Rvannith.8364

They could make the captcha only apply a random number of games, that increases the # of games you play, increasing after the amount of games played in a 24 hour period. If someone is playing pvp for an hour a day, they shouldn't be hit with it. 2 hours, maybe they get a single one. The point is to catch the bots out- which generally run their accounts nearly 24/7, and increasing the captcha rate when it hits the kind of time period that bots play for would limit player annoyance at having to do it.

> @"Khalisto.5780" said: > Which one would you like right now? The results for this probably will be influenced by what rank players are. People in Low Gold-Mid Silver (where most of the bots are) probably would see a ban wave as being significantly more beneficial to our game experience, but players higher who see bots less often probably desire a balance patch more.

> @"Huskyboy.1053" said: > I don't know if there are all that many bots, a lot of them are just PvE players. As the OP specified, these are players with 1000+ games in a single ranked league season. He is very clearly and obviously not talking about casual players who aren't very good. Bots usually have the ability to /whisper them turned off as well, so it's not like you can ask them if they're bots either. > @"Sunit.1698" said: > Why isn't arenanet doing anything about the bots scene dominating sPvP this season? > The neglect for the mode is disgusting, seriously do something, anything, because at this point I think I should totally give up on the mode because I can't play around reset and every match I play has at least 4-5 bots. They made a post about a month ago claiming they were working on it and to just keep using the in-game report function- if they were to give us an updated timeline on when they will start rectifying the issue it would probably make a lot of us feel a lot more positive.

How would you break this down into an easy copy-pastable line to make bad thiefs/etc at lower ranks understand this easier? > @"snoow.1694" said: > Most top players do exactly what you are trying to stop, pushing far directly or from close to far into a 1v1 they know they will win and if they get +1‘ed, they stall through kiting and jumping puzzles in order to bind people in a 2v1, while the rest of the map falls into their hands in a 4v3, winning them the match. You pretend like they are afk‘ing on point and leaving the rest up for slaughter when in reality they are in a 1v1 or 2v1 at far 90% of the time with the exception when they defeat an enemy, whom they basically spawn camp from that point on, leaving the rest of you in a 4v4 while one point is constantly ticking in your favor > Again, top players. Anyone in low plat or below isn't a top player. The #1 cause for matches being lost is ANet refusing to deal with the bots that swamp almost every game in bot and silver. After this is a mesmer or thief who does nothing but run far and die over and over while the rest of their team gets 5v4'd or 4v3'd mid. For the vast majority of people who play PVP, OP's advice is correct.

> @"Fueki.4753" said: > Due to the pandemic and many people are unable to do their jobs and have much more free time than before, while also having nothing better to do than binging video games. Therefore, I think that playing 14 hours a day for multiple weeks isn't too unrealistic anymore. 14 hours a day is best case scenario, and is a bit liberal. Once you factor in a ~2 minute wait time, and maybe another ~2 minutes loading and rezoning back into the lobby between matches, it ends up being about 24 hours a day. Bots tend to run "bunker" builds too, which I would expect makes them harder to kill, which might also extend the average match time- even if only by a few seconds, that adds up as well.

> @"idontnoso.9850" said: > Overall, I try to look for 2-3 of these signs before claiming someone is a bot, unless I noticed number 4, then its an instant report for me. The easiest way to be sure is to add them as a friend, then check their League history. If they have two thousand games in a single season, it's very clear it's not an actual person there.

> @"Albert.3574" said: > like this bot ... second.2619 anet?  > Allegedly it's against Terms of Service to screencap or video bots and name them in the forums here, even if there's overwhelming proof: you might want to edit this before one of the forum moderators censors you themselves, as happened to me a month or two ago. ):

> @"John.8507" said: > Hope to see some Bans of these mesmer bots tomorrow. You might be waiting a while, multiple people have been raising the bots for months and years without any action. ):

Many of the bots are silver, gold and a few are even above. If you mean level by league rank, they're quite high. If you mean level by total PVP experience, bots usually rack up 2000+ games per season, so they have very high PvP levels. The only thing to do would be for anet to start to take the report function seriously, or to at least introduce a filter that takes a look at any account achieving an unrealistic high number of PVP matches each season. If a player is playing ranked PvP 20+ hours a day, for weeks on end without sleeping, eating or working, that should be raising red flags... yet the same accounts have been around for months, if not years, and ANet still hasn't dealt with them. ):

What rank are you? Most bots are bunker and AOE builds, which really drags everything down. Hopefully ANet will deal with the bots soon tho. ):

> @"Omnicron.2467" said: >So how can I tell if there is no player there? It's actually a fairly simple process to see if someone is a person or not. Step one: try to whisper them. Usually if you right click their name on the squad bar, there will be a "dismiss" option, but most of the normal things like "whisper" "guild invite" and "send mail" will not show up for some reason: you can still access these functions from the pvp match panel, but not from the standard user interface. This by itself isn't a certain thing, because _some_ human players turn off their ability to be contacted or communicated with, but _all_ bot accounts appear to have this turned off by default. Step two: * Add the suspected account as a **friend**. * Go to the **PVP panel**. * Go to the **League** tab. * On the right-hand side of the screen, you can see a ranked leaderboard. * The four headings of this leaderboard are "All", "Top" "Friends and Guilds" and "Rewards". * Click the third option, **"Friends and Guilds".** * Scroll through until you find the account.#### of the suspected bot, and take note of their amount of wins and losses. Bots will have significantly higher amounts of total games played (wins+losses) than any actual person is capable of. If they have 2000 games in a single pvp season, they're very unlikely to be a human player: often if you do the math by average game length and add in a reasonable amount of queue time, these accounts are playing 24/7 for many weeks on end without taking a break to sleep or eat.

> @"Dahkeus.8243" said: > It's certainly not specific to silver/gold since there's well documented platinum bots (such as the one in the trending post in the GW2 Subreddit: ) I'm not sure if that is the case: if you look up the bot names in forums etc, some of them have a small amount of account history (such as forum posts) from years ago. A lot are likely former "real" players who have had their abandoned accounts taken over, rather than them being brand spanking new accounts created by bots. A player might achieve a higher rank last season they played, have that displayed, then later have their account taken over? Alternatively, that might not be a bot at all, just someone with a keyboard mashed name running in a line hitting the "reverse direction" key. They don't have much of a PvP history, either way, and even if they are a bot... PvE bots just mess with the in-game economy a bit, they don't stop _the rest of us_ from enjoying core content. If there's a focus here it should really be the issues that impact on people actually enjoying the game first and foremost. Anyway, here Anet, _I've done more of your work for you._ **EDIT:** list of bot accounts removed, just got an official warning for "accusing players of abusive behaviour" by writing a list of accounts that have 1000+ matches this pvp season and told just to use the in-game report function, rip.

> @"DogMD.9182" said: > > How does a bot play 1000 games and be useless and still stay in gold LOL > Bots are often on each team, so you'll have three or four human players on each team, and one or two bots on each team. Some bots are worse than others based on their class (although they appear to be programmed nearly identically) so even if the human players are identically matched, one team will pull ahead because they have a "less bad" bot. As a result, while the bots most often _lose_ more than they _win_ the difference isn't huge, because there's another 9 human or bot players that factor into the defeat or victory. Generally, bots are within a 10% margin, but mathematically speaking this isn't unexpected. There's a win/loss distribution curve you'd expect of even the most poorly programmed bots who do nothing but run to far point and spam AOEs as still winning about 40% of the time at worst: because your rank changes depending on how often you win/lose, which means over long periods of time your win-loss ratio should be somewhat even, _regardless_ of if you're a bot or a real player, or how well or poorly you play. Some of them are actually very close: Shambler.3408 has 442 wins and 451 losses, as an example.

> @"sitarskee.5738" said: > I feel you, brother. ANet is aware of the bots. I'm not sure if they actually are. There can't be more than a couple dozen of them, it's just that the player count is low enough it feels like you get the same handful every couple games. Everyone reports them, ANet never bans them, and we go around in circles. I don't buy into the theory that ANet runs their own to make the player count in PvP look higher to reduce queue times: I can understand if they keep known bots under watch to track RMT (the bots obviously get rewards, which other accounts do they send those rewards to?) but the long term impact on PVP, especially in the middle tiers, is _dreadful._ That the _same_ bots are there multiple seasons over and over implies a decent amount of oversight. I understand PVP isn't their core focus, but very small steps here would go a long way.