Why don’t you guys fix the bots problem in the game? haven’t you noticed that they have started stealing wigs from older ladies now!!!??? Not only that!! but the have also stealing a Rolls Royce from a rich guy who lives in Saudi Arabia, and now he has to drive a bubble car instead!!!
Blizzard!!! why do you let such poor people suffer?
Its a forever cat and mouse game, not something any MMO can fix ^^
Some people dont understand it they ban 100 bots - 5 min later 300 are back i mean some people dont have the brain capacity to understand how hard it is for an mmo to fight bots off.
WoW’s economy has always been one of the weakest among MMORPGs due to trivial (and risk free) farming and asymmetrical supply-demand. Even without bots the massive inflation quickly devalues gathering, and with bots any bottable activity becomes worthless.
We get that blizz is constantly updating their tools and methods, but from our perspective this arms race has become stagnant and the economy is perpetually broken.
Only blizz knows how many people still feel gathering is worth their time, but this sentence is nonsense:
Your tools are not effective if they don’t solve the problem.
What? You’re telling me using a toothpick to defend yourself with isn’t effective against an army?! 
That could make it much more difficult 
Then make Flowers and mining notes spawn in random places and not in the same place every time.
Totally random places, so they’ll have a hard time
On WoW Classic, you could literally type /who BRD to see a dozen rogue bots doing pickpocket farm from phase 1 to phase 6.
If they can’t even remove the bots who are this easy to detect, I doubt they are really trying.
i know man so many bots sould look bg wart and season full bots like wtf army bots run intro stockade https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoiQuvE3Pqk yes this problem only going get worse
Bots no ban…
Find an exploit and get banned in seconds…
I could cleanse this game of bots if given powers to do so in 1 day atleast those farming herbs in the outside world and i can guarantee they would all be legit bans with no mistake
How do you stop those people just recreating the accounts over and over?
Or do you mean that you don’t feel their impact is effective in how they combat in the first place?
The second. Doesn’t matter if they ban a million bots each week unless they can’t do so the minute they create the character. If people feel their preferred activity brings near zero gold/h they’ll start pointing fingers at anything, usually bots and multiboxers.
Granted, I don’t know how sophisticated gameplay bots are capable of, but I have a strong feeling blizzard’s tools impose heavy limitations on their perception/interaction (without running the risk of detection) and if all farming was tied to some level of gameplay (like various types and difficulties of delves) it could exclude bots from that part of the economy.
Recently Icy Veins covered a Reddit post of an operation that has a ridiculous number of accounts running.
I have no idea what version of the game that was from though.
If botting was truly something so easy to fix they would have. But it isn’t, and most people have no real suggestions on how to cut down on it either. I have no clue and I don’t know what it’s like in other games tbh or how they deal with it or avoid it.
It seems it’s time for Blizzard consider IP / MAC address banning for repeat offenders. A ban is no punishment if they can just buy a new license and keep playing.
Another option is to enforce a phone number to play like Overwatch does, that way they can ban the number and make it at least slightly harder for the bots to come back.
May hit university campusses or PC cafes, some ISPs also provide an automatically changing dynamic IP and is easily defeated these days. Or even worse, getting a contaminated IP when you happen to be a new gamer…
While initially it was required to attach a phone for OW2 this plan was removed after severe community backlash. In a seperate form the botters have already sort of bypassed this on WoW with custom group messages requiring 2FA/phone number.
You can still suggest this through the ingame feedback box together with other ideas you may have though.
A MAC address is unique to the network card in the PC and as such there’s no risk of it affecting others on campus, since the MAC can trivially be requested by the battle net client as part of it’s telemetry. Users would have to buy a new network card to defeat such a ban.
It wouldn’t help with VMs, but as I understand it, Blizzard already doesn’t like people using VMs to play wow.
I’m aware of this, but it doesn’t change the fact for the vast majority of users, it’d be a reasonably secure route to ban, and anything is better than the current approach of just “buy the game again”
We’re talking about criminal enterprises who have entire hundreds of bots in control at once per botter. Not regular users who try out a bot once or twice.
Hardware ban or OS Reg Key ban…
Its tough tho. I do agree in what your saying…