Blizz ban again really?

[Deleted]

If it really happened that way it would be pretty weird tbh. Yes, botting is against the rules (and I have no sympathy for you in that case) but why would they punish you a second time? Sounds like you "served your time" and that should have been that. If they would have wanted to perma ban you - or for a year - why not just do so?

[Easo]

Cry more, OP. Sorry (not really, though), but you won't find much simpathy here.

[Hotmail]

Just because people enjoy gathering mats less does not mean the professions are less viable. It would be more accurate to say that professions would be less viable if you couldn't craft anything, like gear or consumables, with it.

Consumables are still relevant, crafted gear is not. Consumables could always be farmed by someone else and traded in large quantities, while in the past you couldn't do the same with crafted gear since it was either bind-on-pîckup, or required materials that would only drop in raid instances. This had the side benefit of limiting the amount of damage that the botters could do to the economy.

Now the rewards of crafted gear are no longer useful on the long term, therefore the process by which you acquire those rewards is no longer interesting - hence an increase in botting.

Players simply found out that they stopped liking the trademark grindiness of the game's genre.

Players found out that they were going to upgrade that crafted gear by collecting squirrel nuts scattered about the world, or queueing for LFR. That's all it is. Obliterum was an amazing idea, but Blizzard capped the benefits at an absurdly low item level, so we are now back to the same problem of the primary crafting professions (BS, LW, Tailoring) not really providing anything exciting in terms of character progression.

Also, that argument makes zero sense when Blizzard is basing a major slice of their content's contuinity on preventing the players from flying, so they can set about looking for targeted exploration objectives - rarespawns, chests, world quests... this is the meat of the gameplay available in WoW, outside of instances and PvP. It is very much trademark grindiness, especially when you factor in Artifact Power.

[Deleted]

Not really, there are 2 types of botters, there are the ones who do it for personal gain of time. Botting to get some herbs for raiding, pvp honor ranks for mounts, gear etc. A permaban here and you usually lose these customers, where as a temp ban will frequently reform these customers as they do not want to lose what they worked for prior to botting. These are the customers you do not want to lose if reformed because they turn into a good customer, frequently. There will always be the bad apples in this bunch but the escalating severity of the ban may at one point work(some repeat offenders are at 24 months now, basically a permaban)

Then there are the ones who do it to make money, real cash and this is easy to do because you either have bots that are scanning the AH for miss-posted stuff(there are tonnes of these) people who misses a zero on a spectral tiger, or under cut on a new BOE too steeply and make 100K gold a day or the farmers that use bots and speed cheats to farm herb and or and make gold that way and then resell to the gold market for real money. You can make a lot of money quickly by doing this and when they get banned on one account they open a new one. it is simple as that and no matter the ban type they will always make money because you can not ban them fast enough to not make money as it takes time for Blizz to build the case to ban them.

The first type of botters will just completely dissappear then, because people will not risk losing their account for botting. Now you have the chance practically to bot with worse consequence being a small break from the game, which a lot of people seem to not mind since they keep botting.
As for the second category, i believe Blizzard could ban them in a rate that would stop being profitable for them specially since "casual" botters will be less. Nevertheless even if Blizzard couldn't, they can not leave their product so undefended against people who "professionaly" destroy it.

As a note i would like to add: I haven't played regularly wow since wotlk (mostly because of limited RL available time) and now i decided to give it a shot once again. During this interval i tried once more to hook up with it.The moment i hit max lvl and i joined my first BGs i realised that a good portion of the players there were bots which made me completely loose my respect/interest towards the game and abandoned it straight away. My point here is not that everyone will unsuscribe because of the bots, but botting harms WoW in more ways than we superficially see.