WoW Classic - 120k Accounts Banned and Death Knight Character Creation Changes
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Greetings,

Over the past few weeks, we’ve taken actions that removed almost 120,000 malicious accounts from the World of Warcraft ecosystem, including both Wrath of the Lich King Classic and Classic Era. This is in addition to our usual, ongoing banwaves, which often include actions against tens of thousands of accounts per week.

As a supplement to these recent actions, we want you to know that as of next week’s regional maintenance, we will be returning the original Death Knight character creation restrictions to Wrath of the Lich King Classic. This means that unless you already have a level 55 character on your account, you will be unable to create a Death Knight. We felt it was very important for the launch of Wrath of the Lich King classic to give anyone who wanted to hop into this iconic expansion the ability to do so with as few barriers as possible. Allowing every account access to Death Knights-- even if they did not meet the historic requirements --was important. However, now that the initial launch period has passed, we no longer wish to allow the unrestricted creation of Death Knights on brand new accounts. It’s a tempting vector for malicious actors to use to get into the game and start exploiting very quickly.

We hope that this helps slow the proliferation of malicious behavior in Wrath of the Lich King Classic. It’s important to keep in mind that as long as there is a demand for gold and other services that players are willing to pay real money for, these malicious actors will keep coming back. Please-- never hesitate to report suspected cheating such as buying and selling gold for real money, automation, and advertisements for power leveling or any real-money sales in chat. Your reports greatly help our efforts to take actions that improve the game.

Thanks to everyone who has commented on this issue over the past several months, and thanks to everyone who helps by reporting suspicious activity.
This article was originally published in forum thread: WoW Classic - 120k Accounts Banned and Death Knight Character Creation Changes started by Lumy View original post
Comments 55 Comments
  1. liyroot's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Agall View Post
    With 120k bans total, even at a 0.1% false-positive rate, that's still 120 people that possibly just got hit falsely. I don't have faith in Blizzard's systems to differentiate 100% and I don't have faith that they'll actually look at appeals.

    RIP anyone who got falsely hit in such a wave.
    Nah man. I work in software. And intern could write a script in 1, 2 days max that could easily detect anyone botting. And if a real programmer was given a week on the problem, you could have a deep learning AI easily detect bots. Truth is, Blizz is in bed with bots. Can't think of any other reason why they would let it go unless they are getting a cut.

    Imagine you bought a really nice restaurant. And you work you ass off, 90 hours a week, running it. Then some guy starts selling drugs in a booth. Every day. Same booth. Same guy. Same customers. Same drugs. There's a line out the door for him. He needs to setup shelves on the dinning table to show of his merch. He's there from open to close. Your normal, regular customers are disgusted and furious.

    So let the guy keep selling drugs in your restaurant?
  1. Itisamuh's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Dioporco View Post
    classic has more than retail players
    Only in your dreams.
  1. liyroot's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by vizzle View Post
    You're implying that Blizzard isn't losing anything by banning bots because they (probably) pay their game time with gold through tokens.

    But you're not considering the fact that since they're buying so many tokens with gold, they're the ones incentivizing the whales to keep buying more tokens with cash.

    If the bots aren't there buying those tokens with gold, then the whales don't need to buy more tokens.

    One way or another, the money is going into Blizzard's system, and the more bots buying gold with tokens, the more the whales pump dollars into Blizzard. So yes, Blizzard -does- lose money by banning the bot accounts, because those bot accounts aren't there to incentivize the whales anymore.

    Here's an example: let's say I'm a whale and I always want 10m gold on hand, and I'm a big spender. Let's just say that right now the token price is 500k gold each. So I need to buy 20 tokens to get that 10m gold. But someone needs to buy those 20 tokens. If it takes me 2 hours to sell those 20 tokens, then great; I get my 10m and then I spend it, and then maybe I buy another 20 tokens just because I can and because I want another 10m. But if it takes me a week to sell those 20 tokens, or even longer, then I don't have the incentive to buy more tokens at the same rate, so I just sit on my money instead of pumping it into Blizzard.

    20 tokens = $400. It's the difference between me as a whale spending $400 3-4x a month versus just spending $400 once a month. With faster token sales, I get tricked into spending $1200-$1600 in this example as opposed to just maybe $400-$800.

    More bot accounts = quicker token sales, meaning whales pump more into Blizzard. While the bot accounts aren't the ones paying Blizzard, they ARE incentivizing the whales to pay Blizzard more than they would otherwise.

    The final point here is: an account that runs off token game time is exactly as profitable to Blizzard (if not more, because of the premium cost of a token) as an account that runs off real currency game time, meaning the loss of either accounts is an equal loss of revenue.

    Please stop failing to get it.
    People who think Blizz would introduce the token and lose money on it are the same people who get destroyed on their taxes every year.
  1. Chaotic1962's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by liyroot View Post
    Imagine you bought a really nice restaurant. And you work you ass off, 90 hours a week, running it. Then some guy starts selling drugs in a booth. Every day. Same booth. Same guy. Same customers. Same drugs. There's a line out the door for him. He needs to setup shelves on the dinning table to show of his merch. He's there from open to close. Your normal, regular customers are disgusted and furious.

    So let the guy keep selling drugs in your restaurant?
    Well Blizzard is getting a cut through subs from bots at the minimum, so theres that. Your normal disgusted customers are still coming in and buying tons of food despite complaining about the dealer and his booth, the druggies are also there eating food and paying for it on top of the drugs. Your waiter comes in around the booth once in a while telling the dude to go away to appease the other customers. One big happy family.
  1. danki1337's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Low Hanging Fruit View Post
    Damage is beyond done. I was in a gdkp this weekend where HM items were going for 120 to 150k a pop. Most of them not even the god tier items. The leader had to rotate a damn alt in to collect pot percentages as they hit gold cap.

    I respect some people in the game are ULTRA wealthy. But to figure people can blow half a gold cap on single items and still be in the run expecting to by more is mind boggling. While many of those people certainly didn't buy all that gold they certainly profited from it. If just one of those guys bought 150k gold for example and got one of those 150k items that is 6kish gold everyone now earned of bought gold. Then, also, now that gold is pretty much clean. It exchanged hands in a way that cut it up between many parties legitimately and then started filtering into the economy is many different ways from the moment it exchanged hands. I wouldn't doubt if TONs of it filters right back, again "legitimately" now onto accounts that store it for future sells. So you sell it once when its dirty, it washes, you get a percent back clean that piles up and then even when ban waves come around you have tons of legit stock still waiting in the winds while you weather rebuilding the dirty parts of the business.

    I personally love gdkps. It is how I have geared a few alts that other wise wouldn't be played. It has made me a ton of gold in the process. But the truth is.. they are the mechanism that really allow the black market to maintain the illusion of being legit on so many fronts and on the backs of almost all legit players that don't do bad things besides try to gear alts and make gold the easiest way possible. I think they need to go. This problem will never slow down or become "normalized" as long as the stakes in gdkps keep going up because it creates an endless inflation cycle of needing more and more gold on an upward scale to continue. They are the actual cancer to the game. Gold buyers and sellers are just the result of it. No way in hell in original WOTLK many people were buying 100k gold a clip and needing it weekly. I know gold selling and buying has always been a thing and always will be. But gdkps have just made it to where its on an infinite need and scale. In the past people bought 5k so they could get epic flying. A few thousand to buy flasks and stuff for raids maybe. But now.. jeez.. all that stuff doesn't even matter its chump change.
    100% madeup facts 120k per item lmfao
  1. liyroot's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Chaotic1962 View Post
    Well Blizzard is getting a cut through subs from bots at the minimum, so theres that. Your normal disgusted customers are still coming in and buying tons of food despite complaining about the dealer and his booth, the druggies are also there eating food and paying for it on top of the drugs. Your waiter comes in around the booth once in a while telling the dude to go away to appease the other customers. One big happy family.
    It's interesting. They banned 120k bots. A minute later 120k new "players" sub. They either like bots or they are the most ineffectual game devs of all time. Do a /who in Botanica and you will see nothing has changed at all.
    Blizz is so blatantly ignoring bots. Gold farmers has invented a way to turn everything in the game into a cash shop item. That's the absolute dream for the money guys internally at Blizz. I just can't imagine why they would let Chinese farmers make hundreds of millions while also using the full power of their legal army to go after little private servers who make $0.
  1. Seiken3's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by liyroot View Post
    It's interesting. They banned 120k bots. A minute later 120k new "players" sub. They either like bots or they are the most ineffectual game devs of all time. Do a /who in Botanica and you will see nothing has changed at all.
    Blizz is so blatantly ignoring bots. Gold farmers has invented a way to turn everything in the game into a cash shop item. That's the absolute dream for the money guys internally at Blizz. I just can't imagine why they would let Chinese farmers make hundreds of millions while also using the full power of their legal army to go after little private servers who make $0.
    Lol I literally did /who Botanica a minute ago and came to the forum here to see if anyone else have done it or so. But yup, the bots are back at in botanica... They beat the system and I doubt they'll do anything for another proper half year... Tons of bots there still... its 5 am on a thursday night/friday morning here, and over 50 hits on DKs in botanica..
  1. liyroot's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Seiken3 View Post
    Lol I literally did /who Botanica a minute ago and came to the forum here to see if anyone else have done it or so. But yup, the bots are back at in botanica... They beat the system and I doubt they'll do anything for another proper half year... Tons of bots there still... its 5 am on a thursday night/friday morning here, and over 50 hits on DKs in botanica..
    I keep waiting to see what the pro blizzard people have to say about this, but I guess even they can't think of an excuse for blizz this time.
  1. Mysterymask's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by liyroot View Post
    Nah man. I work in software. And intern could write a script in 1, 2 days max that could easily detect anyone botting. And if a real programmer was given a week on the problem, you could have a deep learning AI easily detect bots. Truth is, Blizz is in bed with bots. Can't think of any other reason why they would let it go unless they are getting a cut.
    I mean if that was the case why is botting such a prominent problem in so many other games other than wow?
    Most MMOs have a bot problem wow's only so pronounced because its one of the bigger MMOs out there (like Fuck Lost Arc is apparently insane)
    So if larger companies like EA Bethesda and Square Enix have bot problems that can be easily solved by an intern ...what's up?
  1. shirokitsune's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Ssateneth View Post
    *snip* The only way to 100% know if someone was a bot would be highly intrusive scans into your computer system to check for known bot software. Make no mistake, Blizzard KNOWS what bot software is out there, but they are currently limited to scans within the game's own memory space, and it's not as simple as checking for foreign data in the memory space since MANY apps inject their own data into WoW's memory space. More popular apps like Discord and AMD/NVIDIA driver onscreen overlays do this, but less obvious apps like 7-Zip also do this, which is a file compression app. It wouldn't be practical to do a whitelist style anti-cheat. Bot software creators also implement all sorts of obfuscation to hide themselves from anti-cheat.*snip*
    Got some bad news for you, spend some time watching the battle.net launcher and associated processes like agent with a resource monitor/task manager. You're going to find it at the very least maps the entire drive that WoW is installed on, plus any other drive that has a title on it of theirs. Could be wrong in that's why it's accessing them all, but unless you have a better reason for them systematically going through your directory tree and each file in it I'm going to go with that no, they aren't just looking at memory spaces. And before someone goes, oh they're just looking at their files to check if they need updates, note I said they map the ENTIRE drive including things like steam games, and anything else on that drive.
  1. liyroot's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Mysterymask View Post
    I mean if that was the case why is botting such a prominent problem in so many other games other than wow?
    Most MMOs have a bot problem wow's only so pronounced because its one of the bigger MMOs out there (like Fuck Lost Arc is apparently insane)
    So if larger companies like EA Bethesda and Square Enix have bot problems that can be easily solved by an intern ...what's up?
    That's a good point. Too bad there are no numbers to look at here.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by Ssateneth View Post
    snipped * The only way to 100% know if someone was a bot would be highly intrusive scans into your computer system *
    So let's look. Take the Botanica. The bots are wall clipping. That's cheating & against ToS. So you just watch some of the bots. The botting system they are using is a bunch of software, but the core of it looks like it's a hardcoded path. So you could run a script on the backend that looks at anyone who is in the botanica alone, not taking damage, and collecting [insert item]. Put them in a list and then log their X,Y,Z positions. You could just snapshot them every 30 seconds or 1 min. After a day or 2 or a week, w/e you want, if you take those XYZ's, see who is wall clipping and add all the people on the *potential bot* list.
    If they are all doing almost the exact behaviour you slap them with a ToS violation and give them a 1 hour ban or something. Then you check who fights back on that. Anyone who appeals gets instantly unbanned. Run the most simple bot-hunting script that I just thought of in 5 mins again. Apply exponentially longer bans on repeat violators.

    Buying gold is also against ToS. You could say, "In order to fight botting and maintain the original classic wow experience for our players, trading gold is now locked to 5000 gold per week, account wide".

    Idk, you could do something..
  1. Mysterymask's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by liyroot View Post
    That's a good point. Too bad there are no numbers to look at here.
    Because the problem is 3 fold

    1. There is a demand for bots as much as people hate them the demand for what bots do is there and high enough to justify doing it in the first place. Either because people are lazy and don't wanna grind or they just want to buy gold.
    2. There is no alternative to buying gold. The token isn't perfect but it DEFINTELY put a dent in a lot of the botting in Retail with the upside that players who farm gold can trade it for game time and essentially play for free.
    3. Like most viruses and other nefarious things the botting market moves faster than the anti-bot market. Its not feasible to have someone watch every single server/shard/phase/region to find bots and as been shown they make accounts faster than Blizz can ban them and any way to stop this would be borderline Draconian.
  1. Dioporco's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Itisamuh View Post
    Only in your dreams.
    Lets see the data then








    ah you cant prove it, sadly.

    - - - Updated - - -



    total pop on classic across 3 xpac is 450k



    First Vault Boss Normal has been killed 16010 times across all regions and an average raid is 20 man so -> 320k


    450k > 320k


    stay mad
  1. Mysterymask's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Dioporco View Post
    Lets see the data then








    ah you cant prove it, sadly.

    total pop on classic across 3 xpac is 450k
    First Vault Boss Normal has been killed 16010 times across all regions and an average raid is 20 man so -> 320k


    450k > 320k


    stay mad
    The only thing you proved is less people raid in retail than there is in classic? And neither of those account for bots and and stuff

    We already know a ton of people who play retail these days barely touch the raid thanks to M+, much more complicated raids and folks just not wanting to deal with the requirements to actually raid meanwhile the classic audience goes back for the nostalgia and the older raids are part of that
  1. anon5123's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Ssateneth View Post
    None of those reasons you quotes are 100% evidence that someone is a bot.
    I never said they were 100% evidence.

    But there is approximately 0.000001% chance that a level 80 DK named Wkfhsbwjd who is not in a guild and spends 22 hours a day in maraudon, is a real player

    I never said to just insta-ban anyone who fits those descriptions. The actual process is to FLAG those accounts for further review, and depending on how many flags the player/account put up, decide on how closely to inspect from there.

    Quote Originally Posted by Ssateneth View Post
    The only way to 100% know if someone was a bot would be highly intrusive scans into your computer system
    lmao
    not even close

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