I often engage in repetitive activities, for example standing in the same spot in Suramar killing mobs for gold and mats. I find it quite therapeutic and I have a baby that only sleeps when being held, so I mainly do pretty easy stuff.
Now I appreciate that botting is a problem, but the other day a player whispered me in chat telling me to give him a substantial amount of gold or else he’d report me for botting.
I didn’t give him the gold, ignored him and reported him in return, but my thought was, how can Blizzard actually tell the difference between legit players such as myself, who need to get a life, and a bot?
I have a friend that multiboxes, and the way blizzard checks according to him is that GMs usually just spectate the alleged bot, teleports it a few meters to see if there is a reaction or if it just goes back to grinding, stuff like that. Suppose thats how they identify bots.
They won’t go into detail of how they detect bots or tell them apart from regular players because that would give the botters a chance to change their programmes to try and fool the systems.
There has been instances of normal players beibg caught up in banwaves but appeals have succeeded to have the bans overturned.
I have heard the stories of people being randomly teleported about that is supposed to be GMs checking to see if they are bots or not (ha that would be a fun wow inspired game show)
Regrettably not. I wanted to, but by then the conversation had disappeared from my chat window, possibly because I /ignored him. But I doubt I’m the only one he did that to, I suppose there will be multiple complaints about him (or her).
I’m quite annoyed thinking that players might actually give him gold.
I doubt that Blizzard would reveal the techniques and the tools they use to detect bots, it would be a bit like Churchill sending a letter to Hitler notifying him of the D Day landings.
If the botters knew then they would be able to mitigate the issue and escape detection.
Standing there for a few hours killing and looting mobs is OK by me, only thing I would say is that one of the popular farming spots in Suramar is also an objective for a WQ and you could be accused of disrupting someone else’s legitimate gampelay by chain killing the NPC’s.
i dont think that you have reason to worry as blizzard does not only check for repetitiveness of an action.
if you occassionally stop, or do something else then you should be fine. i d keep away from popular bot farming places as well just to be sure.
that doesnt sound like bot behavior, so dont worry about it. on some days i do all the above because i cant be bothered with current content. we all do i suppose at one point.
edit: if you want to be 100% sure you can take your concerns to blizzard and write a ticket and ask just to be on the safe side.
You do realise there’s logs of every single thing you do ingame. Every footstep, every skill cast, every pot used, all chat text, times of skills pressed etc
Bots will have the same path they run over for 15 hours straight. The same skills cast perfectly in sequence thousands of times, at the exact same speed etc.
It’s very, very easy to see a bot from logs. A player standing somewhere for 10 hours playing legit will be completely different logs to be fair, with skills cast completely random intervals. Pathing will be completely random and all over etc. Nothing to worty about if ya play legit.
What makes you thing bots isn’t good at rng in paths and cast sequence.
After all years of wow only thing I have learnt is bots are 1 step ahead of blizz. After introducing tokens they are two step ahead. Before blizz hit banwave - they always do some damage.
You can just /who netherstorm in outland to see how successful or interested Blizzard are at banning bots. There are literally an army of demon hunters bot gold farming one of the instances there.
If you go there they all have repair mounts constantly appearing in the entrance of the dungeon whilst they sell.
A very good question that I asked myself the other day. While I was leveling in Zandalar as a Druid, I came upon a group of many Druid bots in cheetah Travel form. I was afraid that I would get reported because I was at the wrong place at the wrong time, being a Druid and all. I didn’t even have the cheetah form.
