Botters, The Locusts of World Of Warcraft

[Utok]

points 2 & 4 are nothing to do with bots.

for point 2, see demonsteel stirrups - these are better than the sky golem because you can use mining without getting dismounted too.

and for point 4, lots of herbers are using server hop addons, the players that vanish are not using stealth, they are changing groups to move to a different server.

[TheVaryag]

Is this issue ever going to be rectified? Are we ever going to see resolution on this? I have posted a few videos here of a couple perfect examples of what we are dealing with here, as well as my recent ticket in game. I don't have time to write up an entire book on this, but to name a few things to look for.
1. Toons Flying Like Reindeer In The Sky (Pathfinder Pt.2, not Until 7.2) ^_^
2. Toons Herbing Flowers Mounted On Mounts Other Than (Sky Golem)/Scaling 90 Degree Cliffs.
3. Not Finding 1 Herb Node For An Entire Path, All While Seeing Lines Of Deathknights/Demon Hunters named ''Hksjzhd''.
4 Walking Up And Whispering ''Hi or Hey'' And Person Vanishes In Midair! (Mount Stealth AMG!! When Did Blizzard Stealth Buff Mounts?? No Pun intended).

So just going to leave this here..
Thank you.


Edit* Game Master replied to in game ticket, Was indeed just the generic ''We are doing what we can, but we can't say what it is
because then the terrorists would know we are coming!'' garbage..With a lame GM joke on the end to boot. Maybe he mistook my patience
and respectful demeanor as an invitation to make jokes? Sorry Blizzard, I appreciate a good joke, but not a joking matter this time bud.
Not when your players have to spend an extra 10 hours collecting herbs, just to finally give up and waste, yeah waste, 200 Blood Of Sargeras,
because they do not have 24/7 to run around collecting the crumbs. Bots are literally Locusts to the game. I still wrote ''Lol good one'' at his joke.
Probably made his day. But I'm still looking for resolution Blizzard, not seeing any results here. Thank you.

I'm afraid Botters will not be rid of that easily. All Blizzard can do Is try and watch out for them, study them, perhaps even learn how their bot program works well enough to stop all future bot-users. But there's always the running risk you get more innocents caught In the web as well. There's been many people saying how they were simply question around, or even flying around Jade Forest collecting Ghost Iron and they did It In such a fashion that Blizzard's automation triggered and assumed they were a bot while Infact they were not.

So while their automation Is nice, you should never automate anything that does a job for you but rather helps you do the job better. That's the current problem of CS and GMs who try and "Capture" Bot-users In the act. And even If they do they'll first observe them, gather enough evidence and only then mass ban them In large waves like they've been doing for the past few years. I'm sure they've done this before but only now do they mention It as a "Hey guys, we're doing something but we never told you before cause our subs were high enough, but now they're so low we'll tell you cause we wanna make you think we're doing something" kinda thing.

So far the automation process that banned me (not bot-related however) and the Investigation that followed which Incorrectly blames me for what a hacker has done on my account are still not being admited to being flawed by Blizzard and I remain a victim of their automation process and the laziness of their GMs 1 year and 10 months later down the line. Because apparently having your account hacked doesn't warrant having your account back that you've had for 10 years, and god forbid your loyalty, playing for 10 years since Vanila would mean anything for a billion dollar company like Blizzard.

So Blizzard -are- doing something, but not enough they could be doing a lot more with a personal touch to It rather than automation which only hurts them long term.

[Kyanion]

So far the automation process that banned me (not bot-related however) and the Investigation that followed which Incorrectly blames me for what a hacker has done on my account are still not being admited to being flawed by Blizzard and I remain a victim of their automation process and the laziness of their GMs 1 year and 10 months later down the line. Because apparently having your account hacked doesn't warrant having your account back that you've had for 10 years, and god forbid your loyalty, playing for 10 years since Vanila would mean anything for a billion dollar company like Blizzard.

Hey look who it is. Any thread about botters or someone being banned and you swoop in to spew your story of lies. Yet again it is up to other people to point out threads YOU STARTED where you claim it was your brother that was stalking some girl. When your "brother" got your account banned you started stalking Blizz to try to get it back. You weren't hacked. You were stalking a girl, got banned and then stalked Blizz until they ignored you. The best part is that you stalk threads like this to spew your ever changing story in hopes someone is going to what, throw you a pity part? LOL

[ItachiZaku]

I really don't have this problem on either of the servers I play on regularly, but I agree that they should be thangs and stuff.

[xanzul]

Is this issue ever going to be rectified? Are we ever going to see resolution on this? I have posted a few videos here of a couple perfect examples of what we are dealing with here, as well as my recent ticket in game. I don't have time to write up an entire book on this, but to name a few things to look for.
1. Toons Flying Like Reindeer In The Sky (Pathfinder Pt.2, not Until 7.2) ^_^
2. Toons Herbing Flowers Mounted On Mounts Other Than (Sky Golem)/Scaling 90 Degree Cliffs.
3. Not Finding 1 Herb Node For An Entire Path, All While Seeing Lines Of Deathknights/Demon Hunters named ''Hksjzhd''.
4 Walking Up And Whispering ''Hi or Hey'' And Person Vanishes In Midair! (Mount Stealth AMG!! When Did Blizzard Stealth Buff Mounts?? No Pun intended).

So just going to leave this here..
Thank you.


Edit* Game Master replied to in game ticket, Was indeed just the generic ''We are doing what we can, but we can't say what it is
because then the terrorists would know we are coming!'' garbage..With a lame GM joke on the end to boot. Maybe he mistook my patience
and respectful demeanor as an invitation to make jokes? Sorry Blizzard, I appreciate a good joke, but not a joking matter this time bud.
Not when your players have to spend an extra 10 hours collecting herbs, just to finally give up and waste, yeah waste, 200 Blood Of Sargeras,
because they do not have 24/7 to run around collecting the crumbs. Bots are literally Locusts to the game. I still wrote ''Lol good one'' at his joke.
Probably made his day. But I'm still looking for resolution Blizzard, not seeing any results here. Thank you.

There have been 3 ban waves in nearly as many months and one of them was timed around Bossland losing a court battle with Blizzard and barely having enough money to continue operations due to legal fees. This serious lack of funds prompted them to rescind lifetime keys and requiring anyone who bought them to buy the yearly keys which has caused a huge exodus of their customers. Their discord is dead quiet all the time now (except for when support staff and community developers get bored and decide to troll their own customers which is something that used to be unprecedented for them) andthere is very little development or support by the community for addons for this bot.


This is a perfect storm that just may very well put Bossland out of business for good meaning the most popular bot for wow will no longer be available and due to the decline of Wow there wil be very little developer interest in creating new ones for it as most of them have moved on to other games. Ultimately this is the closest Blizzard or any other game developer has come to actually winning this war with botters and cheaters which makes threads like these all the more ridiculous. Even the devs and administration at Bossland have admitted they may no longer be able to stay one step ahead of Blizzard like they have for so many years.

If you people are going to whine about bots at least bother to educate yourself on the topic first before throwing hissy fits.

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they ban hackers in waves
because if they ban them one by one, the others will be warned, stop botting, and wait a few weeks for the next build of the hack to come out, that fixes whatever blizz used to detect it


rather catch thousands at once, then one or two a week

There is also the fact that the time between banwaves creates uncertainty for bot developers to determine how their bots are detected or even when they are detected making it that much harder to figure out how to avoid detection after a ban wave.

- - - Updated - - -

Yea, too bad those waves take what? 6+ months to happen? Yea I bet the botters feel really bad about being banned after a long lucrative farm.

And yet many of the botters who were caught in the banwave where the first 6 month suspensions were handed out have reported that their accounts have been permanently closed in subsequent banwaves. What you people don't seem to understand is that it isn't the casual botters causing harm to this game it is the people who are botting for profit. They don't care if their accounts are banned because they will have made more than the cost of opening a new account and will simply open new accounts upon being banned.

- - - Updated - - -

There's no big data, they are doing the sweeps as they get ready with the code / have the resources to perform it (sweeps need time and careful attention). The "yes, we don't sweep often but that's because we are waiting for botters to feel safe and jump onto the bandwagon" is nonsense PR. There's zero math behind that, just some wishful thinking on the part of whoever put that into circulation. They are sweeping as often as they can - this does not amount to very often because doing detection well is hard.

It isn't nonsense PR. Bossland devs have said this is exactly what is happening. Why would they lie for Blizzard especially in light of the fact this recent lawsuit Blizzard filed against them and won may very well contribute towards putting them out of business for good? Bossland devs have even said they are simply guessing at this point in how Blizzard is detecting their bots causing further erosion of their customer base.

[Twdft]

they could hire that guy to fight bots, or they could hire him to make new content.

What bothers me is that a real guy monitoring the server is way better in confirming a bot than the automatic system we have now.

I don't see many bots in normal play, but the few times I'm on my herbing Alt gathering a bit bots are really really obvious. It's disheartening to right click/report them and nothing happens. Automatic ban waves every couple months might be the best solution for Blizzard, but they don't feel good for me as a player.

[rda]

It isn't nonsense PR. Bossland devs have said this is exactly what is happening. Why would they lie for Blizzard especially in light of the fact this recent lawsuit Blizzard filed against them and won may very well contribute towards putting them out of business for good? Bossland devs have even said they are simply guessing at this point in how Blizzard is detecting their bots causing further erosion of their customer base.

What exactly did Bossland devs say? Any links? (I don't understand the last sentence at all, for what it is worth.)