Solution to Bots: Disable /follow @targettarget in BG and LFR?

[IsaacHawke]

Most of bot AI heavily rely on these two macro commands: one help them move and another help them attack. Disabling them may not solve them problem but it is easy to be done and cause a huge trouble for bot programmers.

And also, 3rd party RBG service could also be slowed if BLZ disable related APIs, few addons and macros use them anyway.

[Deleted]

Didn't they do this with arenas and then some blind players were disappointed that they could no longer play?

[Trimshadow]

Lol no, it was reversed because there is a very large multi-boxing community who cancelled ALL of their accounts that weren't their primary account - Blizzard lost ALOT of money from subs, so while disabling the /follow and /interactwithtarget commands etc... Worked it cost blizzard a lot...

[Keyboard Champion]

They disabled /follow in bgs since mid MoP and broke multiboxing.

[Corpsefury]

Didnt break much, I saw a multiboxer yesterday in a BG, 5 greenfire demo warlock following their leader and mimicing all the abilities of the first one.

[Deleted]

didnt think bots worked on the /follow command

[Blithe]

Bot developers will always find a work around

[Emophia]

Bots use click to move, not /follow.

[Immitis]

Didn't they do this with arenas and then some blind players were disappointed that they could no longer play?

it also fucked up multi boxers who pay thousands of dollars a month to play that way. they will never do this.

[Scully]

That would help but I think the best silver bullet would be to disable click to move as a feature altogether, at the very least disable in bgs. The bot everyone uses would be crippled if this happened. Another idea would be for blizz to constantly do mini patches full of meaningless stuff that dont disrupt the player but forces honorbuddy offline and make the team work really hard pouring through it and checking for dangerous changes. Or just find the most popular profile and set up camp and catch them all red handed

There are tons of effective and easy changes blizzard could do to combat this but they wont. Botters are about 7-10% of their subscribers and no one quits because half their bg are bots

[Rucati]

Either I have the best luck of all time, or people seriously overstate the bot issue. Been doing BGs all week to gear up, and haven't noticed a single bot. Sure there might have been 1 or 2 here and there, but it simply doesn't matter. I still won like 90% of my games, and looking at damage/healing done at the end showed that everyone was participating on both sides.

I just don't really see why people care so much, bots don't even interrupt anything, even if they are as rampant as some people claim.

[Arkaan]

Honestly... removing click to move and removing /follow commands will just be worked around by bots. In fact, there are already a lot of bots out there that don't even use those abilities for navigation. Will it disrupt some bots? Sure, temporarily, but they are making too much money subscribing people to their bots to not just implement other workarounds that already exist. It hurts real customers forever, whilst only hindering botting companies temporarily.

The best solution to prevent botting is designing smart behavior analysis software, of which they already have and are refining. While botting programs and so on are able to be adapted to the constant whack a mole approach by Blizz, one thing that is an enormous hurdle to truly overcome would be that bots tend to behave like bots. Some of them have brilliant pathing systems, however, when they run into an obstacle, instead of say, finding the quickest route around it like a human, it might slowly back up and change directions a couple of times til it finds the suitable path. There are many ways this type of behavior could be deduced within certain various thresholds. The problem is they are computationally intensive and a server doesn't want to waste X amount of processor power on scanning every player at all times for trends. Hence, you report someone, it flags their account for software analysis review.

TL;DR I don't think this is the solution to bots....

[Adrim]

There's two kinds of multiboxers:

Instance copy multiboxers: these are people running essentially multiple copies of WoW on one or more computers, but only actively controlling only one of them, then using macros and keysends to copy control to the other copies. It's very cheap and easy to setup, because all you need is one piece of software (and there's many free ones) that can replicated keysends to multiple copies of an application. Doesn't work with mouse commands or anything like targeting reticles.

Hardware multiboxers: these people are running identical copies of WoW on identical individual computers and using a hardware KVM switch to multiplex their keyboard and mouse commands are perfectly and instantly replicated to every single computer. There's no need for macros (or well, less need) because you are essentially just controlling the one character and letting hardware mirror it. If one toon dies or gets out of sync, you can usually just press a hotkey on your one keyboard to control only that single box, get it back into place, then resume multicasting your keyboard to all of them.

The hardware multiboxers tend to be the major players, like the 40 shaman raid teams and so forth. But they aren't going to really be affected by /follow and /macro limitations because they rarely if ever have to use them. The instance copy ones are usually 3-5 toons that need /follow and /assist to work. Otherwise you have no way to move because movement with a keyboard can't really be sent to multiple copies of a program with precision (resulting in some toons that turn 1/4 and some that turn 1/3 and then pressing forward splits everyone up) and you can't use the mouse to move either.

[pancakebuddy2]

bots have nothing to do with the follow command lol