Originally posted by TeknoBug

BOTS don't affect your grind
BOTS don't affect the nodes you collect
BOTS don't affect your pvp experience
BOTS don't affect dungeons and events

BOTS DO affect the trading post economy
^ that's the biggest concern. The more people buy gold from them, the more email spam you will receive and the more bots you will see, however the amount of email spam I've gotten lately has been drastically cut down so Anet must've done something.

You forgot one that is more immediate: bots DO affect mob tagging since they are not instanced. They affect you if they kill mobs for a particular area's heart quest that are scarce--which happens in some places. And of course they affect your ability to tag mobs that spawn for a DE.

And in case you haven't noticed, the things that are the most profitable at the TP (the rare Ori being the only exception I can think of) all come from mob drops: unidentified dyes, "bags," Green or better equipment, cloth fragments.

It isn't just a matter of possible future economic problems due to market saturation or the inlationary effect of gold buying, there is a real immediate problem when you get  a group of 5 ranger bots AOE'ing a DE killing all he mobs and preventing you from tagging them. This is what peope are most pissed about.

Maybe it's me but when I see threads like this I sit and wonder...what more do you want? All they are doing is telling you they are aware of the problem and working on it. What is the point of them posting that same message every week. To make folks feel better? I don't know how words will do that when you are fed them every week or so. They are aware of the issue and working on it. That's about it. I know I reported one I saw and he was gone within the hour. Not sure what else folks are reaching for here.

And saying you will encourage others to not play it....why? Are you the messiah of games or something? If someone likes a game or not should be left to that individual. Never understood the need to influence anyone else's decision. When someone ask me about a game I tell them the good and bad and tell them to try it for themselves. I'm never going to try to influence their choice even if I don't like the game and there have been quite a few of those.

One of the things NcSoft does, is wait, a long tiiiiime before they do a sweep. The gather as much information as they can , and probably track the transaction of RMT  so they not only sweep out botters but also the people who continue to buy from them.

I wouldnt even bother posting about it, cause t does nothing but troll. They said what they are going to say and players can except that or troll it.

Easy way to confuse a bot in GW2 - use fireworks in game near where they are and they get all discumbobulated. It is pretty funny to see.

There are bots in every game - WoW being the latest with the server kill bot.

A.Net is working on it - they don't want to talk about it becaue it may give information to the botters on how NOT to be detected. Did anyone ever think of that?

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. 

So, let me see if I understand this...    Special snowflakes keep spamming the forums about bots and constantly demand updates on botting efforts.   Special snowflakes further violate the rules by posting account information (a total no-no) and the thread gets deleted and locked.

Moderator writes a pretty civil post.   People whine and complain.   Welcome to the Internet and dealing with people who have the patience of two-year-olds.   Next will, no doubt, come accusations of Nazism and concentration camps where ANet sends infracted forum posters to labor in gold farms for the Chinese gold sellers.

Now, as for rude:

So, what he said:   "As already explained." 

What I bet he really wanted to say:  "No ****, dumb***.   We're getting rid of bots all the time.   We're, on occasion, going to tell the community how many accounts we've busted.  But we can't spend all day answering every whiner personally.   Grow up you petulant crybaby."

But he didn't.  He merely said "As already explained."   Which wasn't rude.  Or condescending.   He's actually pointing out to Special Snowflake Clone 478,954 that they do periodically update on the issue.  And maybe Special Snowflake Clone 478,954 should put in a little effort and find it instead of demanding Mommy Cloud personally attend to him at the expense of the other 2 million 'special snowflake clones'...

Originally posted by Raekon

Well what should I say? :/

As I mentioned in other threads about this already, I haven't come across a bot at the jade quarry server for over 3+ weeks now.

I'm on Aurora Glade.   Right before the last update they got rid of every bot I'd reported.    Today I ran into three new bots.   Three rangers running the exact same loop together.    It was kind of funny.  I reported them.

Not in high level areas and not at queensdale or ashford plains I was yesterday (did dungeons with guildies yesterday and my dailies while I was in these areas anyway) either.

Asked my collegue about his server and he didn't came across any for several weeks either.

Asked my guildies that were in other areas and it was the same answer.

Do the bots avoid our server for whatever reason or are they present on different times then the times I and some of my guildies play? I don't know.

Mostly the bot in low-traffic areas that have lots of 'yellow' monsters, like fireflies.    They've seem to have stopped, at least on my server, the teleporting and have gone to real-world movement.   They're also back to using rangers with bears instead of guardians like they'd gone to for a while.

All I can tell is that many people indeed exaggerate when they say that the "whole game is infested with bots" or that it's "overrun" by the bots.

Most of all when even the ones that are there and will be taken care off overtime doesn't really affect our gameplay.

Except if they would make it impossible to participate in a event which I doubt it can be the case cause after you enter the affected area, everything you do is considered a contribution anyway.

ANet also made a few statements that were posted in these very forums aswell, so I really don't understand why someone would want them to waste their time by answering threads like that like 24/7, when they could use that time to get rid of the problem from the servers that are affected by that greatly instead.

Because snowflake clones really think they're special.

 If the teleportation is indeed a exploit that is getting used by people in WvsWvsW to get to orb locations is a real problem then they should take care of this first in my opinion cause it's actually not botting but rather a exploit real players are using to their advantage (I know that the HoD server did something like that the last few times we faced them).

Creating such threads 24/7 only to drag the game or the company down the whole time won't speed up their efforts, nor it will help the situation some servers are in either.

We know that they are working on it and they already stated that they do so aswell, so let them work so we can have a bot free environment in the game soon.

Yeah, but you have the cultivated 'jaded superiority' people who, with their faux sophistication look down on honest answers from honest people.   You see it a lot in teenagers.   Most grow out of it.  Some don't.

I have found a way to enjoy bots in GW2.  Yep, you heard that right.  Here is the secret to my success...

1.  Go to the WvW borderland of the server that is currently dominating, make sure you are not in that server.  If you are, then you can transfer out if you want.

2.  Go to the Skritt DE there, it is like in the UL of the map in a cave.

3.  There will nearly always be a huge train of bots running around in a circle auto-attacking the skritt over and over again.  They do this because you can literally do 1-80 in WvW because of the scaling so they never have to move.

4.  Kill said bots for tons of badges, exp, and satification.

Now mind you, over the past few days, my bots have acquired "guards."  There are now like 3-5 real players that try to defend the bots against my periodic purges.  But these guards are bad players, so 2 competent players can normally take them out.  Then you have free reign to kill the massive bot train :).

Oh also...the bots appear to be programmed to rez each other.  So if you leave one alive, he will rez the rest and you can kill them again.

Yes, I realize this is farming bots and is kind of exploitative.  But honestly, I consider it a bit poetic.  These guys come on to farm crap and exploit normal players, so it's only right that they wind up being farmed by normal players themselves ;).

Originally posted by TeknoBug

BOTS don't affect your grind
BOTS don't affect the nodes you collect
BOTS don't affect your pvp experience
BOTS don't affect dungeons and events

BOTS DO affect the trading post economy
^ that's the biggest concern. The more people buy gold from them, the more email spam you will receive and the more bots you will see, however the amount of email spam I've gotten lately has been drastically cut down so Anet must've done something.

I have to correct you on this one in red. I stated in another thread that once I saw a group of bots (a dozen+) in the northwest corner of the WvWvW map were players rarely go doing basically a figure "8" while targetting skritts and ignoring an enemy player in the middle of them.

That example right there hinders a dozen or so real players from entering WvWvW because they are causing a queue. Thus hindering our servers ability to fight back during WvWvW. That's all I'm sayin.

Also to SOT (stay on topic), Anet has already been made aware of the botting issue. No need to bombard them with post after post about it. As long as they are working toward correcting the issue, that should be enough for anyone effected. I just hope their priorities are to combat the one effecting WvWvW first as those are directly hindering real players from enjoying a portion of their game.

Bots have very specific programming, and won't go out of their way for much. Moreover, the mobs either A) have to be plentiful or B) have a very low respawn timer, so you shouldn't be heavily affected by this (most of the ones I've seen just wait for an insanely-low respawning group of mobs and farm that). As to the ones that are gathering nodes, you know very well that they aren't affecting *your* farming.

As to the original post, it's not condescension, it's genuine annoyance at people wanting everything done *now* or to be updated at all times as though they worked for Arenanet. It wasn't put in a hostile way and let people know that pestering is rude, there's no problem here.

Bots are less prevalent in pvp, and easier to report. It sucks, but report and keep doing your best.

Originally posted by Creslin321

I have found a way to enjoy bots in GW2.  Yep, you heard that right.  Here is the secret to my success...

1.  Go to the WvW borderland of the server that is currently dominating, make sure you are not in that server.  If you are, then you can transfer out if you want.

2.  Go to the Skritt DE there, it is like in the UL of the map in a cave.

3.  There will nearly always be a huge train of bots running around in a circle auto-attacking the skritt over and over again.  They do this because you can literally do 1-80 in WvW because of the scaling so they never have to move.

4.  Kill said bots for tons of badges, exp, and satification.

Now mind you, over the past few days, my bots have acquired "guards."  There are now like 3-5 real players that try to defend the bots against my periodic purges.  But these guards are bad players, so 2 competent players can normally take them out.  Then you have free reign to kill the massive bot train :).

Oh also...the bots appear to be programmed to rez each other.  So if you leave one alive, he will rez the rest and you can kill them again.

Yes, I realize this is farming bots and is kind of exploitative.  But honestly, I consider it a bit poetic.  These guys come on to farm crap and exploit normal players, so it's only right that they wind up being farmed by normal players themselves ;).

I like the way you think. This is one "exploit" I'm all in favor of.

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 there is no such thing as a "safe" system once it is connected to the internet... it's not possible, there are always holes, some of them in the very standards that are used to make the internet go round.  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.  They could thoeretically block anything that sets off a certain tag or doesn't meet a certain check, but as seen with Ubisofts DRM, that will cause more consumer backlash than good AND at some point tends to mistakenly block hundreds(or thousands) of players that aren't doing anything wrong.  I've seen things like that happen (I've put some of those measures in place only to remove them later due to more harm than good being caused).

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

the best way to end with the bots and gold sellers is to soulbind everything, including gold. Everything that a player gets (rewards, minerals, gold, items, etc etc) should be soulbound to that specific player, only tradeable to NPC merchants so you can sell the items and make cash. Remove auction house. We can play the game for fun, not to have a business in game. Bots and gold sellers wont have a damn reason to farm gold and steal accounts and they will leave.

Create a system so that NPC vendors pay good ammount of cash for valuable unwanted items so it wouldnt be a waste to NPC vendor it. No trades / sells between players. No gold trade between players. You want to make money? craft, do quests, loot and sell to npcs. Bots/gold sellers bye bye

I can see the OP's frustration, I ran into a pack of 10 ranger bots the other day, frist I laughed as I saw 10 bears and 10 rangers killing the same targets...but then after I had a laugh and couldn't complete the event because the bots killed everything before I could target it...I got pretty annoying.

It needs to stop for sure, but the OP is being a bit extreme about leaving the game and encouraging people to leave the game, that is just shit talk.

Did anyone ask to be updated hourly on this issue. NO! What was stated is the Moderated said they could not report on this hourly... when they hadn't commented at all on it in around two weeks. It was nice to have a single thread to rant, discuss and report things into. Now people will just make new topics all over the boards. Sure they will get deleted, but they just made more work for themselfs in the end. 

Second. The people working on the games are not the people moderating those forums. 

Third. Enjoy another bot video from today. Same ones been in this spot for about two weeks.  Boy I don't notice them at all! They seem so life like and natural!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-Pe-CsWyg4

While I do believe Anet that they hired people to stop the botting I am shocked to see so many people here being ignorant to the botting problem. It does not interfere with your events and harvesting? The famous event near Shelter Waypoint whatever the name is near the entrance to the Cursed Shore...

There are 6 bots which have been there for weeks. The problem is, they are Elementalists and keep on spamming AoE even before the mobs spawn. You have 0 chance to deal the neccessary 5% damage to get exp and loot. Which is why people have abandoned the side invested by the bots and only play the event on the west side.

Some people said there are no obvious bots with obvious names. 2 of the above mentioned bots have  such obvious names and just yesterday I saw a Necromancer with the name of jgfkh running around  in circles in Frostgorge Sound, killing nonstop while ignoring any player trying to talk to him.

No, the bots do interfere with our events and our farming  and they do influence the market and I want a solution rather today than tomorrow.

Sorry. I only have good news to add and no drama (I know, booooooring)

A post from Gale Gray on the official forums today:

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.

I have no issue with that post by the dev team. I'd go so far to say that I agree with them. Remember forum posters: we are the 1% of the gaming population. Most of us are whiny little nerds with their priorities in all the wrong places.

Remember when people just went on forums for information and theorycrafting?