ArenaNet Disables PvP Leeching System In Guild Wars 2 Due To ‘Excessive Abuse’ By Botters

The battle against bots in Guild Wars has been going on for the better part of the last two decades. It’s a seemingly never-ending fight that forced ArenaNet to make drastic changes to the game’s PvE content to curb the army of bots that were sweeping through the older version of Tyria. That fight has now spilled over to the PvP arenas, prompting the devs to implement new anti-bot measures.

One of the earlier systems that were put in place to combat bots in PvP was the leeching system which allowed players to report suspected bots. Those that were reported enough times were slapped with the Dishonored debuff which locked them out of PvP queues for a few hours. Botters, however, have started using the system to report legitimate players, not only keeping them out of the queues but also preventing them from reporting suspected bots.

As a result, ArenaNet has decided to disable the leeching system entirely and is now limiting the number of times that players can voluntarily leave a match to once every two hours. While that effectively stops botters from abusing the feature, it doesn’t actually address the root of the problem, which are the bots themselves. It’s highly unlikely that the developers will be able to get rid of them entirely, but regular permabans should help to significantly cull their numbers for the time being.