Botting in Badlands

[Letme-thunderstrike]

Hello
The title says it all. And it goes for many farming spots throughout Azeroth.

Its not good enough Blizzard. I / We, report bots that are so blatantly scripting and botting for 12-18 hours straight through the popular farming spots like the Earth Elementals in Badlands for example. Days, weeks after reporting they are still there, same character, botting. Running the exact same pattern for hours and hours.

Why are not game masters watching over these typical spots a couple times a day to get rid of this pest.
What are we paying for? Cant even log in to try and farm some raid consumes without having to compete with cheaters that should take you hours at max to expose and ban.

[Saneko-ragnaros (Saneko)]

@Letme-thunderstrike

Why are not game masters watching over these typical spots a couple times a day to get rid of this pest.

They used to do this in the past but it did not prove to be effective as they came back significantly faster and with more tweaks from the botting workshops. Nowadays, they use banwaves.

A single report is sufficient for a bot in the area, generally the hotspot gets checked out as well. Thanks!

[Egregore-spineshatter]

@Saneko-ragnaros

Nowadays, they use banwaves.

which don’t work as anyone who plays the game knows

[Saneko-ragnaros (Saneko)]

Since this subject comes back often I’ve made a sourced template with commonly asked Q&A if you want to read up more about it, as it appears you’re not sufficiently informed:

Other games like Valorant/League suffering from cheating and their countermeasures explained in detail

https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/dev/dev-vanguard-x-lol/

An ex-dev that worked at Blizz about the efficiency of banwaves

http://youtube.com/shorts/cADaFm__ApQ

I see often that people suggest that Blizzard profit off bots (Credit Fraud/Stolen accounts etc)

Do other games like Runescape or CSGO also “benefit” from allowing (aim)bots, using them for inflating sub counts or purchases?

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.

But wait “credit card fraud doesnt exist for games!!” Some people forget, that Visa stopped processing payments for Runescape because the occuring fraud was just that extreme at a certain point in history.

One of their last public numbers revealed close to 271k banned in December 2023 alone. I don’t think it was even the majority of them.

Poster mentioned fast bot instant removal problem and low currency accounts

Another poster mentioned they remove bots every few days after a report. They return ofcourse, proving that instant bot removals isn’t going to work.

Video 2 in this post mentions that the alternative to chargeback or stolen account type frauds is “currency fraud” where they pretend to be in that region and buy very low currency accounts to bot onto.

Better solutions?

There’s no game so far on a similar scale that has a solution. This problem is literally everywhere and anti-cheat development has yet to outpace the illegal bot development.

Kaivax statement on countermeasures against botting

@Kaivax

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.

If you have any good ideas don’t forget to submit them through the ingame suggestion box!

[Letme-thunderstrike]

@Saneko-ragnaros

@Letme-thunderstrike

Why are not game masters watching over these typical spots a couple times a day to get rid of this pest.

They used to do this in the past but it did not prove to be effective as they came back significantly faster and with more tweaks from the botting workshops. Nowadays, they use banwaves.

A single report is sufficient for a bot in the area, generally the hotspot gets checked out as well. Thanks!

Maybe Game masters should stick around full time if they can continously catch cheaters in the same spot.

At the moment its next lvl giving up from blizzard. Let them have at it, we swing the hammer in couple months. And even then you only ban like 1/3.

Its disgusting and there is no care for how much this ruins the gameplay for everyone who actually play to play.

[Egregore-spineshatter]

I have a solution. GM’s that actually log into the game and stop botters before they leave the starting area. make sure to answer that in your source templated Q&A. (most of them dont quest but grind the same mob in the same area hundreds of thousands of times so its very easy to track them. obviously very bot behaviour that doesnt fit how real people play the game)

[Linal-die-nachtwache]

@Saneko-ragnaros

Nowadays, they use banwaves.

Crazy. I must have outright terrible luck. No banwave ever got those bots I reported (and many other guild members back in the day). They always missed. Not a single hit.

Actually those bots only disappeared when the server was shut down. I guess they ended up on Mograine…

[Nicolay-thunderstrike]

Remember when Kaivax said the banwaves actually hit all bots. They just create same characters with same name, level them up quickly and set them in the same spot again, and that’s why to a layman it looks like the bots don’t actually get bannned, when they clearly do, trust us.
You’re a sad shill for an uncaring master, no, not even that since you do it for free

[Pilton-firemaw]

Do green posters actually believe anything they’re saying or are they following a script?

[Letme-thunderstrike]

this was my thought aswell. It holds no true to how it really is

[Venomfling-spineshatter]

They do. It’s just the are not frequent enough as they should be. I have been reported the same fools for 3 weeks now every day. Im quite dedicated to that. Sometime I get a thankyou letter but it seems to be 60 days apart. So I am guessing they do a wave roughly every 60 days.

They should get a month long debuff , letting everyone know they have been caught cheating.