So the last week or so I have been observing Mage bots in Eastern Plaguelands in classic era.
They come out from Lights hope chapel, go to the repair guy, go to the mailbox, go behind the chapel and climb up the tree and up far up in to the air where they fly to stratholme and go in to the instance. (Some bots come from other directions as well, but most of them come from inside the chapel)
I decided to count the ones ONLY coming out from LHC (where they would have needed to HS) and counted that there was around 500 bots per hour comming out.
This is going on 24/7.
Doing “/who human mage 60 Stratholme” and “/who gnome mage 60 stratholme” at 4:45 AM gives 50+ results each. All unguilded.
A while I tried to sit there for hours to report them. Unfortunately nothing happens and the report process takes longer than it takes for each bot to go by so there are a lot of bots missed.
Prices on era has skyrocketed due to inflation and it is impossible for real players to farm gold anymore.
Everything that can be botted inside dungeons is super cheap while everything else has gone up in price to absurd ammounts.
Theese bots are nothing new. I know that it has been going on for months, but its kind of killing the game at this point.
I mean having ONE person hired by blizzard with a button that just bans every bot that they see would solve so much. Botting and goldbuying is the single largest threat to classic era right now.
In trade chats you see messages like “Trading my classic era gold for your WoTLK or retail gold” all the time.
They are effectively using it to get tokens to pay for the bots going on.
In pugs people are speaking openly about buying bot services, how you do botting, where you can buy gold and so on, because “Blizzard doesn’t care” and “its the easiest way to be able to raid now with the insane prices”.
People have even started to be afraid of reporting bots because they are afraid of losing their accounts due to the bot army reporting them back.
This all is so backwards.
I mean heck they could hire whoever and I would reduce the bots on era by 95% in a day. (I mean I would take a job like that easy)
They could put invisible walls that no regular players ever would cross and as soon as someone cross them they get tagged as a bot.
They could use AI to recognize input patterns in movement and if more than 100 other accounts would do the same input patterns for a long duration then the account would be flagged for a check.
Bots flying is kind of easy to find and nothing happens. 24/7 bots everywhere and nothing is done. Low bar to climb over to get things to be better.
Sorry for my rant. I am just frustrated. =(