Guild Wars Update Notes

ArenaNet’s official Guild Wars website has been updated with a new set of notes explaining this week’s changes to the game. It appears that “bot” farming is their highest priority:

This week, as part of our in continuing promise to keep Guild Wars free of hacks, cheats, and other exploits, we closed the accounts of more than 100 users of bots. With today’s update we are taking further steps to address the bot problem. New changes will improve our ability to identify and ban users of bots, rebalance mission areas that were highly exploited by bots, and reduce the overall effectiveness of bots, exploits, and other highly repetitive forms of gold and item farming. We are taking these steps to improve the game for all players, so that people using bots to farm gold cannot generate a huge influx of new gold into the economy, which increases prices for everyone and encourages other players to engage in repetitive farming just to keep up.

We know that some players currently engage in repetitive farming activities for the primary purpose of unlocking skills and items for PvP. Rather than preserving the effectiveness of farming for this purpose, it is our intention to address the larger issue of the need for farming by assessing how players acquire and unlock items, runes, and skills, and then by taking steps to ensure that players can acquire and unlock these things through normal gameplay. We believe that the most effective way to play the game should also be the most fun way to play the game. You can expect to see the first meaningful changes towards this goal next week.