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

[fwc577]

Says the one taking offense with someone being open about their sexuality. How about you stop regurgitating what you have been since WoD-days and actually give some counter-argument to how bans work in this game?

Oh right, you can't, because "Blizz dun care hurr!" is demonstrably false. It's actually that sort of inane reasoning that leads to many getting caught in the RMT-business, for example.

14 years ago, Blizzard filed suit against the largest botting software on the market at that time. Prior to that, they were issuing bans via ban waves. 14-15 years of ban waves and botting is worse than ever thanks to the fact that Blizzard LOWERED the barrier to entry. It's time for them to change tactics.

They need to do stuff like remove hyperspawning in old-world content.

They need to employ a couple of GMs to look for unusual clusters of players, especially players of specific races / classes and manually issue banes when botting is obvious.

The fact of the matter is, the current approach of ban waves simply isn't working. Each bot generates enough gold to create a brand new account + profit.

Start finding these botters and hitting them with bans before they can farm up several hundred thousand gold (which will take a few days simple grinding mobs in the manner presented by the video) and then they will stop because this tactic is no longer generating them gold but costing them gold.

I'm sure if people put their heads together, they could figure out other ways to solve this.

15+ years to solve a problem that is extremely detrimental to the health of the community is ridiculous.

[Tiwack]

Bots help the economy by tanking the cost of farmable mats so guilds dont need people to farm shit.

A side-effect is that they make consumeables required in places where they aren't needed nor can they make up for bad play. There was a time where you'd only want them for progress - now they're part of your weekly run at dmg meters on content that's on farm. It's not worth the gold inflation nor the obstruction of actual players to allow these bots to roam free. Besides there's these bot groups that just go for vendoring greys/pure gold drops, then there's bot groups ressource gathering for professions to benefit from the inflated gold price created.

To add, the ingame token didn't fix shit, quite the contrary, they tried to monopolize gold selling while ignoring bots also benefit. Now with a trial character, there's no leveling involved, an account can generate enough gold for its own gametime + generate gold to sell to others in exchange for actual money. As long as Blizz maintain its position on multiboxing, the token and the subscription game model as it currently exists, nothing is going to change.

[fwc577]

Or Blizzard could just say "Hey if someone random sends you a huge amount of gold, don't accept it, report it", alternatively, you could report it if you take the gold by accident.
After all, if you receive a huge amount of gold from a random person, you can guess that something odd was happening.
Then Blizzard deletes the gold off your account and you're fine.

Even if you want to disregard that, there must still be a middle ground between "We ban everyone that looks suspicious" and "Well, we can't do anything, sorry guys".

First off, on chinese servers boosts have so common that it's difficult to avoid them and there those boosters have even taken aggresive steps to bully people out of a group in order to make room for their boosters.

Here's a link to that:
https://www.wowhead.com/news=316097....in-chinese-wow

Also, check the gif in that post in comparison what is happening in the video linked in the OP.
.

Hey man, great post. Wanted to give you kudos. While I don't agree with the first part regarding putting the onus on the player to return gold, everything else is spot on.

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I'm no asmongold fan at all but his specific character streaming the botting to a large audience being layered out to not see them is sketch to put it mildly

I guess the bots are more beneficial to wow token prices than players in terms of what blizzard values.

My assumption is this occurred as an automated system. When there are a lot of players in an area, they don't make new layers and that's where everyone goes. The layering happens because he was a large group that was fairly new to the area, so his group got layered into a new layer.

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Not even close though lol

By average concurrent viewership in 2020, he's #19

By hours watched in 2020, he's #8

[Nitrax]

I would love some bots to interact with, I rarely see another player when leveling, feels like a single player game..? Maybe it's some form of phasing?

[Dalheim]

I would love some bots to interact with, I rarely see another player when leveling, feels like a single player game..? Maybe it's some form of phasing?

If you use Chromie Time, you dont see max levels outside major cities, as you're in your own phase (so max levels in war mode cant gank you, for example).

[fwc577]

Bots help the economy by tanking the cost of farmable mats so guilds dont need people to farm shit.

You are completely and 100% wrong.

These bots aren't farming mats. They're farming raw gold through vendoring all the junk that drops.

This actually RAISES the cost of mats because there is more gold circulating in the economy. They don't use this gold for their own purposes like buying a 5m gold mount, they sell the gold they're making for cash at prices cheaper than the token.

Those players who buy the gold then go do stuff like buy materials or gear or tokens which results in the prices of those items increasing because there is more demand.

[OrcsRLame]

That's if they are bots. You have zero proof they are and only Blizzard does. You can report them, but if you keep reporting players who aren't bots then you yourself can get banned for harassment and flooding the system with false reports.

People were multiboxing like that before and they still can even with the new terms Blizzard released on keystrokes.

Now granted it could be bots, but it also could be regular players.

This is where heuristics are useful. Things I look for are, druid, boosted level 50 gear, name that doesn't spell anything intelligible, no guild and other druids that appear to be on /follow.

Every day when I'm out herbing I see multiple characters that fit that profile. Every day I report them and every day I wake up to new mail in my inbox from Blizzard informing me they took action against an account I reported.

This shit isn't nearly as complicated as you make it out to be.

[Lucetia]

This is where heuristics are useful. Things I look for are, druid, boosted level 50 gear, name that doesn't spell anything intelligible, no guild and other druids that appear to be on /follow.

Every day when I'm out herbing I see multiple characters that fit that profile. Every day I report them and every day I wake up to new mail in my inbox from Blizzard informing me they took action against an account I reported.

This shit isn't nearly as complicated as you make it out to be.

The thing is that if they were bots Blizzard isn't going to ban them immediately. Blizzard has a history, and even stated awhile back, that they let bots stay for a bit so they can observe their behavior and see what they can learn from them that they are countering that is already in the game.

Those reports are also generated if someone gets a temp ban (ie got mass reported) so that doesn't necessarily mean they were banned either.

[OopsReality]

I agree. Someone needs to handle asmongold. His toxicity is a detriment to everything WoW related (even if only because his words are worshipped by his cult-like followers).

So you're just going to ignore the real problem, to concentrate on shit talking someone... who you probably only hate because they make a fortune by playing WoW and making opinionated videos about WoW.

Nice.

[saixilein]

well, there are a LOT of people with an IQ below room temperature. Which is why channels like this not only exist, but thrive.

i watched his stream for like 10 minutes when Classic Release night was... i dont get it. He so unsympathetic, doing just clickbait and annoying. You search something up for wow on youtube, first 10 Videos "Asmondolg reacts/over XY". And in his stream there was shown up 24/7 some stupid emotes with "XY subbed" or "XY donated X$"... i mean he had like 500k views and people still donate money to him, for just sitting there and doing nothing. At this viewcount he didnt even mention the donatiors/subscribers.

Its like you give some millionairs money, just for 2 seconds of attention.

[LemonDemonGirl]

What the hell is wrong with his face? It's like his teeth are bad or something lol

[fathom81]

I found a druid train yesterday and all had similar names but where from different realms! Try hard multiboxing!

[intenz]

Always found it bizarre how asmongold gets so much hate on here and yet you have people unironically watching that fat manchild "Preach". The difference being asmongold plays a character and "Preach" doesn't. I can't even click a "Preach" video because his face and voice are so repulsive, he is the personification of every meme about wow players being bugman manchildren with nothing else in their lives and seeing him mentioned actually makes me want to play less and self-improve more.

[cface]

All I read is "I'm hardcore jealous of his success".

Asmongolds success can be, I care about his followers. Wonder what make them follow a guy like that. I don't think I would ever respect a guy who followed him like the rest of his sheeps.

[Asrialol]

Always found it bizarre how asmongold gets so much hate on here and yet you have people unironically watching that fat manchild "Preach". The difference being asmongold plays a character and "Preach" doesn't. I can't even click a "Preach" video because his face and voice are so repulsive, he is the personification of every meme about wow players being bugman manchildren with nothing else in their lives and seeing him mentioned actually makes me want to play less and self-improve more.

I'd rather watch nothing but Asmongold for the rest of my life, every day than having to accidentally click a Preach video. Or Bellular. Holy shit I can't even.

Now, I don't care much for Asmongold at all. He's just not at the same level of cringe and garbage that Preach, Bellular, Taliesinn and whatever are.

[irspacehamster]

You are completely and 100% wrong.

These bots aren't farming mats. They're farming raw gold through vendoring all the junk that drops.

This actually RAISES the cost of mats because there is more gold circulating in the economy. They don't use this gold for their own purposes like buying a 5m gold mount, they sell the gold they're making for cash at prices cheaper than the token.

Those players who buy the gold then go do stuff like buy materials or gear or tokens which results in the prices of those items increasing because there is more demand.

You are right. Bots will make the economy harder for a quite substantial part of the player base. Asmongold kind of acts as the little guys representative. On the other side its got to be some people that make money from all of this.

Not just the botters but also the "boosting" community that certainly ends up getting a fair share of the gold thats been sold by the botters.

Thats probably also why you see all these attacks on Asmongold. Many of the posters on this forum probably partakes in botting or bosting.

[Varodoc]

What the hell is wrong with his face? It's like his teeth are bad or something lol

Shouldn't you find that attractive? I mean, you have a crush on a [fictional] guy whose face is literally a skull lol.

[Tumile]

I agree. Someone needs to handle asmongold. His toxicity is a detriment to everything WoW related (even if only because his words are worshipped by his cult-like followers).

wat.

name 1 toxic thing he has done

[Cosmic Janitor]

Has anyone pointed out yet that they technically took over BfA and not the shadowlands? :P

[Gimlix]

This is pretty much like how they write articles, Bots taking over means there are more bots then actual players, this is FAR from the case.
Maybe 1% of the playerbase is bots, maybe less..

Just bait. His fanbase (Like OP) obvious falls for it.