Bots Taking Over Shadowlands! Asmongold Leads a Protest on Every WoW Server

[Ryzeth]

His job is entertaining and make people watch him. Obviously very successful. Why does it matter to you how he does it?

Don't overthink what I said, champ.

[fwc577]

Such as...?

They could start with eliminating force-spawning in old-content areas. That would go a long way toward solving the immediate problem that we see in the video I originally posted.

You could have GMs go server to server and run a /who on certain zones and investigate.

I'm currently on Tichondrius. I see 5 druids in Nazmir and 10 druids in Iron Docks. I doubt any of them are legitimate. EZ Bans if a GM ports over and looks at what they're doing.

The bots work via getting consistent loot. They only make like 5k / hour. But they farm 24 hours a day which is 120k / day. They farm for 7 days a week which is 840,000g per week. Assuming the accounts last two weeks before getting hit with the ban hammer, each account is pulling in 1.7 million gold before it gets banned.

You then spend like 300k and you now have a new account.

Total profit = 1.4m gold in two weeks.

You run 20 bots on one machine with rock-bottom settings and no mods?

That's 28 million gold in two weeks.

You sell your gold, $15 for 100,000g?

That's $4,200 every two weeks.

That's 1 machine running for two weeks.

Add 5 more machines, you're making $21,000 in two weeks.

It might not all sell right away, but eventually, it will sell. World first raiders like Skripe admitted to buying gold from Gallywix for the previous WF race.

And as long as Blizz has the stupid AH thing with the tokens, people who want to buy a bunch of gold for anything and need it quick, will end up buying it from RMTers who charge prices barely under Blizz.

[caervek]

Fahrenheit users is a tiny minority at this point - we're talking about 5% or less.

Before Covid it was 4.25% of the worlds population, however that will probably be slightly lower now.

[Ielenia]

They could start with eliminating force-spawning in old-content areas.

That's not a viable strategy. There has to be an investigation to make sure the character is botting. That investigation is not just to make sure the character is botting, but also to find out how the character is botting and protect the game against it. Immediately banning the player's accounts would just help those that create those bots to upgrade their bots.

You could have GMs go server to server and run a /who on certain zones and investigate.

In other words, hire more people just to keep going from server to server doing "/who"s and observing?

I'm currently on Tichondrius. I see 5 druids in Nazmir and 10 druids in Iron Docks. I doubt any of them are legitimate. EZ Bans if a GM ports over and looks at what they're doing.

It's not "GG EZ". It's just "looking". There has to be an investigation, so they don't ban unjustly.

And as long as Blizz has the stupid AH thing with the tokens, people who want to buy a bunch of gold for anything and need it quick, will end up buying it from RMTers who charge prices barely under Blizz.

Real Money Traders existed long before the WoW Tokens were implemented, and will still exist even if the feature were to disappear tomorrow.

[rrayy]

Nobody needs to prove anything.
This isn't a court room. Blizz has the right to ban you for literally anything. This is their private property.

Did you watch the video at all or are you speaking with complete disregard to the actual situation?

Blizzard could literally blanket perm-ban every single balance druid doing their 'perfectly executed pathing with multiple characters' and nobody would care.

If you happen to be a droid and somehow can pull off perfect pathing in straight lines for an extended amount of time you can then manually contest the ban on the available Blizzard support channel.
There Blizz will look more deeply into your situation and then un-ban you.
1) Actual bots will not ask for this and even if they did they'd be caught.
2) The false-positives in this situation would be so astronomically low (unless more than half of every dozen druids are droids irl) that it wouldn't matter and Blizz could easily deal with that many ban appeals.

Now go and watch the video. Thanks.

But BLizard does because 1)they want to break the actual bot, not get into a sticky situation where they banned innocent people. ALso, you example prove my point., Those blanket bans do nothing because they while new accounts and start botting again. They have to break the bot. That is why they make sure it actually is a bot. So they can break it. I am glad you are not running the game because you would never stop the botting since you won't bother doing anything to the actual botting software.

[fwc577]

That's not a viable strategy. There has to be an investigation to make sure the character is botting. That investigation is not just to make sure the character is botting, but also to find out how the character is botting and protect the game against it. Immediately banning the player's accounts would just help those that create those bots to upgrade their bots.

Okay? That literally has nothing to do with my suggestion.

In other words, hire more people just to keep going from server to server doing "/who"s and observing?

I'm sorry. I forgot that Blizzard is a multi-dollar company and cannot afford nice things like staff.

It's not "GG EZ". It's just "looking". There has to be an investigation, so they don't ban unjustly.

You really don't need to do that much investigation. It is quite obvious when it's a bot as opposed to a person. In some cases, the GM can literally teleport the bot to somewhere that might get them stuck. For example, there were some of the bots in Warmode on Isle of Thunder. If you kill them. They just run back. If you keep killing them. They temporarily stop and stealth / hide.

Then I moved to mind controlling them and putting them inside of a tent at which point, they couldn't get out of the tent and would continue running and bouncing into walls.

I DID THIS WITH MY OWN CHARACTER AND NOT WITH THE TOOLS AVAILABLE TO A GM THAT CAN ASSIST THEM IN INVESTIGATING.

I really question the motives of some of you people who are so adamant that POSSIBLY inconveniencing one person with a temp-ban that might get overturned if they challenge it to combat a systemic problem within the game that screws up the economy to the detriment of the ENTIRE PLAYER BASE as a justification that they shouldn't work to do more.

Real Money Traders existed long before the WoW Tokens were implemented, and will still exist even if the feature were to disappear tomorrow.

Wow, really, omg, I didn't know that as if I hadn't been playing the game and a member of this forum for over 10 years.

The point of the token was to combat RMT. There is a market for people who want to buy gold and Blizzard released the token in hopes it would kill that market.

The problem is that 15 years of working on bot detection algorithms and 5 years of the WoW token being around and botting seems worse than ever.

- - - Updated - - -

But BLizard does because 1)they want to break the actual bot, not get into a sticky situation where they banned innocent people. ALso, you example prove my point., Those blanket bans do nothing because they while new accounts and start botting again. They have to break the bot. That is why they make sure it actually is a bot. So they can break it. I am glad you are not running the game because you would never stop the botting since you won't bother doing anything to the actual botting software.

It's been 15+ years. The bots still exist. The war needs to be waged differently.


Also,

I am glad you are not running the game because you would never stop the botting

Blizzard is running the game and they're gigantic fucking failues.

Can we get an f in chat for rrayy's argument?

[Ielenia]

I'm sorry. I forgot that Blizzard is a multi-dollar company and cannot afford nice things like staff.

Being a "multi-million dollar company" does not mean they have the resources to spend willy-nilly like that. I mean, Blizzard could have one janitor for every single room in their company building. But they don't. I wonder why.

You really don't need to do that much investigation. It is quite obvious when it's a bot as opposed to a person.

It's not always "obvious". And as I pointed out, Blizzard doesn't just want to ban the botter. They also want to find out how they're botting and what programs they're using so they can try to find a way to protect the game from said malicious programs.

Wow, really, omg, I didn't know that as if I hadn't been playing the game and a member of this forum for over 10 years.

The point of the token was to combat RMT. There is a market for people who want to buy gold and Blizzard released the token in hopes it would kill that market.

The problem is that 15 years of working on bot detection algorithms and 5 years of the WoW token being around and botting seems worse than ever.

It's nowhere near "worse than ever".

[Thelxi]

Being a "multi-million dollar company" does not mean they have the resources to spend willy-nilly like that. I mean, Blizzard could have one janitor for every single room in their company building. But they don't. I wonder why.


It's not always "obvious". And as I pointed out, Blizzard doesn't just want to ban the botter. They also want to find out how they're botting and what programs they're using so they can try to find a way to protect the game from said malicious programs.


It's nowhere near "worse than ever".

Apologizing for a corporation is pretty pathetic. Blizzard absolutely does have the resources to manually sheer the most obvious cases. They never have and still don't.

As long as there is no danger of consequence, people will cheat. For YEARS there were blatant bot trains in random BGs, all using the same bot program with the bots all on the same pathing. It was extremely obvious, but you would see people with glad titles and 20k+ achievement points part of the bot trains with not a worry in the world about their account. It wasn't until YEARS LATER when Blizzard LOST a lawsuit against the company behind this botting program that they started banning people, in waves, for six months.

Regurgitating their corporate talking points of having to "investigate" and "not enough resources" is, again, pathetic. They could easily employ a couple of people full-time to detect and ban cheaters, not just to clean up the game, but to establish some danger to people's accounts who cheat. Instead, they go with "efficient" banwaves that occasionally slap the masses on the wrist, while collecting legal information and subscription money.

[Ielenia]

Apologizing for a corporation is pretty pathetic.

I'm not apologizing for anyone or anything. If stating facts of how businesses work and what they have to do to stay afloat offends you.

Blizzard absolutely does have the resources to manually sheer the most obvious cases. They never have and still don't.

Yeah. They do. And again: just because they have the resources doesn't mean they can spend it willy-nilly. You don't know how much they spend per month and how much they earn per month. You don't know their profit margin. If they get low profits, it displeases investors.

[fwc577]

I'm not apologizing for anyone or anything. If stating facts of how businesses work and what they have to do to stay afloat offends you.


Yeah. They do. And again: just because they have the resources doesn't mean they can spend it willy-nilly. You don't know how much they spend per month and how much they earn per month. You don't know their profit margin. If they get low profits, it displeases investors.

Activision Blizzard
Activision's headquarters in Santa Monica
Revenue US$6.489 billion (2019)
Operating income US$1.607 billion (2019)
Net income US$1.503 billion (2019)
Total assets US$19.845 billion (2019)


Took me 15 seconds on Google.

1.503 billion and we are talking hiring MAYBE 500k in admins to ban cheaters.

Blizzard is plenty fucking afloat ffs.

[Bisso]

ok so 1. what the fuck are the Boomkin actually doing? there's nothing of value there besides a world quest. also, at least at the start, it looks like they're taking over a small part of Nazmir not Shadowlands

gold. They find a spot that has Hyperspawn. Then just farm random mobs by running in circle throwing Moonfire and Starfall, collecting gold or gray items to sell. Asmongold actually inspects one of the premade level 50 boomkin that must be just a day or 2 old, and had already acquired 60k gold.

Now think about this, 30-60k per day, per bot. There is about 12-20 bots per spots, per server (you can server swap and see similar situation).

There are probably 20 good popular botting spots in BFA zones alone. There are some in Shadowlands, some in Legion. That's even without the bots going in dungeons (I think those might have died since the squish to ilvl).

I wouldn't be surprised that millions of gold are injected EVERYDAY on every realm.

[prwraith]

Lmao we've got a hardass over here. Probably only punched your little sister you feckless thug.

Huh, well way to take that up another notch I gues? gg? Hop off the asmo shrine my dude.

[fwc577]

gold. They find a spot that has Hyperspawn. Then just farm random mobs by running in circle throwing Moonfire and Starfall, collecting gold or gray items to sell. Asmongold actually inspects one of the premade level 50 boomkin that must be just a day or 2 old, and had already acquired 60k gold.

Now think about this, 30-60k per day, per bot. There is about 12-20 bots per spots, per server (you can server swap and see similar situation).

There are probably 20 good popular botting spots in BFA zones alone. There are some in Shadowlands, some in Legion. That's even without the bots going in dungeons (I think those might have died since the squish to ilvl).

I wouldn't be surprised that millions of gold are injected EVERYDAY on every realm.

Yup. I wanted to check this out myself.

Looking at a character right now in Nazmir:

Achievement Escape Exile's Reach on 12/23

Character hit level 50 on 12/28/2020

Comparing the Statistics between this toon who reached level 50 6 days ago compared to my toon I'm inspecting him with (Max level druid created two years ago)

Total gold acquired (2 year old character): 219,386
Total gold acquire (6 day old bot): 511,912
Creatures Killed (2 year old character): 24,693
Creatures Killed (6 day old bot): 206,907
Raw gold looted (2 year old character): 17,611
Raw gold looted (6 day old bot): 153,460
Gold from Vendors (2 year old character): 83,576g
Gold from Vendors (6 day old bot): 358,108g


These bots are at a 4x4 hyperspawn spot in Nazmir. None of them are actually from my server. They're a mix of Mage, Hunters, and Monks.

All the mages are doing is casting Flamestrike and then occasionally casting to create bandages.

Occasionally the hunter by the melee group feigns and mounts on vendor mammoth so everyone in the melee range can vendor. The monk is a Brewmaster Monk with an ox statue and switches between casting vivify and creating bandages.

Here is the level 50 ding of all 7 toons at this spot:

Mage 1 - 12/04/2020
Mage 2 - 12/28/2020
Mage 3 - 12/04/2020
Monk 1 - 12/28/2020
Hunter 1 - 12/06/2020
Hunter 2 - 12/03/2020
Hunter 3 - 12/03/2020

Looking at their guilds for ones available on the armory:
Guild 1 - 5 levels 50s and nobody higher
Guild 2 - 15 levels 50s and nobody higher
Guild 3 - 10 level 50s and nobody higher

All the levels 50s in these guilds contain only Mages, Hunters, and Monks. All these guilds have level 1 warriors (guessing the level 1s participate in some sort of RMT by getting gold to users or do some sort of advertisement).

So between the 3 guilds I can see, there are a total of 20 level 50 toons who all look like they're probably utilized for 4x4 bot farms. I went to their servers and checked to see and, wouldn't you know it, they're all online. Some in Vol'dun, Nazmir, and Tiragarde Sound.

It's pretty obvious none of these toons are legit. They've already managed to farm out millions and need to be banned immediately (but are likely going to be able to farm out millions more before anything is done).

There is work that can be done where you can take normal user behavior and find outliers, review those outliers, and ban bots. You're likely not going to accidentally ban people who are legitimate players.

It's 2:00 AM on my very high pop realm and I decided to do a few /who. This is the following counts for people who are exactly level 50 or either a Druid, Mage, Hunter, or Monk and sub-level 50 in one of these zones.

Horde Side:
Drustvar: 0 out of 2
Tiragarde Sound: 2 out of 2
Stormsong Valley: 0 out of 0
Nazjatar / Mechagon: 2 out of 5
Vol'dun: 4 out of 6
Nazmir: 11 out of 17
Zuldazar: 8 out of 27

All Level 50 Horde Toons:
Level 50 Death Knights Online: 4
Level 50 Paladins Online: 8
Level 50 Warriors Online: 5

Level 50 Hunters Online: 19
Level 50 Shamans Online: 3

Level 50 Demon Hunters Online: 7
Level 50 Druids Online: 39
Level 50 Monks Online: 5
Level 50 Rogues Online: 7

Level 50 Mages Online: 8
Level 50 Priests Online: 2
Level 50 Warlocks Online: 3

The 39 Druids are split between the following zones: Ardenweald (1), Bastion (2), Darkshore (2), Desolace (2), Escape from the Maw (4), Eye of Azshara (3), Iron Docks (9), Nazmir (5), Org (2), Oribos (2), Tirigarde Sound (2), Twilight Highlands (1), Vale of Eternal Blossoms (1), Vol'dun (3)
The 15 Hunters are split between the following zones: Escape from the Maw (4), Firelands (1), Icecrown (1), Org (6), Oribos (2), Winterspring (1), Zuldazar (2)

If I were a GM with this info, I would take a look at Nazmir and Zuldazar to see if players are concentrated together like in 4x4 farms. I would check out the druids in Eye of Azshara, Iron Docks, Nazmir, Tirigarde Sound, and Vol'dun.

Alliance Side:

Drustvar: 0 out of 1
Tiragarde Sound: 0 out of 0
Stormsong Valley: 0 out of 2
Nazjatar / Mechagon: 0 out of 0
Vol'dun: 0 out of 0
Nazmir: 1 out of 1
Zuldazar: 2 out of 2

All Level 50 Alliance Toons
Level 50 Death Knights Online: 0
Level 50 Paladins Online: 2
Level 50 Warriors Online: 1

Level 50 Hunters Online: 1
Level 50 Shamans Online: 2

Level 50 Demon Hunters Online: 1
Level 50 Druids Online: 44
Level 50 Monks Online: 0
Level 50 Rogues Online: 1

Level 50 Mages Online: 2
Level 50 Priests Online: 1
Level 50 Warlocks Online: 0

The 44 Druids are split between the following zones: Azsuna (25), Nazmir (1), Suramar (15), Oribos (3)

If I were a GM with this information, I would check out the druids in Azsuna, Nazmir, and Suramar.

"Classic" Dungeons (20 total): Scholo (1), SM (1), BRD (2), WC (1), All Others = 0
Burning Crusade Dungeons (16 total): MT (1), BM (1), BF (1), Underbog (1), All Others = 0
WotLK Dungeons (16 total): Skipping because of Timewalking
Cataclysm Dungeons (14 total): BRC (2), TVP (1), All Others = 0
MOP Dungeons (6 total): Siege of Niuzao Temple (1), All Others = 0
WOD Dungeons (8 total): Slag Mines (2), Iron Docks (7), All Others = 0 (note: All Iron Docks are level 50 druids)
Legion Dungeons (13 total): BRH (1), CoS (1), EoA (3), HoV (2), All Others = 0 (note: All Eye of Azshara are level 50 druids)
BFA Dungeons (11 total): AD (1), FH (2), SotS (2), ML (2), Underrot (3), TD (4), All Others = 0

Any dungeon with > 1 in the above list the levels and classes differ wildly except where noted. For example, in TD there is a 36 Druid, 40 DH, 49 Shaman, and 52 Paladin.

It's pretty obvious based on this information, that we can look at outliers in user behavior for suspected bots. Get a GM team to periodically review these users history. I'm willing to bet most of the people who would we be suspect of being bots have very little interaction with other users and are online for very long periods of time (possibly never logging out). And if you want to get technical, because maybe they are multiboxing with hardware or some shit that isn't against the TOS, they can still be banned for exploitation of the economy if all their doing is farming hyperspawns / dungeons hours upon hours on end without ever whispering another player and mailing all their gold to a toon on an entirely separate account.

[Mysterymask]

Activision Blizzard
Activision's headquarters in Santa Monica
Revenue US$6.489 billion (2019)
Operating income US$1.607 billion (2019)
Net income US$1.503 billion (2019)
Total assets US$19.845 billion (2019)


Took me 15 seconds on Google.

1.503 billion and we are talking hiring MAYBE 500k in admins to ban cheaters.

Blizzard is plenty fucking afloat ffs.

Your solution is the same as adding more people with fly swatters to solve a bug problem in a skyscraper

[javierdsv]

Who's this dude and why are people giving him free advertising?
I protest against this insanity. This should be a bannable forum offense.

[DesoPL]

Everytime i see Asmongold doing stuff like that, the more i'm conviced that he doing it only to raise his numbers on twitch.

[fwc577]

Your solution is the same as adding more people with fly swatters to solve a bug problem in a skyscraper

No, it's not.

The reason that there are so many bots running around now is because they can remain active for weeks (see my above post, maybe even a month or more in some cases) without getting banned.

This allows them to generate millions of gold before they get banned.

This makes it very profitable to continue this activity with real money trading.

Blizzard has the ability to see user behavior and can easily identify outliers. Just look at the outliers I identified above on my one server with ~20 minutes and the /who command which is currently broken by Blizzard to prevent sites to track population in WoW.

If they made even a slight effort to start banning the botters earlier, the problem would solve itself because the botters would no longer be profitable and worth the effort to the people cheating / exploiting WoW for real world profits.

[Kuvanet]

I would like it if they just go fully into it. If your account is in anyway linked to buying gold, selling gold, selling runs, etc just full auto ban. Ban the IP and all.

[Mysterymask]

-snip-

Ok lets humor your suggestion for a bit

$500k for extra administrators....
Lets be generous and say 30k per...so at 500k thats about 16 people to cover bot patrol as we shall call it 24 hours a day for 241 servers and all shards and zones l within those...and thats just US we still have EU, Australia, Asia, and South America to cover.

So oh man $30k a year for basically 24 hour a day bot patrol suuure sounds fun and totally worth it (btw that job is exempt from Overtime per US laws) so i bet people are going to be rushing to that job and stay forever (it would have to be 24 hour watch cause like here the bots will just wait till off peak hours)

Not to mention if it works as well as you say the better they do the faster they will get laid off...so they have incentive to not give a shit and let a few go cause if they work TOO WELL they are basically unemployed.

But lets look at the job itself...500k is 16 people to cover ALL THOSE SERVERS. Shit lets make it interesting and they split it into 3 8 hour shifts so we have maybe 5 people per shift...plus they need a supervisor, insurance, they get sick sometimes, call off, might just say fuck it and quit and they will be MASSIVELY UNDERSTAFFED to do it.

Yeah its not as easy as you think...raise number of people isnt going to make that better and i havent even talked about countries outside the US that probably have bot issues too


Buuut pretty sure your beyond reason and just think blizz has a stop all bots lever that will solve all problems

[Garymorilix]

But BLizard does because 1)they want to break the actual bot, not get into a sticky situation where they banned innocent people. ALso, you example prove my point., Those blanket bans do nothing because they while new accounts and start botting again. They have to break the bot. That is why they make sure it actually is a bot. So they can break it. I am glad you are not running the game because you would never stop the botting since you won't bother doing anything to the actual botting software.

Are you botting by any chance? Cuz it sounds like you are.

Mmmm, yes, let's reverse engineer a botting software quickly but before that don't we dare ban anyone actually botting.

Yes I would blanket ban and what if they make a new one? I'd ban that too.
They have the data to see where these druid bots are. Look at the data if there are a shitload of druids in an area just look at them and boom banned.
Do this twice a day (but at least once).

You can keep running your druid bots, I hope someone finds you and you get permad also.