Guild Wars 2 - AFK Farmers & You - MMORPG.com

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Guild Wars 2 - AFK Farmers & You - MMORPG.com

Guild Wars 2 has never been notorious for botting, hacking, or just generally exploiting the game. Sure, occasionally you might see a speed hacker, or evade spammer, or teleporter show up in your reddit feed, maybe a dozen a year if you’re lucky, but generally its kept very much in check and under control by the GMs and developers. Recently though, a problem has been growing in both severity and in number with the rise of AFK farming on the new living world maps.

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exile01

game has always been filled with bots, since day 1. Mindless and pointless grind in a pointless game, where everything you do feels pointless.

IceAge

exile01 said:

game has always been filled with bots, since day 1. Mindless and pointless grind in a pointless game, where everything you do feels pointless.

What ?!

Megilindir

What's up with the quasi-mature intermediate school teacher attitude of the GM. We all know that chat can get toxic, but is that really the way to converse with the players?
" Do you want to get suspensions? Because that's how you get suspensions"
Is this a joke or anet epicfail on evaluating CVs for these jobs?

eruexe

exile01 said:

game has always been filled with bots, since day 1. Mindless and pointless grind in a pointless game, where everything you do feels pointless.

Agreed. I liked leveling characters to 80 but after that, it does get meaningless

mad-hatter

When the game first came out, it was rampant with bots, and by that, I mean, an obscene amount of bots.  The worst and most blatant bots I had ever witnessed in a game.

There would be trains of them following each other around certain zones killing everything in their path.  Not just a handful, we are talking 10-20 bots following each other, in multiple zones at a time.  Not only in PVE, but in WvW.   In WvW, there would be, I kid you not, inside the lake underwater, a gigantic pile of bots stacked on top of each other killing everything in sight.  Sometimes you could kill a pile of them, but if you got targeted, it was almost instant death. 

Had to be close to 30-40 of them just sitting there, and also at the little centaur spawns on the outskirts of the map they would do circles clearing the place.

I remember spending hours killing them, for a good month or more, and after about 10 minutes of clearing them out, one or 2 would start acting like they were being played by a player, the "ringleaders" I liked to call them.  They were terrible and couldn't pvp worth a damn, but it was interesting to see someone actually trying to stop you from killing their bot trains.

SpottyGekko

I guess gold-sellers and max-level account sellers need to earn their living somehow...

Dakeru

It's not just the new zones - you can also find them near the Great Wall etc.

Didn't know it was actually against the rules. In that case I will report them from now on.

Nanfoodle

This is all on ANet. Change the skills so this cant be done or change the policy so that doing this is breaking the rules.

Tiamat64

Hmm, not very often I see an MMO company banning people for AFKing with n-game mechanics instead of third party programs. I personally see that as abhorrent, myself, but it's their rules, I suppose. Still, I'm glad I got out of this game a long time ago.

Tyserie

GW2 was literally flooded with AFK boots when it came out.

APThug

There were some bots in the game since the beginning, but I wouldn't say the game was 'flooded" with them to the point where they actually made any sort of impactful difference to the game or the economy. I personally don't see the bots as much of a problem other then a slight annoyance in Lake Doric map. I can make in a day what these afkers make in a week.

Adding champ mobs with large aoe's and slightly altered Ai in areas where people afk farm could potentially solve this. They could mask it as a new "current event" similarly to the bandit one introduced a while ago.

Octagon7711

I know sometimes I'm grinding and not paying attention to chat at all. GM's had to port people in some other games to get their attention to see if they were afk or just not paying attention to chat.

meonthissite

"Guild Wars 2 has never been notorious for botting, hacking, or just generally exploiting the game." Uh yeah it has!

I feel they encourage botting with the amount of experience needed to advance the HOT items which is considered post max level advancement.

HoT invites bots because of it's design flaws. The original leveling system was progressive because it requires the same exact amount of experience points to go from level 5 - 6 as it does to go from level 79 - 80. This design was genius because it prevented bloated end game leveling which is a problem for many games (star trek online, lord of the rings online, DDO the list is long).

I've been playing HoT I've only gotten 2-3 items on one of the leveling sections 2 on another and 1 on another and I've been playing for a month now, daily, doing all the events I can, getting every advancement hero point I can.

The design is terrible in that not only does it go away from the original progressive design of leveling but it's also bloated to the point of stagnation.

Requiring a bloated leveling system to advance is never a good design for an MMO if you want people to play longer or more often making it a chore is never a good design plan.

Renoaku

How can people afk farm if they fix the server to randomly spawn these without keeping it at a specific time then the bot would run the user back to the same place to gather, unless its possible for them to use some type of memory hack to run to the (OBJECT) or the resource in game to harvest it?

Octagon7711

With all the advancements scrolls they have to instantly level you to 20 and 40 plus, I don't see why anyone would bot to reach max level.  They even gave out a free level 80 with gear gem with their last expansion, which is still sitting in my inventory along with an untold number of general advancement scrolls from drops.  Or level just with crafting.

APThug

meonthissite said:

"Guild Wars 2 has never been notorious for botting, hacking, or just generally exploiting the game." Uh yeah it has!



I feel they encourage botting with the amount of experience needed to advance the HOT items which is considered post max level advancement.



HoT invites bots because of it's design flaws. The original leveling system was progressive because it requires the same exact amount of experience points to go from level 5 - 6 as it does to go from level 79 - 80. This design was genius because it prevented bloated end game leveling which is a problem for many games (star trek online, lord of the rings online, DDO the list is long).



I've been playing HoT I've only gotten 2-3 items on one of the leveling sections 2 on another and 1 on another and I've been playing for a month now, daily, doing all the events I can, getting every advancement hero point I can.



The design is terrible in that not only does it go away from the original progressive design of leveling but it's also bloated to the point of stagnation.



Requiring a bloated leveling system to advance is never a good design for an MMO if you want people to play longer or more often making it a chore is never a good design plan.

Bruh, almost everything in this game gives you experience. The mastery leveling for one thing is account bound, so once you've finished it, you never have to do it again unless you buy another account.

The bloodstone map that was introduced in living story 3 gives out the most experience out of any other map. The Dragon stand meta event grants loads of experience. The mini game adventures also grant tons of experience and are repeatable. I currently have the maxed out mastery level of 186. As soon as a new one is introduced I get it maxed out again in less then maybe....2 hours?

If anything you should be more worried about getting mastery points then getting experience. Granted, along the way of earning mastery points you would have already gained a lot of the required experience.

Loke666

The problem is that during the huge nerf after beta weekend 1 they not only decided that everything should become far easier but also that getting a gold medal should be a brezee (don't know how many times I gotten gold for events I never even noticed).

During betaweekend 1 they would just have gotten a crappy bronze for this behaviour and of course does the autoloot makes things far worse today (but I do love that function anyways, saves me a lot of time when I play).

Still, drops go down pretty fast if you do the same mobs so a bit higher difficulty and harder to get gold & silver should make the thing go away.

Loke666

meonthissite said:

"Guild Wars 2 has never been notorious for botting, hacking, or just generally exploiting the game." Uh yeah it has!
....

Famous, no but it was rather common with botting around Claw the first few months. More then a few games have been worse (like the dungeon boss botting in early ESO for instance) but the important thing is that the publisher did something against it.

The games really famous for such behavior (Lineage 2 comes to mind) have had devs not caring about the issue or pretending it doesn't exist so eventually so many cheat that it becomes normal.

Tiller

lol in the beginning it was bad. Bot trains all over Orr and Sparkfly fen; sure it's not as bad now but you still see people botting. My favorite is the people who are too lazy to unlock the auto loot skill and run scripts for looting. You can tell who they are because when they are defeated you get FFFFFFFFFFFFF spam in local chat.

FlyByKnight

You make things a mindless time sink, humans will spend their brainpower and resourcefulness finding a shortcut around it.

I will use a tried and tested PVP adage to apply to Arena Net and the growing bot/macro issues;

"Get gud"

Tiller

FlyByKnight said:

You make things a mindless time sink, humans will spend their brainpower and resourcefulness finding a shortcut around it.

I will use a tried and tested PVP adage to apply to Arena Net and the growing bot/macro issues;

"Get gud"

True, but if you make things hard, or create mechanics to force people to be present at their keyboards people will complain about how the game is a forced grindy suckfest. The best way around this is to just allow it like SWG did with macros, BDO with their AFK grinding. If you can't beat them, create decent mechanics to to allow it.

Aeander

Nanfoodle said:

This is all on ANet. Change the skills so this cant be done or change the policy so that doing this is breaking the rules.

Minions, pets, and turrets are all somewhat lacking as is though.

Wizardry

I don't personally know the severity but i do know from many years of experience that the GM's and developers put almost NO effort at all into botting and cheating.They would rather nobody complains and just ignore it so they don't have to spend any resources tackling it.

So i found that statement to be completely out to lunch.
It is always up to the players to report and break a leg trying to convince the GM's to report it to their superiors.
usually how it begins is forum talk then the developer is quick to start banning anyone who talks about it.When you are more willing to HIDE the problem than work to fix it,you are a scum developer and that is pretty much all of them.

Point being,we usually see the innocent bystanders treated with less respect than the botters and cheaters.
sometimes i just wish we could ban the Gm's and handle stuff ourselves because the gamer's seem to care more about these games than the developers who only seem to care about your money.

Renoaku

Aeander said:

Nanfoodle said:

This is all on ANet. Change the skills so this cant be done or change the policy so that doing this is breaking the rules.

Minions, pets, and turrets are all somewhat lacking as is though.

Okay so I can legally do this in a game like "Sword OF The New World" and not get banned because its not using a 3rd party program?

Now I know how all the Gold Famers, and people have been getting free gold.

BruceYee

Wizardry said:

I don't personally know the severity but i do know from many years of experience that the GM's and developers put almost NO effort at all into botting and cheating.They would rather nobody complains and just ignore it so they don't have to spend any resources tackling it.

So i found that statement to be completely out to lunch.
It is always up to the players to report and break a leg trying to convince the GM's to report it to their superiors.
usually how it begins is forum talk then the developer is quick to start banning anyone who talks about it.When you are more willing to HIDE the problem than work to fix it,you are a scum developer and that is pretty much all of them.

Point being,we usually see the innocent bystanders treated with less respect than the botters and cheaters.
sometimes i just wish we could ban the Gm's and handle stuff ourselves because the gamer's seem to care more about these games than the developers who only seem to care about your money.

You left out the part where in non-ftp games those botters/cheaters are also paying players so to get rid of them means a decrease in revenue. It always comes down to cash money over the "feelings" of honest/regular players.