Since the game was launched back in August of last year, Guild Wars 2 has been plagued with a nasty infestation that no MMO player wants to deal with – bots. Small scripts that control a player’s character for them to level, farm, etc, bots are essentially a cheat for MMORPGs. And, unfortunately, they are found in pretty much every big name MMO out there.
Luckily, ArenaNet, the developer behind GW2, decided to take strong, swift action against people using these cheat programs. According to a recent blog post on the official Guild Wars 2 website, the team actively banned over 34,000 accounts that were violating the terms of service by using bots. That’s quite the banning spree. But what’s even more surprising is how many bots were actually active at any point during the game. Anet had this to say about the situation:
The number of bots reported every hour worldwide has dropped from more than 2,000 in October to a much healthier 20 as of this writing.
What can be taken from this? Actual GW2 players were actively reporting 2,000 accounts as bots every hour during the game. Now, that number is a lot lower after Anet’s massive banning spree. Will this effectively end the war against bots in Guild Wars 2? More than likely, no. But, it will keep the game clean for an extended amount of time until the gold sellers and powerlevelers return in full force.
Bots have been around for several years now and the scripts they run are getting more and more complex. This, in turn, makes it more difficult for developers to catch them. If you’re an avid GW2 player and want to keep bots off the game, do your part and actively report players that appear to be using a bot in-game. Bots in Guild Wars 2 are a dying breed as of right now but, in order to keep it that way, players have to help ArenaNet fight them.
