Bots—Who are they, What can they do, Where are they run from…

[garicasha]

They’ve been around for forever, but they seem several orders of magnitude smarter than they used to be. Let’s talk about that plus:

—Who is running them?

—What are their modern capabilities?

—When will they be banned?

—Where are they run from (and they just VPN right?)

—Why? (What kind of profit do we think a botter can effectively make?)

—How are they going to be flagged as they play more and more like human players?

Now we all know they crash the in-game economy. But one thing I wonder about:

Are their subscription fees subsidizing the game for us? Blizzard hasn’t raised the subscription fee in 15ish years, and from what I can tell there are hundreds if not thousands of bots…that money starts to add up, and even if we don’t like it, it might have an affect on what Blizz has to charge to maintain the game.

[Djuntas]

Haven't really noticed bots on my server in WOTLKC, the bigger fresh EU server. But holly shit balls the gold prices are already very low. And yes I look that shit up for the funs, Im not tempted to buy, especially in WOTLKC gold has been way to easy to get anyway.

In TBCC there was TONS of bots in the open world, or bots at instance portals zoning in and out. Was a plague. But maybe now in WOTLKC they hide more cleverly, or I just dont notice them...

And who is running them? Bro if you haft to ask that, you already live a previledge life. I can go on many youtube videos where such a topic comes up, and down there is some dude spilling the beans...Often like South America, or Asian countries. They can make WAY more IRL money than a average job in their own country, so thats why they do it.

Take a look at say Lost Ark. I would not be suprised its 30-50% pure bots these days.

[Tommi]

Who runs them? Ordinary people like you and I.

I managed to do an "interview" with a botter in TBCC.

[Caprias]

—Who is running them?
Anyone can if they research a bit, it's for sure harder now than in the old Honorbuddy days where you basically could bot for free with sides like codedeception cracking HB keys with ease but yeah...
My guess is that most bots are run by organized pc farms to make it more efficient though.

—What are their modern capabilities?
Depends entirely on the author of the profile, running from coordinate x to y and basic rotation and logic capabilities make most raw gold farms easily possible though, back in WoD I ran 9x bdk on a 2nd pc through tol'vir for raw gold, I think I could have been maybe 20-25% faster with manual play so that was already pretty impressive.

—When will they be banned?
So first of all people saying Blizzard doesn't ban bots at all are idiots, the banwaves are massive and accurate, just not that frequent and kind of at whim.

—Where are they run from (and they just VPN right?)
Doesn't matter, Blizzard doesn't IP/HWID ban (and even if, that wouldn't be an issue to spoof), maybe the big farms do but I wouldn't know why, the only thing a VPN was interesting for is buying cheap licences, for example EU players could buy and play with RU battle chests with a VPN that cost like 3€ a few years ago.

—Why? (What kind of profit do we think a botter can effectively make?)
I did it to accumulate gold for my main account and because it was kind of fun to learn/set up and write my own profiles (yes I work in IT), the friend who taught me in highschool made some pocket money selling gold, the organized farms do it for quite a bit more than pocket money, I don't know how the market looks like now but back in WoD that friend made around 15€/hour profit with 2 pc's running 14~ bots.

—How are they going to be flagged as they play more and more like human players?
Most bot programs need to read/write into the RAM and Blizzards Warden is pretty good at catching that, pixel based bots don't have to do that but they're absolute hell to work with and way less efficient afaik (and will still get caught by pattern recognition programs and whatnot)

[garicasha]

Actually as someone who is real cheap, my other question is who is buying the gold? I never saw any appeal, and yah, on a server with no GDKP, it doesn't even seem like it'd net a player all that much.

[Stickiler]

Actually as someone who is real cheap, my other question is who is buying the gold? I never saw any appeal, and yah, on a server with no GDKP, it doesn't even seem like it'd net a player all that much.

People with money who don't want to grind for gold. I buy tokens on the odd occasion, when I need gold and don't feel like/don't have the time to make gold.

[Kikazz]

They’ve been around for forever, but they seem several orders of magnitude smarter than they used to be. Let’s talk about that plus:

Are their subscription fees subsidizing the game for us? Blizzard hasn’t raised the subscription fee in 15ish years, and from what I can tell there are hundreds if not thousands of bots…that money starts to add up, and even if we don’t like it, it might have an affect on what Blizz has to charge to maintain the game.

Correction, Blizzard hasnt raised the Sub Fee in the US for 15 years,
heaps of other countries have had increases, and thats not because of just Currency exchange, cause if it was, they would just charge everyone $14.95 USD a month.

some countrys are paying 1.5 x what the US pays per month, on their sub.

that is why the Sub hasnt increased for the US base, i think its like 19 euro per month for a Sub, which equates to like $22 US a month,

so thats the reason the SUB fee for the US hasnt increased, as other countrys have increased a Fair Amount, since they started charging Local Currency on things,

i remember paying $75 AUD for a collectors edition when the US paid $60 USD, the us now pays $80 USD, and i pay $120 AUD.

the reason the Sub hasnt changed for the US is Cause blizzard are screwing over NON US based customers.

[garicasha]

One thing that always surprised me is that there weren’t premium servers where GMs were constantly available and kicking bots manually.

I can’t be the only one that’d be willing to pay a little extra to play on a server that wasn’t infested.


heh and part of the reason I never wanted to buy gold is because I didn’t want to be a “degenerate”.

…so I’d just farm it myself by flying in circles through Wintergrasp for dozens of hours.

[Pejo]

One thing that always surprised me is that there weren’t premium servers where GMs were constantly available and kicking bots manually.

I can’t be the only one that’d be willing to pay a little extra to play on a server that wasn’t infested.

It’s because you already pay a premium subscription for that experience, they just aren’t delivering it. There would be many more complaints if you had to pay an additional fee on top of your $15/month for, what should be, a regular experience.

[Hotmail]

Back in TBC (2007ish) I wanted a Mage for endgame but was desperate for a way to skip most of the leveling grind. That led me to discovering Glider, which was very simple to use; it grinded a designated area all day, went to town to sell stuff when your inventory was full, then resumed the grind. You could even set it to reply pre-formatted responses if anyone ever whispered you.

Never got caught but, then again, never botted again once I was past level 50.

[Biglog]

There are far fewer bots in wow than the honorbuddy days, and I don't think it's remotely enough to 'subsidize' wow's subscription revenue. You'll very occasionally now stumble on one but not nearly as often as before wow tokens came out. And Blizz does very well with their wow subscriptions, but that's a topic for a different thread. Wow tokens did a number on the gold farmer/bot scene so the botting problem is nowhere near as bad as it once was.

It's always a battle between Blizzard and the bots getting more undetectable and better AI. There's money in it though so it's going to always be around in some form. Fun fact, Steve Bannon, yes that Steve Bannon, made his first millions running a wow gold farming service back in it's heyday. I think 3rd party buying of in-game items/boosting is what's more common now though than botting.

Fishing is the one thing where I'm not sure I'd complain if Blizzard ever ok'd a bot option though, half-joking.

[kranur]

Haven't really noticed bots on my server in WOTLKC, the bigger fresh EU server. But holly shit balls the gold prices are already very low. And yes I look that shit up for the funs, Im not tempted to buy, especially in WOTLKC gold has been way to easy to get anyway.

In TBCC there was TONS of bots in the open world, or bots at instance portals zoning in and out. Was a plague. But maybe now in WOTLKC they hide more cleverly, or I just dont notice them...

And who is running them? Bro if you haft to ask that, you already live a previledge life. I can go on many youtube videos where such a topic comes up, and down there is some dude spilling the beans...Often like South America, or Asian countries. They can make WAY more IRL money than a average job in their own country, so thats why they do it.

Take a look at say Lost Ark. I would not be suprised its 30-50% pure bots these days.

The reason you're not seeing a lot of them on the big WotLKC servers is because the servers are locked and once banned they can't make a new char and continue to bot.

@OP They aren't some specific kinds of people. Like any software business, it's provided by some developers for people to buy and gets better and better over time, just like any other software out there. Blizzard eventually catches on, bans some botters, the devs update their shit to not get detected as easily and so on, the thing is that Blizzard is slow ... very very slow at taking action. And well, sadly, they have no reason to react swiftly. Bot money is still money.

[Biomega]

Are their subscription fees subsidizing the game for us? Blizzard hasn’t raised the subscription fee in 15ish years, and from what I can tell there are hundreds if not thousands of bots…that money starts to add up, and even if we don’t like it, it might have an affect on what Blizz has to charge to maintain the game.

While Johnny Randombotter gets caught in ban waves and all that, those people aren't Blizzard's primary concern.

It's the organized bot farming operations in low-cost-of-living countries where the profit from botting and selling gold can be a viable business. But here's the thing: a substantial part of the accounts/subscriptions those run on are purchased with stolen credit cards or other financial shenanigans that actually COST Blizzard money rather than making them money. It's not like an organized and/or borderline criminal enterprise abusing bots is going to go "well now, let's just put my personal credit card info into this system to buy the game and we're good to go...".

[Talon8669]

They’ve been around for forever, but they seem several orders of magnitude smarter than they used to be. Let’s talk about that plus:

—Who is running them?

—What are their modern capabilities?

—When will they be banned?

—Where are they run from (and they just VPN right?)

—Why? (What kind of profit do we think a botter can effectively make?)

—How are they going to be flagged as they play more and more like human players?

Now we all know they crash the in-game economy. But one thing I wonder about:

Are their subscription fees subsidizing the game for us? Blizzard hasn’t raised the subscription fee in 15ish years, and from what I can tell there are hundreds if not thousands of bots…that money starts to add up, and even if we don’t like it, it might have an affect on what Blizz has to charge to maintain the game.

All of the bot's in both classic and retail are run exclusively by the music artist formerly known as Prince. I have not seen a public posting declaring pronouns so I will assume he/him is acceptable; he has established a vast network of bot's in the overwhelming attempt to control WoW. The next expansion, I have on good authority, will actually happen IRL and we'll be taking down the ultimate WoW boss the music artist formerly known as Prince while trying to avoid his attempts to serve us pancakes. I hope I have answered all of your questions.

[Twdft]

Actually as someone who is real cheap, my other question is who is buying the gold? I never saw any appeal, and yah, on a server with no GDKP, it doesn't even seem like it'd net a player all that much.

Imagine being a raid or M+ logger. One guy in my guild always levels a single char to max level, does all the shit he has to do to get the char raid ready and from that point on logs in to raid and do M+. With this play style there is no gold income whatsoever, from time to time he drops a 20 for a token so he can have all the buffs, enchants and legendaries.

I play more of the game, over the two years of an expansion I level about 10 different chars to max, I have all the crafting professions on max and dabble a bit in auction house pvp. I don't even go out of my way to make gold but I always have enough for buffs etc. and I never go out and farm mats.

[xskarma]

This is not a topic for this website. We do not allow discussion of bots and people breaking the rules in the way this thread wants to do.

CLOSED.