How to cripple underground herb / mining bots easily and efficiently.

[rboa]

Me and various others reported the same 4-5 terrain exploiting botminers for months in Wintergraps towards the end of wotlk, I went there last week and I still saw two of those same botters (which is pretty sad they are still mining thorium actually). I reported them again, and got the usual automated response I always get, saying something like "we're sorry we missed you, we are investigating who the botters are associating with, blah blah".

I have reported a bot and had a GM answer in about 10 minutes (fastest reply ever). Nothing was done to the bot.

[Cadi]

Knowing how oracle works (to a point, i'm a OCA cert'd dba by trade) the easiest way to cut these down would be:

OT: ooh, they use Oracle for WoW?

[Deleted]

As I herb on a pvp server and my herb alt is only 84 (and is in wotlk gear as he got to 84 purely by herbing) I always use the humanoid tracking food, mainly to help stay alive, but this makes spotting the underground bots trivial as they are literally on your mini-map for one second then teleport using XYZ hacks to another node.

And as others have stated, I always take the 5mins to report a bot with as much detail as I can and add it to my friends list (I have an ally alt which I add them to if they're on the other faction), 9 times out of 10, I never see that bot online again.

Couple of observations to know if it's a bot - if it teleports, it's obviously a bot using XYZ hacks, if it flys vertically upwards to a set height (same for every node) then it's a bot and if you're on a pvp server and it's from the other faction and when you attack it just runs at you performs a very basic dps rotation it's very likely a bot too (especially so if you kill it and it instantly graveyards instead of normal corpse running).

[Deleted]

could they not just make something that insta kills anyone under the terrain?

i had fun on my DK in wotlk with underground miners, sometimes i could deathgrip them up and kill them

[Deleted]

Knowing how oracle works (to a point, i'm a OCA cert'd dba by trade) the easiest way to cut these down would be:

Add a box to the "GM" window "report exploiter" you enter the name. It would then monitor that players co-ordinates for the next 10 minutes, if they are below terrain in more than a couple of places (i.e haven't just glitched and somehow fell thru the floor as sometimes/rarely happens) it would flag the name as an exploiter.

Would be pretty damn simple to setup and pretty effective.

Oracles a bit too unweildy to have this running all the time on everyone but for 30 minutes on a specific player while they are clearly exploiting would trap them most of the time with pretty hard to beat evidense. I don't believe they can fake their position in game as part of the exploit, the co-ords would be true to position.

Suggested it on the main (EU so I don't expect much response) forums. http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/1549440684#1

I don't think that at any point in the game - especially during normal play (i.e. a player moving about the game world) - that there are oracle tables being updated every second to show the position of a player character.

This is evidenced by the nature of the hack - it relies upon the fact that the client tells the server where they are and not the other way round.

[kharyll]

Interesting. I think I encountered my first underground 'gather'. I got to the node first but he popped up from the ground and then dissappeared a couple of times, like there was really bad lag.

reminded me of this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urk6Nt3HSCw

[Isolyphic]

I hate botting, annoys me that some people in my guild do it -.-
We'll lose some of our raid team when 4.3.2 comes out :/

If one was to bot, I would prefer if they did it on an alternate account, and not their main account, Level 80 in a matter of days with RAF and 4 levels for TwiHigh for an easy portal... instead of putting the whole guild at risk. :/

[Deleted]

reroll hunter and have humanoid tracking on while farming used to catch loads of them in wintergrasp

[Cernunnos]

Cast AOEs on nodes.
Check combat log
Get name of botting toon (since the combat log will say your AOE hits X toon for Y damage)
Report toon.

I've got a few bots with that.

[-Zait-]

I want this just on the basis that it would result in hilarious screen shots :P

[Blackmist]

It's really not going to work. You'll end up with 90% of deaths being from buggy nodes that are slightly above the ground and standing near them resulting in insta-death. The server really can't tell whether you're above or below ground. It seems to rely on the game client for that, which means it's hackable. The upshot of that is that you don't fall through the earth every time you get lag.

Remember a few weeks back when certain types of movement resulted in instant disconnections? Mine a node and fly too fast away from it, resulted in me being disconnected every minute without fail, and caused me to swear rather a lot. Lasted about a day or so. I reckon that was down to anti-cheat mechanisms as well (detecting people moving too fast for how they should be). They were very quiet about the cause of it all. I'd be very surprised if there was another explanation.