Direct Teleporting Item or Skill ?

[Kruhljak.2705]

Is there any legit item or ability/skill in this game that would allow one to teleport directly to a resource node (iron, etc.) and/or a chest directly from elsewhere in the game world whether from point to point within the same map or from one map directly into another (ignoring standard waypoint travel)? And be able to do so repeatedly in quick succession? And even while in combat mode?

[mercury ranique.2170]

Yes...It is called going off-line, coming online...

 

Dissapearing when in combat can be caused by logging off/going to character screen. And by parking next to a node you can also appear next to a node in thin air.

[Danikat.8537]

It depends on where the node is and other things such as who else is around. For example sometimes nodes are very close to waypoints so you can teleport almost on top of them. Or a mesmer or thief could create a portal, or someone could use a teleport to friend item to get there - as long as they had a friend already standing there.

 

If you're seeing lots of people appearing next to a rich node (or a normal node) harvesting it then disappearing again it's quite likely they're logging into a character they've parked there, harvesting then logging out again. You can see a lot of this around the Melandru statue in Malchors Leap where 4 or 5 elder wood trees always spawn close together - lots of people will appear from no where, harvest all the nodes and then disappear again. It's not teleportation, just logging in and out.

 

(I do the same with jumping puzzle chests. If there's a puzzle daily I always leave that one until last then leave the character there and log in once a day to open the chest until the next day I feel like doing dailies. Anyone who is there when I do it would see my character appear from nowhere right at the chest, open it and then vanish again when I log out. I see other people doing the same thing sometimes too.)

 

If you think they're botting or hacking or whatever and Anet should do something about it then the best thing you can do is report it. Either report individual players using in-game methods or if they're disappearing too quickly or there's too many of them send a ticket into Support detailing the location, your server, time of day etc. and ask Anet to investigate. They have access to far more data than we do (for example they can tell the difference between a player logging out, using a waypoint or vanishing by some other method, where to us they all look the same) so it's far more practical to alert them and let them investigate than to try to figure it all out yourself.

[Blude.6812]

> @"mercury ranique.2170" said:

> Yes...It is called going off-line, coming online...

>

> Dissapearing when in combat can be caused by logging off/going to character screen. And by parking next to a node you can also appear next to a node in thin air.

 

This^^^^ I have toons parked at the end of JP's. Just as some have them parked at nodes.

[kharmin.7683]

Looks like another veiled attempt at a AFK farming thread/complaint.

[Just a flesh wound.3589]

Yeah, all my chars that I’m not actively playing are parked at a node, farm spot or chest for a daily collection. If someone is there they’ll see my chars appear, harvest, disappear and another appear at the spot and do the same.

[Kruhljak.2705]

I phrased the post specifically to not lead the question, but instead to get at whether there was some new thing in the game that would allow players to do this sort of hop to point thing since I'm not well versed in the late game areas. I figured there wasn't, but I was curious to see if anyone did know of something in the game that might legitimately explain this sort of thing.

 

What I've been seeing is a set of accounts with characters appearing at JP chests, looting, vanishing. Clearly this alone isn't suspicious. However, this is occurring with one character at a time, hopping from map to map every several seconds (for the most part). This isn't a log in, loot chest, log out, switch characters, log back in, etc. routine. Without some legit mechanic, there's no way a single character can loot a chest, then immediately appear on a new map at a different chest with no interim travel time, much less over the course of 25+ maps in a cycle. I watched them appearing at Antre, then Draconis Mons, then Pig Iron Quarry during their cycle while I had alt accounts stationed there. Each time the map changed in the friends list they immediately appeared at these chests.

 

As it relates to mining nodes, this was a bit different with a different tip off: moving directly to a different map while in combat mode, no logging in/out involved. But when watching them they also showed the map-hopping behavior which tells me they're probably using the same hack with mining as the focus rather the simple chest looting. Didn't follow this up because it's probably just tied to the same thing.

 

I was pretty sure this was a bot hack at work right from the beginning when I saw characters appearing at the Antre of Adjournment JP chest, vibrating wildly while going through the 3 second chest opening animation before vanishing. This immediately reminded me of the old mining bots that used to infest the game. They also appeared at nodes, vibrating while mining, then teleported away to the next node. Direct teleport to a given coord the game doesn't really want you at will cause this sort of combat between the bot program and the game constantly shifting the character's position back and forth (or so I understand). This is what spurred me to follow the activities of these accounts. I wasn't surprised at what I saw, but I did want to verify I wasn't just ignorant of some limited use mechanic or item recently added to the game. This has been going on everyday since I first noticed it.

 

Now that my suspicions seem to have been confirmed, I'll drop a note to ANet and see if they care about it. If anyone sees flaws in my reasoning above, feel free to let me know. I could still be wrong, but I obviously don't see where.

 

Anyway, thanks for the input. I know some people are tired of other people worrying about cheaters and botters. Fair enough. You go about your business and ignore it. I happen to despise both and don't mind taking a brief break from regular play to put on my deerstalker and see if I can sleuth out some evidence to figure out what's up. It's like a mini-game. If nothing comes of it, so be it. I just feel ignoring it invites more of it. Tacit acceptance and all that. I prefer less cheating to more. I assume most people and ANet do as well.

[Just a flesh wound.3589]

There have been harvesting bots. I reported the ones I saw by friending them and reporting the accounts to ANet. It can take a while before Anet removes them as apparently they do bans in batches so the bot owners can’t figure out easily how they were caught.

[Smoosh.2718]

If its a small node not a rich one, you can bet they are cheating by teleporting around the map, if its a rich node then its a high chance of parked characters.

[casualkenny.9817]

> @"Kruhljak.2705" said:

> I was pretty sure this was a bot hack at work right from the beginning when I saw characters appearing at the Antre of Adjournment JP chest, vibrating wildly while going through the 3 second chest opening animation before vanishing. This immediately reminded me of the old mining bots that used to infest the game. They also appeared at nodes, vibrating while mining, then teleported away to the next node. Direct teleport to a given coord the game doesn't really want you at will cause this sort of combat between the bot program and the game constantly shifting the character's position back and forth (or so I understand). This is what spurred me to follow the activities of these accounts. I wasn't surprised at what I saw, but I did want to verify I wasn't just ignorant of some limited use mechanic or item recently added to the game. This has been going on everyday since I first noticed it.

>

> Now that my suspicions seem to have been confirmed, I'll drop a note to ANet and see if they care about it. If anyone sees flaws in my reasoning above, feel free to let me know. I could still be wrong, but I obviously don't see where.

>

> Anyway, thanks for the input. I know some people are tired of other people worrying about cheaters and botters. Fair enough. You go about your business and ignore it. I happen to despise both and don't mind taking a brief break from regular play to put on my deerstalker and see if I can sleuth out some evidence to figure out what's up. It's like a mini-game. If nothing comes of it, so be it. I just feel ignoring it invites more of it. Tacit acceptance and all that. I prefer less cheating to more. I assume most people and ANet do as well.

 

Yes, few weeks ago, i saw 1 player teleporting (via hack) between the primordial orchid nodes. i was manually travelling between nodes, and he would disappear after harvesting, and we would meet at a diff node later (via him appearing next to it). i didn't bother to take any screenies since screenies wouldn't prove this type of hack, and i figured it was a lost cause anyway.

[Kruhljak.2705]

I hadn't see this sort of witchcraft in so long I sorta forgot about it even being a thing. Teleport hacking seems to be something that should be recognizable by code, but I'm not going to claim I have any idea how that works. I thought maybe ANet figured out a way to deal with in entirely. Perhaps that's not even possible.

 

Welp, I'm gonna collect up a few more bit of info on accounts I see doing this stuff and toss it to ANet's support staff and then wash my hands of it. Even I have more important things to do. ;-)

[Danikat.8537]

As I said earlier if you suspect anyone of breaking the rules in any way the best thing you can do is report it to Anet and let them investigate. There's no need to attempt to run your own investigation first (unless you're curious and want to learn more about how it's done) because reports in this game aren't automated. No one will get automatically banned, or even warned, just because they've been reported, all it does is flag it up to Anet as something they need to look into. Which means you don't need to be completely sure they're doing something wrong or how they're doing it to report them because if you're wrong it won't do any harm.

 

On top of that Anet have far more tools to work out what's going on than we do. They can see _exactly_ what a player has done at any given time (although I'm not sure how far back their data goes) so for example they can tell the difference between someone who logged out, someone who used a waypoint and someone who used a teleport scroll even though all 3 look absolutely identical to players. They can also do things like track the exact path a character takes, so they can see if it's absolutely identical each time (implying it's a bot) or if there's slight differences (more likely to be a human with a routine). (I once read an article which described it as 'MMO companies have the kind of data on customer behaviour Google would kill for'.) It's much, much easier for Anet to work out what's going on than for a player to do it, and they'll do their own investigation either way, so there's no need to waste your time trying to gather that sort of data and work out all the specifics. Let the people who are being paid to spend time on it do that.

 

> @"Kruhljak.2705" said:

> What I've been seeing is a set of accounts with characters appearing at JP chests, looting, vanishing. Clearly this alone isn't suspicious. However, this is occurring with one character at a time, hopping from map to map every several seconds (for the most part). This isn't a log in, loot chest, log out, switch characters, log back in, etc. routine. Without some legit mechanic, there's no way a single character can loot a chest, then immediately appear on a new map at a different chest with no interim travel time, much less over the course of 25+ maps in a cycle. I watched them appearing at Antre, then Draconis Mons, then Pig Iron Quarry during their cycle while I had alt accounts stationed there. Each time the map changed in the friends list they immediately appeared at these chests.

 

Having said all that, I'm curious now: How can you see what they're doing? How are you able to get from one JP chest to another quickly enough to see them appear and disappear? If you're not there how do you know they're appearing at JP chests and not some other spot (like a waypoint)?

[Treacy.4067]

If they're teleporting from node to node then they're hacking. It's really bad especially on the season 3 maps. You have to keep in mind though that sometimes people do park alts at things like a single rich node or a specific chest. So it's possible they are simply logging in and out. You can tell if they're using teleport hacks if you see a gathering of nodes on screen and they teleport to each.

[Kruhljak.2705]

> @"Danikat.8537" said:

> Having said all that, I'm curious now: How can you see what they're doing? How are you able to get from one JP chest to another quickly enough to see them appear and disappear? If you're not there how do you know they're appearing at JP chests and not some other spot (like a waypoint)?

 

I multibox four accounts when I play. When the character moved to one of the maps I posted a character at (at a JP chest), I shifted to that one's window to see if the character appeared at the chest.

 

 

[Kruhljak.2705]

> @"Treacy.4067" said:

> If they're teleporting from node to node then they're hacking. It's really bad especially on the season 3 maps. You have to keep in mind though that sometimes people do park alts at things like a single rich node or a specific chest. So it's possible they are simply logging in and out. You can tell if they're using teleport hacks if you see a gathering of nodes on screen and they teleport to each.

 

Well, this isn't character cycling at a chest or node. It's easy to see if someone is cycling through characters whether at the same chest/node or any other just by watching the friends list data.

 

...and I have one last post to make...

 

 

[Kruhljak.2705]

As I was replying to a couple of the posts here, I was also watching one of the accounts I've been keeping an eye on as they cycled through maps. I placed a character, one from each of my accounts, at each of four different JP chests, and waited for them to shift to one of those maps just to get one more direct visual on the same character appearing directly at two JPs without any traveling.

 

While I was doing so I saw another character appear at the Southsun Cove Skipping Stones chest and took a screenshot just on a whim because they appeared nearly hanging off the ledge--a weird spot to park yourself. Added them to my friends list just out of curiosity and lo and behold, saw the same map cycling activity at work.

 

Since I already had my other alt accounts parked and ready for the original target to show me more proof of my suspicions, I decided to watch for this new target. Once they cycled to Fireheart Rise, where I had a character parked on the Pig Iron Quarry JP scaffolding platform, I waited for about 20 seconds and yep, they appeared smack on top of the chest. They failed to loot it due to the shaman lava fonting, then launching them off the plateau. Interestingly, instead of ending up dead at the bottom, they immediately logged out before hitting the ground and then back in again, but not back into Fireheart Rise, but into Crystal Oasis. Things don't work that way. Probably explains why Crystal Oasis shows up in theses accounts' map cycles more than once pretty often. It must be the map where the bot program returns a character when they experience a death.

 

So I've caught four distinct accounts already, and no doubt there are plenty more.

 

Thanks for all your input. It did make me second guess and try a bit more to get even more solid proof.

[Linken.6345]

If this is true than thats 1 reason all the jp chests give crap loot.

To reward it as little as possible.

[kharmin.7683]

> @"Linken.6345" said:

> If this is true than thats 1 reason all the jp chests give kitten loot.

> To reward it as little as possible.

 

And yet, they disallow mounts. But that's another thread. (sigh)

[mercury ranique.2170]

another effect is rubberbanding. Your client comminucates to the game client about your location in the game. This also happens with any other player. When this signal is disrupted, the game replaces you once it is restored. This can be seen as glitching/teleporting/vanishing/appearing.

 

As said by others, when you suspect someone is cheating, please report them. Support is able to check the raw data recieved from the client and check if it makes sense or if it must be something illegal.

 

Also make sure you understand it may take some time for them to take action and will not inform you about the outcome.

 

Often the people doing illegal things are doing more then just this. A good example are goldsellers. They often use hacked accounts. So when you see such person a month later walking in Lion's arch, do not assume nothing has been done. It might very well be the account has been given back to the rightfull owner.

[Smoosh.2718]

> @"Linken.6345" said:

> If this is true than thats 1 reason all the jp chests give kitten loot.

> To reward it as little as possible.

 

easy fix to this could be, make it good loot but account wide CD over 1 day.