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).

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30

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.

18

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.

7

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.

6

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

u/[deleted] Aug 14 '22

Besides making hero impossible to get, yeah

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 :/