ArenaNet cracks down on Guild Wars 2 cheaters, bans 34,000 accounts

Guild Wars 2 publisher ArenaNet is rather serious about stamping out cheating in its fan-favorite MMORPG, and alongside a enormous rash of player bans the company has decided to outline its anti-cheating gameplan.

Cheaters have already been the main scourge of hugely multiplayer online games since the subgenre first emerged. Guild Wars 2 is no exception to this truism, and since its debut in August publisher ArenaNet has been scrambling to come up with a viable plan to prevent lazy gamers from ruining the experience for people that hope to enjoy Guild Wars 2 gold the way its developers intended.

The most problematic group of cheaters for practically any hugely multiplayer title is most definitely the "botters." These are players who use third-party program to automate their character's in-game actions. This gets to be a big issue for MMO creators, as most of these games heavily rely on lengthy, involved quests & item collection tasks to artificially lengthen a game's potential shelf-life. What a player can accomplish in a single-player roleplaying game in a matter of minutes usually takes hours in a massively multiplayer game, nonetheless by offering players periodic rewards, these otherwise tedious activities are in a position to release a burst of dopamine inside a player's brain, hence keeping him or her playing (and keeping the game's creators wealthy adequate to continue development on the title & make a nice profit as well). In automating these tasks, botters efficiently remove all the less exciting, effort-filled bits of the game and instead skip right to the neat end-game content, or, if they're pro's, they may use this method to pick up huge lots of in-game items which can then be sold for real-world cash, either through legitimate or black sector channels. These would your stereotypical "Chinese gold farmers."

Given the impact this can have on a publisher's bottom line (not to mention the rage other players could feel at discovering that their peers are cheating), ArenaNet has decided to publicize its recent decisive strike against the legions of botters. In a lengthy post lately added to the official Guild Wars 2 internet site, the game's security coordinator, Mike Lewis, lets players know that during the month of November the company banned a whopping 34,000 player accounts because of reports of botting & other activities strictly outlawed by the game's end user license agreement. Further, he claims that the overall population of botters in ArenaNet seems to be shrinking — though, to be fair, he also notes that this coincides with a lower in the game's overall player population. In accordance with Lewis, ArenaNet monitors global bot activity inside its game and since October the standard quantity of botters active at any given time has dropped from over 2,000 to "a way healthier 20."
Lewis then goes on to thank the game's remaining players for their efforts in reporting botters to ArenaNet before outlining the system the publisher has in place to combat this dilemma. Have a look:

Collecting and analyzing data is very crucial to us at ArenaNet. Data is the most potent weapon in our arsenal against bots. We have gathered enormous quantities of info about the habits of both normal players & automated bot players. We contracted a team of data specialists to help us create comprehensive tools that comb by way of this data and find effective ways to single out and terminate bot accounts. Automating this process has been a major focus of the ArenaNet security team, & we're now seeing the considerable fruits of this labor.
One other way we identify and combat bots is by means of manual observation. Our GM staff is equipped to monitor the game around the clock and detect bots from within the game itself. We have a considerable task force assigned to patrolling the world & eliminating bots, together with helping us continue to boost and refine our automatic detection tools.

Last however not least, we are in a outstanding position to monitor and investigate bot reports as they arrive from players. Aided by our analysis tools and strengthened by manual investigation as necessary, GMs are able to react rapidly and effectively to bot reports & terminate offending accounts in brief order.

Whether ArenaNet is prosperous in its crusade against botters remains to be noticed — no MMO to date has been able to absolutely wipe them out — nevertheless at least it has a plan and is working toward making the online title that a good deal more friendly for individuals that just need to team up with a group of friends to kill extraordinary creatures. Fans can not genuinely ask for more, however we wonder if these efforts will be adequate to stem the slowly-growing exodus the gw2 gold game has noticed since launch.