The only way to be unsure about whether the items sold by Purely/Autism Awareness Is Back/Ether were botted is by burying your head in the sand (which is what I did in nov/dec). That's what the legacy team chooses to do by requiring evidence but not having the means to gather or assess it. Which is what I would do, too, if I were a moderator; things get messy and it will be too much work to sort them out. This has advantages as well, such as giving users more freedom to determine the forum's contents.
Regarding forum contents, it seems to me that this place is now just for trading with loose morals. At the same time, recently there is no longer any interest in threads/discussions about actual gameplay. There's very little that interests me, and very little that I contribute that interests anyone. This thread was helpful for me to determine whether there was a chance of things changing in the future, so thanks to Dadan for starting it.
Exactly this Praise. Most of us dont care that bots are in game, we all are aware of that . We do care that They shamelessly can auction hundreds of items Here, ruining values of most items that regular players get.
Edit. We became fine with data collecting by bots instead of doing research Like it used to be in threads made for example by Red Fireball. This forum changes in the way That Dadan mentioned and Thats issue for some of us.
First things first, I took most of the names from Ether posts (could be his chest-running data post or his WTS). As for the others, that was a bit random. Nevertheless, you do not have to participate, and I apologise for those who didn’t want to be mentioned. That was overall to get as many opinions as possible.
Back to the topic, thanks for the constructive answers received.
By putting them for sale on GuildWars’ biggest community website, botters are making it worst. Spamming, showing and selling 500+ items in Kamadan would surely take some time, thus reducing their impact on the market. I don’t think they would do it anyway.
Accessing the Legacy market and saving that time by only putting an extracted table (from their bots) is a gold mine for them.
I my opinion, I would simply suggest what other people already suggested:
Ban the obvious ones and let the benefit of the doubt for the others.
To the moderators:
Now you know people's mind, the time has come to take a decision and to stand for one side or the other.
I thank you in advance not to answer “No Legacy rules are broken so no action necessary.”.
That would mean either some rules need to be changed or you do not want to do anything.
To let it go is standing on the botters’ side.
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I'll turn the question around: what do you want us to do? It's a slippery slope and it is extremely hard for us to prove something - do I personally think people should be allowed to bot and sell their items here? No, I absolutely do not think they should be.
In fact, people who bot should be banned in the game and in that way we are in quite a unique position - Guild Wars is still popular and active, nowhere near what it used to be, but it is still online. But banning has always been slow in Guild Wars and it feels like it has crawled to a stop nowadays.
Usually, these issues should be handled by the one running the game, not a fan run forum. We lack tools to police things and while we can take action on Legacy, we can't stop things from happening - if we block something, it might just turn up again with a different name/seller.
So what can we do with this, of for this? To be honest, that has been a question that I have been wondering myself for many weeks. We are discussing this internally, we have been following this thread quite well, but most people by now know that I usually keep away from moderation. In my opinion, it is more healthy for a platform when the owner of the platform isn't involved with moderation itself (so that you can remain fully neutral should you need to intervene).
For the moment, our stance has been that we aren't the police of Guild Wars. That role should be filled by ArenaNet - but it is clear that they haven't been fullfilling this role as it should be. So perhaps that policy needs tweaking, but I don't know how far we need to go (and can go) with this.
Do we put a notice on things that we received messages that the user is suspected to be botting? Do we block the account from posting in certain area's on Legacy? Because that will probably lead to them just going for a new account to get around that.
If we ban those users, they will certainly just create a new one so that is not a solution on its own. It won't solve anything, except raise the Legacy user count further.
So this is more complicated than I would prefer it to be. We're talking internally and that it the most I can currently say about it. What I can say is that a rule rework is in progress (has been for a while), but that seems to be progressing nicely now.
So, my question for you guys is: how would you handle this were you in our place? Knowing that bans aren't as effective as you would wish them to be, having to at least have some proof from botting and in what way we could limit/display that.
It's a though nut to crack.
- Kev
