Category Archives: Developer Corner

Developer Corner: On Botting and What ArenaNet Is Doing About It

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Mike Lewis, ArenaNet’s Security Coordinator, posted on the forums today results of “bot” monitoring process and their further plans how to deal with this issue.
 

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.
 
Thank you for your understanding and patience as we continue to improve our ability to deal with this issue.

ArenaNet Limits World Transfers

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North American Community Team Leader Regina Buenaobra announced today that the free World Transfers will be limited to one transfer every 24h.
 

We want to give you a heads up: Starting with the new WvW rotation tomorrow, we will limit the free World transfer to one transfer every 24h. This should address some of the unwanted WvW exploits we have seen, while still giving people the opportunity to switch a server to play with their friends.

 

Source: forums.guildwars2.com

Developer Corner: Jeffrey Vaughn on Problems with End Story Loot

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Like in every other MMO after completing the storyline and the last bossfight players expect some unique weapon or armor as a reward for their efforts. I guess that most of you were pretty disappointed after finishing the Zhaitan bossfight and opening bags. The rewards are usually “5 blues between levels 15 and 35“. Obviously there is a bug, and a great news is that ArenaNet is fixing this with retroactive rewards for people who already completed the story.

 

I don’t set up rewards, so I don’t want to give any inaccurate information… But we are fixing this, and we’re looking at a retroactive reward for people who have already finished the final dungeon. (No ETA on either, sorry!) But you have not been forgotten, nor are you being ignored.

 

It’s my understanding that the final reward will be corrected for people who complete the step, and we’ll be doing something for people who have already completed the story. It shouldn’t matter if you already opened the bags, or have them untouched, since we don’t want to punish people who (in good faith) opened up the rewards and got a bunch of low level items.

Developer Corner: Gaile Gray on Policy for posting videos on Youtube

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You cannot use the monetization system for YouTube or other services. In order words, you cannot make money from our products.
 
YouTube will often note that someone has monetized copyright content, and they will summarily (and properly) close the videos or close the accounts of those involved. You don’t mention if you were using the monetization system, but if you were, you should close the video and re-upload without monetization, or you should disable monetization through the YouTube interface.
 
Now, I should say that this policy may be adjusted in some ways, in the future. We will be sure to let people know if the policies change. But at the current time, that is what is stated in the Guild Wars 2 Content Terms of Use and that is what should be observed.
 
We’re not out to “punish” people for posting their videos, but like any company involved with copyright material — from this movie company to that fast-food restaurant to the other book publisher — we take reasonable efforts to protect our IP (intellectual property). Things are likely to change and more latitude is very likely to be given, but not just yet.

Developer Corner: Jon Peters on the latest dungeon update

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Hey all, it is my fault the updates to those 3 dungeon chains did not get into to the notes. There is a lot going on right now and as we establish our patch process sometimes things will slip through the cracks. I wanted to shed some light on the dungeon speed clear stuff as well. You should not see any diminished returns unless you:
 
1) Run the same exact chain over twice in a row
2) Complete multiple dungeons in 30 minutes or less each.
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Developer Corner: Robert Hrouda on the CoF Changes

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I built this dungeon – Citadel of Flame, and fixed the problem, so I’m going to come at you from the designer perspective on things to try and illuminate why I did what I did, and what exactly I did. It wasn’t made clear, and I apologize for that.
 
The main thing I am seeing, is that people are upset that I took away their super profitable low risk, fast, token grind. I did not go into this thinking everyone would be happy with my changes – I knew I would be upsetting people because I was taking away a super easy speed-run money printer. I took it away for a few reasons – chief among them being what I feel is taking advantage of a couple bugs found in the same chain, and our leashing/aggro system. I played with groups who did this, and watched you-tube clips of what was going on. The problems I identified with the speed run aspect of this are as follows:

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