Blizzard you have had your cake and eaten it for too long. Your playerbase are not fools, we know that the “ban waves” are in place to ensure bitters continue to subscribe.
Rampant botting is the scourge of classic servers, it is the cause of all RMT related issues and of economy breaking inflation that was present in every blizz run iteration of classic wow.
Banning things like boosting/GDKP are red herrins/band aid solutions. Neither of these things produce new raw gold into the economy, botting does. Botting is responsible for all the economic issues in classic sod/etc.
You can detect bots, ban them immediately upon detection. Temp, temp then perm to rule out first positives. If in doubt, hire a couple of GM for each anniversary server from a low income country and pay them to manually review reports and ban obvious bots whom are at the same locations they always have been for the last 20 years.
Your anti cheat can detect most of these immediately, we know it, you know it. Those that you can’t are easily solved by manual intervention which can be done at low cost.
Some accounts also get stolen with phishing methods or used with fraudulent credit cards, that incur chargeback merchant fees for Blizzard. The “paid” amount plus penalty costing Blizzard a lot more not to mention the damage the botters do ingame.
For example in video 2 I think they explain how botters make very cheap accounts not profitable for Blizzard at all in here (thanks to that poster btw for linking):
They used to be banned immediately in the past, and then the illegal workshops would continue to modify them until they slip through. It’s not like they will just say “ah my bot is gone I will now pack my stuff and stop botting forever” it’s a criminal enterprise that will continue to attempt penetrate the security systems.
Seeing the amount of allegations that GM’s are “outsourced (country)” or automated this would highly reinforce the arguments that the investigations weren’t done properly.
It is not mutually exclusive, they can and will do both. Infact, trading is when the tainted gold changes hands so it’s one of the big cogs that has been addressed.
For example in another F2P game Valorant & League this is explained in more detail why it is so difficult:
An ex-dev that worked at Blizz:
If you have any good ideas don’t forget to submit them through the ingame suggestion box!
It looks to me a new account posting with 3 posts, 2 of them insulting me is more akin to a bot than a player who posts with sources backing themselves up and addressing the OP’s points from over half my own post.
That you dislike the content, doesn’t mean you should dismiss their post with insults which happens to happening very often lately.
But you do you.
Edit: Even the follow up replies below here are mostly non-arguments, and insults lacking any depth. Except the other poster who did reply in detail but without a source.
Money making schemes of all sorts exist underground because they are simply not ethical. Think politicians, think businessmen who need permits, think big companies’ price collusions…
Do I need a source to know that the illegal drugs marketcap is bigger than the economy of many, many countries?
Having this amount of bots makes no sense if it goes against a given company’s bottom line. If bots were making Blizzard actually lose money, it would be the very first issue they would tackle every day of the week.
You always reposting the same thing gets more and more tiresome. The fact is, blizzard is not doing nearly enough to combat botting. Banning is only a small portion of what they probably could do.,
The only person who can deny or confirm this would be a Blizzard insider. So if we cannot provide a source, do we dismiss this out of hand?
No, because it is an allegation, an allegation which is based on an understanding of business, banking procedures and common sense.
Blizzard gain £9.99 from each account which is subscribed, there is no distinction here between which account is human and which account is a bot; the price is the same. There is an argument here you have made that these accounts are funded via stolen credit cards or are “stolen” accounts via phishing. This simply doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. The year is 2024, not 2005. Banking technology can detect fraudulent or unusual transactions on credit cards within minutes, even for fairly minor amounts. Whilst its possible this is still used to some extent, it is highly likely that any stolen card will be blocked until the bank has spoken to the issuer, the transaction itself blocked or the card will be frozen by the card holder or reported stolen by the card holder. There is no possible way that you can run thousands of bots off of stolen cards in 2024 - it wouldnt be profitable. Why ? Back charges. The card holder back charges Blizzard as part of a lost & stolen case and this incurs fees for Blizzard, the result of this is that Blizzard would immediately suspend or terminate the associated account, rendering it unusable for botting. This is not done in waves, its done immediately. If this was a common method of obtaining funds to run botnets as it was in 2007 (when most people didnt even regularly access their banking online and thus a transaction could go unnoticed for months), the bots could literally stop working at any moment. These bots owners are running a business, they have spreadsheets and earning projections so they can use that money - unpredictability is not good. As for phishing, it takes a lot now to phish bank accounts and 2FA is a thing. How many accounts can be phished in a dying mmo that dont need to be reactivated with a subscription? There are almost as many bots as there are players, its just not happening. The average WoW player is not of the demographic which easily falls for phishing scams…again this isnt 2007.
When they banned immediately in the past, there were less bots. There was less inflation. It worked. The “problem” your referring too is that as Blizzard updated their security systems the bot sellers (those who code and sell the software) updated their bots to bypass this system, a constant arms race between Blizzard and script creators. However botting was kept under control.
Under the current system, Blizzard bans at regular ban waves, allowing bot coders to predict when their bots will be banned, and allowing bot software purchasers and botters to know roughly how long their bot will be online for before being banned, therefore they are able to calculate how much profit per bot they will make before the ban comes. This works for Blizzard, because they dont need to update their security software or play arms race with bot creators, it works for the creators as they only need make minor tweaks here or there and can generate passive income selling access to their bots, and it works for the bot owners because they can plan accordingly and generate profit from their bots before they are banned. It doesnt work well for the health of games like classic, though.
This argument doesn’t make sense. If there is 3 strike system, then this greatly reduces the chances of false positives before permanent bans. An obvious bot is obvious, and can be permabanned immediately (fly hacking above strat = permanent ban). GMs can manually receive mass reports instead of the current automated system. The only downside is it costs Blizzard money.
Most of the content your linking is not relevant. Valorant nor LoL are comparable to WoW. They do not have server wide, ingame economies than be ruined by botting. Let me explain to you why botting ruins server economies.
When you kill a Defias NPC, he drops you say, 3 copper. Maybe some linen cloths you sell for 20c. This 23copper did not exist, before you killed this mob and vendored the cloth. It did not exist in the game. What you have just done is introduced 23copper into the economy.
When you spend that 23 copper, it is distributed into the game economy and it will circulate within the game economy. It is only removed via gold sinks, or via the character the currency is held on being removed from the game (banned/inactive/unsubscribed/deleted).
Now apply this to bots, this is how bots generally generate raw gold. Lets say Bot owner X has 40 bots, and each of these bots farms raw gold and vendors items 24/7. Lets say on average, each bot produces 115g per day raw gold. That is 4600 gold every 24 hours, and I would say this is a conservative estimate.
Now lets say the bots are able to run for 180 days before being banned. This is 828000 gold pieces introduced into that servers economy by only these 40 bots in this period. Now lets say, the average cost of buying 1000 gold pieces is say, £15, this has generated the bot owner £12,420 over this 180 day period if he has sold all this gold at that price, on the black market. Now, six months sub cost him £60, or even less if he bought a value subscription. But lets say £10/ per bot, thats a cost of £2400 to run these bots, in sub fees, which are collected by Blizzard. Now add on the other outgoing costs for this bot owner, lets say his bot costs him £500 over a six month period, and his electricity bill for running the bots is maybe £1500 over that six month period. His outgoings are £4400 and, so his profits from the bots is £8,020. Not bad right ?
Now imagine what that does to a classic wow economy with very few gold sinks. Well we dont have too, because we can see it on ERA, on SoD and we can watch it unfolding right now on the anniversary realms.
He can then leverage some of that to add more for the next ban wave and the profit can in theory, as long as demand remains steady, continue indefinitely.
By contrast, GDKP/Boosting is really a non issue . These drive demand yes, so banning these can be helpful in reducing that, however both are also players providing services, for ingame gold, to ingame players. If botted gold wasnt an issue, if this was clamped down on, the inflation would not be present and these would not be big issues. Focusing on this as the way to combat inflation within the economy is simply punishing player choice, not the bots.
I never really understood what sort of access you community managers/MVP people have but I can tell from this comment that you don’t have any. If you did, you would see I am not related to these other commentators and that if my account was a person, it would be old enough to vote.
I appreciate your reply but I hope my post helps you understand why you get such negative responses to this copy+pasted comment you have, it is outdated and it doesn’t address the arguments, nor is it really all that relevant.
Good reply. I do remember the days where bots got banned fast and we dident have issues like this. But I dont think the people botting are paying for subs anymore. They simply just have bots farm running for a while and buy the gametime tokens and as long as they are allowed to farm for months on end they will just get more and more bots they lose nothing unless they are banned as fast as possible. In my opinion people who buy gold should have their account deleted instantly if the evidence sufficient. I had ingame friends I stopped talking to because they admit they but gold. If there are harsh punishment for buying gold. I think most people will think an extra time before they risk their account to take part in cheating. I don’t think we have a way to stop the bots since blizzard are so greedy that they cant have GMs ingame anymore to find them. I watch a guy on youtube called Madskillzzhc that is getting death threats and they wanna doxx him because he fights back against the rampant bot problem. And now he wont make anymore videos because of it. Im not a fan of HC but I will now spend a lot of time leveling a hunter on the server he plays on so I can mess with them too. Since blizzard are this lazy. I have no life tbh. I will make it my mission to kill as many bots in HC as I can no threats will stop me. I want justice for a real wow fan that try to do blizzard job. Justice for Madskillzzhc!
Most of the gaming industry are into RMT one way or another. Devil always finds a way in.
But it should not be as widely accepted as it is in World of Warcraft nowdays. I can turn a blind eye to things that are done under the table knowing that people involved having nightmares about waking up to a permabanned account.
But instead we have more bots in the game than real people and real people riding around on a 100% mount in fully enchanted boe bis gear just one week into a fresh server.
And its not an exaggeration about bot numbers. Lost Ark had the same problem. When they finally addressed the issue their active player numbers in steam went down by 50%. THAT IS HALF A MILLION OF BOT ACCOUNTS.
And they had just one single version of the game. If Blizzard bans all the hunter/mage bots in Classic/SoD, all the druid gathering bots in Cata and boomkins in Retail. We will see an even bigger drop
I also believe, if a user can detect a bot, a dedicated employee of a third world country could do that aswell. they could even have access to inspect a dungeon instance. but, they dont have such employees because they dont care that much.
