Curse

Thallandor · Jul 11, 2006, 12:31 AM // 00:31

There are several possible explanations for the recent bans but since Anet have not come clean to admit for the failure its likely theres a few events that has lead up to this breakdown:

Institution of ingame messages: "You have been playing for X hours"
It was clear that Anet used this to discourage players for playing too long (eg 24/7) - remember that Anet has made all the money from you once you bought the game and make no more profit for maintaining service for players other than to promote the next "expansion". But more importantly the implementation can help to track and log players activities over time and highlight those accounts that are used for extended period of time which in most botting cases operate close to 24/7.

Dragon Festival Event: Some patchy programming has been seen with the event such that pets were lost and character faces altered client side has surfaced showing possible lack of extensive testing for updates. Implementation with the new "ring" games has seen possibly a record server wide AFKness and i remember before this banning incidence there were some server wide lags/crashes potentially showing possible problems coping with volume of traffic and scripting. Let us not forget the last major problems with the patch that bought us the tolem axes along with hencies dropping gold. But having said that GW is a extensive game and these conflicts are likely to happen and damage control would come in new patches.

I would agree with the post from threedices,#410 that the technology used in designing bots have been revolutionary (some bots programs have larger file sizes than the client and bascially rewrite the entire game information clientside) and widely used and employed in countries such as China and Tawain where traditional MMOs had their fieldday long before GW came along and let us not forget the cheap labour sweatshop fueling the gold selling market on Ebay.

Both botting accounts and sweatshop farmers have one thing in common, their account are been used to the maximum potential and possibly 24/7 to be able to operate in the most efficient manner possible. See the trend?

Recently we have seen several reports on Anet website of the banning of bots and while we have seen isolated cases of possible misbans the community at large was not concern due to their trust in the competence of Anet policies implementation. But with the amount of complaints of forum and game veterans is has become clear again that Anet has screwed up again, misinterpretation in the bot detection program of classifing Ring AFKers as possible botters having AFK for possibly longer than 5 consective days during the event. There was over 150 districts in the ring gaming areas in the US district imagine the server load across all 5 servers.

In short what that has conspired was a chain reaction of events that was a diasater waiting to happen and not unexpected and can be summaried in the following points:

-shortcuts implementations in player logging activites to indicate possible botting/sweatshop behaviour.

-inadequate testing of delivered content.

-poor event management and implementation without considering possible player responses conflict.

-inadequate server management issues.

What does this mean for us fellow gamers at large? I will let you draw your own conclusion.

But of course we cannot rule out the most silly possiblities:

Someone at Anet got drunk that nite and press the button for the GW-WMD.

milan · Jul 11, 2006, 12:41 AM // 00:41

Well I just got my 3rd account unbanned. First account which I play 80% of the time wasn't touched, neither was my mule account that gets heavy trading from my first account. They banned my third account that has a ranger, necro and a monk on it and all they do is group with other players for barrage runs in topk. Not sure how I could have been considered a bot buy hey...

sinican · Jul 11, 2006, 02:45 AM // 02:45

Quote:

Originally Posted by milan

Well I just got my 3rd account unbanned. First account which I play 80% of the time wasn't touched, neither was my mule account that gets heavy trading from my first account. They banned my third account that has a ranger, necro and a monk on it and all they do is group with other players for barrage runs in topk. Not sure how I could have been considered a bot buy hey...

possibly by trading items accross your 3 accounts without currency being in the exchange... thus flaggin you for potential farming on the intent of selling for rl cash...

heh makes u sound like a drug dealer... intent to sell haha

Crotalus · Jul 11, 2006, 02:47 PM // 14:47

Quote:

Originally Posted by Beat_Go_Stick

Banning us without doing a proper background check (which they obviously did not do) because we "look like a bot" but not telling us what a bot looks like is the equivalent of arresting someone for looking like a thug even though they've committed no crime. Hey, they were just held for 24 hours and never charged with anything so no harm no foul, right? Give me a break.

Unless you have observed all the players banned first hand, at their desk/workstation, everytime they have played as well as knowing all the programs on their hard drive you simply can not say that a person or a group of people did or did not commit a crime. Unfortunately i have lost almost all my faith and trust in the online gaming community including Guild Wars so my views are quite slanted to the negative.

Arenanet banned 4000+ players who they suspected were botting. I am quite sure there were more that they investigated but didnt ban. How long should Arenanet take to investigate an individual botter? an hour? a day? a week? a month? There needs to be a point where they stop looking at a player's repetitive actions and start banning. Let me ask you this do you really want bots banned?

Quote:

We are not saying they need to stop banning bots, we are saying that banning innocent players just to get at the bots is unacceptable....and if they need us to change behavior so that their "anti-bot code" doesn't flag us, then they need to officially tell us to stop doing something or to change the way we do it. Just suddenly banning people for behavior that has been completely supported by A.Net until now strikes me as an excercise in fascism....

If i created bots for Guild Wars then i would want Arenanet to tell me what behaviors flag their anti-bot code so i could make adjustments to my bot's code. I would even encourage it in a topic such as this. A warning would work just as good. I would inquire through the fan forums and their support center to tell me what i have done wrong proclaiming that i am innocent. Meanwhile, i would pull all my bots and try to figure out what piece of code cause the warning. If i was able to get any information, no matter how small, out of any of the ArenaNet's employees then i would use that to my advantage. I am sure none of what i have stated is of any surprise to Arenanet.

My comments may be rude to some but i doubt they are far from the truth, gauging from the insults thrown at me in this topic.

As long as ArenaNet places emphasis on farming, getting rid of bots, and as long as bots get more sophisticated each day then this type of incident will most likely happen again. If it something you can not live with or causes you distress then move on to another game.

I know that it is something i have already decided with Guild Wars.

Cash · Jul 11, 2006, 06:02 PM // 18:02

Quote:

Originally Posted by Crotalus

There needs to be a point where they stop looking at a player's repetitive actions and start banning. Let me ask you this do you really want bots banned?

yes, i definately want the bots banned, but not at the expensive of innocent accounts. not at the expense of having to wonder if im going to be next because i farmed for a green or for money or for experience.

to put it bluntly, this latest fiasco proves that ANET needs to find a better way to detect bots. and they need to perfect that method before dishing out the bans. in all honesty, id prefer a system in which NO ONE was banned to one where innocents lose their accounts.

i know this is a bit of an extreme example, but its like a SWAT team firing into a terrorist/hostage scenario. what should be considered "acceptable losses" (both in RL and for accounts)? obviously in this example, arguments can and should be made asking what the "greater good" is, but in my opinion (as far as the game goes) the threat of bots "destroying the economy" isnt worth risking the loss of innocent players. now if we were talking about hackers and dupers running rampant in game, that might be different, but the biggest problems bots give us is inflation (due to a high influx of gold entering the economy) and honestly guys, some inflation is to be expected anyway as more and more people buy and play the game.

sinican · Jul 11, 2006, 08:45 PM // 20:45

love it i do... everytime i post in this thread i feel that ive posted all i need to post... but seriousely some people need to have everything spelled out and repeated...

i wish some people would read more than they post... everyone of corse will have thier own opinions....

what upsets me though is when those opinions are based on whether they were or weren't one of those who got unjustly banned...

how can you argue against someone who was unjustly banned and tell them they must take one for the team or it was for the greater good...

PEOPLE bots do not affect gameplay as directly as losing your account... i personally could give two *&*^ how much boby made off of selling 100k on ebay... yea its against the tos/eula... what i do care about though is how i might get banned because of something boby does and i dont even frigan know boby...

the econemy in this game imo is so little of a concern... the resources in GW are never ending unlike other games where resources can be thinned out from repeated farming of them... things keep getting cheaper in GW what the heck is wrong with this... most comunities from other games are complainging because things have to high of a value...

I hate cheaters as much as the next guy but their impacting in this game on me is negligable i havent noticed anywhere where a bot has impacted my playtime or what i do in the game... i want them gone sure for fairness but there is no fairness in someone losing their account when they did nothing wrong...

and again we aren't talking 1 or 2 ppl who may have unjustly lost their accounts we are talking over a couple hundress accounts blocked because of error... yes they are fixinging it but what about next time and i still believe they are fixing the problem all wrong...

i want all those banned bots back right along with ALL of the innocent players... if they spent as much time banning people as they are unbanning as we speak we wouldnt have this damn problem

Deathface Jones · Jul 11, 2006, 08:55 PM // 20:55

I'm STILL banned with NO word from anet, I've made a new support ticket and updated the one they merged together , etc, no real word about my account though, only that my support ticket has been moved. 5 Days and no word, what the hell is going on here? This is making me NOT want to play this game...too much effort on my end to get unbanned...

Crotalus · Jul 11, 2006, 09:23 PM // 21:23

Quote:

Originally Posted by cash

yes, i definately want the bots banned, but not at the expensive of innocent accounts. not at the expense of having to wonder if im going to be next because i farmed for a green or for money or for experience.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Eet GnomeSmasher

Dumb question. Of course people want bots banned. But not at the expense of banning innocent people. And the problem wasnt that they did took too long to investigate the botter's actions, it's just the opposite... they just used an automated system to check and therefore banned a lot of innocent people. Do you even understand that?

I will paste what i posted over at TGH.

If they do too much checking on one person then many more bots will go unnoticed and some new ones will pop up. Once they find out that player is not a bot through extensive checking their time is wasted and they have many more bots to finds than when they started. They will spend vast resources to accomplish this and, like the red queen's race, get nowhere.

What is the best solution? Make botting not worth anything in Guild Wars. Will that cause some of their customers to leave? sure but so will banning them.

sinican · Jul 11, 2006, 09:42 PM // 21:42

Quote:

Originally Posted by Crotalus

I will paste what i posted over at TGH.

If they do too much checking on one person then many more bots will go unnoticed and some new ones will pop up. Once they find out that player is not a bot through extensive checking their time is wasted and they have many more bots to finds than when they started. They will spend vast resources to accomplish this and, like the red queen's race, get nowhere.

What is the best solution? Don't put so much emphasis on farming. In fact, make it so farming is never needed for anything, rare skins to greens to money. Will that cause some of their customers to leave? sure but so will banning them for farming.

i dont consider any time is wasted spending time making sure innocent players aren't getting banned... and i personally would settle for playing with bots than have my own account endangered because of them...

solutions... do what other companies do... allow players to report, in game flags that get further investigated... or DO NOTHING AT ALL... its not like we pay a monthly subscription to the game... im prbably right when i say 100 banned bots is just as exciting as 4000 banned bots... beside when u see 4000 banned bots you start to wonder how many where incorrectly banned and there obvousely is a bigger issue at hand here that needs a different approach than simply creating a program that decides the innocents of players and does these mass bannings that of corse result is what we have...

Take your time Anet, make sure your banning the right people...

this is what R&D is for... reasearch and development... spend some time find the bot programs that are out there find what data streams they are tampering with and watch those streams for an indication of if a 3rd party program is being used...

Eet GnomeSmasher · Jul 11, 2006, 10:00 PM // 22:00

Quote:

Originally Posted by Crotalus

I will paste what i posted over at TGH.

If they do too much checking on one person then many more bots will go unnoticed and some new ones will pop up. Once they find out that player is not a bot through extensive checking their time is wasted and they have many more bots to finds than when they started. They will spend vast resources to accomplish this and, like the red queen's race, get nowhere.

What is the best solution? Don't put so much emphasis on farming. In fact, make it so farming is never needed for anything, rare skins to greens to money. Will that cause some of their customers to leave? sure but so will banning them for farming.

Ok, ever heard of that saying "It's better to let 100 guilty men go than to imprison even one single innocent man?" You dont seem to subscribe to that belief. Imagine if the judicial system was based on your philosophy.

The shoot now ask questions later type approach works great, as long as youre not the one getting shot.

And for crying out loud, stop bringing up the farming issue. I can't be called a farmer and yet I was banned. You're grasping at straws here. You seem to think everyone innocent and guilty alike had something to do with farming. You know nothing.

Deathface Jones · Jul 11, 2006, 10:03 PM // 22:03

I gotta agree with Gnome on this....It's easy for you to say this as you didn't get banned yourself man. Seeing that message pop up is quite disturbing , and no real word from Anet in 5 days? What the hell? They must not care about their customers after I've spent all the damn money I have ($200 )

Crotalus · Jul 11, 2006, 10:19 PM // 22:19

Quote:

Originally Posted by sinican

this is what R&D is for... reasearch and development... spend some time find the bot programs that are out there find what data streams they are tampering with and watch those streams for an indication of if a 3rd party program is being used...

Once a bot is caught then within a month it will be changed. It will be an ongoing process. If Anet feels they want to invest time and money in going after bots as well as time in making sure they are bots then that is their prerogative. I would much rather they use their resources for other things.

sinican · Jul 11, 2006, 10:31 PM // 22:31

Quote:

Originally Posted by Crotalus

Once a bot is caught then within a month it will be changed. It will be an ongoing process. If Anet feels they want to invest time and money in going after bots as well as time in making sure they are bots then that is their prerogative. I would much rather they use their resources for other things.

once a bot is banned they just go out and buy another account... what is more effective catching the program and blocking it or just banning the same person over and over and over again just because they keep creating new accounts (such is the case with these companie farming and botting hundreds of accounts for the sole purpose of selling items for rl cash) you ban the account they jsut create another yuo block the program it will take them longer to get on their feet again...

and about investing time and money... what exactly do you think they are doing right now trying to figure out what accounts were innocent and which accounts were legitamately banned...

not to mention the threat they are posing to themselves by banning innnocent people that in turn do not ever bother dealing with any other games the company creates tell their firends not to buy their games etc etc...

GW makes their money off of retail of each expansion... how many banned innocents will be interested in buying the next expansion after they just got banned from a previous one for doing absolutely nothing wrong...

FYI do you think that those 2 mil copies of GW sold where all legit players you may be surprised that the majority of those accounts and profit from the game are from companies intending to exploit the virtual items for rl profit of their own... it is in Anets best interested to Correctly bann the bots because the botters WILL buy new accounts whereass banning innocent players will not result in more sales... DIG!

Swampgirl Inez · Jul 12, 2006, 04:28 AM // 04:28

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Omega_2005 · Jul 12, 2006, 01:20 PM // 13:20

Hmm... I wonder if ANet will go hard on the keyloggers and ARREST them once they have enough information? I mean, that's what they could do. The hacker "catches" the victim's email and password and then attempt to modify their account details all for silly reasons... but if that is the case why don't ANet get powers to arrest them for this act, not "suspend" people...!?

I have never had any problems with my accounts, but if something unexpected did happen, I'll want to know it on paper here, but my sympathies are definetly to those who's accounts are "suspended" wrongfully

sinican · Jul 12, 2006, 09:48 PM // 21:48

Quote:

Originally Posted by Omega_2005

Hmm... I wonder if ANet will go hard on the keyloggers and ARREST them once they have enough information? I mean, that's what they could do. The hacker "catches" the victim's email and password and then attempt to modify their account details all for silly reasons... but if that is the case why don't ANet get powers to arrest them for this act, not "suspend" people...!?

I have never had any problems with my accounts, but if something unexpected did happen, I'll want to know it on paper here, but my sympathies are definetly to those who's accounts are "suspended" wrongfully

your question is kinda off topic... ill answer anyways though...

essentually the victim is who can press charges not a 3rd party...

and in this case the hacker is not hacking anet, they are hacking an individual... the responsibility is on the victim to persue anything out of this...

and keyloggers themselves are not illegal it is the maner in which they are used... plenty of corperations use keyloggers on their own computers because rightfully they want to make sure their employees are using the companies computer to do what they are supposed to be doing...

and there are no privacy rights being violated well because the computers are owned by the company and the people are emplyed by the company

i hope that answers you enough so this off topic post does not need to be continued

Ariana Of Damia · Jul 13, 2006, 09:55 PM // 21:55

Some people got their accounts back and appologies from Anet, but still I think the amount of bans was nuts. It would not have made this much impact if it was done on a smaller scale.

sinican · Jul 13, 2006, 11:54 PM // 23:54

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ariana Of Damia

Some people got their accounts back and appologies from Anet, but still I think the amount of bans was nuts. It would not have made this much impact if it was done on a smaller scale.

whats done is done unfortunately... and at this point im not sure that we really know the impact of what has been done... there are still ppl on vacation and still ppl without a clue...

once the first number of 115 was posted it should have been clear to anet to reverse the entire ban in the first place to make absolutely sure they unbanned all innocent ppl even though ona GW break that havent found out yet... and started the process of banning over but with tweaks to make sure all these innocent ppl dont get banned again

DrSLUGFly · Jul 14, 2006, 04:51 AM // 04:51

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ariana Of Damia

Some people got their accounts back and appologies from Anet, but still I think the amount of bans was nuts. It would not have made this much impact if it was done on a smaller scale.

I think the amount of impact is important though, would Anet be aware of the misbans and the potential for error in their bot-check protocol if they had done it on a smaller scale?

Thorivol · Jul 14, 2006, 10:36 PM // 22:36

man that sucks for u all....i hope i dont get banned or ill bust-a-cap..lol....well i hope yall get ur accounts back