The March of the Bots

4 bots at it now in the european district, maomao mao, Sky Abcd, Beautiful Woman, and Jun Maocsj, 2 are from same guild/sweatshop, I have added them to friend list to see how many days/weeks/months they are allowed to continue.

Or you could even pay to make the decision of what creature will kill the player.

Gwen is 50k.

Haha. I love this idea. Seeing those Banned players have there items, gold and clothes spewed all over the place so that others have a 5 sec chance to pick up a few of the items.

Pay a small fee to choose which creature gets to do the distruction and the most chosen creature gets to do the dirty on the Banned Player.

That would be so fun to watch.

the bots are still there...

that's a great idea about putting them on your friends list..

i'm gonna do that.

Of course the bots are still there nobody is stopping them. As far as i know they have been at it 4 days straight now.

Unfortunately, I think it's more likely that they're going to do the same thing they did with solo-farming and make chests less viable across the board before adding some Banned character execution zone.

There was a dev in Seeker's Passage (had a name matching one of ArenaNet's employees, and I have no doubt those names are reserved) that said they were logging the offenders, I just hope the amount of gold those bots have been collecting can not be sold for more cash than the cost of a new account.

Which brings up another very annoying part of bots: they hasten inflation in the game by only causing a steady influx of gold, so their illegal behaviour affects everyone eventually.

oh wow... what was the employee's name...

i love standing there watching the bots...

it's great as a background when you are busy with other stuff.

sometimes people spontaneously say "i love you" -- i wonder if these are bots?

I absolutely _LOVE_ that idea. You'd also need a Town Crier who read the accusation and the verdict, so everyone knew that what they were witnessing was the banning of an account, $50 down the drain, for misconduct.

I'm guessing ANet doesn't ban accounts all that often, so perhaps all banned accounts could be officially 'ended' this way, but otherwise just select one banned account randomly per day.

While I personally like the idea of beheading, I suppose that is too gruesome and might be upsetting to some players. A more acceptable solution might be to execute the char much like is done in the bloodstone mission - the executioner casts a spell, the character disappears in a flash of light.

We should not be having bannings happening so much in the first place that they're made as a spectator event.

So how much are they making if they've been there 4 days

4 days/divided by average time per run = number of runs

number of runs multiplied by Average drop = ?????????

Bah, nothing wrong with a little light entertainment.

Seriously, though, with x thousand players you're always going to get cheaters, scammers etc and banning their accounts is the only way to deal with them. Might as well make banning entertaining.

You're right, since game companies only seem to do token bannings, they might as well make a scene about it as if they were actually addressing the problem.

I hate botters and farmers as much as the next person, but I hate the fact that game developers never address design flaws in place that makes a perfect a climate and more importantly, a perfect market for farmers.

The adjustments in mob drops and difficulties have obviously not phased the farmers, in fact, it's probably given them MORE business. So yeah, instead of spending energy monitoring and banning people, I'd rather ArenaNet think a little bit harder in how to address the problem on a more permanent basis without having it negatively effect the legitimate players. Because no matter how many bannings take place, farmers and exploiters are going to keep popping up like weeds as long as it's profitable and possible.

Well it costs to write a bot program that is smart enough. The smarter it is the more it will cost. So I wonder how much money will they get?!?

What *I* would do is track offenders, but instead of banning them outright, I'd give them 3 days under observation, log them and everyone to whom the gold goes, ban everyone. You buy stolen goods you go to jail, you deal with botters, you get warning and then ban.
This also makes sure that the great flux of gold gets reduced fast by removing it from play entirely - reducing inflation.

I don't know what kind of bot these people are using but there's basically 2 kinds - one is a fully fledged game client that reproduces the GW client. The other is a macro that simulates the keypresses and so on - the first can be fooled via protocol, the second can be fooled by moving the stuff about.
Respawning the chests in different locations shouldn't be that difficult - and you can make the protocol more secure by adding some challenge-auth for the client. You can even ask for a digital-signatur of each client try breaking a PGP-signed ip packet then tell me you're gonna make money!

A.

I'd say they'd be getting at least 250 plat a day.

nobody told you about OCR did they?


to address the issue of botting....why wouldn't ArenaNET select a 1000x1000 pixel box where the chests generally are...and have it randomly spawn within that box every time. To the end user the chest is always in the same place...to the bot the chest isn't there.

This wouldn't work. I have no idea how the Gold is transferred around, but I would assume the Gold is passed on to one or two real game characters and not transferred using Bot characters to other players for purchase of goods etc.

If you walked up to a normal in game character you, as an innocent player would have no idea whether he was interacting with a Bot or not.

The only way to determine Bots is there names that almost spell out Bot in your face, or the fact that Bots don't tend to be very responsive in the chat department.

The only people to be banned, are those running the Bots, and the same people who are always interacting with those Bots.

If you were to do it your way, well, as the Gold passed from person to person, you would have to ban the whole gaming community as it would probably pass from person to person in some form or other.

i heard drocknor's forge has a bot problem too, out of talas chute. it is harder to spot, though, because there are so many districts.

You hit the nail on the head right there. Most botters will have two accounts a bot account and a regular account. Because banning is always a danger every so often the bot will be used to transfer its money/loot to the non bot account. This way if the bot is banned the loss are not as bad and almost always guarantied a profit.

About the only definitive ways that wouldn't require investigating I can think of catching a bot would to see if they send any improper packets when they interact with something or by scanning for processes attached to the GW client.

Most bot programmers now know to include some type of random movement in their pathing algrorythm so going off of repetive paths and motions more than likely won't work or at least won' be a reliable as a determiner so I am curious if they actually use people to watch others to see if they are a bot. Also I would think that they would include some type of response to others whispering them. If (and I am not saying this is true) someone whispered me, I would include as the first response to anyone, "Hi I am chinese." This way any subsequent responses to the same sender would be seen some what normal as a supposed chinese person in theory, may not understand and send back "Hi" or "I miss you". Now I have no clue how you could keep track of senders but I would think there is a packet detailing who the messenge sender is but I am not a network programmer in the least and have limited knowledge of packets. The chinese response though, if it were a bot, is actually quite smart.

Now what I would do if I was trying to determine whether or not a char in the game is a bot (outside of packets and scanning for processes attached being that I think languages that simulate key strokes may not be detectable using those methods), is first log the time that a char is on GW servers. Someone on 16+ hours 24/7 should be a major red flag. Secondly, I would check (if possible) to see if any account trades on a regular basis with another account. This wouldn't be definitive but it would send a red flag and make me want to investigate further. Depending on if the bot can log in to the system (if its a script that is activated after the person logs into his/her account this won't work), for an account that seems to be on a large amount of time, going to the same area, I'd temp ban them to see if they attempt to keep logging in. After about 3 or 4 tries of logging in, I would think the typical player would give up for a few minutes, a bot on the other hand would probably continue trying.