Battleground Bots

[Palmatum]

A lot could be solved if they had some overtime available and people spent that extra time in BG's looking for bots and banning them outright.

[Xo0]

Had an eye of the storm full of botters this morning, except for me.. They all had the undead guy disguise on them (alliance). They went to MT and just stood there the whole match..
Very weird experience.

[endersblade]

So much ignorance...

Let me put this in simple terms. Which is more effective: Banning individually every player who is botting, or finding out the source of the bot and banning them all at once? Blizzard has stated periodically since...shit, Vanilla probably, that they typically do not ban on a per-account basis, they prefer to detect the bot and hit all of the botters at the same time. So while you may report a bot and continue to see them day after day, it doesn't mean Blizzard isn't doing anything.

Blizzard does indeed ban botters. I already caused a shit storm on here a while back when I admitted to being a botter, so flame on. But the issue is, Blizzard mostly hits the chinese-based bots, which are usually quickly made and very specific to their area. But for every bot that Blizz closes down in this fashion, they just make another. They basically just try to get as much accomplished as they can before Blizzard inevitably hits them. The bots that, say, your typical normal players who like to bot (like me) use are a lot harder for Blizzard to get a hold of. Oftentimes, Blizzard just seeks legal action against the botting company (Glider, Pirox, etc) to shut it down that way. But that requires the botting company to be in a country where they even have the authority to go after them, and most of them are getting smart about this. Blizzard has shut down several of the major English-based bots already, but again, more just pop up, this time bigger and better and harder to take down outside the game.

The vast majority of the bots you see, especially in PvP, are just lazy people (non-chinese farmers) trying to do the grind. They don't make their own routes, they don't follow the guidelines for setting up their bots, and as such, they are stupidly easy to detect. I can tell you from personal experience, if you act like a bot, you're going to get reported for it. If you don't, nobody will ever know the difference. It's absolutely hilarious to go to Ulduar and see 15+ people all following the same exact route around the zone, all stacked on top of each other. Just slightly obvious. And not very productive for them lol.

Blizzard is very lenient with PvP bots, I'm not entirely sure why. I have intentionally tried to get an account banned for botting in PvP, and all they did was just give me suspensions over and over again. I got the 3 hour, 24 hour, and then 8 72 hour suspensions. I made it painfully obvious it was a bot, too: Every hotkey had a macro that would /y I'm a bot! Report me! every time it was pressed. My chat logs were chalk full of people complaining about it lol. I'd wake up in the morning, and sure enough, I'd be suspended. I did this for 3 solid months, and the account was still in good standing lol. I finally tried the same thing on a very popular mining route in Twilight Highlands, and the account was banned within a day. I take that as a sign that they don't really care about bots in PvP, but they try to stymie any gold farming bots as quickly as they can. Though not always, I've reported several people for it, for doing quite obvious botting, and they never got hit. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme nor reason to Blizzard's choice in banning or ignoring botters.

[Coldhearth]

Yes they do.

And your proof of this is where?

I remember when I was naive too. You'd like to believe that Blizz bans bots, but the honest truth is they don't. They dish out warnings and never follow through in most cases.

[Deleted]

Looking at your stats, you also seem like a botter. But I agree those botters are really annoying to play with.

[Lazy Gecko]

The "ban wave" strategy employed for several years now isn't effective. It provides little to no incentive to refrain from botting and in turn does nothing to improve the experience for legitimate players.

If they actually had human resources for sniffing out bots and taking action against them swiftly, it would create some actual fear of getting permabanned and that in itself could probably go a long way, because as it is right now there really isn't any. If you're botting, you will most likely get away with it. That's the message Blizzard has been sending.

[NiveouS]

That is some goddamn stupid bots, why aren't the bots fighting? Btw you never know if a player is a bot or not, sometimes ppl slack and do little, sometimes they bot and kill lots of ppl.

Was under the impression they are all using the exact same botting program. Since they literally followed the exact same pathing/stack together. No way are these people slacking, if anything, people tend to HK farm mid, not run around and and stay near ramp. It is a "battleground" after all.

sadly blizzard only do ban waves: aka they find out how a certain botting software is bypassing guardian and then modifying it to work against bots and then banning all accounts related to that type of botting.

But thing is: bot makers know this too and are always 2 steps ahead of blizzard and refining their botting software to be more undetectable than the last version and only the people who are too cheap to pay the bot companies for the latest versions get caught and banned.

If blizzard upped their game and actually made a team of REAL people to manually search for bots and enforce serious consequences (like credit card blacklisting, ip blacklisting, bank account blacklisting) then maybe people would be less inclined to do it

This is the truth. At least it is what the state, and I completely get the logic behind it. But, the issues which always comes up is, Bots are still paying to play. Which obviously does not help in motivation. And if you consider the numbers, they do make up quite a big chunk of the player base it seems. I'd imagine PvP botting is quite low on the priority list compared to other offences, since it doesn't have the biggest of impact in the long term. Once players have their gear, they will most likely stop.

Looking at your stats, you also seem like a botter. But I agree those botters are really annoying to play with.

Really? Explain how you're meant to have an impact/get kills if 10 players stick together defending the flag, while you push by yourself? Additionally, the two deaths already separates me from the bots. And I did join midgame...

[Fmp]

And your proof of this is where?

I remember when I was naive too. You'd like to believe that Blizz bans bots, but the honest truth is they don't. They dish out warnings and never follow through in most cases.

By my own experience, it was not a BG bot, but another kind of botting.

[Illana]

It's more effective to individually look for botters using current updated bot software and come down HARD on them. It then discourages other people to use them because the risk of being banned is there, not only if you're stupid/cheap to upgrade to the newest bot version.

As I said the banwaves only affect those who used outdated software and the ones who paid for upgrades didn't suffer so it creates the mentality that you're safe when you keep updated which is largely true

if blizzard started cracking down on those who are even using updated software, people see their botting friends getting perma-banned and think "wait what if that happens to me?" and then stop using it because the RISK is there

there is no risk in using updated software because as i mentioned these programmers know how the blizzard guardian system works and can code around it easily and it's obviously easier for them to update their software because they know what blizzard are trying to patch because they're trying to patch something the bot makers already coded.

Manually finding bots and banning them isn't about the efficiency it's about the message you're sending: you won't tolerate it and if you see someone doing it there will be consequences.

Right now you report a bot and it get's "noted" down and when the banwave hits they're only banned if guardian flags that account as still botting, but oh wait guardian won't notice it because it's once again using a new algorithm that isn't defined.

[Creatinebrah]

A 'friend' of mine has been since glider came out. He's used similar bots ever since for leveling, honor and gathering. He has banned just once in the 2008(?) ban wave when glider was around. Infact, he bots more than one character at a given time...

Those ban waves have 0 effect on botters. Botters are EVERYWHERE nowadays; however, most people are ignorant in knowing those are bots. As someone who has a 'friend' that bots, for me, it's extremely easy to see whose a bot whether it's in a BG, leveling, etc. And let me tell you, even today, bots run rampant almost everywhere I go.

[Deleted]

PvP botting has always been rampant - the last ban wave was in Wrath of the Lich King, since then they haven't even bothered. Cataclysm was ruined at any time except prime time - try playing a bg anytime before 3pm or after 9pm and odds are you'd get at least 4 bots, more in the 40man bgs.

Now it's gotten completely out of hand - i've entered Battlegrounds at 90 where I am literally the only human player. They aren't even the expensive bots, they're the cheap (or free) bots that are absolutely terrible and completely obvious. Watching 8 players get stuck at the entrance of Twin Peaks as their botting program breaks is hilarious, but sad at the same time.

There is one very simple, very effective solution to stop botting. It's a system that is in widespread use, and has been for years all over the internet. Even this very website uses it.
Introduce a captcha for entering a battleground - cheap, effective and guaranteed to deter the bots.

[Deleted]

Did a Battle of Gilneas a few days back. The whole enemy (horde) team was comprised of bots. They all hugged the Mines flag the entire game. If you got within range of their spells they all nuked you asap

Easy honor but boring game.

[creamo42]

Did some 85-89 bg's tonight. 8 or so of our team stopped at Farm. Then I looked over at Stables and 8-10 people were sitting there spam buffing too. These bots are pretty good at focus firing though, we went over to farm kills and they tore people apart, moving in a pack.

So funny though, to see 2/3 of your bg being played by robots.