Actions Taken to Address Exploitative Gameplay, Torghast Update, Silithus Stress Test

[Stoy]

Actions Taken to Address Exploitative Gameplay

We’ve recently completed a round of actions against players who were found to be cheating in World of Warcraft.

We rarely communicate publicly about this, because we’ve found that describing our sources and methods can make it easier for malicious actors to work around them, but we feel that it’s worthwhile to expand on the subject today, as many players have recently asked us for more details.

Including today’s actions, over the last month in the Americas, Oceania, and Europe regions, we’ve closed or suspended over 74,000 WoW accounts that were found to be in violation of our End-User License Agreement. The majority of these were found to be using gameplay automation tools, typically to farm resources or kill enemies much more efficiently than legitimate players can.

While today’s suspensions were applied in a batch (often referred to as a “banwave”), it is a top priority for us to identify accounts that are botting and remove them. Our team works around the clock, every day of the week, and many of the suspensions and account closures over the last few months have gone out in the middle of the night, or on weekends.

Like you, we play World of Warcraft. We understand what it’s like to spot a player in-game who appears to be botting. We always want to eliminate the botting player, if it can be proved that they are indeed cheating. And that raises a big difficulty in addressing this issue – we have to prove to ourselves that the accused player is not a person who’s actually controlling a character with their hands on a keyboard.

We use powerful systems to determine if the suspected player is using an identifiable cheat, and our heuristics (which we do not outline publicly) are constantly improving and evolving. But when we examine a suspect and these measurements aren’t out of line, we have to manually gather evidence against the accused player, which can be very time consuming and complex. It’s worthwhile though, because we never want to take action against a legitimate player.
Yes, there have been cases where a legitimate player appeared (to another player) to be botting. In those cases, where a legitimate player is reported and then cleared of wrongdoing, it can be very frustrating to the reporting player to again see what they think is a bot. We’ve also seen examples where the reported player was caught exploiting the game, and was removed from the game, and then quickly returned to doing the same thing on a new account with the same character name. That’s an infuriating sight for the players who initially reported it. We greatly appreciate your reports, and we understand how you feel about this.

We’re ultimately working to unravel a challenging circumstance. Real money trading drives third parties to put an enormous amount of effort into circumventing our detection systems. As much as this is a very high priority for us, it is the only priority for profit-driven botting organizations. The bans we issue are simply a cost of doing business for them.

We’re working on further improvements to every part of the game that might address cheating issues more swiftly and completely, and we’ll continue to let you know as those next steps are taken.

Thank you very much for your feedback on these issues, and thank you for your reports!

Torghast, Tower of the Damned Updates

• The magnitude of the Tower Sentinel’s slowing effect is now greatly reduced when far away from the Sentinel.
• A number of classes have received new Anima and/or updated Powers.
• This week’s build includes numerous bug fixes and small tweaks.

Reminder - Silithus Stress Test Tomorrow - Thursday, June 18

Please join us tomorrow, June 18, on the WoW Classic PTR for a stress test. We’ll turn our attention to Silithus on the PTR at about 2:00 p.m. PDT, and the stress test will begin at 3:00 p.m. PDT (6:00 p.m. EDT).

Check out all of the details here.

Thank you!

[Mysterymask]

Incoming posts!

* Welp Blizz does care

* I WAS WRONGLY BANNED I DONT BOT/USE THIS PROGRAM BECAUSE (REASON)

*Theres still bots....wow is dying

*AMG blizz is ruining game for legit players

[oldgeezer]

Good job on the banwave Blizz. Keep those salty botter tears flowing.

[Cracked]

If your game is easily bottable with high efficiency, it's just too easy. Too bad we cant change classic tho.

[thunderdragon2]

If your game is easily bottable with high efficiency, it's just too easy. Too bad we cant change classic tho.

yyou really haven't seen the classic forums have you?

they literally just announced a cap of 30 instance id per realm

[dacoolist]

Incoming posts!

* Welp Blizz does care

* I WAS WRONGLY BANNED I DONT BOT/USE THIS PROGRAM BECAUSE (REASON)

*Theres still bots....wow is dying

*AMG blizz is ruining game for legit players

This is absolutely exactly what’s about to happen hahaha

[Surfd]

If your game is easily bottable with high efficiency, it's just too easy. Too bad we cant change classic tho.

What year do you think this is? 1990? Pick literally any game you could name, I bet someone with a decent grasp of the software used for modern botting could make a bot that plays the game better than 90% of the playerbase does in a week.

[Gref]

I know its not against tos but i wish they would stop with multiboxing. seeing 5 druids home in to a herb or mine looks ridiculous. also the economy.
not that I care too much, been living with them since classic.

[Zenier]

Time to go and farm some herbs again and to see whether it is any better. I think they should just instantiate all herbs to be personal (with some zone-wide quotas and other measurements/stuff or something to keep things in check - low/high population servers have wildly different economies after all), or that you can't pick herbs/ores while in raid group or you can't pick herbs/ore while server hopping. Last one is extremely infuriating because people from high pop servers come to multibox on low pop servers and effectively steal gatherables from the server economy to feed bigger economies.

[callipygoustp]

Between the bans and the changes to the AH.... game is looking a little better.

[furydeath]

wow 74,000 players meanwhile china bans 124,000 in one week

[HitRefresh]

wow 74,000 players meanwhile china bans 124,000 in one week

There are way more Chinese players, as well as way more gold farmers there.

[OokOok]

The last bot ban wave they announced was almost a year ago. And that's fine, I grasp they have a system where they want to ban everyone at once so they can possibly catch a system they're all using. That's cool.
The issue is, by the time the ban wave actually happens, these bot accounts which most are gold farmers/sellers, have sold their gold and made their money and the people who bought it have now put it into the economy which fucks up the economy. Blizzard also bans ACCOUNTS, not IPs/Machine IDs. They do this for a reason, because these people will go and buy a new account. Blizzard then makes money from these bans.
It's like being a cop and watching drug dealers peddling drugs into your city for a year so you can catch the drug kingpins, the drugs are already in the streets. Then after you catch him, you only put him in a jail for a year so you can arrest him again in a year and make another headline.

I also wouldn't be surprised at this point if blizzard gets a profit from these gold sellers, WOW is one of the only MMO's where I see the company publicly announce shit like 70,000+ botters banned. Yet....gold spamming/selling is still at an all time high.

[Drusin]

Blizzard also bans ACCOUNTS, not IPs/Machine IDs

How do IPs work? Do I have an IP address forever or will I eventually be given a new IP address and someone else gets my old one? What if they play wow and suddenly find themselves banned?

[Mendzia]

Good to finally see this but i've been in Silithus yesterday and had to report like 5-6 bots killing earth elementals in Thundeeran place alone... Not sure if today it will be better. Have to check it after work.
Blizzard if you really want to fight bots please stop doing banwaves and focus on banning continuously all the time.
I've seen several posts on cheating sites where these dogshit people were ready for wave... and now say that it is fine because after that they won't be bannad again for several months between waves.

Anyway good to finally see this post from them, gj!

[Thes]

Blizzard also bans ACCOUNTS, not IPs/Machine IDs. They do this for a reason, because these people will go and buy a new account. Blizzard then makes money from these bans.

You can't really ban IP addresses because people may share an IP and hardware id is easy to spoof so it really does nothing.

[Strawberry]

Blizzard really need to add automation in game.
Like auto grinding, auto questing, etc. Like good old Honorbuddy.
The mentality on MMORPGs is vastly different now compared to 2005.
If you like to manually level 10 alts and don't mind repetition, then that's fine.
But I want sometimes to quest manually, most of the time let the bot do the job. Paid boost just boosts you.

No i didn't get banned.

[Dreen]

Kind of hilarious that this happens a few hours after asmongold did his big "bot report stream" where he basically complained for hours about bots taking over the game, why dont they just fix and balance evrything based off youtubers, twitch streamers and reddit threads, seems like thats their main focus on receiving feedback right now

[MrLoque]

Nothing new under the sun. I doubt it even exists a game without cheaters and bots. As long as competition and money are involved we will always have to deal with it. Some companies (claim to) care more than others but still... Both the ingame economy and the user experience will always be affected, sooner or later. I suspect most of the mobile games are pure trash in terms of fairness and cheaters..

[HitRefresh]

You can't really ban IP addresses because people may share an IP and hardware id is easy to spoof so it really does nothing.

To add, machine ID banning can be problematic for people who play on public machines, or share a machine (like a family) with others who are not breaking rules. There's also the possibility of getting a second hand machine, like an otherwise perfectly fine laptop off eBay. A lot of people in other countries use public machines in internet cafes.

- - - Updated - - -

Blizzard really need to add automation in game.
Like auto grinding, auto questing, etc. Like good old Honorbuddy.
The mentality on MMORPGs is vastly different now compared to 2005.
If you like to manually level 10 alts and don't mind repetition, then that's fine.
But I want sometimes to quest manually, most of the time let the bot do the job. Paid boost just boosts you.

No i didn't get banned.

Why even play? I don't understand this mentality.