Well this is ridiculous - JQ and Bots.

Hey all.

The amount of Bots going round JQ now is crazy. Even during the lively hours, I'm only seeing 1 or 2 teams with more players than bots (on the kurzick side, which is where most of the bots seem to be atm), and for the quieter hours, teams of 6,7,8 bots.

I mean, i'm all for easy faction, but this is boring and past ridiculous. Ive just (this moment) played enough games to get about 120k faction, so im gonna assume around 24, and not a single team had more than 3 human players as far as i could see. I mean, yay, 24 wins, but there is no challenge at all in it.

Why has nothing been done?

mod edit - fixed the typo; it's spelled "ridiculous," kids.

I will confirm there were many bots last time i played it( it was mainly people standing on stairs not doing much to help..).. but well, this is once again the result of a whole..
I've argued a lot about it, but every format is synced/abused now due to the lack of real players.. People realize they get on average a better reward by " not playing" than by playing, then the phenomena extends to other players, etc...

Why has nothing been done, that's the question indeed... My personal answer would be that, if they did ban all the abusers, then PvP would be totally unplayable ( fairly, Ab/Codex and HA would be empty forever and JQ/FA would start having 15 restarts per match...) and that mean they would have to work on a PvP update, which isn't really what they want to do...

They do not have enough staff to buy coffee at break time, let alone do any GM type crap, simple as that.

Once in a blue moon one of them will appear and ban a few, then disappear for many months.

As much as I hate the bots, I'm wondering if they are useful in that they keep jq going, surely it would be pretty dead by now?

Anets history of banning JQ/FA bots has never been good. Many people botted FA for years and only got banned fairly recently.

Holy Crap! Are we to the point where we NEED bots to keep aspects of the game going? Time to turn it off!

Hopefully once GW2 comes out they will gather enough praise and revenue to hopefully pay more attention to GW1 by increasing their staff.

I was on JQ yesterday and several times the teams were maybe 1 or 2 humans and the rest bots. It was rather annoying. Then one match we got all humans on the Kurzick side and steamrolled the Luxons, and it was a nice change of pace. Too bad the former is more common these days.

i would hope u might be joking, but since this is gwguru i'll assume ur not.

what the hell would be the point of working on gw1 after the release of gw2.
The playerbase will move on, and at some stage the gw1 servers will have to close down (within a year - 18months perhaps?), as its going to cost more money to run them than they can generate from micro transactions/new accounts. Its a business after all, they don't operate solely to please people, anet exists ONLY to make money.

Investing time, money or both into gw1 after gw2's release would be absolutely ridiculous from a business perspective.

A bit off-topic, but Anet has already stated they plan to support GW1 as long as there are players logging in. Needless to say, we will loose quit a bit after GW2 is released, but that number will rebound within the first six months - not to mention the fact that there will be many players whose first GW experience will be GW2 and will eventually want to pick up GW1 for some HoM rewards and such. GW1 will be around for just a bit longer than you think.

Anyway, to keep this on topic - yeah, it's a same that both bots and syncing have to ruin not only this, but just about every other PvP format. I mostly do FA with some JQ tossed in now and again, but don't bother doing any more because of the problems.

I remember the days when JQ was completely empty and you had to spam the main towns just to get enough players in to map it for Cartographer. I always thought it would be nice to have matches rounded out with AI teammates and opponents when necessary to prevent having long queue times. Not any different than having bots, but at least the game-controlled AI might end up being actually more useful than these typical bots in matches.

Hanok

GW1 will still make money through the support Anet is giving it even after GW2 comes out. GW costs barely any money to run compared to other games because the live team is small, the amount of servers were reduced years ago and servers are cheaper than you think.

GW2 will be a great game ,I have no doubt about it, but it's not going to have everlasting content upon release. People will get bored and start to log on to GW1 after some time, especially since Anet will keep supporting it. Then there are people who will play GW2 as their first GW game and want to see where things began, get HoM rewards, etc. Besides GW1 and 2 may have the same lore but they are two completely different games in mechanics and structure. GW1 may give first time GW players something different than your typical MMO such as GW2 in terms of persistent worlds, crafting professions, solo game play, etc.

Who knows, six months after GW2 release, GW1 may be better than what it is atm.

IMO:

Roll JQ/FA into AB by putting JQ/FA maps into the map rotation. AB should be accessible without a guild (from balth temple) and you should be able to hit "enter" with less than 4 and automatically pair up with other stragglers. Adjust AB rewards to match JQ/FA. Lower the carto title requirement if needed.

Nuke codex and HA. Make a golden HoH-style guild hall when you have the time.

Put GvG launch area from guild halls into some Battle Isles outpost, to make pugging guests easier and more likely.

Set rewards for these three formats to equal the zombats (or somewhat less), then eliminate zombat.

Basically we concentrate people into RA, one all-inclusive casual Factions format, and one organized 8v8 format. The only thing that can be done with such a shrinking population.

While i agree to some extent that certain formats may become very quiet if bots were all got shut of, I can't help think... 3rd party programs are against the EULA, so surely, whether it will harm other formats or not, these need to be got rid of on the principle of that.

I'm not sure that GM presence would help. While I think I can spot a bot 9/10 as opposed to a bad player, would a GM not have to confirm the same actions of a bot more than once, seems like more effort than is possible. I'm no expert, but surely these bots can be recognised in an other way than me simly looking at it and thinking it's pathing and skill usage is terrible and in many cases, the same as countless others?

I stand by that they ought to be banned irrelevant of harm done to the format and others, it's also not a good example to people who don't bot, seeing all these accounts seemingly getting away with it.

I'm guessing if something was going to be done, it would have been done by now. It's highly obvious how rampant the botting occurs during off-peak hours. However, it does suck when it's time for the FA/JQ zcombats & double weekends, and ya actually recognize seeing the same ol' bots.

I'd like to see AB alive one way or another.

/signed

I would turn off the ability to post click in JQ so they don't have an anchor to guide themselves.

Please guys, support this suggestion.

The funniest thing about this is that Anet already added the /report feature to report leechers and bots, but it isnt effective in JQ / FA because it requires half the team to report a leech, and they need to be reported in two games in a row.

All it takes for the leechers to overcome this is two accounts - leech on one for at least 2 games, then leech on the other while the first is dishonoured.

Another thing that takes the mick is the abuse of /report in RA when people simply dont like someones build. It was stated from the start by Gaile Gray ages ago that /report was not intended to report players for their skill bars, but that is what it mainly gets used for in RA.

Maybe Anet should just remove all rewards from FA/JQ and keep them as fun games, not as virtual semi-jobs. That should fix most problems.

I'm pretty sure that there's a whole buch of you out there that would do that shit for free. Nobody should gripe about lack of staff/funds.

The resources are there. Nobody is using them.

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Totally off-topic, but I think the HoM rewards should not be available to players who haven't done it by "X" time before the release of Guildwars2. I've only been playing for about 2 years, but I imagine how a 6+year veteran pours half a decade into a game and reaps the rewards, then some guy who's all "Oh I saw this game 'Guildwars2' in PC gamer..." buys it then buys gw1 just to grind, not giving a shit about the stories, the lore, then less than 48 hours later this guy has the same gear as the schlepp who stuck it out 7 years.

Just saying.

They still need people to review the fan made content. You can't just update the game with every mod the player base sends you. GW1 would be destroyed.


I have a shit load of expensive items that won't be found by some newbie in GW1 because I acquired them over a 7 year period. HoM is just grind that can be done in a month of hardcore play. If they buy it and play it then they should have access to HoM rewards.