Bots: Going further taking a class action lawsuit

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
1

As most of you guys know, there are tons of bots on classic servers, that’s not new.

I’m not here to whine about it or discuss about why Blizzard doesn’t take appropriate actions. I’m just a player that want to enjoy the game and can’t do it because of the situation.

So we want to make things change.

Most of the players know that bots are like a plague on classic servers, and we try to report them via the in-game report button or to “hacks@blizzard.com” and also on theses forums as well.

But the reality is that nothing (or almost?) has been done for months. We can see everyday the same characters connected all day long botting freely without any concerns.

In-game Game Master requests have an average waiting time of 10 days, that is, in my opinion unacceptable for a game with a monthly subscription fee, but anyway, again, that’s not the subject here.

To this day, it feels like our reports are ignored and that we are not heard at all.

We all want to enjoy the game in our own way and i can understand that, to some players, botting is the only option for some people to enjoy the game… truly. But that ruin the fun for a lot of people around them and hurts many aspect of the game.

Botting is still considered as a Terms violation that Blizzard should make sure to endorse, at least reasonably, but it’s not.

The only options we have to fight against this are the tools Blizzard made available (reporting systems) but it takes months and months for Blizzard to do something about it and it’s in my opinion not adapted to the situation that need to be addressed much more quickly.

- So what can we do?

Well, we have another solution: The legal way, taking a class action by collecting evidences of the reports not being handled and the response time being MONTHS too slow.

- How?

I’m creating a dedicated email to forward your evidences (please mods… be nice… i’m trying to help all the community here to makes things change)

bot.complaints.compilation@gmail.com

  1. By forwarding your email reports that you send to hacks@blizzard.com

  2. Sending screenshots of the in-game reports you are making

  3. Recording youtube videos of botters

  4. Any other information that could be usefull about this subject

/!\ Please be sure to mention the date time and the name of the server & region /!\

With enough data/evidence, we will be able to create a case and take a class action to makes things move and possibly as a first step, be heard by Blizzard Entertainment before going further, if necessary.

Thanks to everyone that will take the time to help things change.

Let’s make a change!

13 Likes
2

Bblizzard is not legally obliged to do anything about bots.

4 Likes
3

I understand that, but they still need to provide a decent support to their game

4

The do ban bots, always.
But…They usually make ban-waves, they let them ruin the economy, steal all your mats, let you with less and less and then after 3-4-5-6 months they delete all of them.

They made a banwave specially for classic’s bots a few weeks ago, if you keep seeing them guess a new coming… Someday.

6

Most of the bots operating in open world or dungeons before that banwave are still operating today. Also it makes 0 sense delaying bans of bots identified via player reports.

2 Likes
7

From my experience Blizzard only ban about 25% of the Bots, who can then come back after 6 months anyway, most have many accounts that every 6 months they swap over due to these bans. Permabans are the best way to go for bots, as it used to be, not this stupid useless 6 month bans for them.

8

They know the bots, they allow the bots, they let them tamper with the economy and then they ban a small fraction in banwaves to pretend like they do something.

Why, because they would rather have the bots subscriptions and try and push classic players to play retail where they will be ENCOURAGED to purchase micro transactions, a core revenue base for blizzard now.

3 Likes
9

i appreciate ur action and thank you for it. surely classic community would benefit from having more ppl like u. wish that more and more ppl who are still involved in wow classic would get behind this action (hope u all the best), as for me, i did the only thing i got full control over and stopped paying this corporation for their subpar services…(waited 5 days for a ticket response, got chat banned for calling out a proven botter, who was voded having automated gameplay and was sent to hacks@blabla…)

1 Like
10

That’s very sad… I don’t understand why ticket take that much time to be treated, it’s not like we weren’t paying subs

11

Paying sub only means we are allowed to make an account under heavy legal terms to protect said company, but doesn’t give you ( the subscriber ) any rights or entitlement other than to enjoy the game as is.

All in the TOS which we all have agreed upon.

12

The oddest thing is Blizzard do not need to do anything, they don’t even need ingame support, they provide it as a courtesy, they need Customer Support for account problems, payments and that kind of thing, but have no legal requirement to help with ingame stuff.

1 Like
13

Which makes it even more fun too see players scream: "I’m a paying subscriber I demand "

14

Blizzard isn’t going to do anything because their stock is going up because of corona. There is no reason to believe you are doing anything badly or wrong if your stock is going up.

15

Looks like Classic has no one dedicated to bot/hack ban reports.
More like automatic Warden ban waves.

At least, we can cast Rain of Fire on them to mess up their fishing bots bobber detection :'D
And if you have friends on the other faction, you can also gank them, as they’re AFK, and eventually fighting back with a fishing rod ^^

16

You have no rights as a end user to anything. So your class action lawsuit will end in the trashbin.

Good luck tho.

17

Well you think their terms give them all the rights they want? You surely don’t understand how this works. They provide us a paid service, they can’t do everything they want, far from that. That’s why lawsuit exist.

18

Yes it does.

Thats why TOS and EULA exist, which upon you have agreed to.
You are renting a service to play on their game, on their terms.

So yes, they can do almost whatever they want with their game as long as it doesnt violate any legal terms.

19

You are mistaking your rights with your legal rights. Blizzard do not need by law to give any help except account help. As in Customer Service help for payments, that kind of thing. All the ToS says is that you shouldn’t bot and may be banned for it, not you will be banned.

20

It really doesn’t matter if you ban them. They will just keep coming back like a virus. I mean all it takes is 1 legit geared mage account to boost 4 new bots in under a week (probably less). Those new accounts could run 24/7 for months before they get banned again. Theres too much money & too many people willing to spend big bucks on items in gbid raids for it to stop. The guild I’m in runs a gbid bwl raid once a week with alts and people are spending upto 16k on one item. If you buy that gold it costs almost €1100. The community is what drives this business model & I bet there’s literally thousands of players willing to drop big money on this game to get the best gear before anyone else.

Imo mages are one of the core issues with botting. I very much doubt it was the original intention to have one class so dominant at farming gold & power lvling. Mage is also the class I see mostly botting out in the world. I’m pretty sure it’s because they’re also the fastest and easiest classes to power lvl. They could easily implement a nerf to mage farming that wouldn’t directly effect any core gameplay.

21

You don’t understand how this works clearly.

https://www.blizzard.com/en-us/legal/fba4d00f-c7e4-4883-b8b9-1b4500a402ea/blizzard-end-user-license-agreement

Blizzard’s Ownership

  1. With the sole exception of the Licensors’ Games, Blizzard is the owner or licensee of all right, title, and interest in and to the Platform, including the Games that are produced and developed by Blizzard (“Blizzard Games”),

Just to add flavor
All Accounts, including the name of the Account and any Battle Tags associated with an Account. All use of an Account shall inure to Blizzard’s benefit

In short:
You own sh*t