Judging by how many bots i have seen in wotlk classic the botters consider these account bans a cheap "cost of doing business".
If blizzard is too slow with the bans the botters get enough profit before their account get taken out.
Wotlk classic is so filled to the brim with bots i can not say that these bans are doing anything effectively to stop the bot swarms.
Lol.
The only reason they are doing this is because they are selling gold now and because they want to scare people from trying to buy gold from 3rd parties. Fucking pathetic.
We're all newbs, some are just more newbier than others.
Just a burned out hardcore raider turned casual.
I'm tired. So very tired. Can I just lay my head on your lap and fall asleep?
#TeamFuckEverything
i wonder if blizz leadership will realize it'll take more than releasing potentially real, potentially fake ban numbers? people trust action more than words so people will only think blizz is doing something to combat bots when they start seeing bots less.
Blizzard banning more bots then most MMORPG has in total active players. Pretty easy to assume how popular WoW still is today.
It is legit hard to know how well a lot of games are doing.
New World we can accurately see thanks to steamcharts and that game requiring a steam account (for the record, new world is averaging 15k lol). For others we can make educated guesses(ff14 and ESO are probably both north of 1 million, they're certainly HEALTHY at any rate), last numbers we had on my old fave LOTRO was 108k/mo in 2020 (DDO was less than half that, and that's more than both EQ's combined) but Lotro has grown since then according to EG7's investment reports), but 167,000 banned accounts is a huge freaking number no matter how you look at it.
I would not dispute the notion that 167k accounts being banned is more than a lot of MMOs typically see in a month.
167k x15$=2.5m$ and that's not including the cost of developing the bots and the computers to run them. There wouldn't be several million dollars worth of bots to ban if they didn't make their money back between the banwaves, they should be happening twice a week instead of twice a year.
Yes it does.
It saves everyone from such a gargabe loot system.
And no, not a 'vanishingly small amount'. It literally causes hyperinflation by itself which affects literally everyone.
In retail people buy runs because they want the achievement from a harder difficulty that they wouldn't be able to do themselves.
It is impossible to guarantee loot to anyone.
Also, gold is not nearly worth that much: you can buy curve for farming herbs for 3 days and then you are done for the tier. That's most people's goal given the advertisements in game always mention 'curve' due to its high demand.
Classic doesn't have such novelty systems in it, people are straight up buying loot.
If there is no loot you can directly buy then the whole system collapses.
It's not a hot take, by the way.
Blizzard removed Master Loot because it was an abusable dogshit system. The percieved benefit of a family guild using it as intended does not outweight the fact that it enabled the most degen god-complex people to use it for their own gain without any repercussions.
Numbers like that, as big as they seem, are (most likely) still a drop in the bucket. These are no longer the poorly scripted hunters with default pet names farming mobs in the open world, it's dozens of accounts being run on virtual machines flyhacking instances for raw gold and farming sholazar nodes 24/7. They make back the initial investment faster than Blizzard is able (willing?) to ban them.
so they banned like 90 % of classic "players"
this shows how few people actually play this bot infested game