Dear ANET, [Merged]

[raykor.6723]

AFK farmers and botters are not a huge problem in this game—certainly not like they are in many other games. Nonetheless, they damage the image of your fine product and most importantly, they disappoint your most loyal customers. We play by the rules and we support the game (yes, we spend money on gems). We watch you do nothing to those that break the rules. The same accounts in the same places day after day after day. It's so obvious that one can only conclude you simply don't care. You make us feel dumb.

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

Report, block if desired, move on. 

[Freya.9075]

I don’t support afk farming, but I have to ask. Why do you say it makes us feel dumb? Just report them and move on. There is no way for us to know which one of these farmers play by the rule or afk. I leave that part to anet. 

[Daniyyel.3428]

They are a huge problem on LW4 maps.  I counted almost 40 or so in Kourna.  That's one map one ip.  When more than half the allowed map population on that map is bots/afkers and passive farmers its a huge problem.   I farm the map daily for karmic retribution.  I've not seen less than 30 of them on a slow day but up to 40 or so on a normal day and that's just the ones I see out in the open.  6 months ago there was less than 10 or so, it seems to increase every month since they know Anet wont do anything. 

Edited January 24, 2023 by Daniyyel.3428

[soul.9651]

4 hours ago, Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:

Report, block if desired, move on. 

Sure and watch how anet ignores all of those reports???????? How afk spots beeing more and more filled despite people reporting them????......

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

And what do you suggest since a Moderator will come by and encourage the OP to do the same?  Only GMs can affect this issue.

[soul.9651]

The same how people are dealing with spec balance in this game... They complain untill anet finally takes action and the spec gets either buffed or nerfed. Same analogy about afk farming, the more people will expose this the bigger headache for anet it will be and they will have to deal with it eventually in one way or the other. 

Or idk find a new GMs or GMs in general if there are none currently considering how the number of afk farmers is just increasing in weeks instead of decreasing or at least staying the same... it looks worse and worse with each reddit and forum post..

Your "report and move on" doesnt mean anything at this point...

Edited January 24, 2023 by soul.9651

[Astralporing.1957]

1 hour ago, Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:

And what do you suggest since a Moderator will come by and encourage the OP to do the same?  Only GMs can affect this issue.

Sure, only Anet can do something about it, but from my experience issues that aren't spoken about do not get fixed here.

[Jukhy.2431]

1 hour ago, soul.9651 said:

Sure and watch how anet ignores all of those reports???????? How afk spots beeing more and more filled despite people reporting them????......

How do you know they ignore it?

Considering how many people I've seen complain about this my guess is that these "afk" farmers get reported in droves followed by visits from GMs checking if they are afk or not. If they are still doing it after all this time I doubt many are actually breaking the rules. Most are probably passively playing the game, eg. working or watching shows/movies while "afk" farming. As long as they can make a discussion with a GM (not automated reply) to prove they are not afk there's not much that can be done here, unless Anet is willing to change the rules to prevent passive farming.

[costepj.5120]

6 hours ago, raykor.6723 said:

It's so obvious that one can only conclude you simply don't care.

Or one can conclude that they aren't breaking any rules. Anet's TOS allows passive farming. They aren't going to ban anyone who isn't breaking their rules.

[Taclism.2406]

2 hours ago, soul.9651 said:

find a new GMs

Legitimately asking : Is that still a thing? I haven't seen / talked to a GM for at least a decade. Like is that a job description at anet?

I'd expect its only a part of what you do as customer service. And that mails have priority over ingame reports, since making sure a new customer is happy makes more $$$ than listening to someone that's already hooked

[soul.9651]

1 hour ago, Jukhy.2431 said:

How do you know they ignore it?

Considering how many people I've seen complain about this my guess is that these "afk" farmers get reported in droves followed by visits from GMs checking if they are afk or not. If they are still doing it after all this time I doubt many are actually breaking the rules. Most are probably passively playing the game, eg. working or watching shows/movies while "afk" farming. As long as they can make a discussion with a GM (not automated reply) to prove they are not afk there's not much that can be done here, unless Anet is willing to change the rules to prevent passive farming.

Again do you even know if they are checking players? Or are you just repeating what you saw someone else wrote? Unless you link some sort of links where devs said THEMSELFS that they are checking people or peoples messages from GMs then you would be more believable.. now its just the same few sentances people write which are becoming more and more meaningless as an excuse that "they are doing something about this". 

Its just annoying to see bigger amount of people afk farming WITHIN WEEKS and all the same excuses that "everything is fine" "they must be doing nothing against ToS they definetely are getting checked"

[soul.9651]

15 minutes ago, Taclism.2406 said:

Legitimately asking : Is that still a thing? I haven't seen / talked to a GM for at least a decade. Like is that a job description at anet?

I'd expect its only a part of what you do as customer service. And that mails have priority over ingame reports, since making sure a new customer is happy makes more $$$ than listening to someone that's already hooked

Idk maybe they are still a thing, i doubt customer service would do this.. on the other hand i heard the rumours that anet doesnt even have any GMs hired currently which idk if are true but looking how "afk farmers" count is increasing who knows.. and for those saying "there are GMs checking people"... THEN SHOW THE MESSAGES to prove that they are checking them...

Or if it turns out that its customer service who should be doing this then there are ton of unhappy customers about this....

Edited January 24, 2023 by soul.9651

[Niteraven.1372]

This is an honest question and an honest statement. The bots on this game have become out of control. Not only are they there, they are FLAGRANT and in your face. What are we supposed to do about this? If I report the nine bots I see every day I will get in trouble for too much reporting. Its disgusting and its sad that this has happened to this game. I have reported a few so far, but it clearly states not to report too much or you acct could be terminated. I guess we just let them ruin the game? I know the answer will be just ignore them. You all have spent a lot of time farming and making gold. This should disgust all of you.

[kharmin.7683]

Report and move on.

[kharmin.7683]

8 minutes ago, soul.9651 said:

... THEN SHOW THE MESSAGES to prove that they are checking them...

For legal reasons, ANet will never do this.

[Freya.9075]

49 minutes ago, soul.9651 said:

and for those saying "there are GMs checking people"... THEN SHOW THE MESSAGES to prove that they are checking them...

I can't show any messages, however I have seen them teleport engineers to check if they are there or if they are bots. Almost all of the engineers that were in the spot reacted to the teleport saying "hi anet" or "O/" and went back to their spot. There were a few standing in the spot they got teleported to and still put down turrets. I assume these are their targets and got a ban when the wave came. This was in the spot in Iron Marches.

Edited January 24, 2023 by Freya.9075

[Danikat.8537]

I think the warning about reporting too much means not to spam it. If you see 9 people doing something they shouldn't and report them once each, then on another day you see the same 9 people doing the same thing and report them once each that's fine.

Some games have an automated component to the report system where if someone is reported enough times in a short space of time they'll be automatically banned while waiting for a GM to look into the reports. That leads to some people spamming reports or encouraging everyone in the map or their guild to report the same person, hoping to trigger an automatic ban. That's the kind of thing it's discouraging.

Also as far as I know that doesn't happen in GW2, reported are only acted on after a human has reviewed them and decided what action to take. (I've heard that with bots they also save them up so they can monitor how the bots act and use that data to identify other bots, then ban all the ones using the same method in one go, otherwise the people running them could just modify the surviving bots to make them harder to spot.)

[Taclism.2406]

9 minutes ago, soul.9651 said:

Idk maybe they are still a thing.. on the other hand i heard the rumours that anet doesnt even have any GMs hired currently which idk if are true but looking how "afk farmers" count is increasing who knows..

I didn't mean anet in particular.
I mean I believe no one hires anymore for people that'll only do GM tasks, seems that was a late 2000's / early 2010 thing - unless someone noticed hirings or job offers I haven't.
While we - as player - massively appreciate the feeling of being listened to ; for the company its salaries spent on creating nothing. Hence why I suppose it became a secondary task for customer service : That work being done "from time to time" remains important, but is most likely done in a few batches rather than through daily bans.

 

11 minutes ago, kharmin.7683 said:

For legal reasons, ANet will never do this

Many games had ways to give you feedback without being specific.

Exemple 1 : Making you pay 1 gold for a report. If a [gm/dev/whatever] find your report was accurate you get 2 gold back ; if it was "seemingly in good faith but wrong" you get your 1gold back, and if it was a report in bad faith or negligeant (barely checked if actually worth reporting) you get nothing (and repeted offense gets you banned)

Exemple 2 :  On another game, you had no notifications whether your reports were accurate or not ; but devs could reward useful reports with a 30days long buff that gave a 1% discount on merch items (30 days buff, stack up to 5 times).  

I prefer the second option since you don't wanna incentivize too hard for the community to police eachother (and it'd probably needs adjustement to fit gw2), but I feel like that concept is a good inbetween to keep complaints to a minimum, while "prooving" the bot problem is in fact being dealt with.

[Danikat.8537]

57 minutes ago, Taclism.2406 said:

Legitimately asking : Is that still a thing? I haven't seen / talked to a GM for at least a decade. Like is that a job description at anet?

I'd expect its only a part of what you do as customer service. And that mails have priority over ingame reports, since making sure a new customer is happy makes more $$$ than listening to someone that's already hooked

I doubt they hire people specifically to be GMs, as other people said it's likely part of a bigger job rather than a seperate thing (kind of like how my work doesn't have anyone whose job is to write the news stories for our website, each one is written by the people whose work it's about).

But they definitely do have people who investigate reports, including for botting. Sometimes they'll whisper suspected bots and it shows up in yellow like update notifications rather than like a normal whisper. As someone else said they'll also teleport people to new locations and see what they do.

You'll also see people with the Anet guild tag in-game sometimes. On the EU servers I mostly see them hanging out in towns, especially around new releases, but they do play too, there's even achievements for killing them in WvW and PvP and for playing raids with them. But anyone who works for Anet can be part of that guild, so they may not have access to tools to edit the game, even to ban bots.

 

13 minutes ago, Taclism.2406 said:

I didn't mean anet in particular.
I mean I believe no one hires anymore for people that'll only do GM tasks, seems that was a late 2000's / early 2010 thing - unless someone noticed hirings or job offers I haven't.
While we - as player - massively appreciate the feeling of being listened to ; for the company its salaries spent on creating nothing. Hence why I suppose it became a secondary task for customer service : That work being done "from time to time" remains important, but is most likely done in a few batches rather than through daily bans.

The only game I know of which did that was Ultima Online and they didn't pay them, they were players who volunteered to be part-time GMs. The whole thing ended badly, I think there were even some lawsuits with some people claiming legally they qualified as employees and should be entitled to various benefits, and they scrapped the system years ago.

These days most games have moved beyond needing someone visibly standing in the map to find and fix problems, they can do most of it behind the scenes by reviewing activity logs. I remember a blog post about GW1 which said this could even give them extra data. For example they'd spot bots more easily because a human trying to do the same thing in exactly the same way will be inconsistent, it might not be noticeable if you watch them but something will take 1 second one time, 0.8 seconds another time and 1.1 seconds a third time, or they'll go slightly to one side of their usual path, whereas a bot will do exactly the same things in the same way each time and even if they're programmed to vary it the variations will be consistent because computers are not actually good at being random.

Although they can also be in the map but invisible if they want to. 

[Peter.3901]

The bot in a game is a measure of how much a company really cares about its product.

[Taclism.2406]

52 minutes ago, Danikat.8537 said:

The only game I know of which did that was Ultima Online and they didn't pay them

I know for sure WoW also had full time GM's, actually paid employees, at least from Vanilla until early Wrath of the lich king - but that was when WoW was crazy popular, and before they merged with Activision. From what friends playing retail told me, I believe Blizzard still has some, but they are massively understaffed and you're nowhere as likely to talk to or meet a gm than back then, and way more likely to have some automated response in your ingame mail.
It might also be GMing isnt their only role in the company anymore as we both suppose.

 

52 minutes ago, Danikat.8537 said:

These days most games have moved beyond needing someone visibly standing in the map to find and fix problems

I might assume too much, but I think the core complaint behind this sort of thread isnt the presence of bots/afk farmers itself, but the underlying feeling of helplessness despite following the procedure of reporting suspected accounts due to the absence of feedback. 
A simple automated mail "your report was read, and prooved useful. Thank you [...]" or "your report was read, but upon investigation we ruled no ToS were broken" (without even being specific on which reported account that response is linked to) wouldn't entirely fix the issue, but probably diminish a lot that sort of complaint. 
You could even add an opt out option if you don't wan't that feedback or prefer to keep your ingame mail clean.
The other 2 exemples I gave in my post above are more or less equivalent to that, but turning a pickle into a positive community thing, rather than simple neutral feedback. 

Edited January 24, 2023 by Taclism.2406

[Jukhy.2431]

2 hours ago, soul.9651 said:

Again do you even know if they are checking players? Or are you just repeating what you saw someone else wrote? Unless you link some sort of links where devs said THEMSELFS that they are checking people or peoples messages from GMs then you would be more believable.. now its just the same few sentances people write which are becoming more and more meaningless as an excuse that "they are doing something about this". 

Its just annoying to see bigger amount of people afk farming WITHIN WEEKS and all the same excuses that "everything is fine" "they must be doing nothing against ToS they definetely are getting checked"

Well, to be fair we do not know what methods Anet uses because they do not share that info (which is why I wrote "my guess is"). But a simple google search will prove that Anet does ban users in large amounts from time to time. However they might be more cautious in this since there has been reportedly innocent users caught in these ban waves.

And again, you cannot know wheter these players are afk or not because they can freely ignore your whispers - they only need to respond to a GM's inquiry.

[Randulf.7614]

Anet, you will close this imminently, but may I suggest you actually follow through on this new era of communication you keep promising (and yet to fully deliver on) and put up some kind of blog post showing that you are dealing with the issue? Shutting down the threads without adequate context is doing more harm than good.

Just talk to your community if you are actively dealing with this problem rather than taking the default route of silence and ignoring it.

Personally I could care less about an issue which isn’t affecting me, but plenty do and people aren’t going to stop making threads or requesting action.

Talk to your community. It’s not hard.

 

[Heibi.4251]

2 hours ago, kharmin.7683 said:

For legal reasons, ANet will never do this.

Correct. And they will tell you this if you submit a ticket to report a player instead. They have a standard reply telling you that they understand your concern but cannot tell you what was done.  So as has been stated to the OP, just report and move on. Something WILL eventually happen.