If you thought modern MMOs were plagued by bots, wait until you see what’s been happening over in Guild Wars – the original Guild Wars – which is almost two decades old.
Botting was such an overt problem in PvE back in the day that ArenaNet changed how loot dropped; past me might have said “broke” and not just “changed,” even. But it also became a problem in PvP, and now it’s posing enough of a challenge that ArenaNet’s Stephen Clarke-Willson has put his foot down – kind of.
“The leeching system has been disabled due to abuse of the system by bots,” the classic Guild Wars game director wrote in yesterday’s patch notes. “A player can now only resign a match once every 120 minutes, also due to excessive abuse of the system by bots.”
The leeching system, as MOP’s Carlo reminds me, was set up as a tool that allows real players to report bots who enter PvP and then AFK while collecting rewards. Bots reported enough times pick up the “dishonored” debuff, which prevents them from queueing up again for a few hours. However, the bots apparently caught on and were using the report tool to harass legitimate players to keep them out of matches – and stop them from accurately reporting botter play.
Of course, while this patch stops bots from abusing the report feature, it doesn’t actually address the bots themselves, who now can’t be properly debuffed. Here’s hoping that Clarke-Willson has a few more feet to put down.
