ArenaNet banned over 34,000 bots from Guild Wars 2 in November

"The bot occupation, I am happy to report, has been dealt a decisive blow."

Those are the words of Mike Lewis, security coordinator for Guild Wars 2 at ArenaNet. One of his many responsibilites is to actively combat botting in the game, and it appears that it's a battle that Guild Wars 2 is winning. In a post made to GuildWars2.com, he thanked all the players for making GW2 popular and successful, then announced that in the month of November, they terminated over 34,000 accounts for operating bots.

Supposedly, in October, the number of bots reported every hour worldwide was 2,000, and as of his article the other day, it has dropped to 20 and hour. He gave a lot of the credit to the effort of the players that report bots, but expanded on their practices to combat bots:

Collecting and analyzing data is very important to us at ArenaNet. Data is the most powerful weapon in our arsenal against bots. We’ve gathered massive amounts of information about the habits of both normal players and automated bot players. We contracted a team of data specialists to help us build comprehensive tools that comb through this data and find effective ways to single out and terminate bot accounts. Automating this process has been a major focus of the ArenaNet security team, and we’re now seeing the considerable fruits of this labor. […] Another way we identify and combat bots is through manual observation. Our GM staff is equipped to monitor the game around the clock and detect bots from within the game itself. We have a considerable task force assigned to patrolling the world and eliminating bots, as well as helping us continue to improve and refine our automatic detection tools.