How bad does ANet REALLY want to stop botters?

Actually, most players *burn* valuables while playing (for instance when buying skills or customized armors) while bots do not.
You're wrong by (at least) an order of magnitude. Lets try to estimate the total number of bots and their income.

A droks troll run (easily automated, usually just takes down trolls) earns 1k per run. Bots are ran for cash, so they'll just STM everything. Resources and such slow down the turnaround, runes don't drop, mods are scarce.

Using a 55 the run can be completed in 10 minutes (estimate for full cycle, putting up enchants, running, etc). Avicara's take their toll (some spawns are tough to navigate, body blocking, and situations that bots can't handle). Lets assume 80% success rate, wasting 2 minutes on each failure.

This leaves us at ideal earnings of 6k per hour, or 144 plat per day. I'm sure that at this rate the anti-farm kicks in pretty quick, leaving you with essentially no drops. Switching areas might help (don't know).

1000 plat is $45 on eBay. That means, that a bot must be running for 7 days non-stop for $45. One week just to break even the purchase price. Even if my estimates are off, they are not off by a magnitude.

How many bots are there?

A bot takes 45 seconds to go from loading and spawn point at droks to the exit. Assuming they complete the cycle, that means they'll apear back in 10 minutes. Taking an "infinite" number of bots, each district has a limited size (don't know, 100 people, 200?).

Each bot spends (45/600) % = 7.5%of their time in town. There's usually 5-10 districts on US servers, less on others. If they are completely populated by bots, that makes 10 * 100 (10 districts, 100 people per dis). However, that's only 7.5% of population, meaning total bot population at 1000 / 7.5% = 13000.

Obviously, not all people in these districts are bots, so we can safely say, at any given time, there are maximum of 20 bots in droks districts = 20 * 10 / 7.5% = 2670 bots total.

During the course of 1 week, they would generate $120000. Nice sum.

But now comes the final part of the equation. The demand. There's no business value in buying copies of GW, if you cannot make up the money. So rationale is, find the optimal number of bots.

Searching eBay again for "guildwars gold" results in 23 hits. Summing up offers from one company results in 10000 plat for sale (funny number, might be a councidence). These offers span 1d4h (time of oldest offer). So, we will conclude that 10k plat sells in this time.

In order to fulfil this demand, you need approx 70 bots.

How accurate is this number? Lets go back to 7.5% presence in towns. 70 bots constantly running would result in 5 bots being in town at any given time. Since droks districts are not evenly populated, there's usually just 3-6 active districts that accept new incoming people. That means, 1 bot on average per district.

While they are not evenly spaces, and will on occasion bunch up, I dare claim, that this is a really good estimation about the order of magnitude. Being a bit flexible, I'll claim there are 50-200 bots running out of Droks.

I know there are other sites dedicated to this, but I doubt they actually have market for the remaining 2600-something bots. There's also "human" botting, the item trading, scamming, etc. But that one is unpredictable. People do trade, but they cannot guarantee revenue. These traders, being human, also have limited work times, and are just filling quotas. What they are is impossible to tell.

But my point above was not finding out how many bot accounts are out there, but estimating the impact. It turns out, that even with rough estimates, thousands of bots are simply not viable.
Banning a bot account is also not negligible. At $40-50 per copy, the bot must run for over a week at peak efficiency, just to cover its own cost.

Some will argue that all the numbers above are made up. Some are, some are educated guesses, some are quite accurate. In the end, this is all just a Fermi estimate.

But yes, bots exist, they are annoying. But I'll still stick with the argument, that there are considerably less of them than it's generally perceived. Someone bored could camp the exit area for an hour or two, and write down names. I'm willing to bet, the number of unique names would be surprisingly low. After all, if you go to ToA, everyone knows the scammers by name, and there's only a handful of them.

Edit: I forgot to include that each 55 costs 50k to make, and anywhere between 12-24h to level. So replacing banned accounts is not cost-free, even more when considering these tasks can't be automated.

it would be extremely hard for anet to take out large troups of bots all at once i just looked on ebay to see howmany different people are selling money on it there 12 pages of different "stores" so i dont see why anet can't do something about the "stores" that sell all the gold and items in the first place. They cannot since they are not in violation of anything.

EULA applies to the game and/or account.

Selling/buying in-game items for real money is only in potential violation of EULA, hence your ability to play the game on ANets servers.

(This doesn't apply to the context or even GW, but is similar) It is possible to operate (not develop) server emulators and run them without requesting any kind of compensation. EULA prevents reverse engineering or manipulating the files, so it's impossible to develop a server without violating it. Charging for such a server would however result in copyright violation (for which there are real laws), providing it for free however s possible.

This is the core problem, namely knowing when and how to charge. It is not breaking any laws, just possibly the agreement between the company and player.

If there were at least the slightest chance of legal action, it would have been taken long ago by just about every MMO provider.

it would be extremely hard for anet to take out large troups of bots all at once i just looked on ebay to see howmany different people are selling money on it there 12 pages of different "stores" so i dont see why anet can't do something about the "stores" that sell all the gold and items in the first place. I would appreciate it if only people who knew something about coding, and specifically pattern recognition, would post definitive things like this.

I know what I am talking about, and I say it would be less then a work days worth of coding (for me personally) to autonomously detect all the bots I pointed out. And thats being generous.

I would appreciate it if only people who knew something about coding, and specifically pattern recognition, would post definitive things like this.

I know what I am talking about, and I say it would be less then a work days worth of coding (for me personally) to autonomously detect all the bots I pointed out. And thats being generous. There's another aspect to it. I went to droks and for 30 minutes wrote down all the Mo/W exiting the area. I identified 7 bots (almost certain), and possible 8 more farmers. Total number of names passing through was 148. So yes, it would be rather easy to filter out the bulk.

But farming is here to stay. And as long as bots are stupid, they are also easily detectable. It's rather easy (once you identify them) to keep track of their earnings. If you banned them on sight, you just trigger evolution, with bots becoming more and more advanced (eventually even ran by people). This in turn makes it harder to detect them.

So sometimes, it might be better to just observe the problem, rather than actively fight it. I believe there is reasonable money to be made from selling in-game stuff, and as long as the market exists, there will be people supplying it.

And last important point is, what happens if you ban just 1 innocent person? Mistakes happen afterall.