Rvannith.8364

Could people please stop using the q slur to refer to LGBT people? As a gay man, use of the "Q slur" is extremely off-putting (right up there with trying to incorporate "cis hets" into LGBT spaces and movements) and effectively implies a weird hyper-online American understanding of LGBT issues, which isn't remotely inclusive to a huge segment of the LGBT community. Thanks!

Changes were made recently that makes the initiative bar staggered, rather than being a straight line. I'm finding this significantly more difficult to read than how it was: is it possible to change this back somehow? I can't find anything in the options or settings, but it's really jarring and inconvenient.

It's significantly harder to read now that it's staggered instead of being a straight line. Did Anet actually seek feedback before imposing this change? It's annoying, I don't play my thief anymore because of it.

Not necessarily. I have all the bot accounts added as friends so I recognise their names: if you go into the league table, select "Friends and Guilds", it will show you how many games someone has played in the current PvP season, so if you add suspected bot accounts as friends you can find out fairly easily if they're just bad or new players. If you extrapolate an average game length, these accounts have been active 20-24 hours a day the entire season. Also, I play in a weird timezone due to work, which probably explains why I get more bots than the average player.

Just had a ranked match with 9 bots and myself as the only human player: anet mentioned a few months ago now that they're aware of this issue and to just keep reporting, but the same bot accounts have been messing up silver and gold pvp for years. Have there been any further updates or statements about what they're doing about this problem?

The same bot accounts have been around for years, not just months, running pvp matches 24/7: anet knows about this problem, they just seem utterly disinterested in dealing with it. Be careful posting their actual account names: it's enough to get you warned or banned from the forums. 😞

The food item: could have slightly higher stats, but is okay when the bug is fixed. The Karma: nice, but we need more things to spend Karma on. It's junk currency for most of us who have been playing so long? The dye: bad. Nice colours, but once-per-account is not very nice. Alternate suggestions: give us a EOD unlock. A nicer fishing rod or something? As it is the rewards are fairly disappointing.

It was actually :')

It depends on your own team makeup and how switched on people are. If you run from them and play points you can win without paying much attention, but this requires the team to understand what you're doing. However, most of the time players at lower skill levels don't have good understanding of game mechanics, and will do two things that cause their team to lose: -run to the wrong point, abandoning their team (usually running to the "far" point).-"fight on the point". Nobody knows where this started, but it's bad advice. The reason this is particularly bad is that the bot accounts are built for two things:a) survival;b) aoe damage. Bots have perfect skill rotations and reflexes. They cannot play tactically, but in a 1v1 they will often beat silver and low gold-ranked players. Bad players will jump on a point, then the two or three bots on the enemy team will soak them in area damage, and they die. Again, bots are easy to "outplay" because they will usually run to enemy points that will cause the rest of their team to be outnumbered, or will run to the "wrong" point, but this requires your team to understand this and be familiar with their run patterns, the way they go to certain points, and how they will always, without fail, try to engage in a 3-on-1 or a 2-on-1 on a point your team holds, even though you can beat them in that matchup. At anything above low gold, players understand how bots work and can work around them, but on lower skill levels we... just don't. So basically: yes, you can beat bots, by running away from them. ;)

Most of my matches today have been like this. Anet mentioned a few months ago now they were working on the bot issue but all of these accounts have been reported many dozens of times, yet are still around clogging up Silver and Gold ranked PVP. Has there been any further comment from anet or any further statements about when this issue is likely to be addressed given it's still having a dire effect on the playability of the game for middling players like myself?

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.

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.

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. 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? 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.

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.

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. ):

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. ):

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm not the best player, and generally rank low-mid Gold (okay, I'm actually quite kitten). Unfortunately, the biggest frustration and thing that stops me from improving is the sheer amount of bots that seem to be active in ranked PVP: accounts that, assuming a combined game and match-up time of sixteen or seventeen minutes, are active nearly 24/7, accruing thousands of ranked matches every single PVP season. The same accounts and profiles are there, season to season: they never seem to get purged. Sometimes we're lucky: a bot like "OmnX KatXryn" is a burst mesmer, and will spam so perfectly that most other teams die to AOEs unless one of them knows it's a bot and baits their skills out. On other occasions, we end up with bots like "CaorXz", a Guardian that does nothing but auto-rally and heal, or "FaXXXXXXr" or "ShXXXXXXXa" who autorun far every respawn and tend to just die over and over without contributing anything. Is ANet at least aware of this problem? Would it trouble anyone to take five minutes, end of season, to look at the accounts that have so many games under their belts that they are either bots, or people who are somehow playing almost every single hour of the day for several weeks without ever sleeping? It's endless, and the majority of my games are undermined by this experience. I'd rather a longer match-up time and to lose to a human than win because there's a spammy bot on my team that out-competes the enemy, or because the other team has one of the "worse" bots that you can easily just auto to death. There's another thread in which people are mentioning this problem from last year, but the problem seems to be getting worse: it feels like the "human" population is dropping, which makes the probability of getting lumped in with a bot seem much more likely? Taking a more pro-active role in dealing with this issue would be very much appreciated, not just by myself but all the other middling players who feel like almost every game is a coin-flip based on the amount of bots we get grouped with rather than anything to do with an honest contest of skill.

I don't think this is entirely a good thing! In the lore, Jormag and his minions are presented as pretty misogynistic. Diversity is important, and ANet have done a fairly good job at presenting LGBT characters in a number of contexts, especially KasJory. On the other hand, after talking with other LGBT people who play the game, this does seem like a bit off base: it seems edged in, in a "look at us, we have dIvErSiTy" manner done for publicity rather than honestly inserting diverse and marginalised characters into the game world as ANet has done in the past: and quite well, might I add. There's also the issue about using a villain as a LGBT character, given the historical tropes of coding "bad guys" as lesbians, gays or trans people. Quoting a post I saw on twitter: "As an actual non-binary person who exists, I'm not interested in the fictional thoughts of a fictional character. I would like to be LESS aware of the opinions of writers who can only imagine non-binary identities in the context of nonhumans, but alas, the topic keeps coming up." There's significant room for critique here, and most of it appears to be coming from LGBT people.