I'm going bot hunting.

This would not help at all.

Botters and smart traders will buy up every item that is being sold under the "going rate" and sell them again at the higher price.

The only way to stop any of this is realizing you do not need a 100k weapon. It is only marginally better then any free max damage weapon drop.

Furthermore you do not NEED the 15K or fissure armor because is isn't better than the normal max armor in droknar's.

I have played 2 characters through the PVE part. NEVER bought a weapon or item off a player except for dyes. NEVER sold items to a player. Both chars have droknar's armor, decent items and 40k in storage.

YOU DO NOT NEED IT

You only need the expensive stuff if you want to be and look the best you can be.

Be warned though

Even with the best weapons, items and armor you are nog guaranteed to win. A highly skilled player could beat you, even with inferiour equipment.

So where is the challenge?

For me it is to be effective and successfull without the uber expensive uber l33t stuff. The need to have those item or be utterly useless is what drove me away from games like everquest.

Shaquira

You are talking about a multi million dollar business.

It cost A-net more dollars to positively detect and ban a botter than it would cost to start up a new one.

The guys/gals doing this are not only in GW. Even if we could temporarily stop them in GW buy a complete and total boycot by all players they will just sit it out and return later.

As said in computer security ... no system can ever be completely safe unless it is turned off, packed in concrete and sunk 50.000 miles below sea-level. (and even then it can still be compromised with determination and the right tools ;-) )

The same goes for MMORPG when it comes to botting

Shaquira


P.S. killing all outside access to the GW program won't work. As a simple example .. your mouse driver is an external program interfacing with the GW program etc etc. Not to mention ppl with alternate input devices to replace the mouse/keyboard for gaming.

I'd just like to say that the Ebay portion of nearly any MMORPG can basically never be shut down.

1) Ebay makes money off of these transactions, so they won't be inclined to stop them.
2) Theoretically these players are not selling the in game items, they are selling their time and effort in finding those items in game, which has no relevance to anything in game (Basically they are selling their own time and service in playing the game)
3) I don't doubt that perhaps some devs or inside people in Anet may be in fact aiding the Ebay market. Good way to make some extra cash on the side.

eBay: As far as I know, eBay-rules don't allow the trade of items that can't be physically passed on to others.
e.g. a year ago someone auctioned a "New Folder". He claimed to have created it accidentally on his desktop and had no use for it and wanted to sell it.
That item was removed because it violated eBay rules (at least in germany)
So the same should be true for in-game items.

bots: how exactly do they work? do they use the MS-windows eventhandler to send mouse/keyboard events to the applicaton?
If so, "simply" have the guilwars.exe listen to the hardware directly instead of using ms-windows routines; if that is, at all, possible.

I don't know to much about programming, so I'm just speculating here.

Everyone read this again.


Here come the punchline.


I have three level 20s, all ascended, only one has not beaten the game, and that one is at Hell's Precipace and will beat it within the next couple days, if I get my act together.

I don't take any of them into the Tombs or GvG. They are not flexible enough for PvP warfare. My W/Mo is fine for PvE, but for PvP my warriors are W/Ele, W/Mes, Ele/W. or the occasional W/Smter. To get all the skills I would need for all these professions I would need a lifetime, just to get the skill points. The armor is another argument, because as a tank is PvE that jump to 85 is nice, but in PvP, who cares, give me energy. The attribute point thing can be gotten around on the secondary, by changing secondaries, but on the primary, it is just easier to delete that PvP only character and remake.

I say this an I have the weapons and armor and money I need, but the way the game is set up it is impractiacal to create a useable PvE character to use in PvP. Save for some Monk and Ele builds, but I still experiment too much to be able to make one character to play long enough to ascend with.

I would like to be in a GvG match showing off my uBer LeEt weapons and armor, but alas, no.

I think you may have discovered something new... bot-farming!

Hmm... wonder if it'll work...

oops, i heard a goldrush: botters create bots to farm bots.

Would be an interesting way to maybe shut down some bots... just go take their gold away. I'm going to give it a try this eve for gits and shiggles, see what happens...

What kind of code have you been writing for 15 years?

I'm pretty sure anything like this requires hardware support... DRM...

Sorry, but no thanks.

You quoted the wrong post.

I've never flamed anyone in my life, although I have been flamed and I certainly don't intend to start now.

Yes I understand that, that why I said it would be nice if the value wasn't real to them.

Well, heh, to be honest you've actually caught me a little there. I have not had the game very long, so I have not experienced the days of glorious loot. So currently I am satisfied with what I have, not really knowing anything better. But, if Anet's solution to Bots is to nerf, then that too will go downhill. Currently, that seems to be the only solution to Bots that they have come up with, or decided to implement. To Nerf...I have read their statement regarding how they are trying to solve the problem which might have unfortunate consequences for players - it's somewhere on their website...So thing is, until they decide to do something different, they are going to keep nerfing because of the bots, and it looks like things might get worse before they get better. That's how I see bots affecting the game experience.
Here's the thing though - I'm not holding out for a fix all - I mean look at the advertisements that scroll across the top of this forum, all the popular online games have been affected by botting and ebay sellers. With that much trouble that none of these game companies seem capable of solving, it might be a long time (or never) before we see a solution that might not adversely affect players.
I don't see just dumping tons of gold in as a solution either. What happens when you drop tons of money into an economy? As I understand it (economists feel free to correct me) It becomes worthless and inflation hits the roof. The Japanese found this out in WWII when they overprinted money to create the famous - worthless, banana notes. You'd have to carry a plastic bag full just to buy a tiny bar of soap, and it would still be out of reach of the poor. The black market kicks in, and who can afford those items? The rich.

Actually, it's not horrendously hard, I think it's worse if you're waiting for items to drop for you, but getting gold itself isn't too hard.

No they are not scamming, but what they are doing is certainly illegal. Of course, the point of argument to that is that we shouldn't be "policing" what is or is not illegal. But the game companies have made it abundantly clear that it is, and they will try to put a stop to it. I have questioned whether or not they really do ban the accounts, and I think they do. Secondly, it's not possible to force these players into anything, as is clear from their proliferation. Most people are just expressing an opinion, they won't actually be able to stop them cold. It's like the hydra.

Well, there's an interesting debate right there. Sweatshop workers are downtrodden, get no rights, are poorly paid and only serve to make the man on top as rich as possible. But they are there because they feel that being poor is better than being dirt poor. Even that $1.50 an hour is preferable to nothing. So what happens? We raid the sweatshop and send them on their way back to being "worse off" because it is "good for them" to not be toiling under abusive conditions. Yet it is also terrible if we don't, it's possible to try for alternate forms of aid, but you can't catch everyone who slips through the cracks. - Anyway, back to the quote...
"stupid groupthink" - and I will call myself a hypocrite right here because I know there are times when I believe that phrase too. But still, it's a double edged sword. Even minorities are groups that engage in groupthink. All people engage in groupthink it just depends on what side you're on for you not to understand the other. I think you're doing a great job of trying to understand the botters and ebay sellers, but unfair to simply label the other side of players "stupid groupthink" without doing the same justice you have given to them.

That's a very unreasonable wish, because in this age our time is more valuable than ever. And it's definitely a good thing.


What do you have?

IIRC they said they'll unnerf it once they've found a better way to stop farmbotting.

A.Net is just using them as an excuse to nerf. They've given us hints that they don't really like farming before. See here, a couple of random quotes from A.Net:

And so on.

I'd say that creating an inflation was mostly the fault of regular hardcore farmers, not botfarmers. It's just a speculation, though. What's really funny is that the nerfing has done much more to create an inflation than farmers ever could.

I can tell what is hard for me and what is not by myself, thank you. And I consider the current situation hard enough.

I bet this thought of somebody violating the EULA keeps you awake at nights. I mean, it's horrible!

I was talking about grind monkies who go "ban everyone who cheats by not having to grind for gold". People have better things to do than grind, but they will still want that FoW armor. So what?

Good job, you just refuted a strawman.

I see one problem with that, what if the bots aren't accessing the game, merely imitating the signals sent to the CPU from the mouse and keyboard using screen coordinates?

Not so easy... no matter how hard Anet try, ppl will always find some ways of decompiling the client, figure out what packet does what and so on...

Bots that directly interfer with the game (sniffing/sending packets...) can be made very impratical changing the packets values often via patchs (wich anet alrdy does well i think) but you cant detect them and "null their access to the program as a whole" as they work externaly from GW and send packets the same way the game client would.

Other type of bot is a "macro bot" that simply mimic mouse mouvements, clicks and keyboard press. These are even harder to detect as they dont interfer with the game's memory itself, they simply make a repetitive sequence of mouse movement,clicks and keyboard press just a human would do or take "decisions" based on pixel recognition (the color of a range of pixels to detect if a blue, purple, gold item droped for example)

LMAO! You must be one of those "Rent-a-Cop" that chases after underage smoking teens hanging around the outside of malls and movie theaters. What a joke dude, get a life or play the game.

DirectInput/Direct3D API hooks...

OP: If my English was abysmal and I had someone I didn't recognize flaming me in PM's I probably wouldn't reply either.

Oh boy, I think you and I are at crossways in understanding one another

Really, as I've been saying all along, yes it Is unreasonable and I don't expect it to happen...I think I mentioned that at least twice before. I'm not sure why people think I'm trying to force people to change their ways when I've said "wishful thinking" so much Oh well, can we leave this alone now Yes it's a dream - a very farfetched one...impossible.

I have the current situation of what people claim is a badly nerfed game, because I only started two months ago - as I said, I didn't play during the glorious days of loot drops.

Great, I'll be waiting with my fingers crossed...(I am sincerely not being sarcastic, please don't read it that way.)

"There will be future changes that will address our intention not to penalize farmer-type players, but instead to make playing through the game lucrative and rewarding so that farming is perceived as what it is meant to be, just one of many gameplay options."
Okay, but aren't botfarmers more effective than people farmers and more of a farming threat? That might be how they looked at it, without realising that botters don't care, they'll make their money regardless. The quote also seems to say that they don't mind player farmers. So could it be perhaps that they are unintentionally driving out the player farmers that they are okay with, while intending to drive out the bot farmers?

That's interesting, made me realise I've been looking at this from a pure gold point of view and neglecting the items...*sits in the corner, musing*

Yeesh, it wasn't a personal attack. I think you said "I think it's hard. I feel like I should be getting more out of the GW experience." and I said "I think it's not hard. I'm quite satisfied with what I have been getting."

There's no need to get snarky. I wrote a lot more than that and it wasn't "argh it's illegal therefore it should be banned."

I can't have refuted what wasn't an argument. I was merely pointing out that calling things "stupid groupthink" isn't a great way to engender understanding. It seemed to me through reading your post, that you were giving the botters and gold buyers the consideration of understanding, but not doing the same for the players whose opinion is to go "bot-hunting".

None of the opinions I have expressed constitute a command for anyone to think like I do. That's what a discussion is.

Seriously I havent a clue!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Call me a noob if you like

Harry

a bot is a computer program that gives a pre calculated response or action. they can be programmed to play the game or spam and complete trades for you and are a complete pain in the ass in most games as they can ruin a games economy quickly or just be a general annoyance

BTW thread necromancy sux

Thanks

Ok I think I have an easy solution (may have been mentioned before)

Anet has made millions off this game, I go to ebay (botter central) and while there are 1k+ items alot of them are the same ppl spamming.

So if there are 100 sellers the lowest price is from $6-15. Why doesn't anet buy one from each costing $600-1500 dollars to them. (i know these are ruff figures and there are other cost involved). They could then check the logs of the character they trade with to find the other accounts they have and also the people buying gold. Ban them all

Make a little investment and keep your community happy so we are still around come chapter two.

If some one comes up with bot hunting plan I'm in

on a side note, there was a bot that was spaming "WTF fiery Dragon sword" then the stats. Now I like the look of the dragon sword, but I'm not sure I would want it after the bot was done with it.