Originally posted by Jyiiga

I'm going to take the gloves off here for a minute and generally be flat out rude. I am posting this here, because if I do on the main forums they will delete it and give me an infraction for it. 

As of today the thread on botting is now closed. 

https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/game/gw2/On-Botting-and-What-We-re-Doing-About-It/page/12

It is 12 pages long and has 566 replies along with 84,516 views.

This is the final comment before it was closed.

The entire post comes off as condescending. Every hour are you kidding me? Mike (the one in charge of security) has not said a peep about botting since the original post was made on Sept 27th. In that time people have primarily posted screenshots, made comments about reporting bots and made comments on where they are finding bots. 

As of now the problem is worse than it was two weeks ago or even a month ago. The game is saturated with bots at most high lvl events. At this time the botters have zero fear of Anet. They bot openly 24/7 in clear view of all others players. 

I like this game.

I want to enjoy this game.

However, if this continues for another month and they keep their mouths shut about it. I will for the first time.. be encouraging people to leave this game. Both my friends and on the forums that I go to. It is out of control and they SHOULD have been better prepared for it. 

It's called the "brush off" why should they care if you leave ? They got your money and some few poeple leaving means less upkeep for them, it's not like everyone will leave becuase some do lol

It's not like they can wave a magic wand and make them all go away, and your all delirious if you think they will put huge amounts of money into fixing this problem.

Ask yourself waht are you doing against botting?

They are mostly rangers, and i report every single one of them, i made it to 38 yesterday.  

I had only seen bots at  Botter's Bridge in Kessex Hills....until tonight.  On Crystal Desert there was a chain of four bots, all rangers with four letter names, comrprised of random letters, running around in a big loop around the ranch in Alter Brook Vale (Queensdale).  After events ended at the farm, I asked the legit players around to report the bots if they could.  No one responded, so I don't know if they did or not.

As far as what Anet should do, well, my idea for when an account IS found to be botting, is to disable the bot's skills, and flag them for PvP, so that any and all players in the area can just murder them.  Once the bot is dead, they're booted out of the game and the account is banned.  

That, or bring back Dhuum and the Ban Scythe from the first game.

Originally posted by Daedelus26

I had only seen bots at  Botter's Bridge in Kessex Hills....until tonight.  On Crystal Desert there was a chain of four bots, all rangers with four letter names, comrprised of random letters, running around in a big loop around the ranch in Alter Brook Vale (Queensdale).  After events ended at the farm, I asked the legit players around to report the bots if they could.  No one responded, so I don't know if they did or not.

 

As far as what Anet should do, well, my idea for when an account IS found to be botting, is to disable the bot's skills, and flag them for PvP, so that any and all players in the area can just murder them.  Once the bot is dead, they're booted out of the game and the account is banned.  

 

That, or bring back Dhuum and the Ban Scythe from the first game.

seen that area(with botters) the change to the bridge event made them move the bots that use to be on the far side of the bridge, because the centaurs will murder bots....

I have been staff on enough private MMO servers to tell you this, even private servers(the big name ones) get botters, and dealing with them can be a pain because, some players will get caught up in any automated anti-bot system, because there are people who love to just farm the same area in the same patern for hours....i personally know a few.....they enjoy it...

this is what anet are trying to avoid, I cant blame them, after the DR patch issues that punished real people rather then bots.....

from what I gather, what anet are likely doing is looking at how the bots communicate with the server and modeling it, so that when they turn the system to detect botters and deal with them on, they wont catch a bunch of grinders in the crossfire, I cant blame them, i would be pretty ticked off if i got banned for farming for blood or the like (did that the other night for 2hrs for a friend, boring but we talked and i played tv shows on my 2nd monitor)......

the biggest way to fix the problem would be to make gold less valuable to sell, the gem to gold conversion rate sucks for gem buyers....hence alot of people risk buying gold rather then gems.....they could fix this with some tuning to drop rates AND how many gems you get for your money OR how much they give you in gold for gems.....(since its pretty clear its not based on players putting in offers on either side...)

Anet are the cause of their own problems when it comes to gold sellers BUT, this is true for EVERY mmo i have seen that allows trading of items of money....only fix is to not allow people to trade anything at all.....and that drives players away....

If you think its so easy to get rid of bots, then ask blizzard why they havent gotten rid of them after 7 years of trying.....or UO after 15 years(yes there are still people botting and farming UO), or <insert mmo name here>, all they can do is cut the numbers down, and from what i have seen thats slowly been happening....

what they really need to do is come up with a system where it stops the player and asks if their a bot and has some "must read and answer" stuff (seen other games do this) if you answer wrong/dont respont, you get booted, not banned at first but put on  a watch list, if it keeps happening, have it setup instead of kicking them from game, move them to a room with something to farm that drops 1 per slot items that are worth nothing, the mobs able to kill them with 1 waypoint inthe area, so each time they die, they loose money rather then make it(we had a setup like this in both UO and WoW servers I was staff on....was funny really.....people running bots for personal use would get pretty mad when they came back to broken gear, no money and a full pack(in uo it was so fulll they couldnt move.....lol, in WoW the server would down level the person due to exp loss...)

theres no perfect fix, if they hire more gm's thats less money for other things, and more people to keep an eye on(gm's are netorous for doing things they shouldnt paid or free, so you need gm's/admins watching them at all times....) 

I do think it would be good if they could put a few gm's per server whos job was just to flag and monitor botters/expoiters and get proof they arent real players, so they could be booted/banned........but, again that gets pricy and if a gm dosnt like somebody they could just say "yup thats a bot/hacker" (seen it happen a few times personally...)

Actually the solution to this is very simple - I tested it last night just by running around to the obvious places and observing.

You hire one person as a 'bot-scout' for each server.

This would be pretty cheap considering it is an unskilled post.

You set them up in-game with an invulnerable toon - make it an eagle or something to not interfere with people's immersion too much, and give it the ability to move at accelerated speeds and teleport at will.

I can tell a bot within seconds - I am sure they could too.

They make a list, hand it to the right people at ANet and you could have swathes of bans done PER DAY.

This would kill stone dead botting on the system and for a pretty modest sum.

It shocks me when people said

" I haven't met any botters yet, i have been playing GW2 none stop"....

I am not saying it's everywhere like early Aion or lingege did, but it is quite obvious if you play long enough.

And it absolutely disguised me when people said botting doesn't bother them.

NCsoft likes them goldfarmers and bots. In the end its the bots that brings the cash and play the game not you.

Originally posted by morbuskabis

NCsoft likes them goldfarmers and bots. In the end its the bots that brings the cash and play the game not you.

This is a very provokative and ignorant statement. It defies the facts that goldselling and the farming behind it directly steels the income they get from the cash-shop. Pls understand how important that part of making money is for this compagny before comming with such pointless statements 

luckely as mentioned earlier we now see the baning of bots have started. 3000 was banned together yesterday. whith around 50 servers thats 60 a server, so there properly still is some way to go. But a good start.

Originally posted by morbuskabis

NCsoft likes them goldfarmers and bots. In the end its the bots that brings the cash and play the game not you.

Yeah....

....NCsoft like goldfarmers undermining their cash shop gem market....

Why don't you engage the neural network provided to you by millions of years of evolution before posting utter rubbish.

I got GW2 a week ago as a gift.  Since I didn't have to pay for it I decided to give it a shot.  I only have a toon to lvl 15, but I don't play often and when I do,  no matter when I logon or where I am I awlays see bots.   It doesn't affect my harvesting, but it screws up the economy.   The way it is now if you want to craft for the sake of crafting then it's all good.  If you want to prehaps do it as a source of income then don't waste your time.  It's just not the bots, but a poor design as well.

It just amazes me how GW2 on this forum seems to get a pass on nearly anything that could be considered a negative, but those same problems on other mmo's get amplified on here and the mmo destroyed.  Funny how that works.

Bots drive down the profit regular players can make from farming.  This makes gem sales more attractive than fruitless grind.

For all we know the bots and gold sellers are independent contractors hired by Anet,  providing a cut rate gold alternative to the the gem shop, either way Anet/NCSoft gets thier cut.

Asian cash shop based games always degenerate into GW2's current state where the only observable actions taken are those to further curtail player income (nerfing drops, dungeons, and farming in general) while bugs and unfinished content are rarely touched. 

It's a shame this generation has no experience with traveling sideshows, carneys, schills, so called games of skill with cheesy prizes, this is just the digital version. 

Enjoy being fleeced.

Originally posted by ennymith

Bots drive down the profit regular players can make from farming.  This makes gem sales more attractive than fruitless grind.

For all we know the bots and gold sellers are independent contractors hired by Anet,  providing a cut rate gold alternative to the the gem shop, either way Anet/NCSoft gets thier cut.

Asian cash shop based games always degenerate into GW2's current state where the only observable actions taken are those to further curtail player income (nerfing drops, dungeons, and farming in general) while bugs and unfinished content are rarely touched. 

It's a shame this generation has no experience with traveling sideshows, carneys, schills, so called games of skill with cheesy prizes, this is just the digital version. 

Enjoy being fleeced.

No, but we do know more than enough about under bridge dwelling creatures and how they like to bash things

I didn't get "condescending" from their post. They were more polite than I would have been. "You're not helping and also, stop doing stupid things on the internet. You guys should know better." I think that's what I would have said.

While I think the botting problem has gotten worse, I don't think this is what they want.  I think that conspiracy is just silly.

It's manpower.  They don't have enough people to handle this issue and everything else it takes to run a MMO.  I point to everyone's love of F2P and B2P as a reason for this.  People that keep comparing this game to a sub game in level of service and handling issues just surprises me.  Maybe because I figured this would happen along with other customer support issues being a problem.  I'm still stunned that they don't have MORE problems considering the way support issues are handled is pretty lack luster for me.  I like MMOs having in-game support.  Or a phone number or live chat on a website.  Something.

Oh well, I'm sure this issue will be resolved.  Eventually.

Originally posted by Betakodo

Originally posted by EagleDelta2

It just goes to show that not only do some players not understand how network security/exploits work, but they can't seem to wrap their mind around the fact that ANet can't continue working on stopping bots if they are reporting to each individual player all the time... it's not humanly possible.  I can't tell you how many times I've had to push back getting a project done for someone simply because they wanted more updates, which split my time up even more.

 

As to exploits and security... welcome to a technological world.  We are taught (Systems Admin here) that....  That kind of stuff can't be controlled by Arena Net (or any other game or software company).

Additionally, most exploits are exactly that... they find a weakness in the code that wasn't a weakness before (or wasn't noticed by the dev team.... which is really normal when working with millions of lines of code) or, as is probably the case with botters, some 3rd party program written to interface with GW2, probably by finding a way to reverse engineer what they downloaded when they got GW2 and then find ways to interface with GW2 in a way that doesn't set off the system's alarms... in situations like that (just like how malware works) ANet cannot combat something they haven't seen yet.  They can't write a counter to code if they don't know what kind of code is being used to exploit the game... that's the nature with the way software programming works.

So, before you self-entitled being starts spouting off rude remarks, try to understand the complexity of the issue at hand.

Hmmm I question if you are really a systems admin or not. Really? I think your hypothesis on how botters do their thing kind of clears that one up. Also, you don't update your bosses? No wonder you think the players who paid for the game are self entitled. The Anet employee isn't even a programmer, he's the community coordinator and he's helping Anet cover up this nasty stain on their name.

If you are a real systems admin, then I would assume you are just bitter from people are bugging you for updates when you're playing on the internet or napping. I think you don't understand the simplicity of the issue at hand. Anet is trying to save face, cheap, and made a lot of stuff client side when it shouldn't have been. See, bot teleports.

1. Just because you pay for something doesn't mean you can make demands of anyone, I don't care who you are. I will listen to you requests if I respect you and respect is earned, not granted.

2. I am a systems admin and no, I have never researched botting, I am making hypotheses based off what I do know of network security.  If it is a client side issue like your referring to, I don't see the problem being easily fixed anytime soon as I would guess it requires a large amount of code restructuring (making another hypothesis as I'm not a dev) to plug those holes.  Either way, it doesn't change the fact that a player/hacker has to take advantage of an exploit (in most cases) before a response can be created (for a variety of reasons)

3. I do report to my boss (weekly) and his boss, I do NOT report to the entire company (our internal customers) or the company's customers on my projects and, in most cases, neither do my bosses.  They only give updates to the supervisors in other departments and only if the information is need to know (may make a difference that my boss's boss is among the top dogs in the company).  We don't need to know ANet's exact progress every day or every week.

4. Forum posts on the official forums do NOT need to be made to report botters.... use the reporting tool, it was created for that reason.

Originally posted by Jyiiga

I'm going to take the gloves off here for a minute and generally be flat out rude. I am posting this here, because if I do on the main forums they will delete it and give me an infraction for it. 

As of today the thread on botting is now closed. 

https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/game/gw2/On-Botting-and-What-We-re-Doing-About-It/page/12

It is 12 pages long and has 566 replies along with 84,516 views.

This is the final comment before it was closed.

The entire post comes off as condescending. Every hour are you kidding me? Mike (the one in charge of security) has not said a peep about botting since the original post was made on Sept 27th. In that time people have primarily posted screenshots, made comments about reporting bots and made comments on where they are finding bots. 

As of now the problem is worse than it was two weeks ago or even a month ago. The game is saturated with bots at most high lvl events. At this time the botters have zero fear of Anet. They bot openly 24/7 in clear view of all others players. 

I like this game.

I want to enjoy this game.

However, if this continues for another month and they keep their mouths shut about it. I will for the first time.. be encouraging people to leave this game. Both my friends and on the forums that I go to. It is out of control and they SHOULD have been better prepared for it. 

1 question;

how do you identify bots? if you answer is I pm them with "are you botting" and they dont reply = bot. then id like tp point out that if you pmed me in game with any like you demeanor in your post then id ignore you 100%.

Originally posted by itgrowls

Sooo once again someone is exaggerating the bot problem. As i posted on the multitude of other threads on this topic, no it is not en masse in every zone of every server. I haven't seen a single one on mine.

 You must be oblivious then, try going on at night, particularly in the lower level zones, you'll see schools of bots teleporting from mob to mob and auto attacking.

I've never seen a bot on my server Aurora Glade. In fact those i have asked have only seen 2-7 bots over 2 weeks time...that's not even much.

If people see bots, they should report them, attach a screenshot with their names and location + server and time.

Originally posted by Pivotelite

Originally posted by itgrowls

Sooo once again someone is exaggerating the bot problem. As i posted on the multitude of other threads on this topic, no it is not en masse in every zone of every server. I haven't seen a single one on mine.

 You must be oblivious then, try going on at night, particularly in the lower level zones, you'll see schools of bots teleporting from mob to mob and auto attacking.

I wouldn't say schools - 1 to 3 maybe. Also, when I reported them, they all disappeared - a GM was in the area.

As I said before, A.Net does not want to tip off the botters as to what they are changing to prevent them. It is an ongoing struggle. As you improve security, hackers will try to get around the new security. 

You can tell what a bot is, in game, usually a ranger with a bear pet. Usually armor is damaged and gone. Have names lile, YeejjjUU ot something random like that.

Just as a note, here's a link to a post from the official forums from yesterday with an brief update on how many accounts were banned yesterday just for botting:

https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/support/account/Botter-reporting-any-way-to-find-out-the-result/first#post391228

They're keeping people updated, some just don't know where to look