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"Anet Speaks on Botting"
Jyiiga
Member UncommonPosts: 1,187
https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/game/gw2/On-Botting-and-What-We-re-Doing-About-It
"We wanted to address some of the concerns around ‘botting’, and let everyone know what we’ve been doing about it, as well as our plans for continuing to tackle this issue.
Our monitoring of ‘bot’ activity has already resulted in over 1600 account terminations world-wide in the last week alone, and we are actively tracking the most common ‘bots’ in use, so that we can continue to eliminate them from the game. As we continue to gather information on these ‘bots’, we will be increasing the rate of account termination to remove them. Please continue to report players that you suspect of ‘botting’ – your support is much appreciated.
We are actively improving our means of detecting ‘bot’ activity in the game automatically. This includes tools for our customer support team to help them verify ‘botting’ reports and efficiently issue account terminations. Recently we have also hired a team of data specialists who will be helping us create more effective tools for analyzing reports of ‘botting.’
As a side effect, these efforts directly impact the operations of third-party gold sellers (and spammers). In conjunction with ‘bot’ removal we also take Real Money Trading very seriously and actively remove hundreds of gold spammers and sellers each day.
In short, we are fully committed to keeping this community free of bots and illicit gold sellers, and we very much appreciate your assistance in identifying and eliminating them.
Thank you for your understanding and patience as we continue to improve our ability to deal with this issue."
Comments
EQ2 fan sites
Carefully worded PR baloney. Note they never promised to actually rid that game of this.
Totally ineffective so far, every choke point DE in the game is infected with numerous bots.
Selling gold via third party shills, gives Anet deniability while they still manage to deflate player income and increase Anet's revenues.
I don't think it's possible to completely rid any game of botting. To promise it would be empty - for any game company.
Promising that they can rid the game of bots is kinda like promising that a ship cant be sunk or that the world will end in next month, it would be impossible to keep that.
And goldsellers is not really good for ANET, there are way better and easier ways to deflate the economy than goldsellers which usually hijack players accounts which easily can take away many players from the game that never will get the expansion or buy any gems.
Botting is not really that common, most goldsellers today hacks accounts instead, a lot less work. Sure, there are morons using it to get more gold and there are some people who used hijacked characters as bots but you make it sounds like they are everywhere. And this is not really something unique to GW2 but something that happened in almost every MMO.
Botting were really popular 5 years ago and so was Chinese prisoners and people in gold farming sweat shops. Now they instead steals your account and rob you blind instead.
Why would ANet sell gold via third party shills when they are already selling gold via the gem store???
Next time, you may want to read up a bit on the game you are trying to attack, it will make your bashing more effective.
Are you team Azeroth, team Tyria, or team Jacob?
Is that your base assumption for anything a developer team says?
If so, then I call "just baloney, not even carefully worded" on that statement.
Fighting third-party organisations leeching around your game takes time and effort. Hiring specialists is a good idea but it will probably only affect the effectiveness of the end-product, not the time at which it arrives. I can wait for that. (I haven't had any bot-filled DEs so far and I've never had any account trouble.)
I am all for having a legitimate discussion here, but this is about two inches away from government conspiracy/tinfoil hat nonsense.
Lets ponder a few things here.
A. If they did do something like this, someone internally would eventually leak infromation about it. They would end up in multiple class action lawsuits and permanently ruin their name in this industry.
B. They have already made serious bank on selling the box. The will continue to make bank on the gem shop alone (disregard gem to gold conversion). Plenty of players will pay for those services and items.
C. Letting gold sellers run rampant in a permanent fashion on the servers is bad for the games long term health. Lets say for a moment your idea has any merit (which is does not). If they fill their own game with bots and spammers.. People will leave and there won't be anyone to sell gold to anyways.
It is in there best interest to keep the game as free of bots as possible (100% free is not possible). Most of us want a fair shake.
It would seem that now adays anyone with power, money, influence, pressence, etc... is conpletely unable to do anything out of kindness goodwill, or good business practice without have an alterier motive, it is ashamed that few people trust that sometimes those is such posistions would act in a good willed manner, but thats what this world has become and it seems ramped in the gamming community that some how we feel that every company is trying to swindel every last dime out of thier customer base, truly depressing how bad the parinoia has gotten.
We go trough life with many yet there is a time we must walk our path alone.
Exaggerating much?
Of course your server might have more than mine.
I didn't came across any Bots for the last around 2,5 - 3 weeks anymore.
Prior to that I came only across 5 of them max (3 were together on a DE spawn point spamming arrows and two other in a other area also in a DE spawning point doing the same with shooting pistols/rifles).
So I highly doubt that the "whole game" and every server is like that.
no ballony here sir,
He just stated a raw number of bans over the past week. Nothing more nothing less.
Popular MMO's always fall prey to gold sellers, i've yet to see one game without (even the bad mmo's had gold sellers ><)
Anet will definitely have to work hard on the bots and Gold sellers.
They rely on cash shop and gem not subs for that extra cash.
So if they don't combat against the them, they will lose a ton of money.
Pardon my English as it is not my 1st language
Next time, you may want to read up a bit on the game you are trying to attack, it will make your bashing more effective.
Quoted for truth, lets keep the teenage paranoia out of the discussions.
GW2 is different in the way that it is structured and hence is very vunerable to many different kinds of bots..
Player reporting and playerbase education on what you are really supporting by purchasing 3rd party gold will be key to anets success, also mercilessly pursuing and banning the idiots stolen accounts that can be tracked back to buying 3rd party gold would make it known to all that it will not be tolerated..
Playing GW2..
And goldsellers is not really good for ANET, there are way better and easier ways to deflate the economy than goldsellers which usually hijack players accounts which easily can take away many players from the game that never will get the expansion or buy any gems.
Botting is not really that common, most goldsellers today hacks accounts instead, a lot less work. Sure, there are morons using it to get more gold and there are some people who used hijacked characters as bots but you make it sounds like they are everywhere. And this is not really something unique to GW2 but something that happened in almost every MMO.
Botting were really popular 5 years ago and so was Chinese prisoners and people in gold farming sweat shops. Now they instead steals your account and rob you blind instead.
1600 in a WEEK isn't really that common is it? On Yak's Bend, they're definitely everywhere, mostly at DE locations, they're even in world vs world zones at those skillpoint locations up in the NE or NW corners. Open your eyes, they ARE everywhere.
I recorded this in the first week of launch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFfJ6usuYkY&feature=plcp
Players voiced their concerns, and the company has responded with their plan of action. What else are they supposed to do? They banned 1600 accounts last week and terminate hundreds every day. The most imporessive part to me is that they've admitted that their current abilities aren't good enough so they've hired a team of data experts to develop new tools to improve bot detection. I say, this is impressive.
If in 1982 we played with the current mentality, we would have burned down all the pac man games since the red ghost was clearly OP. Instead we just got better at the game.
Something's missing from this picture, can you tell what it is?
No mention about taking action against illicit gold buyers or efforts to remove them from the game if caught purchasing gold. (because you really can't have one without the other now, can you?)
In the end its all lip service, of course they won't remove the buyers, and the sellers will just go buy new copies of the game, making ANET more money (or steal people's accounts) and go back to doing business as usual.
Makes for good PR, but lacks any real conviction.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Please give it a rest - if you played GW1, you would understand the lengths A.Net goes to deal with bots and gold sellers.
Your argument is ineffectual, since you are wearing your bias on your sleeve.
Swtor and Bioware did it, not a single bot of goldspammer in 7 months and the credits or gold is a big deal on swtor.
Did you miss the early days of GW1, where bots drove the prices up so high that the economy was ruined for almost the entire life of the title? At least they're not ignoring it this time.
Who wants to bot in TOR? Why would a gold seller be in the game? *sarcasm on* isn't TOR an SSO anyway? *sarcasm off*
Did you ever, by chance, try that crappy F2P called Cabal? The gold spam chat cascaded so fast that your own public text wouldn't stay on the screen for more than half a second. Worst botting/spamming game I've seen so far.
They never promised to rid the game of gold sellers. You just can't do this, unless you close the game down. There will always be hackers, there needs to be only one. Instead of making promises they can't keep, they're working on the problem. How's that for baloney?
"Every choke point DE in the game is infected ith numerous bots." List of "choke point DE's" and list of servers you've noticed this on please?
Now the gold sellers are Anet themselves? *Gasp*
I suppose you have something to back that up, lest your own words be taken for baloney instead of Anet's..