Bots must be banned immediately upon detection

Saneko-ragnaros · December 17, 2024, 1:59am

Do you have a source for this?

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!

We hear folks say things like “just ban the bots” a lot. We ban tens of thousands of bots a week. It’s not visible to you just how much we do, and that is absolutely another problem in itself; we need to be better at surfacing these actions (more on this later). The truth is we’ve never been better and more effective at identifying and actioning malicious accounts, and our Game Security Operations (GSO) team that handle these actions are iterating and innovating on a nearly daily basis.

Unfortunately, in the history of WoW, the people perpetrating this illicit trade have also never been better at coming up with new methods, schemes, farms, and exploits to work around our efforts. As much engineering and analytics effort as we put into this, illicit RMT “workshops” put the same amount in, or more, and there are hundreds, if not thousands of these workshops out there all working around the clock to develop new technologies and techniques to counter our new technologies and techniques. It’s an arms race, and it never, ever ends.

We will never completely beat “bots” or illicit RMT. It’s an unwinnable war as long as there is money to be made by third parties. The ubiquitous nature of this type of thing in online games is an objective fact. It has always been a part of WoW, and every other popular online game for the past 25 years, and it will always be a part of online games going forward. It’s frustrating to fight this fight, but we will not stop fighting it.

While we can’t completely “win” the war, what we can do is mitigate the impact it has on the game. Is WoW Token the be-all and end-all to solve this? No, but it is a tool. It’s just one tool, though, among many. There is clearly a demand for gold for certain types of players, and that demand is only increasing. So, we are engaging a tool that we’ve used before to help mitigate the impact that illicit RMT has on the game. The more tools we employ, and the less lucrative we can make it for third parties to do what they do to make a profit, the less likely it is that new malicious actors enter the illicit RMT scene, and the more likely that existing malicious actors will exit the business. Ultimately, it’s taking incremental steps and using a multitude of tools that will reduce how impactful those third parties will be in Wrath Classic and beyond.

Source.