[Theory] The reason for mass bot appearance in MoP BG's

[slackjawsix]

ive been seeing less bots this xpac, dont get afkers confused with bots

[shokter]

I am a PVE player who does BG for fun, so I fit your demographic. I also made myself a full set of crafted (I think it was 450) PvP gear before I started out. Even if if your theory is correct it (which I doubt....as trying to search for a single explanation to a problem like botting...which by many accounts was also rampant in cata...is just silly) it doesn't excuse the botting player's behavior. Yes, gear matters and PvPing with 0 PvP gear kind of sucks, but lets be real...besides the option to craft a full set there is also the fact that your average random BGer is not even in a full set of PvP gear anyway. Yes a fresh 90 will be at a disadvantage, but it is not a huge one as many think because many people in random BG also have crap gear. Don't blame a gear focused system for lazy/entitled players (and gold farmers) who game it.

---------- Post added 2013-01-03 at 08:53 PM ----------

Why do I bot bgs? Because of this retarded upgrade system.

If you play a class (such as a rogue), your only option is to cap in randoms. Nobody will take you for rbgs or even 2s.

Ok question: If, as you say 'nobody takes you in RBGs or arena' I assume all you do is random BGs...yet you say you bot so you can cap...so when do you actually USE all your ill gotten gear???

sounds like "I cheat so I have gear to use in a part of the game I don't play". Kids these days...

[Avada Kedavra]

Another "I want to PvP, but dont want to work for it" thread. There is no "I WIN" button. Ur raid group (if its any good) wouldnt allow people in PvP gear to go, why? Because the gear is not as good as raid gear. Same thing applies. Im kinda tired of seeing these "Im a raider and I dont have PvP so just give me the gear"

Not how it works, U work for your PvE gear, I work for my PvP gear. Im not bitching cause i Dont have raid gear, suck it up and earn it like the rest of us.

And that would do nothing to get rid of botting. People dont just bot for the gear. Botting is for people who are lazy.

Botting does not equal progression.

[Osmeric]

Epic PVP Gear = 483 equivalent to Raid Finder Gear I believe (Haven't done raid finder).

MSV raid finder is 476; HoF/ToES are 483. But of course VP gear is 489.

[howdydiddlydoo]

Another "I want to PvP, but dont want to work for it" thread. There is no "I WIN" button. Ur raid group (if its any good) wouldnt allow people in PvP gear to go, why? Because the gear is not as good as raid gear. Same thing applies. Im kinda tired of seeing these "Im a raider and I dont have PvP so just give me the gear"

Not how it works, U work for your PvE gear, I work for my PvP gear. Im not bitching cause i Dont have raid gear, suck it up and earn it like the rest of us.

And that would do nothing to get rid of botting. People dont just bot for the gear. Botting is for people who are lazy.

Botting does not equal progression.

People arent working for their PvP gear though. They are botting it.


I view the game model as having quite a large problem when you are forced to EITHER PvE or PvP because of time constraints derived from a gear grind.


What is the problem with letting people feasibly do both with either a PvP character progression path OR a PvE progression path which results in said player being able to compete in both (but with a slightly minor disadvantage to the opposite path he took?)

[Kazgrel]

It takes the pain out of suffering through playing BGs with little/no pvp gear. Let the bot do it's thing, collect loot, then pvp once you have gear accumulated.

Disclaimer: I do not bot. I am merely stating a thought process as to why (more) people bot.

[Avada Kedavra]

People arent working for their PvP gear though. They are botting it.


I view the game model as having quite a large problem when you are forced to EITHER PvE or PvP because of time constraints derived from a gear grind.


What is the problem with letting people feasibly do both with either a PvP character progression path OR a PvE progression path which results in said player being able to compete in both (but with a slightly minor disadvantage to the opposite path he took?)

I agree, its an issue, but saying "just give us X or we will bot" dosent help the situation at all. It comes back to people love to bitch. They bitch when they have nothing to do, and by blizzard making it slight more time consuming to gear up both PvP and PvE, they're bitching cause there is too much to do.

It takes time. There is more than enough to do atm.

[Deleted]

It would be nice if you actually read the thread.

I have made a theory as to why MoP saw a massive influx of BG bots.

Would be nice if you could comment on topic.

You are wrong, very wrong why would we discuss it? The reason why bots become more and more common is because people don't get punished in any kind of way while profiting a lot from them. Nobody is going to stay away from botting when all they have to fear is a three hour ban.

These people get progress towards achievments such as 100 wins on a battleground, they get progress towards other achievments honor kills for the 250k achievment. Also they get loads of honor which they can turn into gold, they get conquest point which many of them can actually use and all of that without any kind of drawback.

I've seen gladiators, heroes of the horde and other very well equipped people botting. Because they get a lot out of it while it has no risk whatsoever.

ive been seeing less bots this xpac, dont get afkers confused with bots

No, there are more bots they however are far more sophisticated then the ones who simply stand there hotting/buffing themselves. Just play at night and watch those two death balls clash in WSG. Since they all use the same bot all of them have the same target priority and will most of the time target the same player at the same time tunneling him or her blindly till either their target or they die.

It's very sad when both times consist mostly out of bots, because it's simply two groups running into each other over and over and over again and because of their large numbers they often win against players who're more isolated.

It takes the pain out of suffering through playing BGs with little/no pvp gear. Let the bot do it's thing, collect loot, then pvp once you have gear accumulated.

Disclaimer: I do not bot. I am merely stating a thought process as to why (more) people bot.

Your assumption is wrong and you should feel bad for making it. Even people with good gear do bot, because they can't be bothered to actually get those achievments, honor kills and conquest points themselves. They're lazy douchebags getting gold and achievments by botting.
And the reason why they dare to do this is because they feel that there is NO risk to their account and sadly they're right about that. Whatever Blizzard says is a lie, even botter get a three hour ban first that slowly ramps up to an 72 hour ban before being permanent and even then you can write an appeal and will get your account back, several times if your sob story is somewhat believable.

Why do I bot bgs? Because of this retarded upgrade system.

If you play a class (such as a rogue), your only option is to cap in randoms. Nobody will take you for rbgs or even 2s.

Rogues are still brought for RBG's and arenas solely because of smokebomb. You obviously never tried to get into an RBG group or arena team and if you did and nobody wanted you gear might not have been the reason.

People like you are the only reason why I at times wish the rating requirements for gear would come back. Gear from 1-2 seasons back is good enough for people like you. Not like you'd earn or deserve the current gear anyway.

[shokter]

words

I pretty much agree 100% with all of your assertions. I wouldn;t say I am usually quick to defend Blizzard, but I am incredibly tolerant/understanding of most of their choices and design decisions, but this is one area where I feel they should step it up. I know they claim to use ban waves, but I can't remember a significant one since the arch bot ban wave in cata. Maybe do a half ban wave? Something, anything...to make the botting community not feel as safe as they obviously do now. I know banning gold farmers can be counter productive as many of them use stolen accounts, but some sort of message needs to be made to the rampant BG botters...something more significant than a 3 hr suspension most of them will serve in their sleep.

[Syh]

People arent working for their PvP gear though. They are botting it.

What? There's still many people who are working for their gear. Not everybody bots.

If they included PvE into PvP again it would honestly be shit. I don't want to PvE to have the best items in PvP. That's retarded. I'm sorry you can't be rewarded in PvP for PvEing but that's the way it should be.

In regards to PvP gear in PvE, as somebody already said - the item level is lower than PvE counterparts, and typically it's missing secondary's which will help in PvE. It's okay for LFR and Heroics, that's it really. Try to get into a pug in trade for normals and they'll likely tell you no, just like if you try to do 2s in full PvE gear.

[Okacz]

No.
PvP and PvE is to different ways to play the game. PvE'ers shouldn't be able to join a BG and play up to par with people in PvP gear, not the other way around either.

This is the main problem of MoP. Blizzard spent a lot of time trying to both separate PvE from PvP, and somehow still keep the whole game intact. As a resoult we have MoP PvP - the worst PvP ever.

The issue centers around the fact that there are 2 main options - a complete separation of both modes, with different leveling pathes, gear, and effects of abilities on players, or more vanilla - like style, where you couldnt tell who is a PvP player and who prefers PvE. Blizzard wants to balance both ideas, which resoulted in this strange mix we have today. PvE players are encouraged to PvP during dailies - but their gear does not allow them. CRZ exist to bring PvP back to leveling - but meanwhile most of the leveling zones separate both factions. Arena becomes easy to access - but the practice mode does not exist, and PvErs cannot practice in BGs because of their PvE gear.

Blizzard needs to choose the side. Either a game that fully mixes PvE and PvP, or one that separates them. Both options can be followed by a nice outcome - PvP and PvE mix in vanilla worked really great, and PvE/PvP separation may be favoured byplayers who are interested only in one aspect of the game. But you simply can't have both and pray that this weird mix will actually taste good.

[kosechi]

People arent working for their PvP gear though. They are botting it.

i wasn't aware you could bot arenas.

[Deleted]

i boycott pvp, cause it''s a joke right know, balance wise(classes+gear)
generally less people play pvp right know, so i guess the number of bots has not gotten much bigger, but the percentage of em relative to the overall playerbase, that plays bgs increased
also the item difference 458(466) >483 is to big to compensate with skill (saying that as a 2times glad), so people get frustated and therefor bot to get over this shit

[hammock]

If the experience of gearing up wasn't such a hell there would be less bots. Fact.

[Sarthan]

Wrong.

You shouldn't be able to show up to a raid in full PvP gear and pull the same numbers as some one in full PvE.

[Deleted]

Blizzard do take action on players that bot, it's just that these players can easily make a new account and carry on. Just read the "banned" threads on bot forums, it's pretty common for those that run BG bots to get a ban.

[Okacz]

Blizzard do take action on players that bot, it's just that these players can easily make a new account and carry on. Just read the "banned" threads on bot forums, it's pretty common for those that run BG bots to get a ban.

Blizzard won't change anything banning bots. This may scare some people, but surely not all, and more bots will just fill in. Blizzard needs to change the reason of bots - random BGs. And this one is very easy. Remove the conquest point reward from them.

If you wanna BG just for fun, you will be happy even with honor gain. If you wanna have fun with PvP on the whole new level, you can't pretedn you are on this level in a BG. WotLK was pretty much great in terms of PvP, because random BGs were to just have fun and practice, and Arenas were for true PvPers.

[blackblade]

No.
PvP and PvE is to different ways to play the game. PvE'ers shouldn't be able to join a BG and play up to par with people in PvP gear, not the other way around either.

The problem here, is that this isn't quite right.

PVE gear is mostly gimp in PVP. There's no PVP Power/Resil on them, and they generally stat for sustained DPS over burst (though I don't imagine that's hard to change with gems/reforge/etc.)

PVP gear is pretty decent in PVE. A set of pvp purps is LFR quality, with the exception of the PVP Weapon (which spend budget on PVP power, generally)
the top-end PVE gear (with the handful of elite ilvl stuff aside) is 26 ilvls above.

I don't understand the segregation though. If they wanted to, they could nerfbat heroic Ilvl gear down to LFR gear, but award the PVE-er with an equivalent amount of Resil/Power to put him toe-to-toe with PVP players. Does it really matter if you got your gear grinding down points or slaying dragons? It's like saying 10/25 man raiders are more entitled because they raid 10/25.

People bot for two reasons:
-The Risk/Reward (to them) is worthwhile. (get pvp set for rated pvp, small chance of account being actioned.)
-The Honor grind isn't fun, engaging. And is generally worth skipping. My experience with recent PVP in the honor grind has been more about "what ends the game the fastest so I can move on to the next one" and really, this is a pretty common mantra in WoW: "How do I clear this heroic quickly so I can start the next?"

Those, coupled with the fact that "Everyone else is doing it" to justify it makes it all the worse.

I really think that if there was a bit more of a forgiving curve on PVP power/Resil, combined with more frequent, more vocal communication about their stance and actions taken against botters, PVP might actually be fun again.

[papajohn4]

If you don't have a fun and the pvp rewards are useless as you say, why someone bot for it?My theory is exactly the opposite...Dungeons reward you with blues, dailies are a whore to do and boring to hell but you can get a nice epic set with conquest points. And since pvp gear now is very viable for pve, because the pvp stats are "extra" stats and you still get 2 secondary pve stats, my guess is people skipping their ways to get the epic gear.

I hate dailies too and I thought to farm some conquest points myself but I also don't like pvp and of course I don't bot but if you ask me what I would like to use a bot, I would say to use it for conquest points...

[Deleted]

Firstly, if BGs were actually fun then people would be more likely not to bot their way through them. I think the primary motivation to bot anything is that its not actually fun to do it manually because if it were fun then you would want to do it.

That said there are clearly some people who still enjoy running BGs, theres just fewer of them, of the people running BGs manually I bet a portion of those are simply only doing it to farm gear and either dont want to risk botting/are against the idea of botting/take pride in actually earning the gear but are again still not there because they enjoy BGs.

Now there are with this new expansion more BGs too, so if the number of actual people playing the BGs has gone down and they are spread out through an even greater number of BGs well then you just plain and simple have fewer actual players per BG, It might not be that the number of bots have gone down, it may well be that through general dissatisfaction with BGs that fewer people are playing them, it might well be that if those actual people are only using them as a stepping stone to area they have already gotten what they wanted, perhaps capped honor/valor in other ways and dont need to run the BGs, whereas due to the way that a bot doesnt care about doing dull repetitive crap the bots continue to do their farming in the BGs

There are other factors, like the fact that BGs are built now will players across all realms in a region. In the past there might have been particular servers renouned for their pvp community and therefore if you went there and joined a BG and were grouped with people from your server and battlegroup only the players were more interested in actually doing the BG. Rated BGs I expect have had a huge effect too, since if the people who enjoy BGs are playing rated then theres fewer people in the randoms

TLDR version, the number of players per random BG has been watered down by several factors. I'm not suggesting the presence of bots has not also driven some of those players away. But i'm not convinced there has been a massive upsurge in the number of bots. Rather a downsurge in non-bots

My suggestions to help solve this would be
-To perhaps remove BGs as a progression path for arena, these two things are not the same and to me it doesn't make sense to give people an arena advantage for how much they grind BGs. Arena SHOULD be about team skill and team skill should determine gearup/rating progression. People would no longer bot BGs as a path to easier arena gearup
-BGs should have their own progression system, like arena you would be matched with players of a similar capability level. Therefore the bots having no 'skill' will end up fighting each other and poorer players perhaps end up facing them as practice before they get better and come up against harder opponents in actual players. This would mean that those who enjoy BGs by virtue of this would be more likely to be matched with real players.
-I would count myself as one of those 'arena/resilience ruined the game' sorts, I would like a system where the BG match making tries to match people with similar levels of resilience. So if you have 80 players queued for 40man BGs people with more pvp gear would be sorted into one and people with more pve gear would be sorted into the other. This would help remove resilience as the barrier to entry that it is for PvE players who want to join the occasional BG for fun.
-Id also add BGs that are designed to be longer, with more focus on objectives rather than simply getting higher kill counts needed to just win by moshing together in the middle and slaughtering. Almost making them more like competitive PvE, like say wintersgrasp but with two bases