Additional instances cannot be launched, please try again later. - Botters?

[Neekoz-spineshatter]

I would assume that bots getting targeted and killed and maybe blizzard actually banning some of them that do hit a huge amount of reports has been occurring. It’s not as bad as post ZG Launch back in 2019 so I assume Blizzard has actually been doing something about it. So are these people using aoe farming methods just to loot/vendor? This is exactly what comes to mind for me.
youtube(DOT)com(SLASH)watch?v=lUeAz4-bpdY

I am not a gambling man but I would best whats left in my pocket that botters decided it was more efficient to hack on some client and have a profile with a bot just aoe pull tons of mobs in various instances using some safespot locations so they don’t evade. Now instance IDs are capped or something. Blizzard really need to just hire GMs that play the game and answer tickets as they moderate gameplay. Would it be that hard to just get people to work remotely, pay them 18 bucks an hour, and have a quota for work? There is probably people, myself included, who have such a chip on our shoulder over botters that we would janny your trash for free. Can’t even farm pummelers right now.

[Saneko-ragnaros (Saneko)]

No definite statement yet on the instance issue. But I’ve seen test samples being gathered over at the US side to replicate it more accurately.

@Neekoz-spineshatter

Would it be that hard to just get people to work remotely

All CS staff is in-house. I’m certain almost all the other staff is too since certain private data is confidential and nobody would like to have it land on the streets now hmm?

@Neekoz-spineshatter

and have a quota for work?

I don’t need to tell you having a quota can have adverse affects on both customer and staff wellbeing.

@Neekoz-spineshatter

There is probably people, myself included, who have such a chip on our shoulder over botters that we would janny your trash for free.

And the same people who on the mere suspicion that you are a bot can ban you for free. Now how does that sound? Bad right?

This reminds me of my old times as Silver Crown at Runescape when people kept spamming the forums saying some freemod banned them when we didn’t ever had ban powers, occassionally I even get the same accusations here as MVP - Blizzard even gets accusations of “automated banning” I can already imagine how worse it will get if regular players were to get ban powers.

Since this subject comes back often I’ve made a sourced template with commonly asked Q&A if you want to read up more about it:

Other games like Valorant/League suffering from cheating and their countermeasures explained in detail

https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/dev/dev-vanguard-x-lol/

An ex-dev that worked at Blizz about the efficiency of banwaves

http://youtube.com/shorts/cADaFm__ApQ

I see often that people suggest that Blizzard profit off bots (Credit Fraud/Stolen accounts etc)

Do other games like Runescape or CSGO also “benefit” from allowing (aim)bots, using them for inflating sub counts or purchases?

Some accounts also get stolen with phishing methods or used with fraudulent credit cards, that incur chargeback merchant fees for Blizzard. The “paid” amount plus penalty costing Blizzard a lot more not to mention the damage the botters do ingame.

But wait “credit card fraud doesnt exist for games!!” Some people forget, that Visa stopped processing payments for Runescape because the occuring fraud was just that extreme at a certain point in history.

One of their last public numbers revealed close to 271k banned in December 2023 alone. I don’t think it was even the majority of them.

Poster mentioned fast bot instant removal problem and low currency accounts

Another poster mentioned they remove bots every few days after a report. They return ofcourse, proving that instant bot removals isn’t going to work.

Video 2 in this post mentions that the alternative to chargeback or stolen account type frauds is “currency fraud” where they pretend to be in that region and buy very low currency accounts to bot onto.

Better solutions?

There’s no game so far on a similar scale that has a solution. This problem is literally everywhere and anti-cheat development has yet to outpace the illegal bot development.

Kaivax statement on countermeasures against botting

@Kaivax

We hear folks say things like “just ban the bots” a lot. We ban tens of thousands of bots a week. It’s not visible to you just how much we do, and that is absolutely another problem in itself; we need to be better at surfacing these actions (more on this later). The truth is we’ve never been better and more effective at identifying and actioning malicious accounts, and our Game Security Operations (GSO) team that handle these actions are iterating and innovating on a nearly daily basis.

Unfortunately, in the history of WoW, the people perpetrating this illicit trade have also never been better at coming up with new methods, schemes, farms, and exploits to work around our efforts. As much engineering and analytics effort as we put into this, illicit RMT “workshops” put the same amount in, or more, and there are hundreds, if not thousands of these workshops out there all working around the clock to develop new technologies and techniques to counter our new technologies and techniques. It’s an arms race, and it never, ever ends.

We will never completely beat “bots” or illicit RMT. It’s an unwinnable war as long as there is money to be made by third parties. The ubiquitous nature of this type of thing in online games is an objective fact. It has always been a part of WoW, and every other popular online game for the past 25 years, and it will always be a part of online games going forward. It’s frustrating to fight this fight, but we will not stop fighting it.

While we can’t completely “win” the war, what we can do is mitigate the impact it has on the game. Is WoW Token the be-all and end-all to solve this? No, but it is a tool. It’s just one tool, though, among many. There is clearly a demand for gold for certain types of players, and that demand is only increasing. So, we are engaging a tool that we’ve used before to help mitigate the impact that illicit RMT has on the game. The more tools we employ, and the less lucrative we can make it for third parties to do what they do to make a profit, the less likely it is that new malicious actors enter the illicit RMT scene, and the more likely that existing malicious actors will exit the business. Ultimately, it’s taking incremental steps and using a multitude of tools that will reduce how impactful those third parties will be in Wrath Classic and beyond.

Source.

If you have any good ideas don’t forget to submit them through the ingame suggestion box!

[Neekoz-spineshatter]

@Saneko-ragnaros

And the same people who on the mere suspicion that you are a bot can ban you for free. Now how does that sound? Bad right?

I am not saying deputize people with ban buttons but people who played this game for a decade plus can look at player movement, cast rotation, and how it reacts to pvp and be 99% sure it’s a bot. Everytime I run through felwood or Azshara i see a half dozen hunters. I kill and report them all. They all
-path at perfect angles,
-won’t change targets until target is dead
-will cast mend pet if you attack pet while its fighting the mob
-will walk over to skin the mob as it dies while you are hitting it
-will never strafe or turn while jumping(usually never jump)
I am not saying give people a button that bans people but give them the ability to make reports that hold a bit more weight and send immediate action request to someone who is actually a authorized employee to ban.
Do you have any bans on record?
Do you have suspensions on record?
How old is account? Active sub time.
Max level?
This is the only fix, whether you agree or not - if Blzzard doesn’t want to actually hire people to be GMs. Also there is nothing wrong with quotas as long as quotas are not designed by complete imbeciles. Usually the word quota makes people think of police pulling people over just so they don’t get in trouble or giving speeding tickets for going 4 over because they sat in a car instead of working for the last week.
I could probably identify 100 people in a 4 hour window if I had a expediated way of traversing from location to location. Blizzard will dodge and say it’s a bug that they are fixing, the bug is that they are not able to ban bots if people can’t report them so the bots sit in Mauradon, Strath, DMN, and probably some other places u can farm with pathing bugs.

[Saneko-ragnaros (Saneko)]

@Neekoz-spineshatter

send immediate action request to someone who is actually a authorized employee to ban.

And what if bots also use the same tool to false report others? Then the employee still needs to go through it no?

In the eventful case that they get it right, congrats. They immediately ban a bot and the bot workshop adjusts the bot next time. Now the player who sees it thinks “this looks like a bot, not sure” instead of “hey this is a bot 100%” and an employee won’t have data that it is a bot because they didn’t or collected too few data by instant banning.

They want to be 99,99% sure and have as few false positives as possible. They did used to ban immediately in the past but it resulted in a greater amount of false positives and more work for the better staffed GM’s back then.

[Saneko-ragnaros (Saneko)]

@Neekoz-spineshatter

How would a bot given permissions when there account is 4 days old, and they have a bunch of random reports.

Multiple assumptions and requirements. You assume that every bot account is several days old and immediately start with a bunch of random reports.

What about legitimate new accounts however? And BNET accounts that have fresh new game licenses?

@Neekoz-spineshatter

You didn’t even read my post. I am saying that Blizzard could give people a special status

On the contrary, I have addressed your post already. What you meant is, is that you disagreed with the counterargument.

@Neekoz-spineshatter

Yah after the report goes through the GM that is handling them just logs in .teleports to reported players location, watches them, does what they need to do and ban. It would probably take 20 seconds per ban.

And how many reports do you think enter per minute? Quite a few. And the reports won’t stop in those 20 seconds that the GM moves to check. I already mentioned that there is a higher false positive rate with this used method in the past.

I believe after your personal attack you did not choose to read through my post after all, that addresses your points thoroughly despite quoting the very sentences that were relevant even lol.

[Neekoz-spineshatter]

You never read through my post and tried to ignore what i said to make it sound like i said something different. There is no excuse for not hiring employees or improving how they handle the report system. I assume they will come up with a plan to increase instance ID count without addressing bots though. Shareholders like subs.

[Azorka-firemaw]

@Saneko-ragnaros

I don’t need to tell you having a quota can have adverse affects on both customer and staff wellbeing.

According to “not Your Friend” on youtube they do indeed have quotas for how many tickets they have to solve and how long they can waste time on 1 ticket. So… yeah. Great company.

[Tryptox-firemaw]

I dont post often but this is stupid. There’s thousands and thousands of bots harvesting everything possible so you try and farm some in the dungeons where they cannot joink anything and then you are hit by “additional instances cannot be launched” jump into the portal for 10minutes while fighting off the opposite faction just to get 1 precious instance.

Feel like an absolute idiot playing this game honestly with all the RMT and botting.