Does Blizzard not care about Un'goro Bots in Classic Era by Purpose?

[Killerduki-mograine]

I think Blizzard wants to destroy Classic Era Community, but allowing Bots to 24/24 farm in Un’goro for some reason.

I see same names, same people doing same stuffs 24/24 Hours a Day, for Months.

They do nothing, but kill stuffs and farm there, not even talking.

[Dottie-pyrewood-village]

Do you even report them?

[Killerduki-mograine]

Yes, nothing happen.

[Dottie-pyrewood-village]

Nothing you can see, that is.

Some people think reporting them means they are instantly looked at, it can take weeks.

[Saneko-ragnaros (Saneko)]

Here’s my usual quote about bots and so on.

For example in another F2P game Valorant & League this is explained in more detail why it is so difficult:

/dev: Vanguard x LoL - League of Legends

The botting problem is prevalant in all games/MMO’s, not just WoW. If there was a solution there would be one by now.

An ex-dev that worked at Blizz:

Banwaves Are Smart

You may suggest any methods you may think of through the ingame feedback box but it is not likely that it will be groundbreaking new suggestion.

@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.

[Sanctifico-nethergarde-keep]

SoD is filled with bots, just did a few quests in badlands and theres a train going from Uldaman back entrance to Kargath, all hunters.

Cant be that hard to /target and ban them.

Give me 2 weeks and i would clear that server for bots and i would do it for free.

Likely i would get a few wrong but that seems to happen alot if you can trust all the false positives on the forum, so i would not do a worse job atleast.

[Saneko-ragnaros (Saneko)]

@Sanctifico-nethergarde-keep

Cant be that hard to /target and ban them.

Banning them without evidence, sure.

@Sanctifico-nethergarde-keep

Give me 2 weeks and i would clear that server for bots and i would do it for free.

Wouldn’t clear the server of bots, since they ban thousands per week. They would just get recreated again to continue unhindered.

[Sanctifico-nethergarde-keep]

@Saneko-ragnaros

Banning them without evidence, sure.

Evidance, read the rules green stuff, we dont need any proof to terminate an account.

@Saneko-ragnaros

Wouldn’t clear the server of bots, since they ban thousands per week. They would just get recreated again to continue unhindered.

I have the dertimination that you have in writing useless comments, so i’m confident that i can do it.

[Saneko-ragnaros (Saneko)]

@Sanctifico-nethergarde-keep

we dont need any proof to terminate an account.

What makes you think you can terminate an account except your own? But they reserve the right to ban with or without reason. They usually have a reason and evidence if it goes to court though.

[Sanctifico-nethergarde-keep]

@Saneko-ragnaros

What makes you think you can terminate an account except your own? But they reserve the right to ban with or without reason. They usually have a reason and evidence if it goes to court though.

Terminate=Perma ban

I would love to see the makers of illigal software and those that use it, take blizzard to court. They would surely have the money to do so, but i doubt they would get anywhere.

[Dottie-pyrewood-village]

Are you sure they are the same bots you see, they could be new ones.

[Bakstabbath-firemaw]

I have been reporting several bots almost daily for about 2 months now! I must have literally reported them 100s of times each! Still they are there! Occasionally I get the standard thank you email from Blizz stating they have done something but I don’t see it! What is the point of having a reporting tool if there is no follow up?

[Sanctifico-nethergarde-keep]

Only the gods know why. Over the last 3 days i have repoted atleast 100, i got 3 mail responses. So thats 3% if you recieve a mail response for every report you do. And Uldaman is still filled with hunters.

But im tired of reading that its so hard to fight them, no one ever said that it should be easy to make billions.

[Dramuir-anachronos (Dramuir)]

Blizzard benefits with the game having bots.

Bots take resources from the game that players otherwise would get. Player then supposedly buys tokens for gold and then items off of the AH instead.

That is what they hope.

What really happens is that over time people leave the game and the population goes down. This is the time that blizzard usually stops releasing population numbers as was the case in the past.

Subs tanked so they made that info offlimits and told no one server pop numbers.

Blizzard is now “confident” in its sub numbers to start releasing numbers again.

What the numbers dont tell you is how fragmented the populations are as there are tons of modes now. Classic, season of discovery, classic vanilla, classic TBC, classic WOTLK, now classic cata, Plunderstorm, MOP redux. They wont care what the subs are for individual modes. They only care for over all total.

But back to bots.

3 month ban waves. So blizzard can be seen as doign something when in fact they are doing nothing at all as the 3 month time frame before a ban wave is enough to make millions in real life money that blizzard gets a cut from. So they are not going to make your life easier by banning bots as they make money from bots.

The only thing the player can do is what i do every once in a while. That is to leave the game entirely. For who knows howlong.