Guild Wars: Time to Play Bot or Not!

A good night of snowballing tonight. Earned 10k faction and had enough wins to put myself right at 3k gamer points.

I almost rage quit at the beginning because of a broken sync team. Now, I'm not opposed to teams of players who try and enter at the same time in order to team up even in a format that's supposed to feature random grouping - far be it from me to tell anyone how they should play the game. But what I can't stand is people who deliberately try and sink my chances of winning. That's what happened in my first match when three of the team landed on the other side and one of their team happened to rez in on mine. I knew it wasn't going to go easily as soon as I saw the tags but that person on my team started to pick up presents and run them to the other side of the map where the other team could cap them more easily. I pride myself on not ragequiting or leaving rounds early but that was just too much for me and I was out of there on the next instant train to map travelville.

Look, I don't care if you don't want your guildies to lose. But just sit in the corner of the map and stay out of the fight - I've beaten teams down players before so it's not a big deal to me if you conscientiously object, so to speak - but don't do something that causes me to lose that I have absolutely no control over or no way to stop. Drives me absolutely crazy. And I was half ready of accusing the other team of doing that on purpose so they could pad their stats. Seems like a nasty exploit to me. Have someone from you guild waiting until it's almost time for you to face your next opponent, hit the enter button, and have them throw the match by taking presents to your avatar. Might not work all the time but I could see it working enough that it would be worth it if you could find someone with nothing better to do. With the way faction flies around in there they wouldn't even be doing it for nothing.

It's all to the good though as I managed to land on a solid team the next go around and get a little streak going. Those always make me feel better. And I took special satisfaction in taking that team to the limit when we met up again - the person who'd been on my team had managed to join theirs so I guess it wasn't a planned thing, just making the most of a bad situation and I calmed down a bit. Didn't quite manage to beat that sync team. Not the first go around anyway. But it was one of those 4-4 games where we were both inches from capping and they managed to get there just a bit ahead of my teammate. But you better believe that game got my blood pumping and pretty much propelled me for the rest of the night. Nothing like someone to smash into the dirt to get me motivated.

The other note from the night was my streak of wins with a leeher. Just yet another bot sitting there sucking up the free faction and points (As someone said "Why do people have to be stupid and not play the game?" My response? "The only stupid thing is that this problem hasn't been fixed yet.") and handicapping my team. I hate that, by the way, becuase it means I either quit out and lose the time it takes to map out and hit the enter button again - which, of course, isn't that much but not when you'd have to do it every time there's a bot, it isn't - or I play and that leecher gets a free ride to any faction or points I earn. I'm fucked either way. All because some little shit who can hack together a few lines of code has found an easy way to get stuff and doesn't happen to care about anybody else in the process.

Now, I've won 3v4 before so it's not really that remarkable that a team that's a player down could pull out a win. What was amazing, though, was that there were so many other bots around tonight that we went 10 games before we faced a full team of players. Just 3v3 or 3v2 the whole way so it's almost as if every team was being handed out a leecher just to make things even. And, again, these bots are around so much that I'm able to recognize them by name now. There were at least five tonight that would show up time after time. I was impressed because one of them not only ran into the corner but they would also activate their defensive skills - Snowcone, Snowfort, and Ice Breaker - so I couldn't plunk them down for the easy faction. Didn't really work, of course, but it points out that the people making these things aren't idiots - they know enough about programming that any kind of preventative methods are going to be thwarted in far less time than it took to create them in the first place. No, the only way to catch these people, as far as I can see, is a system of reporting and log monitoring combined with harsh penalties. Like, I don't know, banning their accounts and sending a bunch of goons to their home to break both their legs.

I am not amused, in case you can't tell. And moreso because I'm afraid that what it takes to crorect this problem is never going to be put into place. Too much time, effort, and money involved in providing that kind of support for it to be worth it for the developers. Because they'd actually have to have people going through the records and deciding caess and the like - it's much easier for them to just let things slide. After all, I've still played enough in the snowball fights to get 300 wins. It can't be that annoying if people are still playing, right? And players like me are going to try and play no matter how bad it is. Right?

Yeah, right.

I don't know about anyone else but I put up with this shit because the Snowball Arena's going to disappear in a few days. And I've never played there before and I think it's a great format so I want to soak up as much of it as I can before it's gone. The faction and gamer track (Not to mention the gold I can make - but I'll talk about that later, I'm too pissed to think of making stuff at the moment. Including money), well, that's just icing on the cake. But if this wasn't a temporary thing I'd have stopped long ago and waited until this was corrected before I even set foot near the place again. I play in spite of the bots and every match that gets blow because I'm fighting with one hand tied behind my back it gets harder and harder to remember why I'm doing it in the first place. Because, let me tell you, those asshats suck the fun right out of the place.

So, now that I've hit my goal of reaching 3k I can wash my hands of the place.