Elonas Reach Meets the Monk Armada

Right now, 3:24 am est, I'm in Elona's Reach....and looking at around 50+ Mo/W in every single district....what in the world is going on.

They all are moving exactly the same...saying nothing...kinda creepy lol

One word: Bots

Its the new farming area for them, so don't be suprised.

hmm didnt see the other posts...and I keep hearing A-net talking abot cracking down on bots....seems to no avail tho...

Yeah, we know. Notice how most of them have odd names (or run into walls)? They get paid to play a game and farm gold to sell (for real money). Not all of them are bots, though...

elona.. ban bots, not nerf the area
Farm-Bot Invasion at Elona Reach International Dis1
Elona... Beyond Ridiculous
tons of Mo/W's in elona?

You'll find the same thing if you check out Droknar's Forge (International Districts). Nothing new, just a problem ArenaNet hasn't addressed.

I think they will eventually. But i hope they nerf the bots and not the area.

1) Griffons outside Augury Rock --(update)--> scarabs.
2) Dying Nightmares in UW.

They've shown that they'd resort to killing areas :/

Seriously.

They have to try to find a way to stop the bots themselves (although I can't think of a way off the top of my head). When they nerf an area the bots just travel somewhere else...like a giant swarm of Monks...traveling from place to place, reaping destruction upon the land. >.>

I need sleep...

Well, i think there must be some way to do it. Maybe they are already in the process of creating some sort of system to tackle bots.

I was in Elona a few nights ago, saw all the Mo/W's, and thought, wow, a lot of monks. Then I remembered the threads here and thought, oh. Sat for a while and watched them all crawl along the wall.

Or maybe they ignore them, because bots are paying customers too.

Anet needs a team of guys who could hack and destroy the bot programs or just find out how they're programmed and get rid of them.

I would hope not, those bots are breaking the rules. If Anet ignores that, it doesn't reflect too well on them.

The problem with detecting bot programs is it would need to be invasive detection on part of gw.exe - sort of like anti-keylogger etc. and the guys who develop the external programs (keyloggers for example) will just make new ones/variants.

it's easier to nerf the whole economy
bots ll stop when most items ll lose their value

as long as there is trade .. => value => gold
just make the gold useless .. => no more bots

RUIN PROTECTIVE SPIRIT...ffs I mean reamove ALL -50 HP items and cripple PS...we've seen everything in the world nerfed yet PS has managed to avoid every serious nerbat...wtf a.net?

When warriors take over add balanced degen mobs

When Eles take over...well mezmers fix that problem

it just take a while to overcome the PS change...i'd love to see the day

yay sure !! remove all mobs !!! no mobs = no drops = no bots !!

cmon .. stop the BS pls

I like your attitude, now listen to the entire pvp community and prot. spirit... btw, farming minotaurs doesn't net that much money, I think griffons were more profitable, as are trolls.. does anyone know why monks aren't farming trolls anymore?

Oh yeah, I also liked the solution someone else had for the 55 monk... make it so superior monk runes don't attrackt a -75hp

I like weird and wonderful ideas, as long as no-one puts them into practice please.

Devaluating the money helps too. Give everybody 100K worth of elite items of their own choice when they create a character, and you'll see prices, drop like flies
People would just create characters for items :P

An experienced 55 Nec can get past either of those issues (scarabs and/or dying nightmares).

You have to know the build very well, and you have to know what you are doing, but it IS quite doable still. In fact, the best practice area for a budding 55 Nec is the Griffons south of Augury (and getting to them).

Just ask my (sometimes) 55 Nec Gall Stone.

I doubt that a protective spirit nerf would help eliminate botters. You'd just start seeing them replaced with w/mo bots.

I'm surprised you don't see more w/mo bots NOW. Killing minos with a w/mo with isn't any harder than it is with a 55 monk. Very simple to cook up the appropriate macros.

Zone....cast live vicariously, cast balthazar's spirit, round up a bunch of minos, and just alternate between bonetti's and cyclone axe. Add whatever you want to make the killing go faster. Super easy....

You forgot Avicara outside Droknar (still possible to farm).
It seems a group of Trolls tends to pull a group of Avicara to the cave from time to time. The farm still works most of the time since the group of Avicara seems bugged (BTW, it's a group with a Necro and a Mesmer)

I just saw this for myself yesterday when I was showing a guildie around. Man I hate bots. I see a couple of posts here and there on this and other threads saying this spot doesn't pay out big money, but I disagree. This was one of my old farming spots and is still one of the better ones. With the right build my elementalist was completing a run and selling in 2 minutes, I clocked it. I pulled in 300-700 per run and found I averaged about 500. So I figure if I ran non-stop, I could pull in 15k an hour. Even when the anti-farming warning pops up, you still pull in a decent amount and it takes very little effort to cancle the patch. So bots running this could be making their owner obscene amounts of money. At least we humans get bored and log off or do something else. It worries me that someone might own dozens of programs running 24/7 and is selling the gold on E-bay. I don't want them to continue to ruin the game by nerfing areas and skills, I mean, what are you supposed to do if you have done all of the quests and aren't into pvp? Let us farm if we want, we paid our dues. I've put in over 1200 hour even with school and work, so I beleive my opinion should count for something ANET. It should be simple to watch for patterns, and once a pattern is identified, assign someone to watch an account play and verify if the account is a bot. Once it is verified, close the account completly. The bot owners will start hurting if they have to shell out money continuously. Make it hard to keep the operation profitable and they will eventually fold. Their only recourse would be to raise E-bay prices which will cause sales to lag, which closes the profit gap even more, and eventually, no more bots, just players.

Trolls have Disrupting Chop, which will disrupt your protective spirits and other spells.... Disaster for bots farming them. However, if you are a human manually farming the trolls, you can anticipate when they'll use the skill and farm them effectively....

That's why:

sweatshops > bots

Well if Anet isn't going to address the issue, then I'll just go and download a bot to farm for me as well. I'm gettin lazy

P.S. Think about what the bots are pulling in. At 15k an hour running non-stop, it's 360k per 24 hours. Three bots and you have 1,080,000 gold in one day. And there are hundreds of them. These people are getting richer than you or I by not even playing a game. How long did it take you to get your first mil? Some guy shells out maybe $90 if he's buying in the right places and he turns around and in one day sells a million gold for how much? Then repeats it every day? Think about that.

Instead of nerfing the area, consider making it less time effective for a machine to function.

So randomly move the merchant. Doesn't have to be much, but if the NPC wandered in an area... the bots would be slowed dramatically as they can't always run to a specific spot and "click" the place in front of them.

The farming they are doing (as posters above stated) is all about killing and merching as fast as possible. Leave the killing where it is, just make it much more time intensive for a machine to find the merchant. Humans will have no problem clicking on a wandering merchant (make sure merch doesn't stop wandering else the bots could lock him in place!)

But now you are talking player - not bot. If a player can do this -more power to them.

Really what the bots thrive on is a repeatable area with a single type of mob class. Mix this either by random mob or mobs that strip enchantments and you have a harder time with a bot.