As the title says, please do something DRASTIC about all the bots. Have some GM’s roll out in the zones and ban some of these botters please, instead of doing huge banwaves from time to time, because I can’t even do quests at certain places. Now, I’m currently leveling a warrior, and at the graveyard-area in western duskwood, I can just delete all my quests, because there is approximately 80 hunters all running the SAME pattern, and instantly stealing the skeletons, making the quest pretty much impossible for me to complete. This is not the only place either, mind you. but it’s by far the most ridiculous thing I’ve seen so far. It really REALLY ruins the experience, and it needs to be addressed.
Besides all the bots, I do enjoy SoD quite alot, but all these bots making it nearly impossible to quest is just sad. Sitting around in one area and targeting 80 constantly moving bots to report them is far too much work for me as a player, and I just want to do just that, PLAY the game. GM’s etc I assume have more power to actually make something happen more efficiently, and it would be a good thing for the game.
They used to do that in the past but they got modified very quickly resulting in a faster Cat 'n Mouse but not eradication as they simply returned to the same or other zones above or below the ground and so on…
You don’t need to report as Blizzard generally knows where they are and/or Warden picked it up. The faster way is also to record a short clip and send it to Hacks@blizzard.com
They have a dedicated anti-cheat team and regular GM’s are not burdened with this task.
Since this topic comes back often I’ve made a sourced template with commonly asked Q&A if you want to read up more about it:
Other games like Valorant/League suffering from cheating and their countermeasures explained in detail
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
Who are you kidding with these replies?! Warden system dont work 90% ATLEAST of the time. Reporting bots dont work eaither, even if you get a mail “Thanks for reporting” I have done tests ONLY reporting 1 bot at a time, getting the mail, 3 days later I see the SAME bot online again.
Half of what he links is lies and Blizzard just relying on their warden system. The warden system do not work. Why do you think they is so many bots? Becuase warden do nothing 90% of the time.
I’m not contesting that at all, I think the botting problem is terrible, and I want it fixed. That’s why I even wrote the post in the first place. My comment was simply because it’s one of the more effort-based replies I’ve ever seen here in the forums. Regardless of whether all the info is accurate or not.
Warden system is terrible, just like Defense Grid (the one for overwatch) is aswell. Blizzard need to do something about their anti-cheats as a whole, and I thought that being more proactive, and sending GM’s out in zones to ban people with “a human touch” would be much better than the current system, but we all know they probably wont. I was mainly just voicing my opinion about how the bots are a real issue, and I sincerely hope something will change. I’d be fine with blizzard including a “spybot” on everyone’s pc even, just to prevent people from cheating. I’m super against cheating in games, and I hope all those that do will have bad things happening to them irl.
Botters are making several million dollars per month, they will never go away, not completely.
Unless we introduce what they have in the asian countries where you bind your social security number to your accounts, so you can only have 1 account ever.
I’m aware. But I’m pretty sure that a serial hardware-ban is possible also, which means they would need to switch out pc-parts aswell. I can’t remember the name of it at the top of my head, and english is not my first language, so I’m sorry for not being able to provide the name of it. But I’m sure some person that reads this would be able to elaborate on what I mean. It won’t make the problem disappear completely, but it could make it a lot less appealing to botters to bother with aswell. Especially if the botters are just a regular player who sometimes wants to use a bot to make their life in wow easier while they’re at work or something.
Imagine if a botter/cheater has to change their motherboard or whatever every time they get busted for botting/cheating. At some point the rewards for it would be too much of a hassle for too little profit, and the numbers would drop drastically. NEVER zero, but ALOT would be gone. They could also crack down harder on those that BUY the gold aswell, to make it less appealing to buy the gold from them aswell. Attack the problem from both sides:)
TBH, in todays society, where info about everyone is being circulated on the internet in one way or another anyways, I would not have an issue sacrificing a small part of my privacy, in order to have a MOSTLY cheater/botter-free experience. Change the eula, implement a minor spyware that tells them if some dubious program is being used, and HARDban them to the point where they have to replace equipment for 100’s of $ or euros or whatever. IMO, a hard punishment system would be in order, and if you are behaving and playing the game as INTENDED, you’re all good xD but unfortunately, there’s alot of people being like “muh privacyyyy”, and they “can’t” implement it because of them.
The botters are using different versions of the bot programs for each set of 1000 bots, so even if you nuke 1 set of 1000 bots they’ll have 2 or 3 new sets of 1000 bots up and running instantly, + you only caught 1000 out of all their bots.
just finished the video, and I was already aware of this from a different video. However, that’s why they should punish people that buy the gold aswell, to give less incentive to actually buy it. AND if they would be allowed to install a program that can be checked to see if you are running anything dubious, then it could be a more instantaneous process, instead of doing banWAVES. It’s probably more complicated than I imagine it, obviously, but if you could choose to have blizzard look into your personal stuff, or some asian mafia that sends death-threats, which would you prefer to have access then? Because I don’t think that’s even a choice. INSTANTLY I would prefer to give my info to blizz instead. There is no privacy anyways, so might aswell side with the creators, rather than the abusers at that point xD
You can believe me when I say that every game developer on earth would love to be able to do this.
Unfortunately, we also love to be able to sell our products in the EU, where the GDPR explicitly forbids it. Not even opt-in solutions are legal, if you so much as scan the RAM that is not being used by your application, you´re effectively just asking for a 7 figure + fine and /or the product’s distribution to be banned in the EU. Because someone with just a little bit of experience and a vested interest in damaging Blizzzard (or that just thinks it´s a funny way to troll) will find it seconds after it goes live and submit indisputable proof to the corresponding authorities, and they already do not differentiate between casual and professional cybercrimes when it comes to prosecution.
But especially when those engaged in them are obviously doing it for profit, such as as in this hypothetical case Blizzard would be doing simpy by being a business that sells games with such invasive anti-cheat measures, the punishments can be absolutely ruinous, including multi year jail sentences.
If on the other hand every country on earth were China or the USA, we could be much more aggressive in our anti-cheating measures, as well as more draconic with our punishments.
That said, in todays day and age where most bots (and franky any halfway saavy end user’s primary desktop) are run on VMs (Virtual machines, one computer emulationg one or more other computers) with MAC address spoofing, hardware bans would basically be useless because you simply set up a new VM. And as a result it bears the additional risk of somebody buying a new computer (or simply a new customer with an existing computer) getting the message that he´s banned before even creating an account, because his network card actually HAS that MAC address that was spoofed…
You could ban the IP like we used to 20-30 years ago, but that also effectively does nothing to hurt those using a VPN, which again includes most botters, and also runs the risk of banning for example entire student dormatories and /or any other user of the same VPN. Which is exactly why it isn´t common practice anymore.
With all due respect, just because you don´t, and most people are simply outright fools that don´t take cybersec seriously “because it´s so convenient”,despite people like myself warning them for literally decades, does not in any way warrant taking away the security some of us do have and very much cherish and protect, instead of logging in to every unsecured WiFi network our phone can see so we can see what the newest TikTok fad is. If I do not personally know the administrator of a network, it is absolutely not a network I need to connect my devices to directly, and definitely not without additional precautions.
Even at home, any sensitive data is not stored or processed on networked machines.
I could literally give you my real life name right now, and I guarantee that the only thing you or anyone else will be able to find that is actually me is a scanned newspaper article about my highschool graduation, and if you´re a saavy Darkweb user the data I planted myself in 2005 or so, specifically to fool people trying to doxx me.
Long story short, Internet Privacy still very much exists, but most people are too busy watching cats on their phone at the airport while Chinese agents steal their browsing history of the last 2 years to care
Ohh, I’m probably not super careful with my info, I’m sure there’s alot more to find about me out there than there is to find about you, but I’m not being flagrant about my info either^^ I’m simply saying that if there was an agreed upon ToS or something, that I would have to agree to some type of spyware to prevent cheating or botting(assuming this would be possible), then I would be willing to do it in certain situations. Especially if alot of the info would be accessible to a tech savvy hacker or something either way, which to be fair, is probably the vast majority of people online. I appreciate your post though, and I’m happy to see info like this:) alot of good info to share with others in that post:)
And, again, more or less every gamedev in the world would love to be able to do it… some try, and they regularly get massive flak for it. For example Valorant´s “Vanguard” anti-cheat, which is one of the most effective in the industry, remains under heavy and constant scrutiny because it requires Kernel level access. The issue there isn’t that it´s doing something illegal or stealing data, but rather the level of permission required for it to function runs the serious risk of Riot releasing a flawed update and bricking windows installations left and right, because the anti cheat software literally has more rights to your machine than you do. That means it absolutely could steal data and then some if they wanted it to, or reformat drives, or simply get windows to uninstall itself.
A benign use case as it currently stands, but still a hypermassive red flag for anyone that has a security or coding background, and one of the best arguments bar none for using a VM while playing games in general
And your post that states I lie doesn’t have a source or anything. Just an opinion that a peer-linked and multi-sourced post is “lying”. Congratulations.
They already suspend with a minimal of 14 days and removal of all gold/items. Stacking time up to permanent I believe.
It is possible (see vanguard link) but it only slows them down as effectively, hardware ID can be spoofed, cleaned or replaced. There have been apparent reports from innocent players who bought HWID banned equipment before. Or the even older trick, a banned player pretending he is innocent and bought HWID banned equipment.
I think it requires higher Kernel access to do the HWID bans though, not entirely sure but Warden isn’t high up in the food chain mhm.
Unless it changes at EU level law, I don’t see gaming companies do this.
