This is really both a technical and in-game problem. I was wondering how seriously Blizzard take this bot problem?
I ask this because yesterday I reported a player for cheating (and named 4 others) that were obviously just killing bats in Revendreth constantly in a quest area so no-one could do the quest, and not only do I find that nothing has been done about them, but they are STILL there a day later doing it!
Not only that, but when my partner checked the WoW Armory to find details on these players (and guilds attached to at least one of them), they only existed on WoW Classic! How can there be players in the game that don’t actually exist? I don’t know about anyone else, but if people can have characters in the game that don’t exist (according to the armory), how safe are our characters in the game from being hacked, even if we have authenticators?
The armory can take a while for data to parse through. The reason it has got so bad I believe is due to lax approach to them since vanilla, even back then they took their time in getting rid of bots up to weeks later before those known bots in Azshara etc disappeared, usually Hunter bots…
It didn’t help when questing in those areas that people would randomly report you, just because you were a hunter. But “investigating” took too long, when they could simply go to where the bot is and observe.
Since then they are constantly on the backlog to deal with them. Preferring to mass ban them after months of investigating to sound good that they “banned 30,000 bots”.
I can understand what you are saying, but unless the data takes more than a few days, I doubt these 60 chars were levelled from scratch in less time than their data takes to come through.
To be quite honest, how long does it take for a GM to log on, get to where the problem is, observe and report to whoever for the bots to be banned? Not too long. And if they did them quicker, I would think more people would be less inclined to trying botting in future.
I’ve worked in software customer support for over 30 years, so I know how things should be prioritised and dealt with. I guess I’m just using my common sense/judgement on what I see this as, and Blizzard’s is not the same as mine.
I’ll just leave this alone, and wait and see what happens sometime in the future.
Hi Jayrena,
As long as you’ve used the “report player” tool to send your report, it will be investigated. Though it generally does take multiple players reporting someone for it to generate the investigation (for obvious reasons)
If no one reports them, then they usually are also caught by our hacks team running their regular actions, but obviously it’s preferable if players report any that they see.
Sadly it’s not viable that Game Masters enter game and pro-actively look for bots, primarily a Game Master’s role is to answer support tickets, to assign individual Game Masters to spots in game (per server) would take more GM’s and time away from the support queues.
But to answer your first question, Blizzard does still take the bot problem very seriously, sadly the bots also take botting very seriously and very quickly have new accounts up and running, so as always, it’s an ongoing fight. 
Please keep sending the reports and we’ll keep actioning them when they reach us 