Rvannith.8364

Could people please stop using the q slur to refer to LGBT people? As a gay man, use of the "Q slur" is extremely off-putting (right up there with trying to incorporate "cis hets" into LGBT spaces and movements) and effectively implies a weird hyper-online American understanding of LGBT issues, which isn't remotely inclusive to a huge segment of the LGBT community. Thanks!

Changes were made recently that makes the initiative bar staggered, rather than being a straight line. I'm finding this significantly more difficult to read than how it was: is it possible to change this back somehow? I can't find anything in the options or settings, but it's really jarring and inconvenient.

It's significantly harder to read now that it's staggered instead of being a straight line. Did Anet actually seek feedback before imposing this change? It's annoying, I don't play my thief anymore because of it.

Not necessarily. I have all the bot accounts added as friends so I recognise their names: if you go into the league table, select "Friends and Guilds", it will show you how many games someone has played in the current PvP season, so if you add suspected bot accounts as friends you can find out fairly easily if they're just bad or new players. If you extrapolate an average game length, these accounts have been active 20-24 hours a day the entire season. Also, I play in a weird timezone due to work, which probably explains why I get more bots than the average player.

Just had a ranked match with 9 bots and myself as the only human player: anet mentioned a few months ago now that they're aware of this issue and to just keep reporting, but the same bot accounts have been messing up silver and gold pvp for years. Have there been any further updates or statements about what they're doing about this problem?

The same bot accounts have been around for years, not just months, running pvp matches 24/7: anet knows about this problem, they just seem utterly disinterested in dealing with it. Be careful posting their actual account names: it's enough to get you warned or banned from the forums. 😞

The food item: could have slightly higher stats, but is okay when the bug is fixed. The Karma: nice, but we need more things to spend Karma on. It's junk currency for most of us who have been playing so long? The dye: bad. Nice colours, but once-per-account is not very nice. Alternate suggestions: give us a EOD unlock. A nicer fishing rod or something? As it is the rewards are fairly disappointing.

It was actually :')

It depends on your own team makeup and how switched on people are. If you run from them and play points you can win without paying much attention, but this requires the team to understand what you're doing. However, most of the time players at lower skill levels don't have good understanding of game mechanics, and will do two things that cause their team to lose: -run to the wrong point, abandoning their team (usually running to the "far" point).-"fight on the point". Nobody knows where this started, but it's bad advice. The reason this is particularly bad is that the bot accounts are built for two things:a) survival;b) aoe damage. Bots have perfect skill rotations and reflexes. They cannot play tactically, but in a 1v1 they will often beat silver and low gold-ranked players. Bad players will jump on a point, then the two or three bots on the enemy team will soak them in area damage, and they die. Again, bots are easy to "outplay" because they will usually run to enemy points that will cause the rest of their team to be outnumbered, or will run to the "wrong" point, but this requires your team to understand this and be familiar with their run patterns, the way they go to certain points, and how they will always, without fail, try to engage in a 3-on-1 or a 2-on-1 on a point your team holds, even though you can beat them in that matchup. At anything above low gold, players understand how bots work and can work around them, but on lower skill levels we... just don't. So basically: yes, you can beat bots, by running away from them. ;)

Most of my matches today have been like this. Anet mentioned a few months ago now they were working on the bot issue but all of these accounts have been reported many dozens of times, yet are still around clogging up Silver and Gold ranked PVP. Has there been any further comment from anet or any further statements about when this issue is likely to be addressed given it's still having a dire effect on the playability of the game for middling players like myself?

They could make the captcha only apply a random number of games, that increases the # of games you play, increasing after the amount of games played in a 24 hour period. If someone is playing pvp for an hour a day, they shouldn't be hit with it. 2 hours, maybe they get a single one. The point is to catch the bots out- which generally run their accounts nearly 24/7, and increasing the captcha rate when it hits the kind of time period that bots play for would limit player annoyance at having to do it.

The results for this probably will be influenced by what rank players are. People in Low Gold-Mid Silver (where most of the bots are) probably would see a ban wave as being significantly more beneficial to our game experience, but players higher who see bots less often probably desire a balance patch more.

As the OP specified, these are players with 1000+ games in a single ranked league season. He is very clearly and obviously not talking about casual players who aren't very good. Bots usually have the ability to /whisper them turned off as well, so it's not like you can ask them if they're bots either. They made a post about a month ago claiming they were working on it and to just keep using the in-game report function- if they were to give us an updated timeline on when they will start rectifying the issue it would probably make a lot of us feel a lot more positive.

How would you break this down into an easy copy-pastable line to make bad thiefs/etc at lower ranks understand this easier? Again, top players. Anyone in low plat or below isn't a top player. The #1 cause for matches being lost is ANet refusing to deal with the bots that swamp almost every game in bot and silver. After this is a mesmer or thief who does nothing but run far and die over and over while the rest of their team gets 5v4'd or 4v3'd mid. For the vast majority of people who play PVP, OP's advice is correct.

The easiest way to be sure is to add them as a friend, then check their League history. If they have two thousand games in a single season, it's very clear it's not an actual person there.