Instance Abuse on a Grand Scale...

[Deleted]

The melodrama is strong in this one. A threat to the games fabric, puhh-lease.

It may be bots, it may be an exploit neither i agree with, yet this just seems to be a ploy to get views on your video, why else would you mention all of these things in the OP?

[Fabled]

Right because if your going to bot you'd only do it during prime time.

Which is why I said at the end "on my server anyways." It varies. Right now there is only one 85 in there, while 6 out of 10 people in Shattered Halls are 80 hunter bots.

[GKLeatherCraft]

This sort of thing has happened for a long time, Back in TBC Ring of Law was heavily farmed, so much so that's a major part of the reason they added the cap for how many times you can enter an instance within a certain time

[Xeraxis]

Which is why I said at the end "on my server anyways." It varies. Right now there is only one 85 in there, while 6 out of 10 people in Shattered Halls are 80 hunter bots.

And you know they're a bot becuase their names are Imabotone, Imabottwo, Imabotthree, and so on?

[blackhammer99]

The fact that SH is an instance which CRZ has no bearing on?
The fact that /who doesn't work on people from other realms that you would only see via CRZ?
The fact that /who caps at 49?

So either your server had some crazy dude(s), or you may be blowing this ever so slightly out of proportion.

I'm sorry if I misspoke, but I never said anything about SH or CRZs effecting /who. I was told to do this by one of the individuals I was with, and returned around 20 in hellfire, and 30 in the instance. Upon examination, we saw even more at the flight points and instances, and nearly as many Alliance as Horde. All this is documented in the video, so not sure what your point is, unfortunately.
I do apologize if somewhere I mislead the reader, but its all there. Should be fairly obvious this is a substantial issue just by watching.

The cap on /who doesn't seem to be relevant either to me. Perhaps I misspoke, but I wasn't literally counting hundreds, just observing there were nearly 50 just on my realm alone through out the few hours, and then we saw many others from other realms as well as Alliance. The numbers we saw were estimated to be over 100. I'll have another look at what I wrote though and attempt to sheer up anything that seems ambiguous.
Thank you very much for your feedback, but please don't discount this issue just because what I said seems a bit open-ended!

[Arbs]

Doesn't /who only show up to 49 people in the zone?

Its only show 49 people at random through the said World. Except Outland

[Trisrx]

I saw this going on at service entrance stratholme a while back. I dont understand why blizzard is so poor at dealing with these issues. I realize wow is a HUGE game to deal with, but exploitation of that magnitude shouldnt be terribly hard to notice and deal with.

[Kuja]

You should check Halls of Lightning and Botanica entrances as well. There's like a thousand skeletons there too. Easy honor farming Too bad the paladins ALWAYS bubble when they come out of the instance to reset it. :c

The sad part is that you can't report them.

1) If you right click them and report cheating, you'll get disconnected after 5 ish reports because the game thinks you're abusing the report feature.

2) If you create a ticket and list all the names in it, they ask you to use the report feature, even if you tell them it's not usable as there's hundreds of people to report.

[Fabled]

And you know they're a bot becuase their names are Imabotone, Imabottwo, Imabotthree, and so on?

Oh if only it'd be the simple good sir! If you cared to look on your own realm you'd probably see random lettered names, such as if you rolled your face on the keyboard, might be guildless, might not. (not that it matters, but it's a trend, there's a whole bot guild on my server that farms HoL). And are all, from what I saw on their armory's on the ones from my server, wearing gear you get from getting a free 80 from Scroll of Resurrections. So either someone is having a massive field day as a hunter loving multiboxer, or something of the botting variety is afoot.

[wow2011]

OP, you and the youtuber are making way too big of a deal out of bot problem. For WoW, bot is not as big of a problem as some other time/money based game. Not to mention WoW is doing a fairly good job at fending bots off considering WoW's popularity.

0 bots or ban nearly instantly 24/7 will be impossible as long as WoW remains popular. Assuming WoW has 10 million players, 0.5% of the account being bots means there are 50000 bot accounts. That's a problem and Blizzard will work on it so always report to help them out. To think Blizzard doesn't care about bots is pretty ridiculous.

Another reason why Bots exist is because players continue to buy gold. Again, assuming 1% of the player base spend 50 dollars buying gold and you have 5 million dollars floating around for gold. As long as demand is there, bots will exist forever and ever. A botless mmo is a dead mmo.

[blackhammer99]

2) If you create a ticket and list all the names in it, they ask you to use the report feature, even if you tell them it's not usable as there's hundreds of people to report.

A lot of people are commenting about this to me as well. That's why I was hoping to see enough people going at them, so they would HAVE to have a response. But it doesn't always work that way.

[Yig]

How in the hell is this news to you, and for that matter news on the scale that would inspire this ballad of an OP? Gold selling sites have used bots grinding old content for years.

It's of course not the most lucrative thing they could do, but the key is in the amount of reward compared to the effort and importantly how repetitive the action is necessary for the reward. Repetition can be repeated in feedback loops, the less variables required to account for, the more you can leave the system alone to keep amassing the desired resource.

This is why we don't worry about all the coal falling on the ground and blowing away as dust when we load trucks with the stuff. We end up getting more through mass production faster than if we painstakingly tried to collected every possible particle.

Why do people keep making threads about this issue as if it's profound and disturbing?

[Sam the Wiser]

I have to say the video acted like something big and bad was going on in wow...These instance bots have been going on for months.... Really nothing you can do but report or kill them.

[Yig]

I saw this going on at service entrance stratholme a while back. I dont understand why blizzard is so poor at dealing with these issues. I realize wow is a HUGE game to deal with, but exploitation of that magnitude shouldnt be terribly hard to notice and deal with.

Because that's not how the issue works. Blizzard bans in waves because there will always be bots replacing whatever they do. Ultimately the faster you go the faster they replace them. At a certain point and with a certain consistent population of people willing to buy the gold, you're just wasting effort combating the issue if you work too hard at it, as long as it's not possible to permanently deal with the issue.

All people are doing here is ignoring what action is taken because it's easy to notice what's still there when you're an armchair quarterback and keep pointing out how the system isn't perfect as if that means the system is lax or flawed.

[Deleted]

if i do /who it only shows 49 results, hmm

just FYI. Hacked accounts have been doing the botanica over and over and over again. I've seen this happen to guild mates when we started wondering why they would start their 112th run there. ( was back in early cataclysm, it might be stonecore or gundrak w/e now )

i highly doubt with the massive inflation if the 500g they make an hour is worth it. even with '' thousands '' of accounts.

[SamR]

I have to say the video acted like something big and bad was going on in wow...These instance bots have been going on for months.... Really nothing you can do but report or kill them.

Months? More like as long as the game has been live. Hunter bots in DM West in vanilla come to mind.

[Tharkkun]

A lot of people are commenting about this to me as well. That's why I was hoping to see enough people going at them, so they would HAVE to have a response. But it doesn't always work that way.

It's been going on since Vanilla. You ticket the players and let Blizzard investigate and that's about all you can do. Unless of course you're on a PVP server, then grief them as they leave/return. Gold farmers despise interference so be prepared for them to fight back.

Story Time: Tyr's hand (right corner of Eastern Plaguelands) was owned by gold farmers. Rogues of different factions who never fought each other. If you ventured out there and started killing mobs they were farming for a quest you would be destroyed. You could kite them away before the owner finally noticed.

We used to go screw with them with 5-10 people killing a few rogues here and there. One night suddenly 15+ rogues from the same guild showed up. It was an epic gold farmer battle for about an hour. Then one day Blizzard made all the mobs elite and the gold farmers were slaughtered.

So create tickets with all the names. Things do get fixed.

---------- Post added 2013-01-29 at 06:35 PM ----------

Months? More like as long as the game has been live. Hunter bots in DM West in vanilla come to mind.

Yup. That's why we have an instance cap of 5 per hour. Hunter bots and teleport hacks.

[blackhammer99]

May be something that has been happening, but still totally intrusive and needs addressing. Not posting here because its news, posting here because I was able to capture live footage of this happening, and I am looking to get more people informed. If you knew about it already, and haven't taken action then I would encourage you to.
If you are just hearing about this now, please do the same.

It is something that I feel is a massive issue, and I understand many people feel it is an inevitable issue, but it doesn't mean we can't atleast TRY to raise awareness.
People say Cancer is inevitable as well, but its still a good idea to raise awareness etc.
Over-dramatic example for effect GO

[Fortera]

Stopped reading when you said 'scarier', implying this is something we need to be afraid of. The video didn't do much for me either except teach me that some people say 'tbh' too much.

[blackhammer99]

Not in the colloquial term, but yes this is scary. Despite the fact that it seems to be constant, it is get more and more brazen. You don't imagine this getting worse and ruining the community? It seems pretty obvious to me, considering it has already ruined Hellfire...

Also, the video was not meant to jerk any tears, just document the issue.
Thanks for the riveting feedback, nonetheless!