stop it, they can barely recognize it short of modifying the client code to specifically look for it. It takes humans to notice it at this point. So what's next, maybe a memory watcher stub ala PunkBuster? Do they really want to get involved in this stuff? (Especially when the serious bot coder laughs at it anyway.) This isn't easy stuff. You have to be about 3x as dedicated as the kid(s) hammering away at you. Good luck. So the level designers or their replacements are having to go over and over the maps again, looking for where something might possibly be exploited by a bot... and change it. This sucks. Sucks for them, sucks for us.

Oh well. Just wait until the private DXhook PvP bots (perfect healer, perfect condition remover, perfect interrupter, etc.) start making it more into the public. Oh, you think there are none, huh? Yeeeeea... you keep on thinkin' that. And laugh.

Hmm, 2 suggestions:

-Farming bots: After x times repeatedly entering the same point of the map within a certain amount of time show a random picture of a number and ask to write it down to prevent disconnection.
-Spamming (advertizing) bots: After x messages within a certain amount of time send a message to the player he/she should leave and re-enter the map before he/she is allowed to message again.

Went to seekers passage and stood there for about five minutes watching the area.
In and out.

In and out.

In and out.

Repetitive zoning in then immediately running for the exit. Over and Over.
Bots ...made me dizzy just watching them all....

I was watching these BOTS go out the door at Seekers Passage and I ended up chatting with a few people there and they said that it is "Corporated". Meaning that people are fronted the cash to send out bots and make X amount of real world cash. Makes sense to me.

Yeah, the wreckages should be randomized. Heck I think the instances should be randomized like in Diablo. That way it would stop the bots and add some replayability to the game.

I saw it with my own, two, pixellated eyes.

I'm hoping that they are taking names this week and will start banning accounts next.

www.guildwars.com

bots have been banned

Reading about bots being banned is all well and fine, but I have left quite a few games already due to bots, so I take those messages with a grain of salt, I see the exact same 4 bots in seekers this morning, Maomao mao and Sky look like they are practicing for some kind of bot marathon.

I actually think it would be easier to stop the bots by banning the players that buy from bots, right now you can buy all the ill gotten gold you want without fear of punishment, Im sure banning a few buyers would cut a lot of the bots customer base.

Definitely hope this is a 'work in progress' thing, seeing a lot of the same names as well, and currently a lot of [hao] and [good] members going at it with three or four at a time.

[seei] was there with several members too - but i can't see them anymore ^^
[good] still has members botting there, saw them just a minute ago.

"chicks too", "angel pvp", "fly girl two", "super mans" and so on are still there botting it up...

i hope anet is able to log the trades of suspicious accounts so they can get a hold on the master account behind the bots - and those who buy the money on ebay need a permaban too.

someone had the idea of flooding e-bay with gold and items that automatically disappear within 2 minutes of receiving them on your character. This would certainly slow down the e-bay aspect of it, and other purchase methods would slow down too.

http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/...rformance.html

Two wrongs don't make a right.

Flooding eBay with fraudulant auctions might not be that great an idea, considering the person(s) involved could get in trouble with the Law.

This may be a problem to us all and but we're going to have to trust Anet to solve this. Any form of vigilante justice that involves cheating people to get at cheaters is dangerous.

In this case, yea it does. How could they get in trouble with the law? The other player recieved his gold and items. Not the sellers fault they magically disappeared after two minutes. The seller did his part. The buyer cant really hold the seller reliable for something that shouldnt really be sold in the first place ::cough::contract::cough::

It's still a scam, one that might get your eBay and Guild Wars account banned if you piss off a persistent enough person.

[Edit] Just to let you all know, there is a precedence of NcSoft dealing with players who break the rules to deal with players who break the rules.

perhaps since this is actually against the end user agreement, Anet could contact e-bay and paypal directly with their grievance. I'm quite sure they would listen...

people are no longer allowed to save toby via paypal (a guy found a rabbit and said he'd eat it unless he received 50,000 bucks in donations before the deadline. He got to 28,000 before protests had paypal shut down his account )