I'm going bot hunting.

this is only a thought dont know if its a good idea but anyway lets see
The amount of money they are making off ebay is not much in some countries but is a lot in some other countries so they can get away with making quite alot out of it
What if GW set up selling on ebay themselves at a very very low rate this will make it unprofitable for anyone wanting to sell on ebay etc and it will satisfy the ones who have to have the expensive gear and have gold etc as to me it doesnt make sense at all as to why they are playing in the first place
And as it is free to play online wouldnt this be used to add on to the game like new areas so we all benefit by it and those who wish to pay to buy gold can support in adding to the game play rather than it working against us?
Also put in a really stupid high return on gold rare items that way there will be less need to farm and by getting a high return from the merchant might that mean people will less likely sell to other players?
see too many lope holes already will leave this post see what others think
No its best if possible bots were reported still and for GW to monitor those accs and logs for possible abuse
Problem is GW has made this a free online game and the amount of resources time and energy put into tracking bots must mean they are less able to focus on the game play and creating a more enjoyable game for us all
So there really has to a be a quick fix more or less once and for all so bots will find they get nothing out of it
Remember they dont care about the players or the game they are only out to make money out of Guildwars and off players

I have an idea...
Go to Ember Light Camp district 1 - You should be able to spot at least 8 bots.

Go to Riverside mission district 1 - at least 10 bots.

Their names usually start with Pt.

"Where does this idiotic notion that all Chinese people are bots come from? This is all just some mass fear of another culture. The same way you act with the Koreans. The same way alot of people did durring the Cold War."

You must not be too bright, are you?
Log on at any time to see 1 person in the same place going over and over and over again saying the same thing in Mandarin Chinese. And I have no idea what this has to do with the Cold War. It is as if someone speaks Nicaraguan and also cheats, you accuse us of fearing them from some random event in the early 1900's.

Uh, that's absurd. Ask anyone who's done any systems design or driver development or just any architecture-specific Assembly programming. They can never prevent it, even if they coded their own OS. Half the time they'd be lucky to detect it! It's not their fault; the main culprit is modular programming and hardware abstraction (i.e. "drivers"). We're all running code on the same framework under the same rules. You put a value onto a buffer. You move it into a memory location. You later retrieve that value. This is how I get you. You can add all the validity checking you want for that value; it's only a matter of time before I convince you it's a legitimate value through various means.

But this is farmbotting. We're not talking about code alteration; we're talking about driver hook bots that are watching the video data and doing scripted keyboard / mouse movement based on what they "see". Technically they're not hacking GW at all... this is nothing ANet can prevent or even complain about. These types of bots don't touch GW code. They are just sitting in between and sniffing. (FRAPS works this way.) The only thing that makes this a bannable offense is using it to gain an unfair advantage which is a EULA violation not a legal violation.

re: real hacking, all you can do is slow down a sufficiently motivated individual. The harder you try to stop them the more challenge is perceived thus the more dedication in busting your code. You want to stop them? A .45 slug to the forehead is a good method. Or girls. (gettin' laid == The Great Distractor.)

Adding a second running executable which monitors the access of memory used by GW is an option. Some companies have already used such defences which have largely been successes (altho they require a significant amount of updates

exactly what is a bot ?

sometimes i leave pc on with game running and just forget.
not farming or playing,yet by these rules am i a bot ?

No, but if (while youre away) your char goes in and out of town hundreds of times spamming obscure, scripted sentences, then chances are:

1- You're a botter

2- Your PC needs an exorcist

I do this. I yell things like "OLD MACDONALD HAD A FARM, T-R-O-L-L!" and "Griffons are the capitalist oppressors of the masses! Workers of Tyria unite!” And then I run off to farm. Mostly that's just because I'm weird.

Possibly, but Punkbuster is a resounding failure. It took the hackers about a week to figure out that they could a) change text and recompile and Punkbuster didn't recognize the hack; actually it was often sufficient to just rename the executable, and b) make the hack a "driver" and hide it in protected OS memory space, where Punkbuster couldn't see it at all.

I heard that Battlefield 2 uses Punkbuster and Starforce, which is like the grand slam of useless copy protection software. I don't play BF2, but if it isn't overrun by hackers yet, it will be very shortly.

If all PB did was scan the memory for known public hacks you could just use a simple packager or even hex editing to avoid being detected. I assume that in reality it might be a little more complicated than that, with something like heuristics and monitoring changes to memory involved. After all, hacks literally destroy the game (and the developer's image) and with a high-profile product like BF2 the drive to hack is just huge, and they must have foreseen it.

Whatever the case, I just checked one of the popular hack repositories and there seems to be more than a few undetected ones available. If somebody like DICE has problems with this, do you think that A.Net will be able to stop cheating in GW where there's real money involved? Why I bet the hacks Chinese use are even public, but only to those who can read in their language. And if A.Net manages to shut some of them down, new holes will be found, and they'll be wasting even more time working not on new content or features, but on ways to counter the hacking.

In short, my point is: don't pay for GW items with real cash.

One'd assume that, yeah. In reality PB spent the first two months of operation with Americas Army: Online not detecting anything at all because of a bug, which amazingly went undetected by their QA, and yes, hex editing DID fool PB.

Yes, they're hiding in protected OS memory space, where PB can't see them at all. PB is utterly powerless against them.

Well, let's not confuse issues. ANet can stop hacks where PB fails, because there's nothing on the client computer to hack. All interesting stuff is on the server, streamed on demand. Oh, you can hack the interface, you can make bots and scripts - but you can't, for instance, give yourself unlimited energy and health.
AFAIK they use scripts, not hacks. That's easy enough to do yourself should you want to. There's very little point, though I suppose that's never stopped people before. Americas Army: Online is a free game without any rewards other than the gameplay, and there's probably more cheaters than legit players playing it (and it's "protected" by PB too). Why they cheat? I have no clue.
Definitely agreed there.

On the contrary, the client-server paradigm applies to both of these games, so A.Net can't really do more than DICE. You can't, say, turn on godmode in BF2 by hacking your client unless you find a bug by reverse engineering, because there is no way to negotiate that change in your local data with the server. However, you can change the way the game appears locally by hacking your graphic drivers or use DLL injection to make the game aim and shoot for you.

The main difference between GW and BF2 is that the items you posess in GW are persistent, there is a demand for different items and a virtual economy based on that demand. So instead of hacks that give you inhuman reflexes and visual aids, you would want to get hacks that automate grinding to get items. Which is what people claim some are doing now.

I don't want this bot hunt to get too off-track, but that's incorrect. I hang out on many forums including a few that are populated with, uh, "alternate" programmers. GW code impresses a few of them, and annoys the rest. It's the ability to checksum yourself, being that it's online only, that gets them. Currently they bitch about a 10-second rule; both the executable and the netcode. There are a couple speed hacks but if you get beyond what the server thinks is a legal value it snaps you back. And there's obviously some realtime checksumming going on, the bitch posts are as informative as the what works/what doesn't threads. Don't worry, what can be hacked will be hacked, including any anti-cheat system you can dream up.

But you're missing the point: These bots are not hacking GW code. They don't even touch it. There is no legal violation, it's an EULA violation. They are dxhook'ing, they basically "watch" the video and playback scripted keypresses / mouse movement based on what they "see". (FRAPS kinda works this way, as do many FPS aimbots.) There is nothing ANet can do about it, and I can get a bagfull of cheap EFF council to prove it.

That's not to say they can't ban for it; they can ban for just about anything they want. And depending on how widespread it gets they can always try C&D on the grounds that the bots are affecting their revenue because it hurts sales of their product with a negative image of a cheater's paradise. (many have tried, but it's expensive and very hard to win, and hackers are usually poor, usually underage kids... why bother?)

Course I'm not a lawyer so assume all this is lies and disinformation.

Now if you think you've seen the worst of the bots, you are sadly mistaken. A dxhooker bot can make a perfect healing/conditions removal machine, a perfect interrupter machine, etc. Even an add-on that just watches chat do automate the more tedious tasks for human players... "I have Spiteful Spirit on me!" to which my HealerHelper v2.0 catches and fires off a hex removal w/o me doing anything, and prevents me from moving and breaking the cast until it's done. Oh yea. Whatever you can think of, someone is already working on.

Anyway, back to the farmbot hunting! (grabs torch and pitchfork)

Evidently there is good money in what hardcore botters do, if there was no demand you'd probably see less bots.

On a completely side note I can't help but notice gil/gold selling banners on this website for other MMORPG games.... gee.

If Anet stated that any ingame materials/accounts were their property, and as such unsellable except by them, then they could go after the botters for selling online. They wouldn't, however, be able to anything more than ban the botters in game. Legal precedent is with them if they do so following a few cases of litigation from japanese multimedia studios who were able to recieve compensation when their fansubbed works were sold.

The items in game are intellectual and material property of X legal identity of their choice, and as such, any sale from someone other than X constitutes fraud in that they're misleading people into buying goods which aren't for sale. Furthermore, if X can prove that the botters are detrimental to sales of their product, they can litigate on those grounds too.

I have no idea why Anet hasn't banned the obvious botters in ember light: they consume server resources, and they degrade gameplay.

All Anet has done is issued a statement that aftermarket addons are potentially dangerous to account integrity. Not much threat if you're the ones making the addons.

I'd like to make it very clear that ArenaNet most decidedly does not have an anti-farming policy. We most decidedly do have an anti-bot policy. Sometimes the two impact upon one another. But we do not address any problems with a specific area in order to tamper with farmers, but only with those who are botting.

Again, there is often a spill-over effect, and sometimes the areas being botted are the same areas being farmed. In those cases, naturally we must act, even if it might appear that we're acting against farmers. But we are not, honestly. We are acting on bots, a continuing and perhaps even growing problem. We will continue to exercise whatever means we can to hinder the use of bots in Guild Wars. If this affect farmers, we apologize and will continue to explain via multiple means (perhaps you can help us get the word out?) that we truly regret any ripple effect, but must take the risk of such in the effort to keep the bots at bay.


Farmers do not have a major negative impact upon the game. Bots do. So we're going to continue to work against bots while doing our best to avoid impacting those who prefer to play the game in a way that's really perfectly fine!

Oh, and we act upon bots regularly; we don't necessarily post about it, but we take action on bots often, as we take action on offensive behavior, scamming, and even offensive names.

Hmm...but Ebay might be able to shut down listings that we report. Of course, that's not to say that they wouldn't just show up again under different usernames but it might slow them down a bit...Of course the Best thing that could happen was if people realised that they shouldn't be shelling out hard earned real money for insubstantial Imaginary money...sigh. There are so many better things to be spending money on after all...

Yeah ... his idea is called essentially 'PUNKBUSTER' and if anyone here has ever played old school Halflife before Steam or are currently playing Battlefield 1942 . They will understand that punkbuster is not only USELESS but hurts the honest player by lagging their system with a 3rd party program. The software checks computer operations but is coded by one group and patched occasionally whereas the people who are dishonest get a near instant crack/hack to bypass the system and continue on.

Also current software protections like Starforce install drivers to monitor your system for software that THAT game's company deems 'improper'. These drivers monitor everything thats going on in your system and slow down drive access. Even after uninstalling the game the drivers/access remains behind resulting in either a wild goosechase locating and eliminating such files and operations or wiping the drive and reinstalling the OS. There is a 3rd way but unfortunately I cannot say as the removal is via nefarious means.

So putting in a form of resident scanning system would harm honest people more than dishonest ones.

As for BOT blocking. Where do I sign up?

No, those works were copyrighted, but the items in GW are not. They aren't IP, and aren't a subject to Berne Convention, so even if A.Net manages to get hold of some exclusive rights to those virtual items, it probably wouldn't apply worldwide.

Ah, but you're wrong to think that real world monetary systems have some underpinned substance, because the real world money is virtual too. The bills and coins are not made of gold, they're made of cheap metal and paper, and their value is simply a result of an agreement in the society. So the gold in GW is no more intangible than, say, dollars or euros. It is clearly a money object by definition, even though a one that exists in a virtual persistent-state world and does not have an objective value, unlike regular cash.

There are no ads on this site or the majority of other sites I visit for me, thanks to Adblock.

That's cool, but not really the point. The point for all this clammoring about bots and how they affect our gameplay, who cares about the fact this website has ads for other MMORPGs selling items? I looked on one of the advertised sites and they sell Guild Wars gold as well.

I agree that BOTs are killing this game with a slow blade, but I see a problem with this quote.

Guild Wars is not a monthly pay game. All those peope that gave up WoW and found out that they needed hundreds of thousands of gold to get the items they want are going to be more than willing to pay a few bucks for some gold instead of paying a monthly fee.

We need to be attacking the heart. The companies on E-Bay and the BOTs.

Give me some directions. I can give up some of my time to help out. Even if helping out does mean putting a little more pressure on the powers that need it.

Quote: "but I see a problem with this quote."

Well, that really was just a bit of wishful thinking on my part, I wasn't serious about saying that they'd give it up or that we could force people to give up spending real cash for fake cash. It was just a "wouldn't it be nice if..."
I was serious about reporting listings to Ebay though, and I've done it before, it's just that, because they don't give you follow up reports beyond the first, "we've received your report" you have to go find out yourself if anything has been done...

Play lineage II for 2 weeks, then we'll talk. LMAO.

Which is the exact reason botting is so rampant in games. People want a Aol-easy-cheese solution to the botters, rather than annihilate the asshats at their source.


I find your offhand comment to be devoid of importance.

Ignorance of what?
Before that, your meaningless existence.

Consider me educated, and you ignored

Either you really are not sure what you speak of, or you simply want to start an argument.

A bot is a robot account character. It connects to the game. It farms gold, it kills people (in other games) who attempt to get gains where it sets up shop. It WILL NOT respond to chatter to it. It will not even respond to being ATTACKED in most cases.

If a bot is not accessing in-game, server-sode code, then the person controlling the bot is actively farming for 12 hours on end to sell on ebay and make all our gaming lives harder than they should be.

No, you missed the point, the phenomena as it occurs, and the overal purpose of my post.

Your statement, lumping what I posted alongside punkbuster is one of 2 things, both meaningless and useless:

1) Bot-supportive propoganda designed to make people think the problem cannot be solved with software-based protections, thus removing vital interest and killing the development of said item in the womb. This is not what I think you meant. But then again, your last part of the quoted text is a blanket statement from hell, so who knows.

or

2) You have absolutely NO idea how punk buster functions with games like Quake II and onward (the half-life era was not the first incarnation). I believe this is your area and not #1.

You see, bunk buster does not access games resident in memory, it has a couple of HMTL documents in the game folder, that you must manually download and update on your own. These files contain code that connect to a central server for pb. You are on the wrong foot, but I understand your reasoning, but no.


My intention was to show that anet could, if it so desired, code this implementation INTO THE GAME, not a 3rd party add-on.

Listen, then open your mouth.

oh noes, soembody hsa upset teh troll!! its liek drama!!

That's really abstracting the point though...it's like saying I could take 1plat from GW and buy food for myself in real life with it, If we were to look at the bigger philosophical picture...You're right to say that "real world money" only has the value we give it and I do agree with that. However, my "wishful thinking" wasn't based on whether or not "real cash" had "real substance" the way humans used to trade milk for pigs. (oh lordy, overdoing the "" ) It was based on the fact that unless the world were to turn topsy turvy tomorrow, regular cash has value while GW cash does not and because it has value, our gaming experience is marred by those who feed off people who think "real world" value is GW value. My point was that it would be nice (wishful thinking) if they realised that it is not...

Why doesn't Arena Net have a few employees buy gold of of eBay, and when they do the trade in game, just ban that account? Selling stuff on ebay is an auto ban, isn't is against the EULA. I know they can't get all of them because there is too many, but one ban can be up to 4 bots possibly. Have a nice day!

SIMPLE

If PB had ANYTHING to do with Quake 2 before Halflife then it was a matter of hours or days before it was available to HL.

As for your smartass seemingly-know-it-all-ness you may or may not know that as soon as a cheat detection package has been updated from ONE source there are NUMEROUS sources right there to get around it. Same idea behind chain-mail to counteract swords, arrows beat chainmail so platemail was made to counter arrows. Except the swords and arrows are coming from many directions.

You seriously do not play any of these games to see what cheat detection does to them. again... I will spell it out for you in simple terms for your simple one track mind to understand.

Putting extra software in will slow the system for everyone including HONEST players. People who can get around the system will do just that meaning the HONEST players have to suffer through the cheat detection software.

Since it seems you do NOT play BF1942 I will again retell the story so your slowness will understand that as well. I and several friends as of 1942's patch 1.61 (includes PB and related changes) cannot play several mods because the system has been cripled. Yes PB has crippled somewhat the game. It's not uncommon on a 32 player server to see in 30mins 10+ people being kicked for PBCL issues and even I have been kicked for the same only to be able to play somewhere else.

Try reading all of the statement instead of what you want to read out of it.

It requires a non-automated process which seems to go against everything I have witnessed from ANet.

Actually, a modicum of thought will reveal that it requires ANet actually transferring money to the botters long before they can find out the account and take action. Every one shut down would come at a cost in real money to ANet.

Incorrect: the copywrite was enacted on the basis that intellectual property from the studios was being sold without their compensation. The case has ONLY been made post licensing in foreign contries. meaning that if i take your work and do stuff with it, its fine unless i'm undercutting you directly. Since bots essentially destroy the game, they risk ruining A.Net's future revenue by destroying player bases now.

Thus the intellectual property of a party is being used for the monetary benefit of another to the detriment of the first. That precedent is what caused copywrite law to come into existance, but doesn't mean that you need a specific copywrite on something you own to prevent it from being abused, especially if its against the EULA. If you violate the EULA, technically you shouldn't have access to any of the software that ANet gives you to play GW on. Oh, note, none of you own guild wars: you own a license to use it. You aren't allowed to decompile the program because it isn't yours.

Gaile, it's really great to see you posting in one of my threads

I have an interesting thought for you...
Would it be possible to somehow have a different loot table for the players you identify as not being a botter?

I mean, a botter gets banned but a farmer is left alone to carry on his merry way and to continue to collect the poor loot too. Which just makes things less exciting and strung-out as we search longer and longer for those fun things.
Wouldn't it reflect better on ArenaNets methods if you could actually benefit the genuine players once identified, aswell as punishing the bad apples?

It wouldn't apply to the rest of the non-farmers because according to ArenaNets own statements, people who play the game in its "normal" linear fashion actually get good drops anyway (Which i can concur).

It just seems a tad unfair that genuine players (such as myself) continue to get the white items and stacks of minotaur horns instead of the "fun" stuff which we got a month ago or more.

"OK, he's clean, send him the un-nerf patch." Is this a feasible proposal?

I'm not saying what you're say I'm saying at all. It is the real world currency that holds an objective value, and Guild Wars gold with a value particular only to a given person. Which doesn't make it (the value) any less real.

Also, I would like to ask you how exactly do you think our experience is "marred" by these sellers?

Why don't they create a non-grind environment by not nerfing everything they can find instead? It's particulary unfair for the newer players who have never had an access to easy farming areas. All they have done by nerfing is supported elitism and created a resentment among those who missed the chance. Selling gold and items on eBay is an another side of the same problem.

In fact, nerfing in Guild Wars does not make sense at all, as this is not a game with a monthly subscription fee that would benefit from creating a time-consuming grind environment. All it achieves is increasing the personal wealth of the already rich players. So why is it that getting gold and items has been made so hard? Why are my level 20 characters almost like dead slots because I can't afford the time it takes to make them PvP-ready? Sure, they've introduced faction points which are easily farmable, but it doesn't make my PvE character more useful. I need perfect items to gain that all-important edge in PvP, and they cost more money than I've made in all my 400 hours of gameplay. They could at least free the slot for a new character after I've finished the game, so I wouldn't have the temptation to delete it along with the 100% explored Tyria map.

After all, I bought this game to compete with skill, not my ability to waste time.

And as for all the hypocrites that can't stand other players making money from Guild Wars: blame A.Net for deliberately making gold this scarce instead, if you must. The sellers are just satisfying a demand, not scamming others. Stop trying to enforce your gaming style on people who aren't as grindfest-loving as you, and spare us your zeal and intolerance. It's not even in A.Net's interests to ban them, because it would hurt the future sales.

Note that I have never used eBay or any other similar service except for Amazon.com in my life, and I don't intend to in the near future. So this is not an justification to buying gold from farmbotters or sweatshop workers, it's just a protest against the stupid groupthink in these forums.

I believe it is called copyrights.

Yeah, and what you're saying is true, it's a breach of the EULA, but probably not copyright laws per se. Of course, IANAL. I don't even know wether a software license can be used as a basis to sue you where I live.

Never again will the spellcheck be left unwatched O_o.

This thread has gotten big in NO time, wow.

If you are doing some illegal activities, would you be telling the world your name and address?

If I were botting, I wouldn't spam english phrases.

Religion with religious groups gets big, abortion among religious versus non-religious groups gets big, and so on. You are just seeing the backlash of what people are passionate about and percieve being trampled by real or imagined forces. The ensuing dialogue is more of an effort to feel more than just a victim of circumstance and sometimes can lead to change.

Not on here it won't but I admire your wisdom, nonetheless

Then why oh why for weeks have we seen CONSTANT bot behavior at Ember Light Camp? When is ANet going to address this blatantly obvious botting behavior?

Doesn't anyone at ANet PLAY this game, even once in a while? All you have to do is stand in Ember Light Camp for 20 seconds to see it.

Yeah, the activities at emberlight are VERY obvious. The fact that every suspicious player stops and offers money for random trades, for example, is indicative of bot like behavior.

Also, i offered a bot 1 gold and it gave me a hundred in return. Very suspicious indeed.

Yeah, mail this to support !!