I think that due to various reasons (at least three: extremely non-exciting mobs (who doesn’t hate undead in GW2?), non-exciting landscape (there is only so much ruins with black whirly things I can take in one day) and non-working events), most “regular” players - who play for fun/exploration/whatever as opposed to farming karma/mats/whatever - stop playing in the Orr zones and either move to WvW, Frostgorge, dungeons or switch to alts.
At the same time, Orr is like heaven for farmers. That’s why the contrast is staggering and for every “regular” player you see 10 bots and farmers.
Orr seems to be a failure on so many levels. Whoever thought that it’s going to be fun to have most of the end game zones full of the same boring stupid Risen mobs, well, he was wrong. They should have added some variety to undead forces and have one more dragon (the frost one?) at launch. They probably planned to have Jormag there but dropped it for now and that’s why Frostgorge and the whole winter theme feels so incomplete.
KevinC
4502
I don’t think Orr needs dragons, I like the current setup with the Temples (when they work). The mechanics there are more interesting to me than the Claw of Jormag fight. I do agree there would more than endless waves of undead in Orr. It’s nice to stock up on Large Bones and all, but some variety would be nice… :)
Mainly I just want them to go into bug crunching mode for a solid month. Not just events, but exploits, hacks, and all the class bugs too (My original 2-3 builds I had planned for a Mesmer are gimped because of all the trait bugs!).
Also, can we get some changes to WvW already? It’s such a snowball effect that once a team gets some momentum (read: orbs) it’s nearly impossible for the other teams to come back. One evening of night-capping and the other two servers quit for 6 days, because trying to take an orb back when you’re down 3-0 is not much fun. I’ve tried transferring from Jade Quarry to Kaineng to Anvil Rock to Sorrow’s Furnace (is that the right name?) and every matchup I’ve been on it’s been an absolute steamroll for one server. You should see increasing resistance the more your server starts to push, instead it just gets easier and easier because of all the rewards for winning.
Derbain
4503
Don’t the orbs reset every day?
Sinij
4504
Disagree that orbs have that big effect.
3-0 is not the cause, rather symptom of bad matchmaking.
Seneca
4505
Beyond the stat bonuses from the orbs, my guess is they also have a pyschological influence on the casual WvW player. If a player logs in at night, checks the scoreboard, and sees that their realm is down 3-0, they are not heading to the battlegrounds. Our experience this past week with poor server turnout is a pretty strong indication that they have a negative influence on the losing realm. Morale was also low because of the bugs, orb hacking, and GoM got their act together.
The orb and undermanned bonuses should be reversed. If you are undermanned, then you get the stat bonuses. The realm with the orbs can enjoy the karma and experience bonuses.
So apparently there’s a know exploit to move friendly NPCs, which has been reported for a long while, and is now more or less public knowledge. It’s leading exactly to what you’d expect.
“Actually this issue has escalated. Now that the majority of the people know about the reddit post, there are now players transferring to the enemy server, for WvWvW, they want to lose and using the same NPC push trick, to push the Legendary Defenders at base camps in borderlands or eternity , to a different area and camp farming the home base.”
https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/game/gw2/Griefing-discovered-need-punishment-please
Hehe, sorry, I didn’t mean they need to add one more dragon to Orr. I kind of combined two requests into one sentence - more monster types in Orr and one more dragon (not in Orr :)) at release.
One more dragon area is required so that when we are sick of doing the Orr (undead) endgame zones, we could switch to some other (winter?) endgame zone. Frostgorge alone is just not enough - it’s not endgamey.
Having only Orr as level 80 area and having undead as the only mob type there is boring.
Jesus, WvWvW sounds totally fucked up. Kinda makes me glad I’m late to the party and still working my way through the PvE content.
I’m having a lot of fun with the game after my intial sense of being somewhat overwhelmed by everything. I’ve learned how to work the events, discovered the jumping puzzles (not sure that’s a good thing), worked the kinks out of crafting and have progressed a good way into my personal story. I’m transitioning from Norn starter lands into the mixed race areas now, and have visited some of the other races homelands. The game still seems vast, and I’m looking forward to working in more tightly knit groups to take on the higher level content.
Every single MMO that comes out has these sorts of botting and hacking issues. I’m guessing it has something to do with the complexity of what’s being done, etc., but every single time, it goes on for far longer than you’d think it would–again, I’m guessing it’s because it’s not easy to fix without screwing up other stuff. And companies never really address this stuff publicly, for all sorts of reasons. But I would be very interested to hear what it’s like from the live team side, when they have to deal with all of this.
I mean, ArenaNet has to be aware of this stuff, right? And they have to be working on fixing it, right? Unless, of course, the botters and hackers are somehow their best gem buying customers I guess…
Despite the exploits WvW is great fun. I’m on Yaks Bend and this week we’ve been in a tight match all week with Northern Shiverpeaks and Sanctum of Rall. Its been great fun.
OMG Halloween event coming soon:
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/events/halloween-2012
Shadow of the Mad King is the first major game release for Guild Wars 2 and will go live on October 22. This new game update will include a number of new features for all of our players to enjoy, new content to explore and see, and a week-long Halloween event.
Highlights:
Halloween is coming! Festivities are afoot, and Tyria will be transformed with decorations, new mini-games, new dynamic events, and more. Despite the celebrations there are those who dread the coming of Halloween and all that it may bring, for it is the time of year when barriers between the realms are weakest. Be prepared for an epic adventure in four acts starting October 22 and running until October 31.
Never one to miss out on an opportunity, Evon Gnashblade has stocked all new items at the Black Lion Trading Company, including Halloween costumes and new transforms that will allow you to play Costume Brawl with fellow costumed players.
Paid tournaments will be available for competitive, five-person teams. These tournaments require tickets to enter and give better prizes than normal tournaments. Participating teams will earn qualifier points that will allow them to compete in future, larger tournaments. Tournament tickets can be earned from winning normal tournaments or purchased in the Gem Store.
The world continues to evolve with new events, jumping puzzles, bosses, mini-dungeons, and achievements appearing across a variety of maps.
rossm
4512
There is no “fix” for botting and hacking, ever, in any mmo.
“Botting” is not realistically preventable. People write software that automates keyboard presses for you. It’s kind of the whole point of PCs (user code), so it’s not going away. ANet can throw a lot of money at writing software that uses heuristics or whatever to flag users who run software like this, but it’s expensive, you run the risk of false positives, and it will mostly just catch the low hanging fruit. A determined botter could just make a mechanical device that pressed your keys instead of software, or use software that runs on another machine. Traditionally botting is simply discouraged through game mechanics and throwing money at more GMs to ban reported people. It’s something they’ll have to get a handle on over time, or just ignore because honestly who gives a shit.
Hacking is also not feasible to prevent. Movement is all client side, in basically every realtime online game ever. There’s nothing stopping people from editing memory on their pc or whatever else to teleport, speed hack, etc. The way this is traditionally prevented is by smart detection on the server and quick bannings. But it’s difficult to implement because a lot of the time it looks similar to lag.
To explain that further, your computer is communicating with the servers very regularly. However, when you press W to move forward, it doesn’t tell the server you pressed W and then wait for the server to say OK before it moves forward. It would have to do this every frame, which is obviously not realistic. Movement has to be done client side in this sort of game, which means anybody can move anywhere they want (teleporting, etc). All mmos work this way. GW2 is not any different.
Nice summary, thanks. I was aware of most of this, I guess, but I’m interested in how companies deal with these issues, and how they communicate their dealings to their users. Much of what happens may well be an inevitable by-product of PC MMOs, but different companies seem to have different cultures when it comes to both dealing with the issues and dealing with the community. Hell, I don’t think anyone has ever come out and just listed the problems as baldly as was done here; perhaps official communications to that effect would help people chill–or maybe just encourage more abuse, who knows?
I do wonder, though, as you allude, that perhaps there are game design ways of minimizing the desirability of abuses. If you can’t stop them technically, can you craft gameplay that doesn’t reward abuse, and still be good gameplay?
Aeek
4514
GW2 makes power levelling pretty pointless, and yet bots are doing it.
KevinC
4515
I got an in-game spam mail once offering powerleveling services for $180. I just had to scratch my head wondering what I was paying them for. Well, I do that anyways in other MMOs because the concept doesn’t make sense to me (pay people to play the game you’re paying money to play), but it especially doesn’t make sense here where I’d be doing the exact same thing at 80 as I’d be doing at L10.
Yeah, that’s a good point about power leveling in GW2. Maybe the habits of botters and farmers are so ingrained by now that it’s sort of a reflex action…
Great post but for this part. On most gamer mechanics, I think GW2 is well set to survive bots except for two where they do have to give a shit, or stated they do:
1 - Dynamic Events, Two sub-issues:
a - the bots are farming a nearby spawn and are not set up to engage in the DE. The DE near the farm spots scales based on the bots being there and is not winnable ever. This is already an issue in a couple places.
b - the bots are set to farm the DE itself. The DE is never fails, ever. Also players who wish participation credit on the DE or loot credit on the mobs in the DE must adopt certain builds in order to also tag the mobs or they may not even get full credit for participating, which is really annoying in some really long DE’s.
2 - MUDflation, usual economic distortions:
Arenanet has said they want an economy. Bots can rapidly increase inflation in the closed system of an MMO. Excessive gold sinks that only players, not bots, have to use can annoy the player base and mudlfation is newbie unfriendly. Bots cornering the market for certain things or flooding the market with certain items also can cause economic issues.
Phred
4518
Makes you wonder who decided to do away with a more traditional beta that would have revealed a lot more of the problems than the weekend “events” and whether they regret that decision now.
Phred
4519
And seriously why has Anet nerfed the event rewards to the point that this kind of micromanaging is optimal?
Phred
4520
Guilds are also transferring to use up supply on enemy realms apparently.
