Current Status Of Botting

Mike Lewis, security coordinator for ArenaNet, hit up the forums today to give us an update on the current situation with botting.

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We wanted to address some of the concerns around ‘botting’, and let everyone know what we’ve been doing about it, as well as our plans for continuing to tackle this issue.

Our monitoring of ‘bot’ activity has already resulted in over 1600 account terminations world-wide in the last week alone, and we are actively tracking the most common ‘bots’ in use, so that we can continue to eliminate them from the game. As we continue to gather information on these ‘bots’, we will be increasing the rate of account termination to remove them. Please continue to report players that you suspect of ‘botting’ – your support is much appreciated.

We are actively improving our means of detecting ‘bot’ activity in the game automatically. This includes tools for our customer support team to help them verify ‘botting’ reports and efficiently issue account terminations. Recently we have also hired a team of data specialists who will be helping us create more effective tools for analyzing reports of ‘botting.’

As a side effect, these efforts directly impact the operations of third-party gold sellers (and spammers). In conjunction with ‘bot’ removal we also take Real Money Trading very seriously and actively remove hundreds of gold spammers and sellers each day.

In short, we are fully committed to keeping this community free of bots and illicit gold sellers, and we very much appreciate your assistance in identifying and eliminating them.

The original post can be found here. Given some of the crazy examples we’ve seen in the last few days hopefully this situation continues to be address in a timely fashion.