Slowing down bots?

The farming bots are doing is all about killing and merching as fast as possible. You could continue to modify farming areas by changing up the monster makeup, but you'd always be playing catchup. Leave the killing where it is, just make it much more time intensive for a machine to find the merchant and perform the second part of their program.

Randomly move the merchants. Doesn't have to be much, but if the NPC wandered in an area... the bots would be slowed dramatically as they can't always run to a specific spot and "click" the place in front of them. There are already NPCs that wander, so extending this to merchants isn't a big jump. Obviously the merchant shouldn't stop in place once you talk to him because bots could lock him in place.

Humans will have no problem clicking on a wandering merchant - we click on mobs all the time.

Sure, bots creators will be able to work around this by leveraging storage for some extra spots, but in order to offload the goods, a human would have to be involved. What that means is the pure programatic bot will be slowed down - reducing the effectivness.

I dont know much about these Bots, but from what you've said here I am assuming that they:

1/ Exit a city
2/ Farm enemy
3/ Collect goods
4/ Enter town
5/ Sell goods

Is that right?

If this is correct then what is actually wrong with this? Is it against the GW rules?

Of course it's against the EULA/TOS, that you agreed to to play Guild Wars, to run bots with Guild Wars.

gw rules say you cant use bot

bots are illegal...these users are breaking the license agreemesnt

id think you should report anyone using them since it is cheating

The problem with is is that it screws over the economy for the rest of us.
They use bots to farm 24/7, gain an insane amount of gold, then spend it all, which boosts the hell out of item costs. Then the only way to afford these items is to farm as much as they do, which is actually pretty much impossible. This is also why they hate ordinary farmers, because it screws over the casual gamers by forcing them to farm as well.

But if you move the NPCs around, can you imaging how hard it will be to find them in Kaineng center ?
Its hard enough as it is, so I go to House zu Heltzer instead.

/signed

Anything to screw over bots is fine with me, even if it is at the detriment of my self...

Randomizing the merchant location may be tricky since you enter a city with other players in it. You would have to enter a new district every time for that to work.

An idea that I saw someone post was the randomization of enemies (their location, class make-up, skills they have). This would render the bots useless and would make the game in general less repetitive and a bit more challanging.

Not so much randomizing the location as much as just having the PC wander around. They don't have to wander over the entire town, perhaps just within a reasonable sized box - big enough that a bot program can't accurately guess the location of the NPC, but small enough that humans know where to go.

You've got guards in Lions Arch that do this now.

Can bots warp to guild halls? Than warp back to there farming location, and repeat?

They should be able to warp to Guild Hall.....he would have to move too

The problem is, if you press V then you target the nearest NPC.. so the bot would only have to run to the approximate merchant location, press V and then space.

Yes, the bots are not actual programs, but macros that capture button placement by using mouse cordinates (x,y) then executing a keyboard function, such as spacebar or enter. So you could tell it map anywhere and then map back to anywhere, including the guild hall.

How do you they are running a bot? Because they map in and out of a region? I do that. Because they are are Wa/Mo or Mo/Wa? I have one I use to farm. Do I farm, yes, with a bot, no. I think Anet are the only ones that can determine if its a bot or not.

This would not render the bots useless. The bots use keyboard functions such as tab to select next target, then uses a skill or spacebar to attack. The bots would just farm a different monster.

The idea about having the merchant kind of walk around town is a good idea of chocking the merchant aspect of bot farming. The merchant would have to walk in a big enough area that the entire NPC's name moves out of a set x,y cordinates. For example, moving merchant from 1,3 to 2,4 is not enough, moving merchant from 1,3 to 345,348 would. However, if the merchant is stationary at the guild hall, the bots would just map to their guild hall to merchant the junk.

Ive suggested creating an auto-disconnect after X hours if the player didnt answer a certain question properly, most likely an character recognition question, like those "Type whats in this box" thing when you sign up for forums.

Player John has been playing for 3 hours.
The game warns him, and asks if he wants to keep playing to type in a random letter/number combo thats in a box thats distorted to prevent OCR software from reading it.
He types it in and goes on his merry way.


Bot Farmer has been playing for 3 hours.
The game warns him, and asks if he wants to keep playing to type in a random letter/number combo thats in a box thats distorted to prevent OCR software from reading it.
Bot Farmer cant read it.
The network disconnects him.
He cant log back in without confirming another anti-bot barrier.


Yes its VERY extreme, but theres my idea :P

I say this from an Ex-Diablo2 Botter (Meph and Pindle bot) but ANYTHING can be circumvented.

for moving NPC's all that would have to be done is either as mentioned above, press "v" or use packet injection.

dialog box every 3 hours? too many problems wrong with that...
1. it will annoy everyone that plays legit.
2. botters will just come back every 3 hours.
3. what happens if John is afk when it pops up? it just disconnects him.. stupid thing to punish non-botters.
4. people will just decrypt the packets being sent from the server to get the string of letters. only way to stop that would be too use images, which botters would just make a database of.

not trying to kill the idea, but it's just not reasonable.
insted what anet needs to do is go spectate them verify its a bot and put it on a banlist that will be taken into effect once every couple weeks (to prevent constant new versions)
or use something like gameguard to monitor processes and have constant updates.

It wouldn't be hard to get past, press CTRL or ALT or whatever to make the merchant flash up green, scan for the light green distinguishing color and auto clicks it to sell. Bots wouldn't be phased by this I don't think, just one small mod to the program. I don't run bots or anything, but I know a lot about computers and robots and their abilities, and it's not that hard to come to a reasonable conjecture. :/

Do the bots have character recognition? If not, then other NPCs in the area would pick up the "conversation" and bots would have more "work" to do to find an NPC capable of finding somewhere to sell.

Yes, any merchant anywhere (or to be correct any NPC capable of buying items from players) would need to have random movement instituted.

Would this stop bots? Obviously not, but it would slow them down - enough to make them not profitable enough? I have no idea, but doing something is better then doing nothing.