Blizzard response to botting

[Deleted]

Out of interest, when was the last huge wave?

They did mass ban weaves in vanilla and tbc. Then merge with Activision happened and good uncle Kotick explained to Blizzard that banning paying customers is bad for business. Since then botting bloomed. Now when botting is widely accepted by community and bragging about it is nothing uncommon, we got random BGs with more than half participants being bots, and it is worse outside of prime time.

[Perfectdoll]

Good on you, OP. Ignore the people telling you you're a shitty friend for reporting him.

[Kuja]

I'd do the same thing if he was botting 24/7 and ignored my warnings. If he did it in moderation, then I'd have no problems with it.

[Styx1992]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6Io6XBRRUs

We can dance if we want to
We can leave your friends behind
'Cause your friends don't dance and if they don't dance
Well they're no friends of mine

That is all!

[alkyd]

If you report your friend, then he is not your friend anymore.

[kopcap]

Ignore the haters OP, a bunch of high pony 5 year olds.

[Deleted]

read report > investigate player > obtain evidence > investigate bot program > invest time in breaking it on their systems > test the fix > deploy the patch world wide > begin the ban wave.

You think all this happens in a matter of days. Guess you have never been part of the development of anything.

[kaamila]

ive reported dozens of obvious bots in bgs/farming and nothing ever gets done so i stopped caring

[Thelxi]

You guys obviously know nothing about botting.

Personally I can think of one program (not going to say the same) that I personally use to bot on another account, that blizzard is in a legal battle with right now. Blizzard doesn't ban actual programs anymore, because blizzard has no way of knowing what program you are using. It has been said before and I will say it again, it is against the law for them to monitor memory usage of other programs on your computer. They patriot act doesn't mean they get to tap our shit too.
Yes the warden is there to weed out the idiots that use old programs because the warden blocks certain change in code. This is the reason botting is still be used by people today. Botting doesn't change coding of the game or alter server side coding. It uses controls on your own computer and the click to move method that is IMPLEMENTED in the game.
Now if you were to try and use something like a speed hack or a emulator, or even cheat engine; than you would get banned. When your client doesn't match with the server side packets is when the warden says "the fuck is this guy doin?"

tl;dr
Blizzard doesnt ban programs because they have no way of knowing what you are using. It's illegal for them to do that. Quit being stupid.

EDIT : If any of you know anything about botting also, you would know the easiest ways to actually get caught, which profiles get you caught faster, and when and where to bot.
Also Blizzards only way of fighting back at the herb/mining botters was to lower the node count and make them respawn less often, making it a bitch for actual farmers or botters to obtain herbs and ore.

Anyone with a brain can spot the bot train in all AM bgs, and anyone with half a brain can see the pile of skeletons at the repair vendor in front of the botanica.

Blizzard's problem is them being unable to automatically and magically ban all bots forever and ever on a tight budget.

[gongmonk]

It's a 10 years old game...give it a rest.

[foxHeart]

You act like I sentenced him to the fiery pits of hell for eternity. I asked that he simply be discouraged from doing it again, he hasnt been harmed in any way

And your say has absolutely nothing to do with how he is punished. Do you really, really think that for a second just because you're his "friend" and that you asked for leniency that the GMs will give a single fuck about your opinion when it comes to banning him if he's found guilty?

[Kuja]

This is very silly of them. When I reported 150 ish bots that were farming Botanica and Halls of Lightning 24/7, I got the same response, that I have to click every last one of them and file an INDIVIDUAL REPORT. Like hell I will

[Gimlix]

There are some grammar mistakes in the response, I feel like this is written by you x)

[Aboubacar]

Gotta love the community that is completely ok with people cheating and do whatever they want because "the problem is everyone has to stop" - guess what? won't happen as long as 90% seem to be ok with it.
YOU GUYS don't report them because they're your "friends"
YOU GUYS discourage people who actually do report cheaters by insulting them
YOU GUYS send the message cheating is ok.
Blizz doesn't.



There's absolutely no difference. You either cheat and deserve a ban or you don't.

I'm just indifferent to it now. Like everyone else I know the effect it has on the game, I've tried in the past to get it to stop, it didn't and i can't be bothered to care or keep trying. Like I said others have probably given up too and after so long of nothing changing to stop it by Blizzard people just start thinking "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em"

Bots are the absolute worst thing for the game, it's worse than account sharing, some angry kid cursing in trade, etc. etc., but it's the least acted upon offense and they need to crack down on it. They probably won't and I don't really care anymore. I can't even be bothered to report the bots because it changes nothing until Blizzard gets more aggressive w/ their anti-botting actions.

The community will never stamp out botting on its own. Even if everyone stopped botting out of the goodness of their hearts (lol) there would still be business interests doing it (ie foreign gold farmers)

[Deleted]

The community will never stamp out botting on its own. Even if everyone stopped botting out of the goodness of their hearts (lol) there would still be business interests doing it (ie foreign gold farmers)

Because some shitty cheaters BUY THEIR STUFF. If the community wouldn't fucking cheat there wouldn't be RMT sites. end of story

[Maximus345]

I think a lot of people unfortunately are choosing to assume Blizzard isn't doing anything about bots, purely because they don't put out a newsletter specifically describing what they've done and how many bots they're removed.

This is at the root of many discussions (read: venting sessions) about bots that I've read over the years--it's usually one guy declaring "I reported a guy for botting and his account didn't immediately explode" or "I logged in and there's still bots" and then everyone high fives each other for "figuring out" that Blizzard hasn't been doing anything about the problem.

The reality here is probably that Blizzard's teams are constantly working against bots, but they aren't giving us progress updates and it's also unrealistic to expect the complete eradication of bots from WoW.

[Ronduwil]

I am starting to wonder, could they be deliberately ignoring cheaters to avoid losing subs by banning people? Is this GM actually helpless to do anything about it?

Sort of. Blizzard is reluctant to ban people because they lose money when they do that, but they will also tell you that they tend to ban people in waves in order to maximize the number of perpetrators that they can catch because if they banned each botter the minute they caught them they would adapt to Blizzard's bot detection algorithms too quickly. This is pure speculation on my part, but I wouldn't be surprised if these banning waves didn't happen to fall the week after the quarterly results were reported.

[Deleted]

You reported your own friend? That's.. really shitty of you.

He's really shitty for being a bad contributor to an already falling community. If a friend of mine was botting, I'd definitely report him. Being my friend though, I would tell him about it so he had a chance to remove the bot first.

[Frizzlewits]

i have reported online friends for botting, cheating
bad naming ect ect....
just cuz they are online friends, not even RL friends. half of them i never liked them either :P

OT: it might take a few months of half a year, or even an year. but your friend will get permabanned at some point during his game time. cuz he is botting.

as pointed out by above posters

[NatePsy]

Ive been an admin for years on various games, being my friend never saved anyone, people get what they earn

pservers doesn't count.