WoW Classic - Thank You For Your Reports

[arr0gance]

The best part about this is the reason this is a bigger issue now is due to NetEase (China's WoW distributor) cracking down on domestic botting; thereby making it financially more lucrative to bot on NA/EU servers by a magnitude of 7 to 8 times. Granted, they do have the WoW token for Classic which helps alleviate some of the supply/demand concerns but one has to wonder if a similar solution would be necessary to fix the problem in the West.

[Kanegasi]

It's not that Blizzard is doing "literally nothing," it's that they aren't doing enough in a reasonable time frame. Your anecdote is an absolutely inexcusable amount of time to finally get around to banning bots. YEARS to stop blatant bot activity is not defensible for a company the size of Blizzard, with all their resources. That is an absurd thing to defend.



This is an extremely poor analogy of medicine, and implies that we never treat the symptoms unless we plan to entirely wipe out the whole infection in one fel swoop, or such. Yikes. This argument only kind of works on the angle of breaking bots, but not on the angle of banning them and limiting their impact. Banning botters doesn't mean that you have to wipe out the bot itself. That would be akin to saying you won't arrest any low level gang members, because it means nothing without getting the boss; like taking that individual out of the equation doesn't still make an impact. The point is that intermediate actions can be taken to limit the impact of these people, which is what the community ultimately wants. Most people know that some form of hacking, botting, or cheating is always going to exist in some measure in the game - it's impossible to stop everything full force. However, the activity has ramped up dramatically in the last several years, becoming more and more obvious, and with seemingly little action in response from Blizzard to deal with it. Waiting for years to see any action, which you seem to think is fine, doesn't even help the players or community in the long run. The damage is already done by that point, the raw gold already long since sold off and circulated in the economy, the leather and herbs already harvested and sold, etc., and only more damage will be done daily until action is actually taken.

Okay.

oh the irony of calling me naive when you actualy think this is not a profit move by blizz,they would lose atleast half the sub base by baning bots,the day they start baning bots as they detect them is the day wow goes bankrupt

No, not really.

[arr0gance]

oh the irony of calling me naive when you actualy think this is not a profit move by blizz,they would lose atleast half the sub base by baning bots,the day they start baning bots as they detect them is the day wow goes bankrupt

"Half the sub base is bots," is that really the sword you want to die on? Come on, now. I don't even like Classic that much but even I understand how impossibly ludicrous this statement is.

[deenman]

"Half the sub base is bots," is that really the sword you want to die on? Come on, now. I don't even like Classic that much but even I understand how impossibly ludicrous this statement is.

its not just classic,the sun over nazjatar is blot out by all the druid multibox bots picking flowers

[arr0gance]

its not just classic,the sun over nazjatar is blot out by all the druid multibox bots picking flowers

You are grossly overstating the impact of botters on WoW's subscriber bottom line.

[Alcsaar]

"They spent a ton of cash in another country". Lmao. They made 8.5 million dollars in that lawsuit.

They were awarded a judgement of 8.5 million dollars, doesn't mean they'll actually see a dime from Bossland.

[xazrael]

I understand if it is PVP botting, or something that prevents other players from content (bots farming all lotus') but I don't really understand why people hate bots that operate on a 1 player sense.

Like why be upset if player A botted to 1000 for the epic mount, when you grinded it by hand? Because they got something easier than you did? I prefer to see it as "work smarter, not harder".

IMO, it becomes a problem once they start selling gold to others. That should be the misconduct that is focused on here.

And don't start with the "botting hurts the economy". No it doesn't. In fact, most of the time, it helps it.

[Monkiy]

Like why be upset if player A botted to 1000 for the epic mount, when you grinded it by hand? Because they got something easier than you did? I prefer to see it as "work smarter, not harder".

The fact that you think getting a program to do the work for you counts as the "work" part of work smarter, is the issue. You aren't just not working smarter, you aren't working at all. That's the point.

[SniperCT]

It doesn't matter what game it is, in every MMO I've played I see a thread about botters and there's always some people saying the company isn't doing anything because they want the subs from the botters.

Handling botters is probably way more complicated than any of us know. I'm on the side that they probably want to make sure that they catch as many as possible plus also figure out how to prevent it.

[Mendzia]

There were and always be small % of playebase botting. It will probably never change.
The problem is when you see the exactly same 'person' at the same place killing same mobs after 5 days and multiple reports... you really think that Blizzard does not give a shit at all.
Some of these cases are sooo obvious dude. And this is the reason why it hurts normal playerbase so much. It takes 3 sec to be sure they are botting.
'Investing' literally one employee that focuses banning the 'obvious' ones would be simpliest solution.

[Kuja]

Right-click reporting a player for cheating is the best way you can participate in our speedily removing bot accounts

"Speedily". I have visited many of the bot infested places and right clicked a hundred different bots to report them, yet they are still there after months. Surely they can offer a more efficient way of reporting hundreds of bots at a time. It's almost like work having to click so many players one at a time. And especially if nothing is done about them, it's just waste of time.

Or then they don't care about retail botting, if botting is not allowed on classic only.

[meheez]

lol i wonder how many report just random real players

[Mirishka]

And this is the short way to say "I have no idea what Im talking about".

Damn, beat me to it.

[Mysterymask]

"They spent a ton of cash in another country". Lmao. They made 8.5 million dollars in that lawsuit.

...chances are about 7.9 million of that went to the lawyers and court costs...plus pretty unlikely they actually GOT that money

Which is honestly couch cash to blizzard

[Luihu]

It seems like everybody in this day and age want instant results. They think nothing is happening when their action results in nothing they can see. Bots are still there 5 minutes after a report? Blizzard must be doing nothing!

Not reporting because you think it does nothing is the same as not voting because you think it does nothing. It's doing nothing because many other people think it does nothing and also don't report. If everyone votes, things eventually happen. If everyone reports, things eventually happen.

I don't expect bots to vanish right after a report, but I actually expect them to vanish and this just isnt happening right now. I've reported multiple bots at levels below 5 and months later they are still in stratholme farming almost 24/7. I still report every bot I come across, but I dont expect anything to happen because of it. I've also heard that best way to get results is to send email to hacks@blizzard.com with screenshots/video, but honestly if I would do that with every bot I see, I wouldnt be able to play the game because all my free time would be spent making emails.

Blizzards host over at china just banned over 100k bots, you can just guess where those bots went after that. Month of gametime in these countries costs about 5 dollars, in the time they get banned they could literally buy thousands of new accounts with the money they make. Like with Venezuelans and OSRS where gold sellers were making more than doctors in their country, we are talking about this kind of money.

Also in the WillE video he talking about the hacker who send him the ZG noclip herbing clip and how he had been doing it since classic release with no bans. So yeah, at this point it really seems like that someone forgot to enable anti-cheat in the classic client.

[Unholyground]

They could stop the bot issues by making a proprietary botting system you can pay for and have your character do things with certain limits while you aren't playing, it would make the game world feel more alive too as you would see more people. you would have to make it clear that a player is not in control while it is active.

[Triggered Fridgekin]

They've done nothing and they're all out of idea.

[Mamut]

oh the irony of calling me naive when you actualy think this is not a profit move by blizz,they would lose atleast half the sub base by baning bots,the day they start baning bots as they detect them is the day wow goes bankrupt

Nah, 99,9% are bots, actually its only 1 real person playing WoW and its me

Really, why people like to make yourself look like fool with those statements?