Curse

undead living · Feb 28, 2012, 09:22 PM // 21:22

im just curious in their farming style. Is it send the rit bot to farm solo, and if it dies, UA heroes comes to the rescue? if thats the case theres a lot of variables that would affect the botters bot.

Spiritz · Feb 28, 2012, 10:53 PM // 22:53

Quote:

Originally Posted by undead living

im just curious in their farming style. Is it send the rit bot to farm solo, and if it dies, UA heroes comes to the rescue? if thats the case theres a lot of variables that would affect the botters bot.

ok i appologise now lol`ing at that , thats a question that would show who bots by the answer.Normal player wont think on how its done also they cant really answer , but a bot user would be able to answer that and in doing so would show they bot - if that makes sense

Da Kenster · Feb 29, 2012, 12:43 AM // 00:43

It is interesting watching them interact with the voice since it turns, then still kneeling anyway.

/report and send in screens, that's the best we can do to resolve it.

Dayquil · Feb 29, 2012, 12:47 AM // 00:47

Quote:

Originally Posted by Da Kenster

It is interesting watching them interact with the voice since it turns, then still kneeling anyway.

/report and send in screens, that's the best we can do to resolve it.

I thought about doing that, but I wasn't sure how much good screens would be for evidence, unless you're taking frame by frame screens of them standing...standing...standing....kneeling etc.

Sidenote: Can I get MY account banned for reporting all these botters? I ask because I reported about a dozen in an hour earlier while bored and afk'ing there at work.

StormDragonZ · Feb 29, 2012, 01:22 AM // 01:22

I'm sure something will be done about this...

... after the month of June.

BuD · Feb 29, 2012, 02:04 AM // 02:04

Quote:

Originally Posted by StormDragonZ

I'm sure something will be done about this...

... after the month of June.

of 2016 when they shut the servers down...

spun ducky · Feb 29, 2012, 03:23 AM // 03:23

I have a bit of free time so I suppose I will explain what these Rt/x and x/Rt bots are doing in zin ku corridor. They also are in chantry of secrets in elona and also TOA in tyria.

It is a 7H team comprised of whatever minimum heroes available to the account since a lot of them are bought or stolen. The 7H team all runs UA as their elite skill with either some prot, heal, or damage as the rest of their bar. I have seen quite a few variations.

The actual bot being the player account runs a SoS bar as expected by all the Rt. The bot moves to several waypoints around the start area of UW while not on a strict timer but rather checking for the death of all enemies within in a certain range of a waypoint or team before moving onto the next point for aggro. It is possible they also check for energy and health levels of the heroes which is possible as that info isn't strictly serverside.

The goal of this team is to make it to the labyrinth reaper and pop him making sure he is secure. The next part is the interesting part.

The way dialogues work in gw you can send dialogue packets so to speak that aren't normally possible as a normal human player. That is why as mentioned they enter uw weird sometimes.

The big deal with being able to send any dialogue you want is in UW the way it is designed you can teleport as if all the reapers are up. So their first stop is bone pits then plains, and finally spawning pools clearing all these areas.

So they skip on the slow and tedious mountains using this exploit/hack to get to the high ecto drop areas thus making 7h not such a detriment to your ecto rates.

If you are wondering well hell I am going to rush out and get me this neato setup gl it is a private system and by the looks of it over 100 accounts strong. My guess is one of these major RMT sites running them.

I left quite a bit out of their workings but that should enlighten people as to what those are actually doing at least at the most basic sense.

Kunder · Feb 29, 2012, 05:57 AM // 05:57

That sounds like a major bug on Anet's side. Only checking for quest completion to activate the teleportation from the client's side? Silly game developers

Obviously a really inefficient farming method, but bot farmers care about a lot more things than efficiency.

undead living · Feb 29, 2012, 06:02 AM // 06:02

i don't understand how they are to teleport without popping reapers?

Kunder · Feb 29, 2012, 06:11 AM // 06:11

Quote:

Originally Posted by undead living

i don't understand how they are to teleport without popping reapers?

My understanding from what spun ducky said:

The game lets you teleport whenever you send a certain message to Anet's servers. Your own PC checks whether you should be able to teleport, but obviously you can modify code on your own PC to send the teleport message regardless. When Anet's servers get that message they teleport you without double checking that you can actually teleport, which is where the check really needs to be.

A fairly common exploit in anything with a user-server setup, always boils down to trusting the user's PC instead of verifying things on the server's end.

Kiki Go Boom · Feb 29, 2012, 06:20 AM // 06:20

All Anet's fault for telling me to stop reporting bots.
I kept that place clean for most of the latter half of last year while waiting around for people and now that I stopped, all is "back to normal"

Also, the majority of them are not hacked accounts. The RMT companies don't rely on that anymore, it's risky for them to do that. Most of the bots are brand new accounts since it's so cheap to buy the game. They hire "levellers" to run the bots from Shing Jea Island up to Zin Ku Corridor (or ToA, Chantry of Secrets etc depending on where they wanna farm from). I've seen them happen and even befriended one of the levellers on accident

. They don't work for the rmt companies but they know everything about them and I learned a lot!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Spun Ducky

It is a 7H team comprised of whatever minimum heroes available to the account since a lot of them are bought or stolen.

I don't completely agree with this because I've seen the bots as they've started out in Shing Jea Monastery and only some of them get run through eotn for the heroes. Most don't and they end up using henchmen.

If it's a hero team, either it's a hacked account (which are mostly used for feather farming in jaya bluffs, not ecto farming) or the particular leveller ran the bots through eotn.

Also, there is more than one type of bot. The ones that we mostly see are the 8man party farmers, but sometimes you'll see solo ecto farming bots! There aren't as much of these and I mostly see them in the asian districts. These ones, imo, aren't controlled by rmt companies but by other, more secretive and less populated groups of people. These are more advanced bots as they aren't as easily detected through anet's bot detection system and it took almost a month of investigation to finally take down some of them. I'm thinking that these are the bots that are run by the actual people that wrote the codes and they know how to make the bots as undetectable as possible. Fun fact: these bots are also programmed to farm the gvg zquest!

I banned around 1500-2000 ecto farming bots late last year (maybe more because sometimes the support team told me they managed to find more bot accounts that were under the same ip) that it almost certainly meant that less ectos were being introduced into the game, which is why I sometimes think that I was the cause of the ecto price rise.... sorry everyone.

Sad to see that all my efforts didn't achieve anything though, other than make Anet some more cash.

spun ducky · Feb 29, 2012, 06:20 AM // 06:20

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kunder

That sounds like a major bug on Anet's side. Only checking for quest completion to activate the teleportation from the client's side? Silly game developers

Obviously a really inefficient farming method, but bot farmers care about a lot more things than efficiency.

It is actually a very lucrative farm weighing in at several stacks of ecto per 24 hours with the number of accounts running.

A fun piece of trivia the same packet manipulation technique for the teleport also use to let you enter UW for free it may still but I am not sure.

Martin Alvito · Feb 29, 2012, 06:47 AM // 06:47

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kiki Go Boom

Sad to see that all my efforts didn't achieve anything though, other than make Anet some more cash.

You should ask for a commission next time.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kunder

A fairly common exploit in anything with a user-server setup, always boils down to trusting the user's PC instead of verifying things on the server's end.

One can only hope that they've already learned that lesson in GW2. We'll know soon enough.

It's a minor miracle that the exploit either took this long to find or remained secret for this long. Duping got outed within six months. HM Urgoz got outed within a month. I think the Ebony Citadel glitch took two. This would have been available from a month after release, and practical at least since 2008.

superraptors · Feb 29, 2012, 06:59 AM // 06:59

absolutely no point in trying to stop them, do you realize how insignificant all this effort is for?

It is most likely less than 1% of all the bots you see.

Showtime · Feb 29, 2012, 07:20 AM // 07:20

Quote:

Originally Posted by superraptors

absolutely no point in trying to stop them, do you realize how insignificant all this effort is for?

It is most likely less than 1% of all the bots you see.

This is the wrong attitude, my friend.

Martin Alvito · Feb 29, 2012, 07:29 AM // 07:29

Quote:

Originally Posted by Showtime

This is the wrong attitude, my friend.

No, he has a point. Enforcement really isn't the answer, at least not the way ANet has gone about it. You don't cure these problems by playing Whac-A-Mole with the botters. That's inefficient, costly and ineffective. You cure them by fixing systems so that botters can't easily exploit them.

ANet has always been out of touch and slow to react when it comes to these issues. They deserve the criticism on this front. What they've always needed and lacked is a good intelligence operation to keep abreast of botters' methods and a small team of people with the right sort of creativity. Defending against this sort of problem requires both anticipating problems in system redesigns (stuff like red /resign just should never happen) and plugging holes quickly once they spring up.

Missing HB · Feb 29, 2012, 10:23 AM // 10:23

Quote:

Originally Posted by Martin Alvito

ANet has always been out of touch and slow to react when it comes to these issues. They deserve the criticism on this front. What they've always needed and lacked is a good intelligence operation to keep abreast of botters' methods and a small team of people with the right sort of creativity. Defending against this sort of problem requires both anticipating problems in system redesigns (stuff like red /resign just should never happen) and plugging holes quickly once they spring up.

I do agree with this, but superraptors does have a point.. We can fairly say that the number of abusers( botters/syncers/bug exploiters,..) left in the game is quite high...
Remove them all and the following will happen :
- a lot of ecto sellers/gold traders will disappear and it will have some impact on the economy of the game
- that's about 60% of the PvP population, the rest 40% won't be able to do anything else than some RA and C GvG At's, that's all..

Note that i'm completly for doing something against abusers, but I think they should have done something in the past; at this point, if they " removed " all botters and abusers, they would also have to do something in PvP especially, and i don't believe they plan on doing that..

For PvE anyway, i think there will always be botters somewhere. Even if they were farming elementals in ascalon without doing anything, they would still have some profit.. What i mean is that they could still go farm in an empty place where noone goes and still farm, although profit will be less..

Swingline · Feb 29, 2012, 11:11 AM // 11:11

It very difficult for Anet to plug the exploit holes in this game. Their usual method is to adjust mobs(position, skillbars etc.) but that can be difficult to do without making it extremely hard for normal groups trying to complete UW.

I believe this all comes down to the fact Anet used all their resources to make GW2 as bot free as possible. They seem to think this will redeem their failures in GW1.

Has Anet ever considered using a punkbuster type program?

Martin Alvito · Feb 29, 2012, 03:22 PM // 15:22

Quote:

Originally Posted by Missing HB

For PvE anyway, i think there will always be botters somewhere. Even if they were farming elementals in ascalon without doing anything, they would still have some profit.. What i mean is that they could still go farm in an empty place where noone goes and still farm, although profit will be less..

You're never going to remove the possibility of automation entirely. What you want to do is create as large a profit disparity between automation and the efforts of a talented human as possible. At that point the gold farmer has the former bot supervisors play a single account rather than manage the efforts of dozens, which is the closest thing to victory that is attainable.

jazilla · Feb 29, 2012, 04:19 PM // 16:19

Wouldn't it just be easier for Martin, Regina, Stephane, or Rubi to read this and have someone spend 10 minutes of their day in Zin Ku and see that it's happening, than for people to keep sending in screens of it?

Am I being naive? If so, flame away