The Gap in Response to the Community.

I'm going to try and keep this as Diet Rage as I can.

The Main focus of this is on Guild Wars a ArenaNet Developed and NCsoft Published game. That said this is I hope will be a semi decent read for any company with a Online title.

Guild Wars in the past few years has been slowly but surely overtaken by Bots. This is looking at JQ (Jade Quarry) this is a pvp zone that has an effect on the economy though Zishen Keys. Most of the value of the Keys is because of Hall of Monuments a feature only really used by players who plan on playing Guild wars 2. On an average 12/16 people in a JQ run are bots. Not counting matches that are 16/16 fully bot populated. Any player doing JQ semi actively has come across a match or two where they are the only Active player on the team or in the match.

At this point in the a player has 2 real but very limited options in trying to help ArenaNet and/or NCsoft deal with the bots. Those are /report a In-game function giving players the ability to notify the companies Customer service teams of any issue from a couple forms of harassment to botting and naming issues. None of those are out of the range of a normal /report feature of any MMO in the last 10+ years. The only limiting thing about this feature is that you can only report 50 times in one 24 hour period. This timer goes in to effect starting at your last /report. with JQ being over run by bots you can reach this 50 /reports in a very short time span. Other option a player has short of ignoring the problem or not doing this form of pvp is a email or contact there website support. This option takes a player away from the game and extends the work put in by the player. This option is not to my liking sadly for reporting a bot it is the only option that lets you go beyond the 50 report cap. Hand writing out or tabbing over to a txt file to get down a time, date, location and name.

What I have seen is a slow increasing of bots over the last 3 years. As a player only speaking for my self I don't see a change in the number of bots from week to week or month to month. I think this is because of the lack of viable punishment for botting. This is not me saying that they are not doing there job at trying to control or ban the botting community. When a person views another doing something with no repercussions they on average will fallow in those same steps. A number of these bots take part in RMT (Real Money Transactions) AKA selling for real life cash, most of them are personal use such as farming Crafting materials and gold.

I do know ArenaNet and NCsoft work very hard at countering RMT and botting. With that a few things can be changed with very little effort and no new systems put in to place to help counter botting. My favorite one is talking to your community, keeping the user base informed of the accomplishments and goals is a good way of doing this. A blog post every quarter or month with very basic information. Something to the effect of our accounts investigation staff banned <#> of botting accounts, RMT linked Accounts and spamming accounts. Giving this very basic information to the player base will and has lowered botting in other online games and community.

Online gaming companies have become so very secretive over the years. Sadly to the detriment of its community, as everyone knows online games are nothing with out there community. I have been playing games online for over 15 years this view is only focused on Guild Wars because it is my current focus of play. If anyone has thoughts or questions please do reply to this. If you think I'm wrong say so also and give your two cents as what you think would make a better impact.

Mod Edit: Moved to Riverside, as this is a discussion thread and is not asking a question

While i am well aware of the bot population of JQ, as this is the only thing i still do in GW nowadays, you strongly exaggarate on the scale. Or you play on otherwise dead hours, which only bots might populate; however even in eu weekday mornings, when the problem seems the most prominent, i never had more than 8~9 bots in a match total.
That's WAY too much, sure it is, but don't say that 12/16 is the 'average'.


That tendency is true for every MMO game i've ever played.


Also, please use commas.

In 2 hours of JQ today I filled out my 50 /reports. I'm active from 10am-10pm PST for play time off and on.

For those 2 hours yesterday I had five matches. Two of them had a full team of bots on the enemy team. How do you know they are bots when Everyone is rushing Mid lane and fighting between or at the two towers. Four min in to the match you see Yellow is still not caped.

This shouldn't be in Q&A since I honestly don't see what your question was.

So : I. You posted in the wrong section. This should be probably moved.

II. Bots tend to annoy me too. Regardless what hours you play you will still get a lot of bots in your team. For example I play Kurzkick (I don't really like Luxons but whatever) and the Kurzick teams seem full of bots. I want to play Kurzick not go on Luxons side to get Faction.

III. *laughs* They work HARD? How does ArenaNet work HARD of all things??? They should permanently ban the account or something similar or should investigate it. THEY DO NOTHING! After I report them I see the same bots the next day or the freaking next match!

IV. I actually stopped playing JQ because of them.

Fixed that for you, unfortunately.

Yes, bots are bad, yes they seem to be getting more prevalent in recent years (though I've not seen them at 12/16 in JQ myself), no Anet isn't likely to do anything of significance about it when they're too busy working on GW2.

Will the same thing end up happening in GW2... probably

You get Imperial Faction nowadays, so you can play on the Luxon side and then turn Imp Faction into Kurzick Faction, and donate it to your Kurzick guild.

If the developers do nothing about the problem, the players themselves should - designate the Luxon side as the home of real players (as more bots right now are Kurzick), and shift it whenever the bot owners notice it.

I love how people apparently need ArenaNet to post big signs and such saying they are working on issues in order for people to actually understand that.

I love how you think they're working.

I heard dev team didn't abandon GW1 years ago for GW2, lmk. It's hilarious to me that people assume GW2 will be in the same state that GW1 is, it's got zero devs on team right now, all resources have slowly been taken away from the game and now completely taken. Get over it people... prepare for GW2. The bot QQ threads get old after a while, yours is the millionth one so congratulations you win nothing but ANets undying love for you

I have a vision of an office area full of empty chairs and desks covered in dust

That is the thing most people have that view of ArenaNet and NCsoft. Even though we are given 3-6 minor or major patches every month. So they still have some staff doing a bit of effort.

The reason why I say they are working hard is because no player knows how much effort they are or are not putting in on there end to counter the problems that come up. I have done CSR work in the past it's never as cut and dry as people think. That is why I support any company saying there accomplishments.

Knowing Anet they don't have the luxury of letting work space collect dust.

If only I could play GW offline as a single player game...

Even when they do something that should build the community faith in them as a company they say nothing.

May 11th it was found out there was a Duping bug this bug was active for two days. Every last thing created by this bug was removed from the game. If ArenaNet came out and said "Hello Guys and Gals It has come to our attention there was a Duping bug in the game, We fixed the problem removed the loot gained from it and banned ### of Accounts for using it." The response would have be less negative and far more positive, the player base for once would understand actions are being taken.

We all know a small portion of the community goes on forums at best 5% of the population. That is not like they don't have a log in screen announcements, could be used for more then weekend bonus.

I think what he meant to say is that he doesn't want to play as a Godless heathen scum. It's not about crunching the numbers to get "x" reward, it's about the game of it. Luxons go to Hell!

Also OP's averages of bot players is in no way exaggerated. I think I played with a live-human like what... twice in three hours. Two matches contained a single human player on my side anyways.

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I tried to "like" this post... But there was no button.

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That's what is essentially is(and has always been). They should just remove the online-requirement part of it.

Seriously, you could do all of GW without ever ever interacting with a living soul in any way whatsoever..

I always wished anet would do something about this problem, but it's not a priority since GW2 has to be so ****ing important.

Why not just announce that shutdown and get it over with? You know it's exactly what they've been pushing us to for over the past 5 years.

i'd say its the same amount of bots, but less normal players

so the percentage bots vs players increases

There's no better way to prevent botting than making it pointless. The hard part is coming up with the design that makes them pointless.

Bots exist because of RMT and grind. Still way too much grind in GW, thanks titles, really bad idea.

I never understood RMT, I guess people are just stupid.

Long ago there should have been in game ambassador's that were players, that were allowed to aid in the management of day to day game events. Have them under a NDA and give them the ability to escalate items and the such so that instead of having to have a dev do all the footwork on things, you have someone doing background, that way, by this point in the game, if you had some left, you could give them the ability to short term remove players and then be dealt with in the "support" staff. Bots typically dont file reports for their account being removed.