There are ways to mitigate it, even if not comparing to other games, some of us still have memories of when the bot problem wasn’t this bad, of a time where there were still GMs working at blizz, when you’d encounter like 2-3 bots in a day and making a ticket would get them instantly banned in hours.
Right now if i fly around for 10 min i will encounter more bots than people and if i stop over a mining node there are so many bots i can’t even report them all.
Blizzard is doing nothing to mitigate this problem right now, they fired most of the people who were supposed to do something about it and you people are cheering them on.
LOL experienced today, when I was on my walock and then I decided to just practice on a training dummy. But then suddenly, a druid appears with several characters following him. I guess they don’t bother to hide anymore either.
If they are profiting of botting, they recreate more accounts. It means you have to ban them before they profit. You have to track their trades with other accounts , locate their bank accounts / max crafter accounts and ban them as well. Ofcourse it may not be easy in practice.
and probably not quite right.
If you have to use a script or something that does something automatically, which you certainly do with Multi boxing, then it is probably illegal.
because if everyone is made to do what the first one does, then it is botting
There is also the easy way to remove the /follow command. No need to hire extra staff for GM’s, few actual ppl use it. They remove other action for more idiotic reasons tha this…
I always thought this was the reason they made cell numbers almost mandatory. It was one way to identify you, but even those are disposable and can be replaced quickly and easily.
I think they used to ban them (near) immediately in the past but they just recreate them with a slightly different botware within minutes. I don’t disagree Blizzard should hit them before they make a profit ofcourse.
It could attract severe backlash from the community if it were to be limited or removed. But if you were to limit trading to lets say, 3-5 times per day (or an average/median) of a regular player and anything above that is not allowed or requires “trade tokens” (tax papers! Kinda like the Boston tea papers.) then they should test this out. With or without the trade tokens.
As much as I would love for them to do it, Blizzard should ban 4 certain countries, from being able to access the servers, as those 4 countries are very well known for their gold farming companies.
The downside is unfortunately Blizzard doesn’t ban IP ranges, even though most of those companies use VPNs. Of course Blizzard are able to see that 20+ accounts are all logging in from the same IP, but of course the software those companies use, will cycle through a few IP, as they do not stay logged in 24 hours, they will automatically log out, log in another character to do it’s set pattern/route.
They could do a mac address ban, which they can do and is very rarely, but compared to what it was like in the past, you can spoof your mac address to be something different, those bypassing a hardware ban.
The only way to really deal with bots is to fully ban anyone who is confirmed to have purchased gold. They’re able to see this information through the logs that are generated and those logs are stored for around 2 to 3 months before it’s purged to make room for new incoming log data.
But the nail on the coffin for the bot problem, is Blizzard want to retain as many customers as possible, so they will hardly ban people who buy gold, they will not remove the gold that was purchases and the bot accounts are banned in large waves, which happens within a subscription/token use timeframe to maximize profits on their end.
If they were to ban all those individuals, they will see a huge dip in their monthly/yearly concurrent user, plus money generated, thus their shareholders & Microsoft would not be too happy.