WoW Classic - 120k Accounts Banned and Death Knight Character Creation Changes

[Echo of Soul]

Only 120k?

I thought bots were in the millions

You can't have more bots than players

[azuremyst]

they should have had DK free for a week at most, how such a highly experienced company could not possess the foresight to see this blindlingly obvious problem is beyond me

[Mendzia]

Step in right direction but mass banwaves once per 6 months or so are still not enough.
What about all these mages and other certain classes 'farming' non-stop in closed instances with random names like 'Gsadfdafs'? You can't even report them.

[Nalam the Venom]

You can't have more bots than players

Well, The theory with Lost ark is that te steam charts is 60% bots.

So you can have more bots than players

[tikcol]

It's ok guys they removed a few tumors after the whole system is metastasized with cancer. Praise blizzard.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

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.

[Shaetha]

Sorry for not fellating blizzard for finally doing the obvious correct choice of action months late.

so, banning bots is good. This change is good for the health of the game.

The concept of there being no pleasing some people comes about because THEY GAVE YOU WHAT YOU WANTED, AND IT STILL WASN'T GOOD ENOUGH.

[Rikkuu]

so, banning bots is good. This change is good for the health of the game.

The concept of there being no pleasing some people comes about because THEY GAVE YOU WHAT YOU WANTED, AND IT STILL WASN'T GOOD ENOUGH.

Well, i think you misunderstood here a bit. People are not complaining about them banning bots. People are complaining that they just treat the symptoms and not the real cause of all of this. Its like poorly treated cancer, it always comes back.

If flasks, epic flying and some change was all people needed, there would be zero bots, because buying 5k gold once per patch would not sustain any goldfarmer.

The real problem is, as others mentioned, GDKP. Now this isnt some "im poor so i cannot afford GDKP" rant. Just please, think about it for a second. HM Items in GDKP runs go for 100-150K, Valanyr goes for like 250k + (even up to 500k). How the hell would people farm so much gold... they just dont, they swipe credit card on G2G... this is the true problem that causes the massive inflation and demand for goldfarming bots.

[DarkAmbient]

The botters will be grateful for the heads up, allowing them to stockpile DKs before the restrictions are implemented.

[Cynicalnerd]

120k? Sounds made up. I don’t even think classic has 120k players

[Linkedblade]

120k? Sounds made up. I don’t even think classic has 120k players

IronForge has the population at 404,000 characters. So probabaly closer to 200-250k actual players.

[Dioporco]

120k? Sounds made up. I don’t even think classic has 120k players

classic has more than retail players

[Konteil]

its about time. the amount of dk mining bots and herbing bots in icecrown on a daily basis on the pagle server is insane. im glad they did this.

[Pokeylope]

They said 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." They don't realize the WoW token is just that lol.
B:izz Logic "Gee golly don't buy/sell gold for real money, well...... except if its through us then its cool."
Blizz always creates their own issues by trying to solve other issues.

[Mysterymask]

Well, i think you misunderstood here a bit. People are not complaining about them banning bots. People are complaining that they just treat the symptoms and not the real cause of all of this. Its like poorly treated cancer, it always comes back.

If flasks, epic flying and some change was all people needed, there would be zero bots, because buying 5k gold once per patch would not sustain any goldfarmer.

The real problem is, as others mentioned, GDKP. Now this isnt some "im poor so i cannot afford GDKP" rant. Just please, think about it for a second. HM Items in GDKP runs go for 100-150K, Valanyr goes for like 250k + (even up to 500k). How the hell would people farm so much gold... they just dont, they swipe credit card on G2G... this is the true problem that causes the massive inflation and demand for goldfarming bots.

It's almost as though a lot of those unpopular changes in retail were made to fix bigger problems that is now manifesting in classic

Oh gee who knew

[Aerisot]

Where do you think the tokens that they pay gold for come from? The FreeGameTime fairy? There's a 33% premium on top of the sub price and someone pays for it.

Ya, Not them.

- - - Updated - - -

I don't know how some of you guys still make this mistake. Just because an account buys game time with a WoW token doesn't mean it's not contributing to Blizzard getting profit. Those accounts might've bought tokens for game time, but someone actually bought those tokens because there was a demand for them. If the demand goes away, then people buy less tokens because there's less need for them, and Blizzard loses out on profit. Without them, the tokens don't get sold, meaning the whales buying the tokens with cash have no reason to buy more of them.

I know it's an extra step, but I promise you, the math still works out with Blizzard getting money and those accounts contributing to that.

I do not understand how it is a mistake, yes someone else is buying those tokens, but not the bots.

[vizzle]

I do not understand how it is a mistake, yes someone else is buying those tokens, but not the bots.

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.

[anon5123]

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.

It's extremely easy to differentiate a bot from a player.

Players have normal names.
Bots have nonsense names like "Xkiqhdkaw" and "Lfojqweknas"

Players are in guilds. (most of the time. Seeing an unguilded 80 is pretty uncommon)
Bots are not. (most of the time)

Players play for reasonable amounts of time.
Bots are online 24/7.

Players go to different zones.
Bots are in the same zone 99% of the time.

I highly doubt Blizzard just mashed "permaban" on 120,000 accounts without checking things like these first.

- - - Updated - - -

THEY GAVE YOU WHAT YOU WANTED

Please familiarize yourself with the term "too little, too late".

The damage from botting is already done. There's millions upon millions of botted gold flooding the economy of every server. Bots should have been dealt with years ago.

[Ssateneth]

It's extremely easy to differentiate a bot from a player.

None of those reasons you quotes are 100% evidence that someone is a bot. They are all circumstantial. There would be far more outrage over a small amount of false bans than just having bots do their thing and not get banned. Even if the legit person gets unbanned, the PR backlash and unsubs would be immense.

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.

This is why it is important to report bots as you see them. Sure, Blizzard could employ thousands of people to stick an invisible character behind every player in the outside world/bg's to police for bot-like behavior (Yes, there used to be ingame GM's that froze and mocked bots wayyyyy back in the day), but from a business perspective, it's not practical or economical. It's cheaper to just rely on mass reports and investigate later.

[Toby451]

classic has more than retail players

More than retail guild wars maybe...