Yes, Blizzard ban bots.... For 3 hours

[Uselessrouge]

last time i was isle of conquest alliance had like 35 bots in the base :< i should have frapsed it was realy funny ^^

Well and nope i dont belive blizz bans for botting :/ even if i would love it.. i love random bg's but well to be hones its dead since all those bot are there ( i can only play pvp at night and i do random bgs.. or well i did befor it was so bad ) since MoP pvp is ***** for me :|

[Thallidomaniac]

3 hours? That's pretty silly that you can get a longer ban for griefing your own faction in IoC by pulling out the boss so he'll enrage and one shot people (I got a 1 day ban for doing this), than this.

[Deleted]

1. its always 3 days, never hours.
2. There has been a big banwave just yesterday

---------- Post added 2012-12-08 at 02:22 AM ----------

This is one of the dumbest argument if I have ever seen one.
Do you honestly think that income from botters is greater than all the losses from all the people who quit because they are sick of bots?

oh most definitely, i would even go as far the number of people allegedly being driven to the use of bots is greater than the number of people quitting over them.

HOWEVER, Blizzard does not see it that way and fights bots any way they can but they shriek back a bit when it comes to plainly ban every botter without giving them a second(third, fourth, fifth) chance

[Deleted]

This is one of the dumbest argument if I have ever seen one.
Do you honestly think that income from botters is greater than all the losses from all the people who quit because they are sick of bots?

Must be so because youll get permanent banned for finding a way to chat with the opposite faction.

[Wildtree]

1. its always 3 days, never hours.

It's known that Blizzard has a punishment pyramid in place.
That was confirmed, pointed out, or however you want to call it, by CM's in the official forums. A 3 hour ban is one part of that pyramid. 3 days is quite a bit up to the top already, with the top being the ultimate punishment, account shut down.

The case at hand makes actually sense. Blizzard can see everything we do in the game. There are backlogs. It's easy for them to determine whether an account is actually actively used, and the acct holder uses a bot while still actively playing too, or the acct doesn't do anything but botting.
In the first case, with a clean slate up until caught, a mild punishment as a warning shot is justified.
In the second case, I am sure such acct gets totally shut down.

If the guy in case 1 gets caught again however, he can be sure that the next punishment will be more severe, but still not necessarily the ultimate punishment.

I see nothing wrong with that handling from Blizzard.

---------- Post added 2012-12-08 at 08:41 AM ----------

3 hours? That's pretty silly that you can get a longer ban for griefing your own faction in IoC by pulling out the boss so he'll enrage and one shot people (I got a 1 day ban for doing this), than this.

Always behaved nicely in the game? No spam reports, or profanity in chat channels reports against you? You know.... if you talk shit in trade, and people report you, that doesn't necessarily have to end up in a result against you. It can just lead to notes on your acct., and at the next occasion the hammer falls down.

---------- Post added 2012-12-08 at 08:44 AM ----------

Must be so because youll get permanent banned for finding a way to chat with the opposite faction.

The only method for that is a hack program, as much as I know. And the use of a hack program is just quite step above that of an auto bot.
Those progs usually have other powerful hacks in addition.
Easy to google and find out what's possible in that field.

[Matt0193]

they are mostly compromised accounts

Perhaps mode grinding bots are, but there is no way a PvP bot is someone who's been hacked and the hacker is using PvP as a way to make money out of the account. You get fuck all from PvP compared to PvE (Grinding/Farming ect). I find it really hard to believe that the sheer amount of bots in BGs aren't there voluntarily grinding to skip the honor treadmill.

[rektbrah]

This is one of the dumbest argument if I have ever seen one.
Do you honestly think that income from botters is greater than all the losses from all the people who quit because they are sick of bots?

Do you honestly think people quit because of bots?

Honestly, people who just do random BG's and dont set foot in arena who are really the only ones affected by bots should quit.

[Deleted]

Do you honestly think people quit because of bots?

Honestly, people who just do random BG's and dont set foot in arena who are really the only ones affected by bots should quit.

Yes they do. I personally know several who stopped playing and while bots weren't the sole reason in most cases (in some they were) they always contributed a big deal as they completly took out the fun from normal unrated PvP.

[Nest]

Back in Vanilla my other account got perm banned for exploiting and exploring.
Now it's possible to have several accounts botting at the same time with no fear of losing accounts, even if you get banned its just couple days or you can always call Blizz and tell them that you got hacked, they got soft with all the money they've got now. Also, I am not saying that I am botting now.

[Thallidomaniac]

Always behaved nicely in the game? No spam reports, or profanity in chat channels reports against you? You know.... if you talk shit in trade, and people report you, that doesn't necessarily have to end up in a result against you. It can just lead to notes on your acct., and at the next occasion the hammer falls down.

Still, it doesn't make sense that intentionally throwing BG games can lead to a longer ban that using a bot to play BGs.

[Deleted]

Someone I have known intimately for nearly 9 years was AFKing in several battlegrounds, he received a 3 hour ban within 24 hours and upon making a ticket was told by Blizzard that they had investigated and confirmed botting was taking place on his account in order to exploit the honor system.

They also said they had removed all his honor, that was a lie as well.

[matthias9742]

I do wish blizzard would just close the accounts of botters for first offense. Even if it was an account hack a phone call or E-mails would clear that up pretty quick. An interesting read is the "buddy" suite of programs forum. They have a whole section about whether you got banned or reported while using their product just as if it were a bug report section in WoW. I can only presume this is to make a better bot in the future, but sadly most of the bans there are the 3-72 hour bans, with the only perma ones I have seen so far from AH bots that spam transactions.

[Demetrion]

If he's caught multiple times he'll get banned.

First 3 hour suspension is there as a warning.

[venie]

And i get 6 hours for insulting someone????????

Only 6? i got 18 hours >< not my fault i broke 5 rules in 1 sentence. imo

although.. there was that one time where a gm took down a ticket that i logged saying he deserved it, so i guess its okay right?

but on the topic, Botters should be banned for min 6 hours. 3 hours = pathetic. but remember activision runs blizzard now. basically

[Deleted]

Missunderstood, sorry;>



I got banned for 72 hours for joking about dead kitties.

I got banned for 48 hours for saying the F word.

It happened in TBC/WOTLK.

Since CATA ive been breaking so many rules and have only got a 3 hours ban in MOP for botting and sending death treaths, no warning. Lol this is retarded.

If i did what i did in CATA during the TBC time, i would get permanent banned like 50 times.



As you can see in my pic i laughed at Blizzard for giving me a three hours ban for botting, cheating and sending death treaths.

They said they reviewed it and the 3 hours ban is fine.

They dont want to ban us bots forever, they know we are so many they have to scare us to play normally in this game again.

Stay classy there bro.

[Berri]

No surprise there; there's almost no sense in permabanning a paying customer if you think about it.

[Deleted]

I just got a ban like this 10 minutes ago... The problem is i have never botted in wow. Good to know they do least something lol.. i just played many bgs past two days thats all.

[Deleted]

No surprise there; there's almost no sense in permabanning a paying customer if you think about it.

Which you clearly haven't...

There is every sense in banning a person who makes the game pointless / unplayable for X number of other people.

To use your logic I should be allowed to do anything so long as I'm paying a subscription, which is absurd.

Not banning bots does two things:

1) People who are actually playing eventually get fed up and leave (less money...)
2) People who can't beat them, join them and you end up with more bots

And the vicious circle goes round and round.

[Deleted]

I think Nevalistis summed this up quite well: This is one of the biggest misconceptions we have, and I genuinely wish we could permanently clear it up. I'll provide a few hypothetical situations (mind you, these numbers are ENTIRELY made up).


Let's say 90% of botters were compromised accounts. This means that 90% of these botters aren't paying accounts; they're stolen accounts, which are generally fueled by stolen credit cards. These payments usually get disputed and taken back, which actually costs us money. If we're looking to make a purely fiscal observation, it makes no financial sense to let these continue (aside from the fact that we don't like compromised accounts to begin with — we want our players to be playing their own accounts safely and enjoyably).


Let's go on the other side of the fence and say 90% of these botters were otherwise legitimate players paying for their accounts, as you purport. When players bot, other players are inconvenienced by this behavior (and trust me, you guys outnumber the botters, even if you may feel it's the other way around). The inconveniences range from normal players having difficulty farming on their own to struggling to keep up with an economy that's being forcibly fluctuated via unfair advantage. When players are inconvenienced in this manner, they submit petitions.


Every petition submitted goes to a Game Master for review. A living, breathing person that is paid to provide customer service looks over it, does what's necessary for the situation (in botting cases, usually forwarding the info on to our exploitation/hacks team), and provides a response. Let's say 1–2 people are inconvenienced by a single botter (in all likelihood, we probably get many more petitions per botter than that). This would mean each botter is inconveniencing at least as many, and likely more, players that are positive to the community (the kinds of players we like and want to continue to play our game). For each botter we allow to continue botting, we potentially stand to lose more than we gain for a single subscription, just out of the sheer inconvenience it causes other players.


Even if you change those numbers around of legitimate players versus compromised accounts — we only stand to lose more if we don't take action on bots (which we do, regularly).

He doesn't say 90% of botters are compromised accounts, he says lets "say" 90% are. This statement means nothing because you could also say lets say 5% of the accounts are compromised. In fact in the paragraph before it he even says MIND YOU, THESE NUMBERS ARE ENTIRELY MADE UP

[Flaks]

No surprise there; there's almost no sense in permabanning a paying customer if you think about it.

There IS sense in permanently banning cheaters. Because otherwise you set a precedence for this kind of thing making ACTUAL and usually more loyal customers quit the game. Keeping bots is a massive short-term gain. It is an even bigger long-term loss.