Bot INFESTATION on Living Flame EU

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
1

Guys, Blizzard, i gotta ask: are you even trying?

on my casual morning stroll through felwood to find myself a songflower (from bloodvenom post to southern felwood) i found no less than 11 bots… ELEVEN!!! (and that was just on the layer i was on, god knows they flood every other layer too).

literally any open world zone is shamelessly infested with these vermin and while i frequently get mail confirmation that action has been taken against those i report, its clearly not sufficient.

You ban 1 bots 5 more takes its place, its honestly gotten to the point where i just drive-by report any troll hunter i see who happens to have a boar pet… i am not even exaggerating when i tell you; i see MORE bots than i see actual players no matter where i go, EVERYWHERE i go.

and by the way, literally each and every one of them are running the sniper training rune and the genuises running them have figured out how to program the instant aimed shot into their rotation. GJ. i told you this would happen.

if i end up targeting innocent players who are actual players who simply happens to play troll hunter with a boar pet, this is now directly on you.
your refusal to deal with this problem to the degree that is needed has caused this problem to spin waaaaaaaaaaay out of control and now i might end up accidentally “false” reporting some players for botting.

either hire more gm’s to ban bots 24/7 (literally around the clock) or lock living flame up again.
phase 1 and 2 were so great because our server was bot free.

this is what happens when you listen to those “i wunna plae witff my frends wtf oben liveing flaem pls”… you literally let the barbarians through the gate, and you’re oblivious to this fact.

curious how these monkeys no longer repeatedly flood the forums asking to “plae with their frends” even though living flame is supposedly faction locked on horde side atm.
i’m seriously curious how many legit player slots on our server are currently being swallowed up by these scourges, ironically preventing real players from getting a slot.

do you even perma ban these bot accounts on their first offense?
i swear if i learn that you don’t that would be the most unacceptable thing i’ve ever heard.

P.S Tanaris is infested with bots as well…

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2

First offense on cheating is usually 6 months or permanent.

They’re very hard to deal with. So hiring more GM’s wouldn’t solve the problem as you admitted they would just create 5 more bots in its place immediately.

For example in another F2P game Valorant & League this is explained in more detail why it is so difficult:

The botting problem is prevalant in all games/MMO’s, not just WoW. If there was a solution there would be one by now.

An ex-dev that worked at Blizz:

You may suggest any methods you may think of through the ingame feedback box but it is not likely that it will be groundbreaking new suggestion.

Source.

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when there is 11 (!!!) ELEVEN bots on a casual stroll in felwood, nowhere near enough is being done to prevent it.

there is a solution: lock the server up.

kick them out and lock it. seriously this is unacceptable and im not buying these excuses that its a neverending fight, they have means to get rid of them, they just refuse to do it

(see LOCKING the server).

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No they are not.

Imagine a small game Like Vindictus is still reporting how many they ban, and they post that every single week.

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As a given example Vindictus has problems with bots (every game does!), and they ban weekly and there are still bots. Blizzard generally bans monthly and they provided examples of actions like this one:

But then players still doubted the truth of it so I do wonder that is why they stopped reporting that.

Wouldn’t have any use, bot creators would then adjust daily/hourly until their creations are not detected by automated systems anymore (see my post above.) Even if they were manually checked on the spot it would require a human to check through the entire bot wave which is immense.

This is explained partially by the ex-dev that they do and then incorporate it into a banwave. Immediate bans would be scrutinized by the ban creators and then be adjusted from:

To:

“move - use slightly different dps rotation - move - loot - skin - move - herb/mine - move - vendor” to evade a ban detector if that would be what set it off.

If automation is stopped, then what will detect them? Have you seen the Valorant chart? And this is only in the thousands per week.

The problem isn’t whether if they can be spotted but the amount of them unfortunately. They cannot be stopped at creation because they will keep retrying until they circumvent that and if they get banned they recreate it and thus the cat and mouse continues. You can see in my linked post they have a dedicated team and regular GM’s are not in the anti-cheat team.

You’re going in circles so I grouped your posts repeating the same things.

First you say that they’re not doing anything then you provide proof they infact did something. They’re basically doing a lot of things behind the scene as my post states.

So on one hand we have players claiming that Blizzard does something above and at the same time claim they’re not doing anything because of ulterior motives :thinking:

There’s even a video of an ex-dev that’s no longer working at Blizzard explaining what the process is behind the banwaves. If he wants to, he could just divulge as a “whistleblower” or other ex-company secrets that may or may not be outdated depending on software processes.

There’s the following things in here from (ex-)Blizzard or game industries:

  • Anti-cheating background
  • Some account actions taken in the past
  • Stastistics

And still players think there is some international conspiracy going on that no game company is able to solve: Bots Three games have been named with botting problems, 2 games that bans weekly (Riot Games, Vindictus) and Blizzard Monthly and people only suggest to ban faster which… Won’t do anything.

You’re free to add any suggestions to the ingame suggestion box but it’s not likely to be new or groundbreaking.

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They need to show that their actions even does any thing.

Blizzard need to ban Daily, so people see a difference in bot activity out in the world.

Honestly i’d want them to ban like hourly tho… because that’s just how many there are.

If you don’t show players a difference between banning and not banning then… what does it matter?

People need to see it to believe it, out in the actual world, not just “we banned 250.000 accounts this month” That does not really tell people any thing unless they see the tons of bot trains actually disappearing from the world

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honestly I’ve never read somuch skill issue from devs as of now.

bots are programmed to do certain actions over and over again, so how is blizzard not checking the input of said bots over a day or 2 and see if they do these inputs repeat very often? as an example of these inputs:
move - use same dps rotation - move - loot - skin - move - herb/mine - move - vendor

normal players would do many more actions than a bot does atm and the fact blizz doesnt seem to notice is hilarious.

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then stop with automation.

If players can spot them, so can GM’s

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then have both?

A while back blizzard did manage to break the bots and they just stood at the SW innkeeper, at such a point there should’ve been manual or automated GM’s just coming in and banning them all, but they still stood there for hours.

Ban them when you have an obvious chance to ban them, there’s no need to wait for the arbitrary last day of the month to ban

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I don’t consider 50+ bots standing in stormwind “Something”

They should be banned/removed if seen, if there’s not GM’s monitoring for these sorts of things, then maybe hire some?

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insert “don’t bully the billion dollar company” meme

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There’s so much denial about bots it’s like they hired a political spin doctor to write a PR statement for them.

They just don’t want to remove em sadly for what ever nefarious reasons they won’t divulge, we will have to wait for a whistle blower to tell us.

And player’s like them too - these bots are not playing for fun they have orders to fulfill.

I saw teams of bots in the incursions the other day farming gold, blatantly obvious for any to see.

But they know they will get away with it so why try hide.

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you cannot possibly gaslight anyone into believing any of this crap.
if players can see them, so can the gm’s.

many of these bots are allowed to level all the way to 50 and farm for weeks or even months before they are removed, in fact i dare say the vast majority of them do, based on the fact that i see a lot more bots sitting at lvl 50 than any other level range.

stop defending blizzards inability to remove bots. private servers can do it, blizzard can do it.

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There are butt loads of them yes, they can make butt loads more very easily and quickly yes indeedy.

The bots may fight back for a while, delete one and two more appear!

But how long will they keep up this practice of loosing accounts on a daily/weekly basis? not long I think.

No farmer wants to see there little robots get deleted on a daily basis

The several month holiday time /ban waves! they get now gives they the freedom to earn enough money in that time to make it worth the possibility of loosing that account

Oh and target them while they are leveling up - give reward satchel to players who help spot them, with xp bonus cookies inside

Maybe it goes like this

“sup big boss man”

"sup dude!

“We have had lots of great ideas on how to remove the bots that should work, we just need to hire some staff to help”

“You want to decrease accounts and increase staff expenditure?”
“…erm yeah”

" We can’t OK this, come back when you have an idea on how to get more subscriptions and remove bots for free"

“…mkay…/sadface”

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There’s a reason why it is a time sample of a day or multiple days, basically it is a lot of data that Blizzard can automate to ban bots which exclusively use 1 or 2 dps rotations on CD. Doing nothing currently isn’t gonna fix any of the bot problems. Implementing an input check that tracks your characters input commands/chats/whatever is gonna give Blizzard information which they can use to automate a ban system based off inputs.

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So, that means Blizzard is getting more money from bot accounts than from player accounts… I wonder why Blizzard does not do anything about it. Or why they ban the player accounts who buy gold, but not the bot accounts, who sell gold…

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Thats why you dont rely on automated systems to ban people and bots.
Unless you are not really trying.
Solution to bot problem is complex and won’t be able to 100% protect from botting. Also it requires some kind of an effort.
Instead effort is wasted on some trash like plunderthingy whatever its called

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hey if blizzard wants to cater to actual botters, that’s fine. but then they have to announce that so those of us who has a problem with that can unsub and be on our way.

they are sitting there PRETENDING as if they are against it and are supposedly doing ‘all they can’ to fight the problem… this would be a lie if behind the curtain they actively cater to botters.

here’s the deal: without real players there will be no botters because there will be no demand for their gold sellings, and then they have NOBODY to cater to.

at least in a world without botters blizzard can still fall back on the real players.

i don’t adhere to this tinfoil theory, but i will say that its super sus how they changed sniper training rune to basically be designed to help bots perform better.
sure a real player can make use of it too, but a rune that rewards not moving and giving an instant nuke as a reward for not moving for long enough is peak bot design.