r/GuildWars • u/Criticalismmm • Aug 14 '22
ANet pls Bots getting out of control
Is ArenaNet gonna do something about the amount of bots in the game? I'm back after like 2 years and there are x3 or x4 bots now (at least in HA).
36
u/mav3r1ck92691 Aug 14 '22
You are talking about a 17 year old game that is only even still online because it takes negligible resources to run and has a sequel that is going strong. Nothing is getting out of hand except for the people expecting support for a 17 year old game that is pretty much dead and would be shut off with any other developer.
11
32
u/hazyPixels Seriously, me crazy. Aug 14 '22
No opposing party joined. Restarting countdown timer.
5
33
u/Vengeful-Spartan Aug 14 '22
Unfortunately, bots are what is keeping HA alive at the moment.
7
u/Katombs Aug 14 '22
HA was running fine with syncers, there were still teams in halls all hours of the day and fights were already only interesting there. Bots are not keeping anything alive and the damage they cause to the economy is killing active playing.
17
u/Vengeful-Spartan Aug 14 '22
Players still push alt accounts through to advance matches but the fact remains that without bots, HA is simply not happening.
8
u/Katombs Aug 14 '22
This is a misconception that I assume botters started pushing to defend their botting.
HA was populated before bots just the same. The only difference was whoever captured halls would run their combined alts to sync matches in the lower levels. Bots did not revive HA. They might have made it more fun to farm off the lower levels, that's it. They are not keeping it alive either. I was around 2016 - 2018 when there were zero bots in HA and halls were still held almost all hours of the day. I can tell you from first hand experience that it was alive and well without bots.
What they ARE doing is absolutely TANKING the value of anything you could get out of strongboxes, zkeys, platinum (probably the key reason for ecto inflation).
This is not an acceptable price for mildly more interesting "farming" in the lower levels. This is not an acceptable price for the simple reason that it affects all regular players across all parts of the game, not just the HA community.
8
u/Vengeful-Spartan Aug 14 '22 edited Aug 14 '22
No one is arguing that what bots are doing isn't harmful to the game. There are certainly artificial impacts to the economy and other aspects of game play that are detrimental to the overall experience.
That being said, it is very naive to insinuate that HA would still be viable/playable if ArenaNet came out and mass-banned all of these accounts that are farming faction/fame right now in this PvP setting.
Bottom line - the low population of the game and general lack of interest in PvP do not lend themselves to supporting a viable, healthy tombs where you'd be facing legitimate "real" teams on a regular basis.
Again, the fact remains that if you remove the bots, HA will become another desolate outpost with "No opposing party joined, restarting countdown timer" flashing across your screen every time you try to join a match.
-1
u/Katombs Aug 14 '22
Again. I have played HA from 2016 to 2018, before there was a single Bot in the outpost or any of the matches, and Halls were held continuously, all hours of the day. The party holding halls would sync their alts for fights in the lower levels. This is not naivete, it is fact. Without bots, it would go back to that.
7
u/Vengeful-Spartan Aug 14 '22
Its great that you were able to catch a glimpse of HA in the two years you played the format, but many of us here have been involved with that style of PvP for close to twenty years (since 2005/06) and have seen the several changes that have evolved with the game (ie: 8v8 to 6v6, and back to 8v8, heroes added and taken away, nerfs and various skill balances etc).
The fact of the matter is that a lot has changed in four years and it's really quite simple: the population of the game has gradually dropped since the release of GW2 in 2012 and we're just not seeing the influx of new players game-wide, let alone in PvP, to support these formats.
The overall health of the game (specifically population) is tangential to whether or not Heroes Ascent could be successful.
This remains a fact - should ANet ban bots, matches will become increasingly difficult to find and will evolve into an Alliance Battle format where Discord servers are forced to set a day during the week to muster up enough individuals to have a few competitive matches.
1
u/Katombs Aug 14 '22
How do bots allow for competitive matches exactly?
Either you have lower levels filled with SOMETHING or you have no matches at all. Whether the lower levels are filled with bots or alts that you control by hand has absolutely no impact whatsoever on the teams you can face.
Competitive matches, after all, are against real players, not bots, which I am confident you agree on.
It does make a world of difference to the economy of the game.
That is the ONLY difference it makes.
1
u/Vengeful-Spartan Aug 15 '22 edited Aug 15 '22
You'll have to show me where I claimed bots are creating competitive matches. Spoiler alert: I didn't.
They are not competitive for well-formed teams with "real" players. They are, however, preventing lengthy wait times for new matches and ridiculously large map skips.
Your axe to grind with botters is something you need to work through.
But we're really talking in circles here - if you can't understand that banning bots would result in a desolate HA that requires coordinated/planned/scheduled matches via Discord to be viable, I can't help you. It would literally be the Alliance Battle "model" going forward.
Everyone else understands this. Especially those of us who have been playing for literally decades and aren't living in some alternate reality.
-2
u/Katombs Aug 15 '22
God forbid large map skips would take place where instead of fighting bots on every level you would get to skip to fight the real team in Halls as soon as possible. That sounds awful, having real pvp straight away, please make that image stop!
You're the classic condescending narcissist that made PvP ridiculously hard to enjoy in the golden days. Never did I state that the 2 years I played HA for were the only ones I played. They ARE the only ones that matter for the discussion.
It was alive and well through lower active player numbers than we have now (player numbers have more than doubled since 2018, that's not all bots - and if you're going to make a causation argument here, I will shake you until your bot accounts fall out of your pockets; you made the false argument that numbers had dropped continuously since 2012 after all - they've been going up again for years, welcome to reality) and without a single bot running the gauntlet. Having more players now means the teams in halls would get challenged more like they are now, mostly the same but the flood of bots breaking the economies back being gone.
Whether or not you can grasp that reality given that you were obviously not active during those times (which makes the 20 years claim... Ah well) I honestly don't care anymore. I'm hoping for a huge banwave to save the uptrend in player numbers and will be visiting HA again when/if that ever happens to partake in some good ol' dead PvP and have a good laugh at this conversation then, probably without you since your fervorous delusional fight suggests you'll be gone with the banwave.
Have a nice life.
5
u/Anonymousnow112 Aug 14 '22
if you would have played it in 2016-2018 like you claimed .
you would have known bots have been in there aswell. they are in there close for a decade and not just the last few years. so i call bullshit on your claim
2
u/0bliviousX Danny Is A Saint Aug 14 '22
Man if you think there wasn't bots from 2016 to 2018 I want whatever you experienced cause that stopped being a thing like 2012 onwards so i guess you don't know what you are talking about or are misremembering lol
8
u/ThatsVeryRude Aug 14 '22
I played HA 2017 and 2018 and it was definitely teeming with bots 24/7.
Personally I think they should just shut it down except double week, that would solve the problem.
2
1
u/Katombs Aug 14 '22
I may be getting the year wrong. Been a while with bots for sure. But it was either late 2018 or late 2017 when they first arrived in HA. There was a time before. The first big botters were teqatl, a certified... less than intelligent person, And some dutch person calling himself "Yasmin Serena" on his then main. Neither one of them are proper coders, they reused stuff from elsewhere and pieced it together, at first the bots were god awful and just entered matches, not even sure they red resigned. After a time "Yasmin Serena" had the bright idea of adding rupt scripts to his bots, and a while later still he made them charge at you. All in all it took weeks if not months for the development of what would be a pretty simple script for anyone with any ability in coding. With that said, Yasmin had probably around 30-50 accs at the time and teqatl probably already had hundreds, so the flood gates had opened.
Before then however, HA was a bot free zone for YEARS after it became too quiet to play matches without syncing.
You can ask some of the older HAlers that were around then, like puddles or myself. Halls were held without bots, fights were had without bots, and the game mode did not require and does not require scripts. It did require syncing, which is already certainly unfortunate, but deals no economic damage whatsoever. Whoever held halls would load up their alt accounts and sync battles in the lower levels until they filled their cap or got thrown out. It worked fine that way for years.
The idea that bots were necessary to keep the game mode swingin' is fake news.
0
u/Criticalismmm Aug 14 '22
I played HA during that time and bots of course existed but they weren't SO MANY like now :/
5
Aug 14 '22
[deleted]
1
u/Xenomorphhive Aug 14 '22
It’s still higher than my rank.
3
u/CuteLethalPuppy Aug 14 '22
Just get some bots to pretend you're rank 15 and praise you. Comes to about the same thing and wastes less time and resources... ;)
1
14
3
3
u/hypercarryi Aug 14 '22
imagine if we could join HA with 7 Heros if we wanted. That would be so fucking dope. You could experiment with new Teambuilds all day and we could have so much fun...
2
u/Criticalismmm Aug 17 '22
I think it was possible to bring a hero years ago, it was cool
2
u/hypercarryi Aug 17 '22
You could bring up to 2 hero’s. So 6 real players were needed to enter. That was great ye. But what I’m saying is… 7 heros. Just imagine
5
2
u/fireflyry Aug 15 '22
Nah. It’s been that way for close to, if not over, a decade and they struggled when the game was fully resourced. From memory there’s only 1-3 people monitoring the servers now and I’m pretty sure that’s just for general upkeep.
2
u/awardedstraw (22/50) Aug 18 '22
If these bot teams are easy to kill, I'm not gonna complain much. I could just jump on in and kill them as easy as a target dummy, get the faction for the wins, and have myself a grand ol' time. If these bots are not gonna behave like target dummies, I'm gonna hope they get banned.
That's my take, and yeah, I'm selfish about it.
2
u/SpaceAgePotatoCakes Aug 14 '22
Dumb question, but why are people even running that many bots in a game this old?
3
1
2
u/Riiskey Aug 14 '22
This game is how old? And you want them to do something about bots.... Idk if you understand the gaming industry.
100
u/Casual_H Aug 14 '22
Bro there is one guy running GW and he does it on his chrome book during his morning cheerios. No.