Blizzard laying waste to the botting community

[Ambulatory Cube]

For sure, but people that dont bot for profit, bot to play the game, they lose more then those that bot for profit. If banwave happens every month, twice a month or ever 3rd month, that player needs to deal with AP again, gear up again etc to be competetive.

That's why they use throw-away accounts. They'll set it up to farm materials and stuff to send to their mains. That kinda thing. The god-awful profession system this xpac probably is a big deterrant, though. Kinda sucks it has to come at the expense of my sanity, lol. I hate all these quests so much [softly weeps]

[Low Hanging Fruit]

The solution is easy, permaban the fuckers.

I agree. But I don't think they will. More accounts = more money potential sadly.

[Deleted]

Do you really believe it takes Blizzard two years to figure out how to detect a new public bot? It probably takes them less than two days, remember for any public bot they can simply download and analyse it.

It takes a metric fuckton of time and expertise to find out if someone messes around with your processes on a level very close to direct RAM modification. And also, it takes a equal time to find out how to modify processes in a way your customers won't get detected easily.

As soon as Blizzard actually catches a bot, you can be sure someone is already creating another way to control WoW's processes third-party wise. It's somehow an eternal game, just like law always finds a way to fight crime, and crime always finds a way to slip through the law.

[Xarian]

So you have 3 accounts. Or 4. Or 5. You cancel accounts when they are banned. You end up only paying for the one you are botting on. Also they are not losing the accounts. They only lose access to them for a short time. It really isn't that hard to science around bans.

Uhm, no, of course not

buy new account

ban "avoided"

Thats not the point, its about effort required to re-gear if you bot to progress, or effort required to relevel if you bot to farm materials.

Someone that bots for profit will easily run 10+ accounts, i know of several that run over 100. Each banwave these accounts get 6 months, for the first wave they would need 200 accounts, 100 soaks the first wave and the remaining 100 continues, while he purchases another 100 to prepare for the next wave. Total is now 300 accounts. Eventually the first soaking batch will get hit a second time and be out for 18 months, substantially increasing the amount of new accounts required to fill in for the period.

Now imagine waves happening every month like is currently happening, you think anyones gonna wanna manage that?

It might be more likely for the causal botters that do it to progress be that in pve or pvp, but again the effort they would need to keep excess accounts geared at the level of their main in the event the main is banning, every few weeks is pretty substantial.

[Shudder]

you sound like you're one of the botters lol

I don't even play WoW.

[shadycharacter1]

Good, the salt is always the finest quality.

I don't think I ever heard a botter complain about getting banned, they know what they sign up to.

[socialmaker]

Yeah that is a good question. So he thinks that 25% of all bot bans are innocent players? I would bet that number is far far lower.

Definitely. I would be surprised if the false positives (bans) are even higher than 0.5% to be honest. I think they ban when they are SURE of it even if risking not banning everyone that deserves it.

[Jewsco]

The only problem is that without bots consumables stay super expensive(too expensive for most players)

Not true at all that is the myth the botters like to keep going. Did the consumables drop much in price this expansion? Or did they stay pretty constant? If anything the biggest drop happened after blizz inacted the bloods of sargarous being able to buy mats. So in fact it took blizz basically upping the availability of mats to drop the prices.
All botters do is add gold to the game that shouldn't be there and thus cause inflation. Even if they slightly drop the prices on consumables( which are easy for one to get themselves or thru a any decent guild) with all the extra gold now in the economy they raise the prices on everything else. Things like mounts,pets,toys ,gear,transmog,bamh, buying carries, and most importantly the price of tokens so the price to play the game itself . If they were true robin hoods and really did it to help the rest of us with consumables why don't they make the stuff dirt cheap? They aren't doing any work and are supposedly helping us? No they are helping themselves period. It is a good lie they keep trying to spread though.

[Igi]

Why don't they ban IP instead of an account? Botters just swap to another account after ban.

[Deleted]

That sounds like an obscene margin of error, any proof of this?

He's pulling it out his ass and is wrong.

[Arcanines]

So what? Maybe some of those people can go get their own mats, use cheaper options or *gasp* do without. And really that is a BS argument. So some things are cheaper. However, OTHER things are more expensive because bots will use that gold to funnel to their real accounts and buy things like mounts and certain rare items and drive the price up of those. So what if you get a few mats cheap if you get screwed out of buying a mount you wanted because the price is astronomical because cheaters bought them up.

Good thing JOE has several hours a day besides his job. Joe gets home at 530PM, and Jodie his wife and him plays World Of Warcraft. they raid every tuesday and thursday. On a good day, they both maybe play 1-2 hours. They are casuals. They cannot afford the basic raiding mats such as flask and food. Joe and Jordie gets removed from the raid team. This is because of bans. At the start of EN a flask costed 4k+ food was 190+ and a pot, here cores the expensive part, STARTED at 1600G.

Numbers are comming from TarrenMill/Kazzak EU at launch of EN.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

Uhm, no, of course not

buy new account

ban "avoided"

Thats not the point, its about effort required to re-gear if you bot to progress, or effort required to relevel if you bot to farm materials.

Someone that bots for profit will easily run 10+ accounts, i know of several that run over 100. Each banwave these accounts get 6 months, for the first wave they would need 200 accounts, 100 soaks the first wave and the remaining 100 continues, while he purchases another 100 to prepare for the next wave. Total is now 300 accounts. Eventually the first soaking batch will get hit a second time and be out for 18 months, substantially increasing the amount of new accounts required to fill in for the period.

Now imagine waves happening every month like is currently happening, you think anyones gonna wanna manage that?

It might be more likely for the causal botters that do it to progress be that in pve or pvp, but again the effort they would need to keep excess accounts geared at the level of their main in the event the main is banning, every few weeks is pretty substantial.

Like they currently are happening is very subjective. We have over 10 years of history to review. We have about a month of the current model being worked. Once I see a year of the current model being worked at this constant rate you might have a case. Right now I am just setting a standard knee jerk bot ban wave.

Plus it isn't like I like botting.

Not to mention you are talking about how people do botting. You easily are one if you have such detail. If not. You easily do not know what you are talking about. I don't understand what you have to worry about being so invested in this discussion. But trust me.. their are ways around it. But I honestly don't care all that much. If you do that is cool.

[Arcanines]

Not true at all that is the myth the botters like to keep going. Did the consumables drop much in price this expansion? Or did they stay pretty constant? If anything the biggest drop happened after blizz inacted the bloods of sargarous being able to buy mats. So in fact it took blizz basically upping the availability of mats to drop the prices.
All botters do is add gold to the game that shouldn't be there and thus cause inflation. Even if they slightly drop the prices on consumables( which are easy for one to get themselves or thru a any decent guild) with all the extra gold now in the economy they raise the prices on everything else. Things like mounts,pets,toys ,gear,transmog,bamh, buying carries, and most importantly the price of tokens so the price to play the game itself . If they were true robin hoods and really did it to help the rest of us with consumables why don't they make the stuff dirt cheap? They aren't doing any work and are supposedly helping us? No they are helping themselves period. It is a good lie they keep trying to spread though.

If your not braindead when botting, you'll NEVER EVER farm gold during this period, every decent botter and gold farmer that can think. Farmed herbs, when a Stormheim herb sold for 80g+ and dropped in 3's. Every single bot was farming them. I didn't see a single bot in the other spots, as it was a simple waste of time.

[tikcol]

Botting community.. please

[Stockers]

My name is Stockers and I am an ex botter.

Getting a 6 month ban was the best thing to have ever happened to me.

Back in the first May 2015 6 month banwave I was banned.

I had enjoyed using my druid for herbs and ore, rolling around dungeons, and raids using my rotation bots often topping the charts, levelling characters while I was at work or playing other games, then one night, I got an e-mail. It was gone, I was banned.

LOL no problem, i'll wait the 6 months playing many of my other games on Steam. FU BLIZZ.

But no, it didn't work like that. 2 months later, I had a new account and was playing the old fashioned way.

4 months after that, my old account was unbanned and all my gold gone.

No problem, I sent all my gold from my new account ready to go back at it.

My name is Stockers and I have been clean from botting for 18 months.

[Daefish]

Good thing JOE has several hours a day besides his job. Joe gets home at 530PM, and Jodie his wife and him plays World Of Warcraft. they raid every tuesday and thursday. On a good day, they both maybe play 1-2 hours. They are casuals. They cannot afford the basic raiding mats such as flask and food. Joe and Jordie gets removed from the raid team. This is because of bans. At the start of EN a flask costed 4k+ food was 190+ and a pot, here cores the expensive part, STARTED at 1600G.

Numbers are comming from TarrenMill/Kazzak EU at launch of EN.

Sounds like Joe and Jodie need a new guild. Any guild these days that can't afford to supply its members with flasks/food (seriously, most guilds have hundreds of thousands of gold in the gbank) isn't a guild worth being in. And if Joe and Jodie are in their guild for the social aspect, then they sound like assholes because their guildies don't want to raid with them.

[Osmeric]

You want to buy flasks? Get a herbalism character and farm mats (and no, don't bot). The mats sell for obscene amounts of gold on the AH. The Harvester shoulder enchant is also very useful.

[Jessicka]

Why don't they ban IP instead of an account? Botters just swap to another account after ban.

They tried this with Overwatch, IP or MAC address banning, but people found ways around it anyway. It's been a while since a banwave too, so there's increasing numbers of videos and stuff coming out of people using aimbots and stuff as people are emboldened by the lack of action and knowing how to get back in even if they are caught. :/

[Xarian]

Like they currently are happening is very subjective. We have over 10 years of history to review. We have about a month of the current model being worked. Once I see a year of the current model being worked at this constant rate you might have a case. Right now I am just setting a standard knee jerk bot ban wave.

Plus it isn't like I like botting.

Not to mention you are talking about how people do botting. You easily are one if you have such detail. If not. You easily do not know what you are talking about. I don't understand what you have to worry about being so invested in this discussion. But trust me.. their are ways around it. But I honestly don't care all that much. If you do that is cool.

I do not deny i have been botting for years, started back in wrath actually. I stopped botting in WoD but i keep active in the scene, especially with recent developments, so this is where i base my opinions.

[demonyaa]

It takes a metric fuckton of time and expertise to find out if someone messes around with your processes on a level very close to direct RAM modification. And also, it takes a equal time to find out how to modify processes in a way your customers won't get detected easily.

As soon as Blizzard actually catches a bot, you can be sure someone is already creating another way to control WoW's processes third-party wise. It's somehow an eternal game, just like law always finds a way to fight crime, and crime always finds a way to slip through the law.

What you say is applicable to private bots. Those I'll give you that Blizzard could would have a hard time catching, but even then its perfectly doable - Niantic catches bots in a beautiful way on Poke Go, the only problem is the exact replication of their method would be too resource intensive for a realtime mmo.

However for public bots Blizzard can just analyse the bot, so it greatly reduces the scope, requirements and effort on Blizzards part.