Botting: Could This Prevent It?

[pimpeddakota]

I don't support this for only 1 reason.... If you push the bots out of BG's they will then bot the open world going after nodes, herbs, or just simple mob killing a zone. I'd rather they stay in the bg's.

[apepi]

I don't want to press numbers every time I enter BG, dungeon, fish, gathering, kill monsters, etc etc.

The bot problem should be resolved, but not by making MY gameplay worse.

The only problem with bots is that blizzard don't care about them. At all. Simple as that.
You can download a bot from open websites in the internet, use it for weeks and months, and never get banned.
How could this happen?? Why don't they update warden database? Why don't they ban people?

I don't know. Because bots count as subscribers. Because you need employees to fight with bot users. Because they don't care about players. Or maybe all of this.

Anyway, I'm strongly against captchas. And it will never be implemented.

Because basically if warden reads any more it would be kinda be counted as spyware?

[Nelfie]

I don't mind botters, they are easy kills/honor for me. Keep them coming

[Joshdatroll]

I think you underestimate how advanced these bots are. I have a friend (and happen-to-be classmate) who works as a programmer for a certain botting company in Europe, and the code they work on is... staggeringly brilliant. These companies (or at least the one my friend works for) also work on contingencies to eliminate downtimes should a new feature in Warden's repetuare (sp) be added. I seem to remember a ban wave that occurred about a month and a half, two months after Archaeology was implemented. The bots ran off scripts that put the locations of dig sites in the actual chat boxes because the devs couldn't reconcile a executable path that didn't involve that. The who and why is second hand, but I do remember the ban wave. This captcha system would be overcome within two weeks to a month tops.

Simply put, bots aren't going away. There is no system that is conceivable at this point in time that wouldn't completely inconvenience the legitimate players of this game, and I'm not even sure that, should a system like that be implemented, that it wouldn't be overcome. The best thing that EVERYONE can keep doing is filing tickets and using that new stupid report feature.

What I do is, if I see more than a few bots in a span of time, or people I even THINK are botting, I will report them as I see them, and I write their names down. Once I find three plus, I write a ticket. I do this in an effort to inconvenience the CM's who will, in tun, bitch to their bosses, who will bitch to their bosses who will bitch at the developers. Or, so I hope.

[Milkshake86]

So I just posted in my Botting: PvP is now PvE thread

When you notice a terrible bot or think its a terrible bot its either a cheap/free program or an actual player who is terrible. I won't name any specific programs but a few exist and have existed for a premium which will fight better and more accurately in a BG setting than most players, a cpu will blow survival cd's and such at a much faster reaction than that of a human, executes get hit instantly on activation etc.

[Imnick]

Captchas don't work because they just pay someone less than minimum wage to fill them out for an hour, the same thing can happen here

[nxzt]

In this thread: People who have absolutely no clue how bots work.

[tielknight]

The only problem with bots is that blizzard don't care about them. At all. Simple as that.
You can download a bot from open websites in the internet, use it for weeks and months, and never get banned.
How could this happen?? Why don't they update warden database? Why don't they ban people?

I don't know. Because bots count as subscribers. Because you need employees to fight with bot users. Because they don't care about players. Or maybe all of this.

Yes because banning them before studying how the bot works when is use is a good idea. They have said, and will continue to say so, that the bans are done in waves. A good chunk of them are compromised accounts used to farm crap for gold. The ones farming BG's are generally lazy people and they too will get banned in waves as well. They need to study the bot, find a way to detect it/break it without breaking normal addons or disrupting gameplay for regular players.

Just because they aren't doing things right away and are taking time to figure out how to break the bots doesn't mean they are doing nothing. That also means jumping on the "LOL they are paying them so they don't care!" train isn't helping you not look like your wearing a tinfoil hat.

[HardCoder]

Captchas to enter BGs.

I would have no problem with the occasional CAPTCHA in WoW, and I think it's 100% SoCal pride that we don't have them now.

And if it weren't for that SoCal pride we would have fewer botters.

---------- Post added 2012-10-27 at 11:04 PM ----------

They need to study the bot, find a way to detect it

So, "spent 98% of the BG with follow on" requires a ton of study.

[Cryonic]

Would probably be better if a GM was assigned to spectate BG's at random occations and ban off the boters, they are easy to spot.

[tielknight]

So, "spent 98% of the BG with follow on" requires a ton of study.

That is the end result.
The important bits are stuff like what does it do to send those commands to the game, what happens if nobody is in range, what can be changed to prevent it from working within the game environment, etc etc.

[Nicola]

No, there is a reason why all those captchas you see nowadays are near unreadable, so bots can't read it either.
And I'm fairly sure most people here hate those near unreadable captchas

[jontunnel130]

My favorite thing to do in WoW was to bg. On multiple toons almost everytime I could, I would. To give you an idea how much I use to bg, I have around 500k hk's through about 8 or 9 toons.That being said I've reported well over 100 botters, even though I've seen far beyond that. At a certain point I just gave up on reporting them. Basically all they would do is warn them. No permanent bans, nothing. I would see the same toons botting over and over again. In the end you come to this conclusion "Subs that don't bot are still subs and subs that do bot are still subs". It took me a long time to realize that this was the inevitable fact and one of the detriments leading to my unsub. The worst period of these bots for me was during Cataclysm. 3-4 players on average per 10 in a wsg/gilneas were bots. Too say it was an epidemic would be understating.

It's nice to see someone trying to be proactive, albeit in a futile cause. They will not dedicate resources/time to this as it will, in the big picture, not affect the overall game. If you were to post this on the bnet forums and were lucky enough to get a blue to comment on it, you'd probably be greeted with a "thanks for the ideas and feedback" and then a "we value your opinion". And that would be as far as this feature could ever hope for.

[Morden]

tbh there isnt a great deal that can be done other than Blizz hiring what would essentially be hall monitors for BG's who could keep an eye out and punish the botters.

Get caught once? lose all your honor/valor
Get caught twice? lose all your pvp gear
Third time? b-b-banned.

If your suspected of botting, then they could contact you and ask you questions to verify that you are actually there.

Wont happen though, too much effort, too little gain for blizz to keep ontop of the problem. They doll out bans in waves to keep the populous happy but as long as they're getting your cash they dont care. only way to make them care is enough people voting with their wallet and that wont happen.

[Banzhe]

There's no point in inconveniencing 100% of the player base that pvp's b/c a small % of them sometimes get bots. I've played several years and rarely seen any botters, and when i have i deal with it or leave. People complain pvp is dead now imagine having to authenticate every bg you enter, no thanks. Also to dispute your assumption that im against it b/c im a botter, nope...im against it because it's just not needed.

What inconvenience?- There's a full minute before a battleground starts anyway, where players are just standing about buffing and waiting.

[casually]

even bots can figure out captchas. captchas are garbage and sometimes even human accessment cant read the letters properly. the number system would be a better way to ensure pvp isnt bottable. but blizz doesnt care enough to want to change it. money coming in is money, even if its botted.

[Deleted]

What inconvenience?- There's a full minute before a battleground starts anyway, where players are just standing about buffing and waiting.

This is exactly what i was going to say, theres plenty of dead time at the start and even if you join late it would take seconds to click the right button.

I played a game years ago, cant remember the name but these popped up every now and then in normal play, was no inconvenience there either.

[Deleted]

give everyone free authenticator, require authenticator code on every few battlegrounds? though it would require people to always have an authenticator at all times :\

[Scummer]

I'm not sure.
Yes it would work for the most part and the idea itself is fine. But again with anything like this it's an inconvenience for everybody who isn't a bot to have to do it each time they join a BG, it will get very tedious after a while.

If there was a way to execute such a system where it didn't get tedious for the people no botting then I'd be fine.

[Baloneyz]

This thing is a valid system against bots.
I guess even if developers took this thing seriously it would take time to make it work in the live game.

Also, i noticed a big number difference in botting on the EU and US servers. US servers tend to be CROWDED with bots all over the place and on all servers ( popular and not popular ) while on EU it seems that bots like to hang out on low pop servers, and rarely i saw them on more popular when i played. ( Dunemaul, Killrog, Hyjal, Stormreaver )