I’m afraid I disagree. From that video, I would say they’re probably bots. I sure as hell hope Blizzard do not have evidence requirements that low for bot bans.
Hunter is one of the most popular classes in classic, and for new players, almost certainly the most popular.
Depending on how many other players are around, and because of the way the respawns work. Once you’ve found a spot with some good reachable spawn points around you, not moving at all is a pretty good strategy right now. When they have the pet holding things at bay and able to kill them easily, there’s also really no need to move.
I have first aid, and a few pots. But you know, I don’t have engineering and I really don’t know that everyone is always using first aid and/or pots. I don’t think this is evidence of much. It’s take a fair bit more video showing them dying over and over and doing the exact same thing over and over to be considered evidence.
I think if the bots use Boars for that reason, many players will too. Naming, I’ve plenty of times just left the name as is on a pet I only expect to use for a short time.
I feel like bots are less likely to have these short names. They were probably only available for a short time, and really a bot doesn’t care too much about their name, I would think. It’s nothing more than an indicator.
Like I say, they’re all together they’re good hints to say “probably bot” but they’re not evidence that they definitely are.
Also, the video is like 40 seconds and shows 2 bots and about 1.5 engagements. It proves nothing in reality from my opinion.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Blizzard could easily get enough information that does prove it. But, like most businesses right now, the customer is last on the list of people they care about. Spending any kind of resource solving this hasn’t interested Blizzard in over a decade. I have a video from 2012 showing the abysmal state of BG botting at the time. They didn’t do anything then, and I can’t see them putting a lot of effort in now.
man you’re coping hard… you know what, go to these areas yourself and “prove” it your self I cant really convince you. I understand that some people don’t want these bots banned because they plan to buy some gold because they cant function in-game without doing so.
Of course it’s not “evidence”, but you can put 2 and 2 together and see they are bots, no need for an essay. What do you want them to do? /yell and admit they are bots?
I mean any human can see beyond a reasonable doubt they are damn bots farming.
No, I expect more than a 46 second video showing two players killing 1.5 creatures before deciding. All of which is irrelevant because we all know Blizzard won’t do anything until some time in 2025 when they’ll blow their trumpet and declare they banned 500,000 accounts (long after the owners made bank in RMT anyway). The game will be relatively bot free for a couple of weeks until they work around whatever they’re detecting and that’s it.
Also, no. It’s not beyond reasonable doubt. It might be on the balance of probabilities.
What exactly do you expect then? This is as close as it gets in this day and age. Bots are not THAT stupid that you can point at them and see for 100% sure they are bots.
I mean I can see clear as day they are bots but seems like you can’t.
It’s either banning these leeches one by one with a human or setting up easy anti cheat properly which people don’t want because “mah privacy”.
OK First of all, there’s not a race here. You keep editing while I’m replying. It’s probably better to type it all out, read it back. Make sure it’s all good, then post. There’s no one-upmanship on replying within 1 minute.
We’re well into hypothetical here. Because, Blizzard don’t employ me to decide who to ban.
There are many clear signs of a bot, but all of them take more than 46 seconds of video on a single “player” to show clearly. I didn’t really see any of them clearly shown here. What I expect to see are:
Fixed rotation/basic response criteria. That is, they will engage and basically just do the same thing every time even if they get attacked by something else. This needs to be demonstrated multiple times exactly the same actions.
Failure to respond to unexpected events. That is, mostly player interaction. Now being an enemy player just there loitering, doesn’t count. If the player engages them and are ignored, and the bot continued to fight the creatures or treated you like just another npc. That’d be pretty good.
Clear waypointing. Now as I said, currently with the servers as busy as they are, running around waypoints can be counter-productive and finding a spot in range of several known spawn points can be much better for you. If I were a bot creator I might make a profile for these spots for when the realms are this busy.
Yes, as mentioned before in the thread. Not using food, drink, first aid (if you have it), and potions (if you have them) is a bot trait. But you need to be watching them for longer to make that analysis. However as I mention next, older bots used food and drink fine, and in fact was a way to identify the bot.
One of the easiest ways to spot a bot is to trigger one of their events. I actually remember seeing a pretty good video of this quite some time ago. I vaguely remember the guy found they auto used food at precisely a certain health level and was able to trigger just before and after over and over with different “players” using the same software. I’m not sure if they used pvp, or let them get close to the % they ate and then buffed them when out of combat to push the % low enough to make them instantly eat. But I remember seeing it and thinking, that’s some pretty compelling proof. Repeatable consistently.
So, in the hypothetical example I was in charge of banning bots. That’s the kind of thing I’d want to see.
But Blizzard wouldn’t need that. They could if they wanted, watchlist reported bot suspects and essentially record their game event data (it’s actually not as much data as you might think) analyse it offline and present the most likely suspects to their security team who could use that data to detect the specific software. They could do that now. But, why should they?
And, just to re-iterate. I’m not saying they’re not bots, I think they are. I’m just saying, I don’t see any real proof they are. I’d put my guess at somewhere between 60 and 70% certainty.
Look, even if Blizzard gave a fk and employed GM’s, they wouldn’t stalk these 3 bots for hours for you. All they would have time for is porting in there, seeing these 3 bots doing exactly the same thing, see the same traits and ban them all, go next.
They are 100% bots and if you can’t see that I don’t know what to tell you. You are trying to make it more complicated than what it is.
Of course you can’t automate bans based on things I said but if a GM ports there and sees the entire situation it’s obvious.
Easiest way to see if its a bot is to go to places where they normally are first of all, but if you look at them for less them 5 minutes you see they are following a waypoint system, they going the exacly the same route and their turning is not smooth, its very “pointy”.
I mean look at prices people are asking for consumes and gear already. People are obviously buying gold en masse already. Players buying gold pushing up the prices of basic items and bog standard low lvl gear that will be obsolete in a few weeks anyway. Playerbase will ruin the game once again, min maxers spending ridiculous amounts of money on items pretending they farmed the gold. Won’t be long until GDKP has started which indirectly feeds bots.