OK. THIS is just wrong on so many levels I cannot even begin to count them.
According to a very reliable friend of mine, Guild Wars 2 is banning the handicapped.
This is how it breaks down. Arenanet recently started purging GW2 of bots. Except that the definition of a "bot" includes people that contact them to protest being banned because they are using handicapped-assists.
Please excuse my language, but...
What the genuine crispy shit is this.
Yeah, I can understand wanting to remove bots from your game. That's fine and dandy. But there are two kinds of bots.
1). Bots that are wholly autonomous grindmachines. They either interface with the client, or load up instead of the client.
2). Bots that follow commands given by a live player. This is less a 'botting' and more 'multiboxing' - there's still an actual player present, but he's using macros to control several logged-in characters at once.
Bot type #1 is a problem. They can grind 24-7 without rest, inflating the supply of whatever they intend to farm, be it money (creating inflation), or items (crashing item prices). Getting rid of those is something I wholly support.
Bot type #2 isn't so much an issue. Macro teams are often more limited than a equivalent team of actual players. All of the macro'd characters have to be doing roughly the same thing as the primary character, they're elaborate to set up, they're vulnerable to lag and desynchronization, and you can't run each character to their optimum performance (there are some things an automated character just can't do). In addition, since a living, breathing person has to be there to manage them, the macro team has to log off from time to time for rest and recuperation; they don't have as pervasive and constant an effect on the economy as a perpetually-active bot.
Further, #2 is stupidly easy to detect and thwart via game design and enforcement. Simply force teams to split up occasionally to deal with multiple threats, and arrange dynamic team content that's more than just tank-and-spank. Further, if you see someone with a heavily-geared main tank, followed around hot on his heels by a healer and a gaggle of barely-equipped ranged DPS classes that all seem to follow his movements near exactly and never use more than a couple of their skills at a time, then you've probably spotted a macro team.
Short summary?
There's no reason to ban people for disabled-assist software. Simple enforcement will get rid of macro teams. The only programs you need to ban are those that allow for fully-autonomous bots, and those tend to be very specific to the game they're botting for.
