Need help reporting bots

The situation: we all know that botters have characters spring up on resource nodes, farm it and poof away. Usually that gives us enough time to click their name, hit report and move on. However, I've noticed that the bots are now popping in, hitting the node just once, popping away, then coming back to hit it again, then out and then back for the third hit. Because they poof away so fast, I can't physically click their character, then click on their icon to get the menu to report them before they disappear which resets needing to click their character to click the icon to get to the report menu.

I don't run any video capture programs and I certainly don't run one constantly to catch one of these bots in action.

Is there any in game tool that I can use to get these cheaters reported that I'm not seeing?

PrtSc? Or just email exploits@arena.net with the time, IP address, screenshot of map area, etc.

Good luck.

I have seen then put in a ticket and managed to tag one person a bot. It is like the afk farmers in Malchor's leap and other places.Report and nothing is getting done.

I never report botters, gold selling spammers... whats the point? they keep coming back like cockroaches

I've never seen this happen. I didn't even know it was a thing.

Can you catch the name? If you can type it into your friends list and report from there.

Are you sure it's not someone who just has a char parked on a node and just logs on then off to switch to the next char? This is something I do. I have 20 chars parked at various farms for daily gathering.

@Vash.2386 said:Are you sure it's not someone who just has a char parked on a node and just logs on then off to switch to the next char? This is something I do. I have 20 chars parked at various farms for daily gathering.

Its the same character, hits the node once, then disappears, then comes back to do it again (three times in total). I too have a few character just hanging at the top of some JPs. If you've ever seen a bot hop in an out, you'll know the difference pretty quick - not to mention, there are three or four hitting it the same way at the same time.

I'll try and hit a prnt screen and then enter the name in the friends list to get it reported. Though, those special characters are not easy to get entered.

@Blockhead Magee.3092 said:

@Vash.2386 said:Are you sure it's not someone who just has a char parked on a node and just logs on then off to switch to the next char? This is something I do. I have 20 chars parked at various farms for daily gathering.

just take a print screen shoot it is more faster that way !! then send the report and let it go . even tho noting will happen even has not happened since the game came out will not happen now . and the only ones that have are the ones that got fame off you tube . like that time what's his name cleartly banned some one and then jumped on his account and then jumped off some spot . :# :# :# :#

I'm also doing this everyday with all my alternative characters. Parking them all on the node. Harvest, Log Out, Log In Harvest and the cycle repeats.

I didn't know this is considered as botting, i guess i should stop doing this. sigh, too bad

@geochan.9184 said:I'm also doing this everyday with all my alternative characters. Parking them all on the node. Harvest, Log Out, Log In Harvest and the cycle repeats.

I didn't know this is considered as botting, i guess i should stop doing this. sigh, too bad

There's a difference between what you (and many other) people do and the botting that OP is talking about. The former is completely fine and looks normal. The latter will often not look normal (ie. the name appearing at ground level).

@geochan.9184 said:I'm also doing this everyday with all my alternative characters. Parking them all on the node. Harvest, Log Out, Log In Harvest and the cycle repeats.

I didn't know this is considered as botting, i guess i should stop doing this. sigh, too bad

It’s not the same and a player logging in at a node, harvesting and logging out/switching chars is not botting. After you’ve seen a few you can tell the difference between a player and a bot. The bot is much faster and doesn’t do things like stop to kill a mob attacking it or stand there and sort Inventory and a bot will often teleport to another node. ANet can also tell the difference so even if you get reported you won’t get in trouble.

@WARIORSCHARGEING.2637 said:

@Blockhead Magee.3092 said:

@Vash.2386 said:Are you sure it's not someone who just has a char parked on a node and just logs on then off to switch to the next char? This is something I do. I have 20 chars parked at various farms for daily gathering.

You do realize bots and such are banned in waves, and the CS/Security Team won't be sending you a notice, I hope.

@Samnang.1879 said:I never report botters, gold selling spammers... whats the point? they keep coming back like cockroaches

The point is you get the botter to buy a new account if s/he want to continue the process

I use to think it was people logging on and off but then I started to see them at other nodes.Caught one that appeared , harvested and vanished. The they appeared at the next tree not too far away.Caught them tagged as a bot.

i see. that's cool then.

@Blockhead Magee.3092 said:The situation: we all know that botters have characters spring up on resource nodes, farm it and poof away. Usually that gives us enough time to click their name, hit report and move on. However, I've noticed that the bots are now popping in, hitting the node just once, popping away, then coming back to hit it again, then out and then back for the third hit. Because they poof away so fast, I can't physically click their character, then click on their icon to get the menu to report them before they disappear which resets needing to click their character to click the icon to get to the report menu.

I don't run any video capture programs and I certainly don't run one constantly to catch one of these bots in action.

Is there any in game tool that I can use to get these cheaters reported that I'm not seeing?

I hate to blow your supposition that people who leave characters at nodes are bots but this is not true in most cases. There are plenty of us who leave little used characters at valuable nodes to farm them once a day. I leave some characters at them and they are not bots. I manually go to characters and farm them then leave the character. The problem with reporting players as bots is that you have zero way of knowing if that person is a player who smart farms or is a bot. Reporting someone who isn't a botter could get their account locked out and ruin their week.

Parking characters is not against the rules of the game no matter what other players think about it. If they didn't want us parking characters they would remove all fixed location nodes.

Parking on nodes is not the problem. Its the people using some program to teleport a character instantly to harvesting nodes one after the other.There like Genies. Poof their here. Poof the are over there and so on

@jediwolf.8724 said:Parking on nodes is not the problem. Its the people using some program to teleport a character instantly to harvesting nodes one after the other.There like Genies. Poof their here. Poof the are over there and so on

With all the lag going on these days in the game how can you tell if they are a bot or just lag is causing you to see them poof around. lol

@Mewcifer.5198 said:I've never seen this happen. I didn't even know it was a thing.

It has been happening since launch. It is the same thing, every day, every year. No money is being spent proactively to make the game detect these things to ban them. Anet is literally expecting the playerbase to report what they see. That said, the reporting tools aren't very good. So, they expect you to also run a third party video capture tool before they will even consider your report (understandable, sort of). On top of that, in the past, I have reported people for this behavior, and a month goes by and they are still logging on. It's like Anet just wants us to ignore it and pretend it isn't happening.

@Tekoneiric.6817 said:

@jediwolf.8724 said:Parking on nodes is not the problem. Its the people using some program to teleport a character instantly to harvesting nodes one after the other.There like Genies. Poof their here. Poof the are over there and so on

Before my area got 4G I played with 3G or sometimes 2G and I had a lot of lag. When there’s that much lag other people might see you porting from spot to spot. However they’ll also see you running in place while stopped by terrain and they’ll see you standing by a node because lag won’t let you harvest. You don’t see the person fluidly harvesting and porting from node to node.

@Tekoneiric.6817 said:I hate to blow your supposition that people who leave characters at nodes are bots but this is not true in most cases. There are plenty of us who leave little used characters at valuable nodes to farm them once a day. I leave some characters at them and they are not bots. I manually go to characters and farm them then leave the character.

Do you log in, take a swing, log out, log back in, take another swing, log out, log back in to take a last swing? Or at rich veins, do you take three swing, log out, log back in, take another three swings etc.?

That is what OP was writing, and if you really do that, don't be surprised to be reported because that clearly is bot-behaviour.

Why do people without fail push the sentiment that nothing gets done when you make a proper report. That's literally the only thing notifying a game that an exploit is happening. No reports equals no action.

@Faaris.8013 said:

@Tekoneiric.6817 said:I hate to blow your supposition that people who leave characters at nodes are bots but this is not true in most cases. There are plenty of us who leave little used characters at valuable nodes to farm them once a day. I leave some characters at them and they are not bots. I manually go to characters and farm them then leave the character.

I have several rarely used characters at valuable nodes that take some time to get to. I pop into the character, kill the creature that spawns there if needed, farm the node then switch to my next character. This is common for players who are not bots to do in the game. From someone else's perspective if you see a player pop in, farm the node then exit the character then it's probably a human player who left the character parked there.

I'm not sure how the bot programs are doing their stuff but I would imagine they are digging into the running game's routines and pointers. One thing the devs could do to combat this is to intentionally change the pointers and relative memory locations for character position and movement with each game load. Basically have the game randomly decide which variable it's going to use for these from a table of them. All others in that table would lead to a terminate program routine.

From a in game perspective there are things they could do to reduce botting by changing fixed node locations by using the preassigned node location and varying it off that by some distance on each map instance but keeping it in the general area. They could also not allow farming for 2 minutes on loading a character. It'd be a bit annoying for players but majorly slow down any bot program. They could also cap how much of a given crafting item you could sell on the TP at any one time. This would have the added benefit of reducing dumping of hot crafting items but might affect prices during legendary spikes. They could also cap player to player item item transfers like they did with gold. If an account couldn't sell more than 1000 of any one item at a time on the TP or had their player to player specific item transfers capped at 1000 a day it would dampen any potential bot profits. A combination of things done in the game could push botters off to other more profitable games.

I'm just not a fan of players reporting other players of suspected botting because as I said if it's a false or vindictive report then it could ruin someone's enjoyment of the game. Reporting players should be limited to rude, lewd, crude and generally bad behavior to other players.

@Just a flesh wound.3589 said:

@Tekoneiric.6817 said:

@jediwolf.8724 said:Parking on nodes is not the problem. Its the people using some program to teleport a character instantly to harvesting nodes one after the other.There like Genies. Poof their here. Poof the are over there and so on

Could running in place while hung on an object be a bot? Yes but it could just as easily be a player who's attention wandered or that fell asleep at the controls. That latter part does happen. I know I've left a character in auto run and gotten distracted then looked back to see them hung. I've had those moments of micro-sleep too when I'm sleep deprived but pushing myself to stay awake for various reasons IRL.