Originally Posted by Sausaletus Rex

Make no mistake, bots can be used in GW. As people have suggested, the main draw is to acrue items and wealth. As long as there exists a secondary market - your Ebay, your IGE, and anywhere else where real game items will be traded for real world cash - then there's an incentive for people to figure out the best way of grinding out items and gold. And what better way is there than to have a program do it for you?

Bots can be made, bots have been made, to farm in GW. As long as there's at least the perception that it takes time to get the equipment or the money that you need, then they'll continue to be used. The instanced system doesn't prevent this at all, if anything it makes it easier. There's no one in your instance to report you to a GM. There's no one to interfere with your bot. There's no one to steal kills from or anything else that normally gives bots a bad names. No, bots can quietly and quickly farm and pile up massive amounts of loot. And what that does, as has been said, is to wreck the ecconomy. If some people, those who can run or who can obtain the benefit of running bots, can pile up gold piece after gold piece while you have to grind them out then pretty soon, gold becomes meaningless. The work you'd have to put into getting the gold to actually trade for something of value is insanely high and your only reasonable recourse is to run a bot yourself or to run to an online auction store. The same goes for items as long. As the game includes any sort of scarcity and rarity to give those items value - if you can't just get anything you want right away - then there's going to be a desire for a shortcut. Think about how often gold dropped last BWE, think about how much a full set of max armor would cost you, then think about whether or not you'd be willing to use a program that let you get that gold in a fraction of the time. That's where bots come from.

If you think that's it's impossible or that it hasn't happened, you're wrong. Alphas have made, tested, bots and, indeed, have been encouraged to by the developers so that defenses could be made agaisnt such things. You might remember that at one point there was a hotkey to "target nearest item", a key you could press that selected the closest drop or something along those lines. There's another hotkey to pick up that item. Such things made developing a bot to collect drops a fairly simple matter. Remember that GW has been designed to run as a window or alt-tabbed out of so that people can run things like IRC or Instant Messanger or Ventrillo in the background more easily as they play, using "3rd party" software with GW isn't a big deal in the first place, all you have to know is a bit about how to program such things. The select nearest item hotkey was subsequently removed from the game along with a lot of other changes. But that's only made the job of Botters or people who'll come up with programs that will, say, let you toggle the function of holding down CTRL during PvP or programs that will ping every taget on your mini-map or help you scan for Monks or whatever else you might think of just a little bit harder. No system's perfect, certainly not one as open and accessable as the interface for GW, there'll always be flaws and gaps that people can exploit.

I know, without doubt, that some alphas, some guilds have run such bots and used them to gain an advantage. This was long ago, there's little need for such things now, but once the game is released, there will be again. Items are a significant part of your character. Gold is valuable and used to purchase your skills and armor. Don't believe for one second that farming well can't lead to success. War Machine won their Top 5 prize largely due to the fact that they had a few members already in the alpha who used the time leading up to the ladder competition to farm like mad. I've even heard fairly viscious, though I'll stress unsubstantiated, rumors to the effect that they were running bots in order to do so. It can happen, it does happen, and it will happen, if there's any advantage to be drawn from botting and other "hacks". As of now, it looks like there's going to be significant advantage to be drawn from such things, despite ANet's best efforts. The best to hope for is that they'll be quick to respond and eliminate the problems as they occur because it's getting a bit late to deal with the fundamental underlying causes and attack the problem from the demand side rather than the supply side.