Seeing boosters in rbg getting banned all the time but then immediately creating new accounts to bypass the ban makes me feel like devs in this game on the same side with cheaters.
I came from swtor game where devs were famous for poor ban policy due to which cheaters and wintraders were avoiding bans pretty easy. But even there if a player got a ban and creates a new account to avoid it one report was enough to get him banned again in few days. They just checked this player id, mac adress and pc characteristics and if matched with his previous account - rebanned him.
On other side we have wow, a much bigger and solid game with more devs. Yet boosters who are dropping mmr in rbg by giving free wins to random teams, gather/npc killing bots who are farming level and mats on dragon isles are getting constantly banned yet constantly recreating new accounts to avoid it and just continue to ruin the game for legit players.
Things became so bad that people just tired to waste their time to write reports since they know same cheaters will just buy a new account in one day and do the same lmao. In the end, why players should even waste their time writing so many reports on same rule breakers who are keeping to return back again and again. Wow is going to become famous as the most comfortable game for cheaters, bot users and other rule breakers
kind of curious too, since the bots always are in the same place you’d think it would be easy to find them. My current guess is what people often say about this and that is because of money
ofc they don’t care, they ban an account and let people instantly make a new one, why? because it gives them more money ofcourse, this company has zero integrity and whoever works there should be ashamed of themselves honestly, blizzard entertainment deserves to get shutdown and lose it’s entire fanbase at this point
yeah you are right. But even if the logic is in getting money they actually screw up in the future since in long term they will lose money. People are leaving the game when they see such things happening. Few rule breakers against many people leaving i think second one causes more money loss…of course in the short term they gain money for ignoring cheaters because legit players aren’t leaving the game fast. But in long term people will leave subsequently, and they will lose more money lmao
This is something that feels engineered, after all for the near zero cost of sending a ban email, and marking an account as “banned” in the system.
They get potentially:
A new sale of the expansion
New level 70 boost
Another sub paid for.
They could easily use IPs or hardware ID bans to at least try and circumvent this, but the cynic in me suggests this is why they don’t.
(Before the comments pour in I KNOW that these suggestions don’t make it impossible for people to make a new account, but an effort to prevent banned users from making new accounts, would be nice)
Obviously that’s not the cost of banning someone. That’s trivial - any software engineer or programmer can write such a python script in 10 minutes.
The real challenge is finding out who’s cheating and being certain.
Unironically AI can actually help here.
Bots show very recognisable behaviour to humans and we can say with a fairly large degree of confidence if someone is botting. We can even explain why. But programming this is a surprisingly hard challenge.
Reinforcement learning AI can definitely help detect cheaters and botters by observing their behaviour over a limited timespan and seeing how well it matches the behaviour of others who got banned, then giving a confidence interval and alerting customer service staff.
It would indeed be interesting, but we all know Blizzard will never do it, as it would generate a lot of negative press for them and the shareholders will throw their dummies out of the pram!
The ones that use those botting programmes are banned in waves, so that they catch everyone using the same software in one swoop. It’s a constant battle and for all the ones banned, they just create new accounts ofc. Same with most activities that break ToS.
I’m not sure the reporting process for things that affect accounts can be automated which is the only way they’d be able to keep up with the sheer volume of reports. However it would still be a constant process due to the fact that these accounts just start fresh again. We see it with the third party sites spammers too, the boost sellers etc.
even though they get banned in waves, botting will always win just like with us using ad block addons for YouTube. YouTube will always update its stuff to break the addons but at the same time, the addons will counter YouTube.
so at least blizzard are doing something to shorten the outbreak from getting worst, I think that is better than what China had to suffer when they had the bot issue. it was almost unplayable for actual players.
Just adding to the conversation that yes… Automated tools for banning / timing out proved countless times to be prominent for abuse from poorly intentioned people. So it tends to be used more to strike innocent people than actually handling “cheating” or breaking TOS players.
It’s a very hard to fight battle, and yes, I agree that AI is a massive spark of hope on this decades old fight.
